Presocratic Reflexivity: The Construction of Philosophical Discourse 600-450 B.C.: Logological Investigations (Logological Investigations, Vol 3)

PRESOCRATIC REFLEXIVITY: THE CONSTRUCTION OF PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE c. 600–450 BC This is a marvellous example of the author’s extraordinary scholarship. No one in the social sciences today has the detailed knowledge of the Presocratic texts displayed here. I cannot emphasize the amount of knowledge and labour that has gone into the author’s grasp and reorientation of the texts—exemplary in the case of Heraclitus, let alone the rest of the Presocratic texts. (John O’Neill, Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology, York University, Canada) …the project takes us to the heart of human awareness, the preconditions or self-consciousness of any form of intellectual order. Given the scale and daring of this enterprise it is all the more impressive that Sandywell has continued to write so clearly and with such control over a complex agenda. (David Chancy, Professor of Sociology, University of Durham) How did Western philosophy begin? What are the relationships between the construction of self-reflection and the social context and political institutions of ancient Greek society? In this third volume of Logological Investigations Sandywell continues his sociological reconstruction of the origins of reflexive thought and discourse with special reference to Presocratic philosophy and science and their sociopolitical context. He begins by criticizing traditional histories of philosophy which abstract speculative thought from its sociocultural and historical contexts, and proposes instead an explicitly contextual and reflexive approach to ancient Greek society and culture. Each chapter is devoted to a seminal figure or ‘school’ of reflection in early Greek philosophy. Special emphasis is placed upon the verbal and rhetorical innovations of protophilosophy in the sixth and fifth centuries BC. These chapters are also exemplary displays of the distinctive logological method of cultural analysis and through them Sandywell shows that by returning to the earliest problematics of reflexivity in premodern culture we may gain an insight into some of the central currents of modern and postmodern self-reflection. Barry Sandywell is Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of York.

PRESOCRATIC REFLEXIVITY: THE CONSTRUCTION OF PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE c. 600–450 BC Logological Investigations Volume 3

Barry Sandywell

London and New York

First published 1996 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1996 Barry Sandywell All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-42480-8 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-73304-5 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-10170-0 (Print Edition)

It is through wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize. (Aristotle, Metaphysics 982b10–12; cf. Plato, Theaetetus 155D2–5) And the beginning, as you know, is always the most important part of any work. (Plato, Republic II 377A) What is in the beginning slight becomes in the end of immense importance. (Aristotle, De Caelo 271b12–13) Die Wehen bei der Geburt neuer Begriffe (The labour pains at the birth of new concepts). (Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1980:62)

For Gerard

CONTENTS

Abbreviations

xii

INTRODUCTION: TOWARD A SOCIOLOGY OF PHILOSOPHICAL CULTURE 1

2

PRESOCRATIC THOUGHT AND THE ORIGINS OF WESTERN EUROPEAN REFLECTION 1 Introduction: the birth of theories 2 The construction of the cosmos in Early Greek philosophy 3 Language and ‘the epoch of the Logos’ 4 The Ionian revolution in cosmological thinking 5 Greek cosmology as a form of life

1 28 28 40 59 61 65

THALES AND THE ORIGINS OF IONIAN COSMOLOGY 1 Ionian natural philosophy as cosmology 2 The golden triangle of Ionia and the Odyssean spirit 3 The discovery of reflexivity 4 Self, self-knowledge, and reflexivity 5 The sociological origins of philosophy and cultures of critical discourse 6 A comparative analysis of ancient institutions of reflexivity 7 Conclusion: the concept of a philosophical movement

102 122 130

3

ANAXIMANDER’S COSMOS 1 Introduction 2 The text of Anaximander: the Apeiron-Fragment 3 Anaximander’s discourse 4 Anaximander’s cosmos 5 The cosmic vortex 6 After Anaximander

136 136 138 140 155 163 166

4

ANAXIMENES’ PNEUMATOLOGY 1 Introduction

172 172

ix

75 75 78 92 98

CONTENTS

2 3 4 5 6

Anaximenes’ prose and its deconstruction Anaximenes’ cosmos: Anaximenes as a natural philosopher? Natural philosophy as critical theory The self-deconstruction of Anaximenes’ text A reflexive pneumatology?

172 174 180 181 185

5

THE PYTHAGOREAN FORM OF LIFE 1 Introduction: the Pythagorean form of life 2 The ontotheology of Number: all is Number 3 Pythagorean videology 4 The Pythagorean soul and metempsychosis 5 Philosophia and the three lives 6 The videological form of life 7 Conclusion: The elements of Classical videological culture

189 189 197 209 214 220 221 229

6

HERACLITUS, LOGOLOGIST: THE REFLEXIVE COSMOS OF HERACLITUS 1 Introduction 2 Critical reflexivity: thinking as polemos 3 Peri Phusis 4 Logological configurations 5 The Logos teaching 6 Interpretations of the Logos-concept in Heraclitus 7 Language-play in Heraclitus’ text 8 The reflexive psyche in Heraclitus 9 Logos and Kosmos 10Process philosophy

234 234 236 241 244 248 250 256 267 275 280

7

ELEATIC ONTOLOGY FROM XENOPHANES TO PARMENIDES AND BEYOND Xenophanes and the unity of God 1 Introduction 2 Xenophanes’ critical reflexivity 3 Xenophanes’ natural theology 4 From Xenophanes to Parmenides Parmenides and the unity of Being 5 Introduction 6 The beginnings of ontology: the philosophy of absolute Being 7 The logological presuppositions of Parmenidean ontology 8 Parmenides’ reflexive Logos 9 Parmenides’ later impact: the origins of metaphysical modernity Melissus’ revision 10The infinity of Being x

284 285 285 286 291 293 295 296 296 312 332 332 336 336

CONTENTS

11Against plurality Zeno on the One and the Many 12Introduction 13Zeno as a reflexive thinker 14Conclusion: the genealogy of logic 8

PLURALISTS: EMPEDOCLES, ANAXAGORAS, AND THE BEGINNINGS OF GREEK ATOMISM Empedocles 1 Introduction 2 The limitations of human experience 3 The fourfold roots of Being 4 Eternal cyclical change: the One from the Many, the Many from the One 5 The soul and God 6 From Empedocles to Aristotle Anaxagoras 7 Introduction 8 Anaxagoras’ general philosophical outlook 9 Nous as the World-Mind The Atomists: Leucippus and Democritus Leucippus of Miletus Democritus 10Introduction 11The Democritean vision of the atomic universe 12Conclusion: ancient and modern Atomism Notes Bibliography Name index Subject index

340 340 341 341 349 352 354 354 356 358 361 363 363 365 365 367 372 377 377 379 379 380 388 393 463 497 502

xi

ABBREVIATIONS

To simplify an already complex text I have deleted all diacritical marks from English transliterations of Greek words. Where possible I have cited Classical works in the Loeb Classical Library edition (which contains both the Greek and English translation). I have followed the standard conventions for citing the works of Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Cicero, and other Classical authors. Further bibliographical information is given in the notes which introduce the main bibliographies. More detailed and extensive bibliographical information can be found in the standard scholarly texts on the Presocratic philosophers and early Greek thought in general (for example Diels and Kranz, 1966 and 1964; Guthrie, 1962–81; Barnes 1979,1982,1987; Everson, ed., 1990, 1991 and 1994; Long and Sedley, 1987). Other frequent abbreviations used in the text are as follows: Acad. Cicero, Academica, trans. H.Rackham (London: William Heinemann/Loeb Classical Library, 1933). Aëtius Second century AD author; compiler of an eclectic anthology of the opinions of early philosophers, the Placita; these are also reproduced in the pseudo-Plutarchean Epitome and in John Stobaeus’ Eclogae (in Dox. Gr.). See also DK. Alexander, Alexander of Aphrodisias, On Aristotle Metaphysics 1, trans. Met. William E.Dooley (London: Duckworth, 1989). ANET J.B.Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 3rd edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969). An. post. Aristotle, Analytica Posteriora in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941). An. prior. Aristotle, Analytica Priora, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941). AT R.Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. C.Adam and P.Tannery (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J.Vrin, 1969). Bywater Heraclitus of Ephesus: The Fragments of the Work of Heraclitus of Epheses ‘On Nature’, trans. G.T.W.Patrick and Heracliti xii

ABBREVIATIONS

Ephesii Reliquiae, trans. I.Bywater Introduction and Bibliography by L.A.Richards) (Chicago: Argonaut, 1969). CHCL Cambridge History of Classical Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Cicero, Ref. Cicero’s work, De Re Publica and De Legibus, trans. Clinton Walker Keyes (London: William Heinemann/Loeb Classical Library, 1977). Clement Clement of Alexandria (c. AD 150–215). Christian compiler of an anthology or miscellany of pre-Christian philosophers (the Stromata or Miscellanies. De Anima Aristotle, On the Soul (many editions; especially useful is Aristotle, De Anima, trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986)). De. gen. Aristotle, De Generatione et Corruptione (On Generation and Corruption), in R.McKeon, ed., The Basic Works of Aristotle corrup. (New York: Random House, 1941). De Rerum Work of the Roman author, Lucretius, On the Nature of the Natura Universe. De Sensu Theophrastus, De Sensu or De Sensibus (On the Senses, in (or De Theophrastus and the Greek Physiological Psychology Before Sensibus) Aristotle, trans. G.M.Stratton (Amsterdam: E.J.Bonset and P. Schippers N.V., 1964). DH Dionysius of Halicarnassus, The Critical Essays, 2 vols, trans. Stephen Usher (London: William Heinemann/Loeb Classical Library, 1974). Diodorus Diodorus Siculus, Sicilian author of a Universal History. Dk (or H.Diels and W.Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 10th Dielsedn. (Dublin/Zurich: Weidmann), Volume 1: (1966); Volume 2: Kranz) (1966); Volume 3: (1964). DL Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, ed. and trans. R.D.Hicks (London: William Heinemann/Loeb Classical Library, 1925). Dox. Gr. H.Diels, Doxographi Graeci (1879), compilation of the opin(or Diels) ions, theories, and glosses on the Greek natural philosophers. See Doxographi Graeci, 3rd edn (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1958). This volume also includes the fragments of Theophrastus’ Physical Opinions. EE Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, trans. M.Woods, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); also Loeb classical edition). Euclid Euclid, The Thirteen Books of Euclid’s Elements, trans. T.L. Heath (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), and the shorter work, Euclid, Elements, Books 1–6, 11, 12, ed. I.Todhunter (London: Dent, 1967). Eustathius Christian bishop, c. twelfth century AD. Famous for his xiii

ABBREVIATIONS

Herodotus Hippolytus

Il. KR KRS

Loeb LS Met. MM NE OCD Od. OH

OSAP Paus. Peri Phusis (or Peri Phuseos) Pindar

Plato, Rep.

Commentaries on Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Commentary on Pindar, the treatise Inquiry into Monastic Life, and other works. Herodotus, History, 4 vols, trans. A.D.Godley (London: William Heinemann/Loeb Classical Library, 1946). Hippolytus of Rome, Christian theologian who compiled an anthology of philosophical theories in his polemics against heretical doctrine (the Refutation of all Heresies). See Ref. below. Homer, The Iliad (many editions). G.S.Kirk and J.E.Raven, eds, The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). G.S.Kirk, J.E.Raven, and M.Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard University Press/William Heinemann). H.G.Liddell and R.Scott, An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon (1889) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964). Aristotle, Metaphysics, in R.McKeon, ed., The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random House, 1941). Pseudo-Aristotle, Magna Moralia, trans. H.Tredennick, Volume 2 (London: William Heinemann/Loeb Classical Library, 1935). Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, in R.McKeon, ed., The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random House, 1941). Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. N.G.L.Hammond and H.H. Scullard, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). Homer, The Odyssey (many editions). The Oxford History of Greece and the Hellenistic World, eds, J. Boardman, J.Griffin, and O.Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, ed. Julia Annas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983–). Pausanias, Guide to Greece (Description of Greece, trans. P. Levi, 2 vols (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971). A standard title of the words of the Milesian natural philosophers. Literally ‘On Nature’. Lyric poet; author of celebrated odes in honour of victors of the Games; these are grouped around the four pan-Hellenic sites of the games: Olympian, Nemean, Pythian, Isthmian. See F.J. Nisetich, trans., Pindar’s Victory Songs (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). Plato, Republic (many editions; see for example The Republic,

xiv

ABBREVIATIONS

trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)). Pliny Pliny, Natural History, trans. H.Rackham London: William Heinemann/Loeb Classical Library, 1942). Proclus, Proclus Diadochus, Commentary on Euclid’s Elements I, in M. Commen- Cohen and I.E.Drabkin, eds, A Source Book in Greek Science tary (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1948). Ref. (or Hippolyuis, Refutation of All Heresies (see C.Osborne, RefutaRethinking Early Greek Philosophy: Hippolytus of Rome and tion) the Presocratics (London: Duckworth, 1987). Simplicius Sixth-century AD Aristotelian commentator (careful analysis of the De Caelo, Categories, Physics, and De Anima). A key source of information on the Presocratic philosophers. See Simplicius, On Aristotle Physics 6, trans. David Konstan (London: Duckworth, 1989). Stobaeus John Stobaeus (c. fifth century AD), author of a commonplace book, usually referred to as the Anthology or Anthologies; a source of information on the lives of the Presocratic philosophers. Suda (or The The title of a Byzantine reference work, of unknown authorSuda) ship, preserving miscellaneous information on ancient philosophers and the ancient world. Suidae Lexicon (Leipzig, 1933–8). Theophrastus Student of Aristotle. Author of works on plants (The Study of Plants), sense-perception (On Sense Perception), characterology (Characters), metaphysics (Metaphysics), and a history of the opinions of the natural philosophers (On the Natural Philosophers or Physical Opinions, Phusikon doxai). Thucydides Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (London: William Heinemann/Loeb Classical Library) Volume 1: (1962); Volume 3: (1966); also History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. R.Warner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954). v. Pythag. Porphyry, Life of Pythagoras and lamblichus, Life of Pythagoras. For the latter see lamblichus, On the Pythagorean Life, trans. G.Clark (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1989). WA P.V.Jones, The World of Athens: An Introduction to Classical Athenian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). WS A.J.B.Wace and F.H.Stubbings, eds, A Companion to Homer (London: Macmillan, 1962).

xv

ABBREVIATIONS

NOTE ON END NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY For further detail on these conventions see the notes to the general bibliography at the end of the book. Footnotes to the main text have a variety of functions, among these: to provide further and more specialized bibliographical information, to suggest more advanced sources and investigations of related points, to comment upon and occasionally question the text, and to open up other lines of thought for anyone wishing to engage in further research on these topics.

xvi

INTRODUCTION Toward a sociology of philosophical culture

Only in the stream of thought and life do words have meaning. (Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1967: §173) A reader who has opened this book and read its table of contents might be forgiven for thinking that this is a work that falls exclusively within the field of philosophy or the history of philosophy. While I am certainly interested in questions concerning the origins of philosophical concepts and methods, the following studies belong primarily to the growing interdisciplinary field of research in the sociology of reflective instruments and cultural formations. They form part of a multivolume project concerned with rethinking the ways in which value orientations and discursive strategies are implicated in the social construction of what we call reality, selfhood, and history—in this specific instance, with the cultural evolution of the Western European worldview and what I refer to as its dominant videological culture. Logological investigations It might be useful to begin with a brief résumé of principles discussed in the earlier volumes. One of the central themes of Volume 1 was the idea that the crisis of modern thought and the self-questioning of reason can only be fully understood by analyzing the origins and presuppositions of European ways of thinking. In Volume 2 I traced the beginnings of reflexive modes of thought and selfhood to some of the earliest literary practices of Hellenic culture. Each of these poetic forms was viewed as a distinctive mode of theorizing rather than as a literary ‘reflection’ of a pre-existent world. Adopting the terminology of Volume 11 claimed that meaning practices had a constitutive role in forming the rhetorics of Western cultural identity. As a case study I explored the part played by Homeric literature in creating idealized self-images and imaginary representations which became historically effective in shaping civic experience, motivational rhetorics, and cultural life in Greece during the sixth and fifth centuries. In brief, the ‘imaginary formation’ which shaped the way Greeks thought, talked, and behaved was crafted from a matrix of narrative poetry 1

INTRODUCTION

and mythology (cf. Lindberg, 1992:25). The chapters of Volume 2 were presented as examples of logological analysis of some of the earliest sources of European culture. Logological investigations commend a reflexive definition of culture as the ‘sense-making’ rhetorics and rituals a society elaborates to reflect upon its concerns and problems. Discursive formations in particular were viewed as societal media of identity formation and self-reflection. Once in existence these reflective rhetorics become available to individuals as methodic procedures and techniques of inquiry through which further forms of talk, action, and social membership can be elaborated. In this way the thought forms and modes of subjectivity defining an ‘imagined community’ come to be externalized and incorporated in the axiological grammar of a social formation (in the idiom of Volume 1, social practices and institutions must continuously enact their moral identity to remain institutions). Toward a sociology of ancient philosophical culture Here I take up the threads of the story begun in Volume 2 by analyzing the formation of ancient Greek philosophy from the end of the Archaic epoch to the first decades of the Greek enlightenment in the fifth century. In traditional intellectual history the period from around 600 to the mid-fifth century BC is usually described as ‘the age of the Presocratic thinkers’. In investigating the discursive formation of Greek thought, however, my primary intention is not to offer another history of ancient philosophy, but to reconstruct a fundamental intellectual revolution by examining the ways in which the languages of reflection and self-reflection were created by the argumentative forms of the first European thinkers. Each chapter is presented as a case study of a particular discursive innovation in the language of early philosophical speculation. I assemble some of the fragments of a complex mosaic to create an image of the spirit of Greek reflexivity in the late Archaic age. My main claim is that the seminal arguments of protophilosophy helped to articulate new definitions of truth (aletheia), being, and reality, and thereby created narrative forms which changed the way the world was perceived, interpreted, and lived. But the first and most important point to note in studying early Greek civilization is the very existence of traditions of reflexivity and a history of speculative argument prior to the rise of Classical philosophy. We need to inquire back into a period when the basic categories of metaphysics and systematic inquiry were unavailable and study the genesis of philosophical practices. The Hellenic culture of the Aegean during this period was unique in the ancient world in creating the idea and material possibility of free speculation, a ‘civilized art’ that accompanied the institutionalized forms of free speech and autonomous political institutions. As Antony Andrewes has observed, ‘the point lies not so much in the particular answers given, valuable and powerful as they often are, but in the fact that the questions were asked at all, and asked in this way’ (1967:259). This picture, of course, is already the product of a later Greek 2

INTRODUCTION

self-image of the autonomy of rational argument, the will to truth, and the power of conceptual discourse. We might balance this image with the countervailing notion that if human beings are by nature ‘political’ there can be no truly ‘autonomous’ history of the development of ideas in abstraction from social practices and larger institutional configurations. How did the art of systematic questioning and formal argument become a valued ideal? Theoretical thought, science, politics, philosophical inquiry, structures of knowledge, and other cultural forms do not exist in a vacuum. The Greek celebration of the logos and its indefatigable commitment to critical inquiry are related to larger changes in political institutions, cultural values, and moral codes dating back to the dawn of Western thought. The birth of Presocratic philosophy and its vision of an orderly cosmos coincided with the emergence of the Greek polis and polis-system that would dominate much of fifth- and fourth-century Greek history. In fact the polis-system functioned as both an effective network of communication and cultural exchange and also as a source of reflective models and interpretation systems during the sixth and fifth century BC (further explorations of the related development of political theory might be conducted using analogous genealogical techniques). The history of Western humanism in theoretical philosophy and political thought, for example, has its roots in the political rhetorics and argumentative rituals disseminated by these democratic experiments. As there is a dialectical relationship between modes of thinking, forms of subjectivity, and institutional structures we need to explore the place of ancient cultural formations within the institutional fabric of moral, political, and religious institutions. In other words, the Voices’ of Presocratic philosophy need to be studied and appraised as both a reflexive medium and as a product of Greek political experience. The Presocratics did not ‘discover Reason’ so much as invent a particular form of rationality, preparing the way for the construction of Classical metaphysics and the basic impulses of Western modernity. Paradigms in the study of ancient Greek culture To set the studies of Volume 3 in a wider context it might be useful to examine some earlier contributions to the history of Greek ways of thinking. What is distinctive about logological inquiry as a form of cultural analysis can then be briefly outlined in comparison with existing approaches to the emergence of reflexivity in the ancient world. The basic assumption here is that only a systematic genealogical study of its founding cultural configurations will help us understand the origins and dynamics of modernity. And here ‘culture’ must be defined in its multifaceted material, sociological, and reflexive senses. We may recall from Volume 1 that the theme of the self and its social constitution is central to logological investigations. By approaching culture as semiopraxis we can study both the processes of meaning in society and the presence of society in meaning. If we think of cultural practices as processes 3

INTRODUCTION

of identity formation then accounts of Greek thought can also be seen as ways of traducing the otherness of this vital tradition to the terms of reference of later paradigms of the self. Contemporary historiography accepts the importance of studying societies and civilizations in processual, developmental, and interactional terms. For example, every general history of European civilization refers to the ‘fusion’ of ancient Greek philosophy, Roman law and administration, and JudaicChristian religion in forming the manifold ’voices’ of Western culture. But most perspectives tend to divide up the ‘data’ of historical research into disciplinary ‘compartments’ (and these are grouped into ‘bounded events’ depicted as though they obeyed some categorial ordering principle immanent in the historical phenomena). It is as if ‘events’ fell naturally into economic, political, and cultural categories. Yet empirical historiography forgets that these terms are themselves rooted in earlier metaphysical and philosophical thematics. Today the history of antiquity has its specialists in political, military, economic, constitutional, diplomatic, and social studies. Occasionally these categories are allowed to interact and create more complex constellations— the field of ‘ideas’, ‘modes of thought’, ‘mentalities’, and ‘culture’, for example, might be included in the research programme. Yet traditional disciplinary mappings still tend to elide the manifold ways in which the field of discourse extends beyond conventional definitions of ‘expressive culture’ or ‘mentalities’ into the domains of ‘visual culture’, ‘everyday life’, and the ‘history of power and selfhood’; and only recently have historians begun to entertain the possibility that ‘the cultural field’ actively ‘constitutes’ the terms of reference of other practices in a given society. In more reflexive perspectives, however, it has become commonplace to deconstruct the basic instruments of research as ‘frames of meaning’ with a complex history and presuppositional implications in their own right. For example, the division of the social world into ‘economic’, ‘political’, and ‘cultural’ spheres (or more technical divisions into state, society, and superstructures) is manifestly a modern way of schematizing the past in terms of the cognitive interests of the present. The implicit ‘balkanization’ of social reality into mutually exclusive ‘spheres’ has proved immensely damaging to the progress of social analysis. We now recognize that ‘collective mentalities’ are not pregiven objects separate from the social practices and institutions they inform. Influenced by developments in the sociology of culture, phenomena indexed by the terms ‘mentality’ and ‘ideas’ are no longer viewed as autonomous fields to be added to a list of departmentalized specialisms. In this polemical context we might suspend the unitary concepts of ‘society’ and ‘culture’ and proceed by asking another order of question: how have historians traditionally attempted to incorporate a more reflexive understanding of ‘the symbolic order’ of culture in their research programmes? And more particularly how have they approached the genesis and effects of the rise of philosophical culture? To simplify a very complex field we can 4

INTRODUCTION

distinguish the following approaches to Greek antiquity: high culture theory, history of ideas, history of philosophy, contextual history of philosophy, analytical history of philosophy, sociological paradigms, critical theories of antiquity, and configurational perspectives. High culture theory If asked to define ‘culture’ we might cite the following phenomena: the artifacts of material culture, ordinary language, everyday attitudes and sensibilities, popular culture, mythology, religion, rituals, literature, art, music, law, forms of knowledge, ‘sciences’, philosophical schools, and traditions. However, the first theorists to study the impact of Greek philosophical traditions on modern culture had a more exclusive definition of their field. One influential persuasion was simply to define the ‘spirit’ of Greek civilization as the formative source and point of origin of Western civilization. The expressive culture of the ancient Greeks was not merely one important episode in the long history of Western consciousness, but rather created the idea of autonomous culture, freedom, and rational self-determination which helped to lay the spiritual foundations for the Western project: modernity begins with the Greeks. Only Greek civilization amongst the cultures of the ancient world made the transition from Mythos to Logos. In Gilbert Murray’s succint formulation, European civilization as a whole is a child of the GraecoRoman tradition (1946b: 198). This simple evolutionary scheme dates back to the Renaissance humanists (or even earlier, to the Carolingian Renaissance); it emerged as a dominant metanarrative with the revival of Classical studies in the eighteenth century, and was still accepted by historians of philosophy and sociologists in the late nineteenth century (for example, in Enlightenment rationalist and empiricist histories of the teleological progress of the mind, in Comte’s metahistory tracing the movement of humanity from primitive metaphysics and theology to the world-view of positive science, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s view that the Greeks invented the archetypes of philosophical thought (1962:31), and in Max Weber’s diagnosis of the influence of the ‘rational spirit’ of Greek antiquity upon the institutional life of the West (1986)). In the words of a later defender of the continuity of Greek ideology and the Classical tradition, Greek thought is the first act in ‘that great spiritual adventure of mankind which we call Civilization’ (Murray, 1946b: 231). It is well known that the cultural mandarins of the Aufklärung (c. 1750– 1800) constructed an idealized Greece as the mirror of their own identity, a myth of ‘imagined community’. This interpretation was organically related to the emergence of the problem of collective identity and national self-determination in the latter part of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century. The basic elements of this view were drawn from German Neoclassicism (associated with Johan Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68) and his influential work Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks: 5

INTRODUCTION

With Instructions for the Connoisseur, and an Essay on Grace in Works of Art, 1765), Friedrich Schleiermacher’s translation of Plato and the related project of a hermeneutic ‘recovery’ of Classical culture, Christoph Wieland’s and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s defence of Classical humanist ideals, and Goethe’s, Schiller’s, and Hölderlin’s invocation of Greek culture as a guiding moral and aesthetic norm. The outcome was an image of Greek antiquity as an aesthetic ideal—a myth of Greece where Hellenism was seen not merely as one important creative civilization, but as the very embodiment of ‘civilized virtue’ itself, the exemplar of cultural autonomy and ‘health’, a supreme ideal of human existence to be imitated by other nations striving to achieve ‘greatness’ and self-determination. In its extreme Romantic formulations, the Hellenic ideal imagined a civilization which folded the realms of ‘truth’, ‘beauty’, and ‘virtue’ into a harmonious totality. Ancient Greek culture was thus idealized and elevated into a sacred icon of ‘Western civilization’: for many—like Kant and Hegel, but not the ‘pagan’ Goethe—civilization was simply Greek culture made progressive by the addition of modern science and the Christian ideal of spiritual freedom. ‘Hellenism’, in sum, became an instrument of national self-identity and moral reflection. The basic terms of the Hellenic paradigm were already in place by the last quarter of the eighteenth century (c. 1760–70). But it was defined most emphatically in the age of German Idealism, c. 1820–30 and its intellectual aftermath. The codification of the paradigm is probably due to the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy and later Hegelians influenced by his dialectical reconstruction of earlier philosophical traditions. We should also mention Herder’s influential Reflections on Philosophy of the History of Mankind. Following themes developed by Schiller and Goethe on the aesthetic education of mankind, Herder invoked the ancients as a primary, if naive, ‘folk-culture’, an inspiring matrix of civilizational values, and the point of origin of a new European Geist that would transcend the ‘divided mind’ of modernity. Hegel transmuted these concerns into the substance of a philosophy of history, culminating in his glorification of the ‘Christian-German’ Occident as the true inheritor of the Greek legacy of rational discourse and political liberty. The seminal work is Hegel’s Philosophy of History where ‘world history’ is divided into three great stages—Greek antiquity as a golden age of liberty, medieval or ‘Germanic’ culture as an epoch of the spirit, and modernity promising a reconciliation of knowledge and faith. For Hegel, epochal history is ultimately the history of thought (or collective modes of thought relative to different ‘epochs’ of Spirit in the ancient, medieval, and modern eras). But the supreme form of spirit is not what the German patrician class called ‘arts and letters’ (from Literae Humaniores), but the wider field of ‘thought about thought’ which in its categorial purity Hegel called philosophy, the ‘pure thought’ of the Idea. It was thus Hegel in particular who popularized the idea that ‘philosophical culture’ not only had a social and cultural grounding but was 6

INTRODUCTION

in fact the key symbolic system and fundamental leitmotif for the history of nations and thus, on a larger canvas, for the ‘movement’ of ‘World History’. Philosophy, then, is the mirror of the Zeitgeist, an expressive totality reflecting the Spirit of the age. Much subsequent ‘cultural theory’ in the Germanspeaking world is either a defence of this universal idea of ‘philosophy’ and philosophical development (Fichte, Schelling, J.E.Erdman, Victor Cousin, etc.) or its critical rejection (Schopenhauer down to Nietzsche, Marx, Dilthey, Neokantianism, Positivism, and beyond).1 We might compare Neoclassicism and Hegelian historicism with a very different example of Graecophilia—the case of Nietzsche. For Nietzsche the recovery of pre-Classical Greece was a strategic move in his philosophical campaign to undermine the axiological foundations of Christian civilization. The theme is already explicit in his earlier work The Birth of Tragedy (1872). Where for Hegel Greek Sittlichkeit was personified by the fifth-century polis and its ‘thinkers’, Socrates, Euripides, Sophocles, Plato, and Demosthenes, for Nietzsche the truly creative period of Greek culture is located in the Presocratic age of the sixth century BC—the ‘tragic age’ which created the cultural values which energized the period of state-building and imperial expansion in the fifth century. Nietzsche, of course, was resolutely opposed to Winckelmann’s Greece of ‘noble simplicity’ and ‘sedate grandeur’. In fact, the ‘harmonious Hellenism’ of Socrates, Plato, and Euripides represents a degeneration of the passionate creative life of Presocratic culture. Nietzsche’s main aim was to subvert the Apollonian image of Greece at the centre of Neoclassical ideology (Hegel had already led the way by questioning the aesthetic mythology of ‘the beautiful soul’ of Greece in his criticism of Greek slavery and the imperial basis of direct democracy in the fifth century). If Greece is a mirror for the Western Self, then the Greek experience Nietzsche articulates in his essay Philosophic im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen (Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks) is one that was repressed by the aesthetic theorizing of the German enlightenment—a Dionysian experience of creative excess, unbridled sexuality, and the tragic sense of life. The pretext of Nietzsche’s polemic was his effort to recover the Dionysian-Apollonian dialectic of Presocratic culture in the Birth of Tragedy—the quest for the ‘hidden motives’ and ‘directive spirit’ of vital civilizations (the NietzscheBurckhardt link should also be noted in this context; especially the ‘spiritual sociology’ implicit in Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860));2 but the problem has earlier antecedents—the conflict of ‘Athens and Jerusalem’ that can be found as early as Tertullian, the struggle between pagan and Christian appropriations of antiquity throughout the Renaissance, and the debate between Ancient and Moderns that periodically flared up from the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century.3

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The history of ideas The history of ideas as it is conventionally defined is broader than the history of philosophy. In its modern guise the systematic study of ideas abandons the totalizing concepts of Reason and Idea inherited from Hegel. ‘Ideas’ are rather contingent products of specific individuals, communities, and traditions. Yet the lingering influence of idealism within the traditional history of ideas tends to lead away from contextual research into the formation and circulation of discourses toward the morphology and ‘evolution’ of isolated ‘unit ideas’ and single concepts. The fundamental premise of the history of ideas can be condensed in the directive that if ‘thought’ can be understood as a relatively autonomous formation—the ‘realm’ of ideas and discursive intellect—then a history of ideas might be constructed which traces the origins, direction, and vicissitudes of intellectual beliefs. In the writings of such figures as Wilhelm Dilthey, Ernst Cassirer, Alexandre Koyré, Paul Hazard, Elie Halevy, Arthur Lovejoy, and Paul Oskar Kristeller, the emphasis is placed upon the immanent development of ideas, the continuity of intellectual formations, and a weak form of societal determination as ways of recovering the mentality or ‘thought worlds’ of an epoch. The task is one of understanding Greek language and thought as a way of entering the imaginary life of Greek society. The means is the careful history of the developments of individual concepts—what German theorists call Begriffsgeschichte. We think of the work of historians of ideas like Arthur Lovejoy and his students (Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being (1936), Essays in the History of Ideas (1955), The Reason, the Understanding and Time (1961), Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (1935, with George Boas)), Collingwood’s celebration of the Herodotean origins of rational historiography in The Idea of History, and the defence of ‘classical values’ in the writings of Allan Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind; Introduction to Plato).4 The theme of the essential continuity of Greek ideology from Homer and Herodotus through Thucydides to Euripides and Plato to the present can be found in endless permutations in the secondary literature on Greek culture. In essence, the Greeks are viewed as the creators of Western civilization, while Roman culture produced apparatuses to disseminate this civilization throughout Europe (Moritz, in Rees, ed., 1970:22). The Greeks are presented as a paradigm of imaginative freedom: The openness of mind and readiness to discuss…must take pride of place among the claims which the Greeks have on our attention, along with the clear vision of their artists and the vigorous beauty of their poetry and the best of their prose. (Andrewes, 1967:265) Greek art and philosophical practices in particular are seen as symptomatic of a unique experiment in instituting universal freedoms: 8

INTRODUCTION

This is a world whose air we can breathe. It is different enough from our own to force us to look at it attentively, not only at the high masterpieces, but at ordinary things; and like enough, for us to feel that the issues which moved the Greeks are substantially of the same kind that move us. (Andrewes, 1967:266) R.G.Collingwood, for instance, expresses the theme with exemplary clarity: ‘our philosophical tradition goes back to a continuous line to sixth-century Greece’(1993:4). The idea of Graeco-Modern continuity was to become one of the leading plot devices of all the great histories of philosophy from the nineteenth century to the present day. In Gilbert Murray’s judgement: ‘of all the peoples known to us in history, the Greeks were far and away the freest thinkers…leaving India and China out of account for the moment—there is no philosophy except in Greece or derived from Greece’ (1946b: 67–8). This is the schema that is still operative in the magisterial, if unsociological, histories of Werner Jaeger (Paideia, 1969) and The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, 1947), Karl Reinhardt (Parmenides, 1959), Bruno Snell (The Discovery of the Mind: the Greek Origins of European Thought, 1953), Uvo Hölscher (Anfängliches Fragen, 1968), and others—discourses which inherited the German tradition of historiography represented by earlier figures like Eduard Zeller (Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy, 1969 and Socrates and the Socratic Schools, 1868), Wilhelm Windelband (History of Ancient Philosophy, 1956; History of Philosophy, 1901), Theodor Gomperz (1920), and Paul Friedländer (Plato, 1928). Jaeger’s developmental reading of Aristotle’s intellectual evolution in his Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of His Development (1948), for example, has been continued in a more sociological direction by Felix Grayleff and Henry Veatch.5 We can summarize this brief discussion by noting that the imaginary signifier ‘Greece’ has figured as a canvas for a range of mythical representations that have exerted a powerful influence, especially within the German language area: Greek antiquity as a pure form of moral and aesthetic Bildung; the identification of ‘German nationalism’ and national self-formation with Greek cultural ideals of freedom and self-determination (from Hölderlin to Schiller, Hegel, Herder, Kant, down to Burckhardt, Nietzsche, Schmitt, and Heidegger); the pervasive influence of Graecophilia upon the politics of German nationalism and state formation; Greek humanism as a normative response to the pathologies of modernity (Max Weber and Edmund Husserl on the humanist roots of the Greek spirit of rational science and universal reason in shaping European identity); Greece as a source of insights to ‘overcome’ the crisis of modernity (Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger), Greek literature as the matrix of the mimetic ideal in Western culture (Auerbach, 1957), Greek philosophy as the source of rational technology (Heidegger) and the unique term of difference in the dialectical fusion of traditions (Gadamer). As one 9

INTRODUCTION

author has observed, German humanism ‘invented an idealized version of Greece intended to serve as a practical model for overcoming the alienation and material decadence of modernity’ (Mewes, 1992:23). Moreover, the Hellenic paradigm functioned as a teleological model for a progressivist philosophy of history: this ideal of Greece is presented in the overall framework of a philosophy or theodicy of history entirely alien to ancient Greek thought or experience. German humanists, in short, presented their Greek ideal as an historically early stage of human perfection intended to serve as ‘principle’ or model for the perfection of mankind to be attained as the final universal stage in the education of all mankind or humanity. (Mewes, 1992:23) The history of philosophy In emphasizing the contributions of German humanists and classical scholars we cannot avoid noting the link between the history of philosophy and Classical philology. Up to the end of the nineteenth century Classical philology laid claim to a monopoly on research in Greek philosophy (recall that the German philosopher Nietzsche began his academic career at the University of Basel as a Classical philologist). Here, to understand the thought of the ancients is to decipher the ‘grammar’ of the language in which this thought was embodied and realized. As we have already observed, this task was predicated on the idea of universal translation as a total recovery of ‘Greek thought and beliefs’ through the work of philological traduction. With the aid of advances in linguistics and semantics, the philologist could in principle understand the ancient Greeks better than they understood themselves. The British parallel to this detailed philological reconstruction of the origins of Greek philosophy can be found in the tradition of historical research influenced by the Oxbridge Classics curriculum (the Cambridge Tripos, ‘Greats’ at the University of Oxford—crystallizing in the examination in Classical history and philosophy that was frequently seen as a basic training for the future élite of the Victorian and Edwardian state): the work of George Grote (History of Greece), John Burnet (Greek Philosophy: Thales to Plato and Early Greek Philosophy), James Adam (The Religions Teachers of Greece), Gilbert Murray (Greek Studies), Gilbert Highet (The Classical Tradition), among others. We should also mention the Cambridge school of Hellenic studies at the turn of the century, influenced by Durkheimian sociology and late nineteenth-century anthropology: Francis M.Cornford, Jane Harrison, and Gilbert Murray. Some of the works to emerge from this tradition are now regarded as classic works in their own right—we think of the great work of translation and editing of the Presocratic thinkers by Hermann Diels and Werner Kranz (Diels’ work Fragmente der Vorsokratiker 10

INTRODUCTION

was first published in 1903; his earlier compilation, the Doxographi Graeci, was published in 1879); in England, W.D.Ross’s studies of Aristotle and Plato (e.g. Plato’s Theory of Ideas); W.K.C.Guthrie’s multivolume History of Greek Philosophy, 1962–81, A.E.Taylor’s Plato: the Man and his Works, F.M.Cornford’s Principium Sapientiae and Plato’s Theory of Knowledge, and Kathleen Free-man’s Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers. Contextual history of philosophy Scholarship, however, from around 1945 to the present has in general been critical of the ‘great survey’ style of German and English histories of philosophy (and their typical form, the handbook digest of philosophical doctrines and schools). Condensing a complex debate into a few lines we can say that the history of ideas paradigm has been criticized on two counts: first for ignoring the verbal and linguistic media of creative thought; and second, for adopting an uncritical idea of translation which abstracted ideas from their wider contexts and reconstructed these ‘ideas’ as though they had a history independent of sociocultural life. Because of the lack of linguistic self-reflection, the dialectical development of philosophical thinking tended to be reduced to the history of individual thinkers and schools of thought while ignoring the argumentative content of philosophy. By opposing this kind of biographical historiography, the contextual historian of philosophy reoriented inquiry to the task of recovering the idioms and language-games of philosophy as the central hermeneutical task. The philosophical culture of Platonic, Aristotelian, or Stoic metaphysics is not to be treated as an abstract realm of ‘ideas’, but as an intellectual formation embodied in concepts, statements, prepositional forms, and argumentative contexts. By emphasizing the order of concepts, research on the origins of philosophy shifted toward more linguistically informed investigations of Greek modes of thought in their verbal and logical contexts (among the journals devoted to this perspective are the Revue de Philologie, Revue des Etudes Grecques, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophic, Journal of Hellenic Studies, Yale Classical Studies, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy). The following works might be cited as a representative range of works in this tradition: Harold Cherniss’ The Riddle of the Early Academy (1945); Walter Burkert’s work on the Pythagoreans and Pythagorean culture, Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism;6 Hermann Fränkel’s study of the early history of Greek poetry and protophilosophy;7 S.Sambursky’s The Physical World of the Greeks;8 Friedrich Solmsen’s studies of the intellectual culture of the Greek Enlightenment, Plato’s theology, and the role of the Aristotelian framework of metaphysics in constructing a physical picture of the natural world;9 Otto Neugebauer’s work on ancient mathematics, including mathematical symbolisms from the non-Greek world;10 George Sarton’s history of Greek science;11 Geoffrey’s Lloyd’s contextually sensitive 11

INTRODUCTION

analysis of Greek science, folkloric knowledge, and medical practices;12 G.S.Kirk’s extensive writings on Greek myth, Homeric poetry, and literary consciousness (from his Myth (1970) and The Nature of Greek Myths (1974) to his comprehensive commentaries on the Iliad);13 Gregory Vlastos’ careful studies of the internal logics of philosophical ideas and intellectual debates;14 Giorgio de Santillana’s history of the origins of scientific thought;15 J.M.Rist’s account of the Stoics and Giovanni Reale’s recent critical history of the origins and development of Greek philosophy.16 Analytical history of philosophy Under this heading we can designate research that has emerged from or is closely associated with the ‘analytic’ tradition of Anglo-American philosophy, especially influenced by the linguistic philosophy of J.L.Austin, Gilbert Ryle, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Anscombe, Peter Strawson, Jonathan Bennett, and others. Work in this tradition tends to focus exclusively upon the conceptual order of thought separated from its historical, biographical, and sociocultural contexts; it privileges analytical reasoning in decomposing ideas to their propositional core and advocates an ‘immanent’ text-centred view of the transmission of debates and intellectual traditions. The primary aim of analysis is to reconstruct the precise meaning and significance of concepts and arguments proposed by an earlier philosopher irrespective of the wider intellectual and social context. This is often termed rational reconstruction: These questions cannot be answered fully without a thorough understanding of the language; for the language is, after all, the vehicle both of the meaning and of the form in which the meaning is expressed. It is here that the linguistic element comes into its own, wherever it is possible to study a work in the original. (Moritz, in Rees, ed., 1970:30) Here the media of reflection and modes of externalization of thought are ‘detached’ from the immanent content of the thought itself. The undoubted strengths of rational reconstruction lie in the detailed attention to the specific claims and linguistic structure of the language-games of Greek cosmology, science, and intellectual culture. Many schools of literary, structuralist, and semiological analysis today pursue a similar objective: What made the writer choose a particular word or phrase, a particular collocation of words in a particular order, a particular grammatical usage, or a particular sound and rhythm; how does it contribute to the meaning and its artistic expression; and how successful is the choice? (Moritz, in Rees, ed., 1970:30) The framework of analytical reconstruction, however, is less successful in 12

INTRODUCTION

exploring the wider social background, ideological contexts, and rhetorical formations of philosophical ideas. As we have noted, modes of thought are disengaged from their cultural structures and social functions. The medium and rhetorical techniques of philosophical expression are thought to be separate from the conceptual message of philosophical argument. Exemplary studies carried out within this paradigm can be found in the writings of Charles H.Kahn, J.E.Raven (Pythagoreans and Eleatics, 1948), David Furley’s work on Greek cosmology, Edward Hussey’s incisive book on the Presocratic thinkers (1972), Geoffrey Lloyd’s sociologically-informed studies of Greek science, medicine, and philosophy, G.E.L.Owens’ writings on the Eleatics, Hugh Lawson-Tancred’s introduction to the Penguin edition of Aristotle’s De Anima (1986), Jonathan Barnes’ influential work on the Presocratic thinkers, The Pre-Socratic Philosophers (1979), Myles Burnycat’s essays on ancient epistemology (his studies of ancient scepticism and his edition of the Theaetetus), Malcolm Schofield’s work on Anaxagoras and Aristotle, Terence Irwin’s comprehensive study of Platonic moral theory and Aristotelian ontology, and Martha Nussbaum’s essays on Greek tragedy, Aristotle, and related Greek thinkers.17 Sociological paradigms In contrast to non-sociological perspectives, one of the fundamental recommendations of sociology and the sociology of culture is to locate meaning, thought, and cultural practices in the everyday realities of their original social structures. Another recommendation is to study ‘meaning’ in terms of the collective forms of expression and communication. Like other types of formal thought, theorizing and abstract philosophy must be described and explained in relation to their generative historical and sociological conditions—an investigative attitude which criticizes the separation of form and content in traditional analysis and contests the philological attitude that ‘glosses over slavery, infanticide, exploitation of the lower classes, the violence and cruelty of political life in Greece and Rome, and the ruthlessness of ancient imperialism’.18 The sociological perspective—whether of a Marxist, Durkheimian, or Weberian provenance—moves research beyond the study of philosophical cultures at the level of conceptual structures and arguments toward larger ‘units of analysis’, to social activities and their corresponding distributive forms—intellectual currents, schools, traditions, political debates, class formations, and ideological problematics. How ideas are formed and circulated is as important as what is thought or debated in a society. If the world of ideas and thought is included in the realm of social practices then traditions of ‘theoretical practice’ should be understood and explained as socially organized phenomena. Philosophy is itself a social practice sustained by specific institutions and investments of cultural capital. Given the diversity of 13

INTRODUCTION

sociological perspectives, a number of approaches can be isolated for illustrative purposes. First, what we might call generic sociology. This perspective would include a wide range of research on ancient Greek society and culture that is ‘sociologically informed’, without being committed to a particular social theory or sociological paradigm. The basic synchronic principle of this framework can be stated simply: ‘Every ancient author wrote in the context of his [sic] own time and must be studied in that context.’ Its diachronic correlate is the insight that ‘social conditions change and science changes with them’. Hence we need to study beliefs and knowledge formation in the context of social agencies and sustaining social systems. We might even think of the more ‘holistic’ approaches to the Classical world as practical sociologies: Classics is the oldest and best established of all sociologies: much of it is, or ought to be concerned with analysing and explaining the social systems of the Greeks and Romans, of which their art, architecture, literature and philosophy were at once products and manifestations’.19 A more explicit analytical framework is provided by Marxist historians of Greek antiquity. Studying the culture of the Athenian democracy or Roman Empire is part of a comparative history of ‘Western’ modes of production. Here the primary ‘context’ is that provided by the socioeconomic relations and political structure of antiquity. In this framework, art, theory, and philosophical culture are viewed as ‘superstructural’ phenomena rooted in relations of production, markets, schools, and the like, reflecting class antagonisms. Poetry, science, philosophy, etc. are ‘forms of consciousness’ articulating the ideological thought and culture of an epoch. But they are also ‘reflections’ and ‘witnesses’ to the social movements and everyday life of the ancient world. Here cultural analysis should be integrated with the economics and politics of a social formation. Philosophy, like any other form of knowledge or verbal culture, must be explained by studying the organization of societies which sanction this form of ideological activity. Examples of this type of materialist epistemology would include the work of George Thomson on the ancient Aegean economy and early Greek philosophy, Benjamin Farrington’s theory of the emergence of ancient science, J.D.Bernal’s materialist account of the growth of Western science, and A.D.Winspear’s Marxist reconstruction of Platonic ideology, The Genesis of Plato’s Thought (1974).20 Where generic sociology privileges ‘the social moment’ as a determining causal nexus (‘few, if any, writers can be completely isolated from the context of the time and atmosphere in which they wrote’, Moritz, in Rees, ed., 1970:27), Marxist historiography tends to reduce cultural formations to reflections of economic systems and material life-conditions— a tendency that is exacerbated by an uncritical use of mechanical and reflectionist models of the social formation (e.g.Oliva,1981). A related sociological approach is represented by structuralist research: 14

INTRODUCTION

the work of Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) in sociology and the writings of Marcel Mauss (1872–1950), Lucien Levy-Bruhl (1857–1939), and Claude Lévi-Strauss in anthropology can be mentioned. This approach to culture can be traced to the sociology of ‘collective representations’ in Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915) and the semiological model of mythological communication in Lévi-Strauss’ studies of South American mythologies. In this approach, philosophical discourse takes its place as a ‘level’ or ‘moment’ of the social formation, a structured ‘representation’ elaborated by society as a whole. The application of semiological models to earlier cultural formations is crucial to this perspective: Language is a system of signs that express ideas, and is therefore comparable to a system of writing, the alphabet of deaf mutes, symbolic rites, polite formulas, military signals, etc…. A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable… I shall call it semiology. (Saussure, 1983:16) There have been notable attempts to apply structural and semiotic methods to the analysis and understanding of Greek modes of thought and culture. The most illuminating of these have distinguished between different types and levels of determining ‘context’ in order to analyze the multiple structural ‘determination’ of thought and knowledge. Thus by emphasizing language and semiotic practices, we are directed to more specific ‘modes of literary production’ in accounting for the particular characteristics of literary and philosophical genres.21 Analogously, structural approaches derived from psychoanalytical and social-psychological perspectives have also been applied to the study of the culture of antiquity. We know that Freud developed the central ‘myth’ of psychoanalysis, the Oedipus complex, from his reading of Sophocles and other great exponents of Attic tragedy. Nietzsche constructed his famous typology of Dionysian and Apollonian experience from a genealogical ‘psychology’ of value formation (he was also influenced by Erwin Rohde’s path-breaking study of Greek beliefs (1925) concerning the soul and immortality). Some of the more creative psychological investigations have emphasized the reciprocal interplay between the ‘discourses’ of reason and unreason in the ancient world, stressing the interaction of rational formations and ‘barbaric’ myth, intellect, and poiesis, socially ordering practices and the disordering work of magic, cult, and expressive affectivity—the informing ‘structures of feeling’ in the myth and religion of premodern civilizations (for example, research on the role of mania and madness in ancient Greece, on the psychology of Orphic religiosity, and the evolution and role of ethical conceptions of human nature in Greek society).22

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Critical theories of antiquity The recent revival of global sociology and the comparative sociology of civilizations has led to reappraisals of earlier accounts of societal selfformation. Among the major contributions in this area are Max Weber’s comparative Religionssoziologie, Marx and Engels’ appreciation of the creative civilization of the ancient world, precapitalist modes of production, and military formations, Karl Polanyi’s work on the Archaic economy, Perry Anderson’s work on the genealogy of absolutism, and Michael Mann’s historical study of the interaction between economic, ideological, political, and military relations in The Sources of Social Power (1986). While many of these studies tend to footnote philosophical culture as a dependent element of the social superstructure and separate cultural analysis from more general historical and sociological problematics, the intellectual advance over non-sociological perspectives remains a central achievement. Weber’s work in particular deserves more extended analysis. Suffice here to remark that Weber theorizes the dynamic interaction between social and cultural formations by emphasizing the reciprocal evolution of material and ideal interests, the conjuncture of complex orders of social, economic, military, political, and geographical ‘systems’, and the seminal impact of ethical and metaphysical ‘world-views’ in creating the patterns of ethical conduct and social institutions. The implicit principles of Weber’s Religionssoziologie might be used as an exemplar of this approach (Gerth and Mills, eds, 1948: Part 3): (i) the sociological linkage of religious beliefs, ethical codes, and philosophical logics to the social and economic dynamics of institutions (‘No economic ethic has ever been determined solely by religion’, Gerth and Mills, eds, 1948:268); (ii) comparative analysis of civilizations as dynamic, multifaceted systems; (iii) the long-term evolution of Occidental rationalism within the broader horizon of progressive social and political rationalization (especially ethical rationalization of life conduct embedded in the organisation of specific moral, ethical, and social codes). Weber’s scattered remarks on Greek antiquity presuppose a complex and discontinuous process whereby different spheres of life were ‘rationalized’ in an essentially prerational and premodern civilization. The philosophers and scientists of Greek antiquity effectively began the ‘disenchantment of the world’ which laid the foundations of modernity. Here the role of ‘ideas’ in historical change is of paramount importance. Thus the development of mathematical algorithms, Milesian science, the Socratic analysis of concepts, and rational deliberation in the democratic forum represent waves of Zweckrationalität in a sea of Wertrationalität. We also know that Weber’s comparative sociology of belief systems and knowledge was not intended to 16

INTRODUCTION

replace a dogmatic materialist theory of culture with an idealist metaphysics of progressive ‘enlightenment’. Weber recognized that the relationships between the socioeconomic infrastructure and the ‘Value-spheres’ of superstructural practices and beliefs were immensely complex: ‘it is, of course, not my aim to substitute for a one-sided materialistic an equally one-sided spiritualistic causal interpretation of culture and of history’ (1976a: 183). The sociological impact of ideas and beliefs presupposes an antecedent order of institutions and social interests. As Weber says more generally, Not ideas, but material and ideal interests, directly govern men’s conduct. Yet very frequently the ‘world images’ that have been created by ‘ideas’ have, like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest. ‘From what’ and ‘for what’ one wished to be redeemed and, let us not forget, ‘could be’ redeemed, depended upon one’s image of the world. (Gerth and Mills, eds, 1948:280) These cautionary reminders, however, did not prevent Weber from isolating a general tendency within the overall social dynamics of European civilization. From a logical point of view Weber’s master theme of the rationalization of the West—like Hegel’s Geist or the ‘cunning of Reason’—has the status of an ideal-typical framework for more specific sociological investigations into the institutional processes of self-consciousness and reflectivity.23 Weber thus speaks of ‘the modern form of thoroughly rationalizing the conception of the world’, the rationalization of ethical orders, and the ‘rationalization of practical life’ (1948:281, 283–4, 291–2, 293–5). The great evolutionary theme of ‘the rationalization of the West’ in Max Weber’s sociology is now frequently appropriated as a truism in the sociology of Western civilization: Since the development of Greek thought, however, the tendency of Western civilization has been towards rationalism and hence away from the religious life. That is its distinguishing characteristic…With very few exceptions…no such marked turning away from religion is to be found in the history of the world outside the West. (Braudel, 1994:23) Configurational perspectives Weber pursued a multidimensional approach to the explanation of interdependent social and cultural processes (Gerth and Mills, eds, 1948:291– 301). Empirical historiography is given the task of ‘factoring out’ relationships from a complex, multicausal fabric and exploring particular constellations of factors and relations: The features of religions that are important for economic ethics shall 17

INTRODUCTION

interest us primarily from a definite point of view: we shall be interested in the way in which they are related to economic rationalism. More particularly, we mean the economic rationalism of the type which, since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, has come to dominate the Occident as part of the particular rationalization of civic life. (Gerth and Mills, eds, 1948:293; also 294–5, passim) His general sociology of culture is particularly important in stressing the dynamic interplay between powerful interest groups and ideological formations, the role of urban élites and cities in cultural change, the importance of ‘routinizing’ ideas and beliefs, the impact of markets and other social networks on ideological innovation. In contemporary cultural theory Weber’s relatively isolated attempt to create such a comprehensive sociology of culture has been supplemented by other frameworks and perspectives (cf. Kalberg, 1994: Part 2, ch. 5). A number of approaches can be briefly distinguished for analytical purposes: Philosophical culture as ideology In a more flexible form of class analysis, the philosophical culture and ‘superstructures’ of the ancient world are to be understood as the products of class struggle, situated within the internal conflicts or stasis of city-state political life. The classical precursor here is Fustel de Coulanges’ The Ancient City. Unlike the reflectionist paradigm of early Marxist historiography, however, recent work has stressed the relative autonomy of ideology and philosophical culture and the dialectical role of thought and ideas in shaping the social fabric of the ancient world.24 Epochal history By ‘epochal history’ we refer to the attempt to excavate the axial principles governing the dominant ideology of historical epochs and the decisive shifts from one epoch to another. Once established, each ‘epoch’ is governed by a dominant self-interpretation of human existence, a self-conception which prefigures the very meaning of action and life within that era. As a metahistory, epochal historiography involves an ‘archaeology’ of the ‘depth history’ of ancient cosmologies, religious ethics, and philosophical beliefs—the underlying symbolic frameworks in whose terms knowledge projects were shaped and the extent of their cultural influence. In addition to Nietzsche’s ‘psychology’ of value systems, perhaps the attempts of Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and Hans-Georg Gadamer to ‘deconstruct’ Western metaphysics as a way of analyzing the epochal deep structure of Western civilization might serve to illustrate this approach.25 Related to this concern for ‘epochal principles’ is 18

INTRODUCTION

the view of antiquity as a unified culture of praxis and political action, and modernity as a loss of ethically grounded culture.26 Genealogical history In this context ‘genealogy’ refers primarily to a method of cultural history; the exemplary texts for this approach are Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals (1969), Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1967) and his multivolume History of Sexuality. The crucial advance of this method over conventional historiography and sociology is its ‘triangulation’ of forms of knowledge (Foucault’s earlier language of epistemes in The Order of Things (1966) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969)), relations of power, and institutional orders. This facilitates empirical researches on the power/knowledge networks in a given society (for example, the archaeology of the ‘medical gaze’ in terms of the institutionalization of scientific medicine in The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and the disciplinary ‘knowledges’ linked to the birth of the modern prison system and its associated penologies (in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975)). The perspective is also closely related in method and intention to what we can call the ‘history of everyday life’, originally influenced by the ‘Annales school’ of Marc Bloch, Georges Duby, Le Goff, and others. Today this approach is represented by individuals such as Roger Chartier, Michel de Certeau, and Norbert Elias.27 Feminist perspectives The increasing interest in the social organization of everyday life and past ‘figurations’ of power has also encouraged the development of feminist research on the development and influence of philosophical culture. Recent work has highlighted processes of exclusion within the Western intellectual tradition and the importance of developing techniques and strategies to overcome the phallocentrism of Western culture.28 Reflexive ‘archaeology’ We might cite Michel Foucault’s research on ancient Greek and Christian ‘technologies of self in creating ethical-political self-regimes of the body and cultural definitions of sexuality (The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction (1979), but especially History of Sexuality: Volume 2: The Uses of Pleasure (1985) and History of Sexuality: Volume 3: The Care of the Self (1986)). But we could also extend the category to include a growing field of research on the multidimensional and reflexive linkages between self, society, and culture. Much of this research can be considerd as an effort to escape the frozen dichotomies of voluntarism and determinism, understanding and 19

INTRODUCTION

causality, synchrony or diachrony, structure or agency, unilinear or multilinear explanations inherited from earlier metaphysical paradigms. For example the renewed interest in the historical development of concepts of self, agency, and the person might be located in this critical nexus.29 Some methodological guidelines Building upon this critical ‘turn’ toward non-determinist social and cultural perspectives, we are now in a position to suggest a number of guidlines in moving toward a reflexive sociology of culture. The following topics can serve as headings to summarize the discussion and frame the chapters which follow: the powerful role of cultural myths and commonsense conceptions in defining the objects of study; the importance of moving beyond the intrinsic/extrinsic duality in studying theoretical discourses; the importance of combining diachronic and synchronic analysis in approaching text-context constellations (text-context; continuity-discontinuity; heterogeneity-difference; history of self and identity formations); the importance of rethinking culture in dynamic, constructionist terms as embodied, constitutive, and creative rhetorics; and the centrality of narrative self-understanding prefiguring courses of conduct and social interaction. In general, the emphasis is placed upon analyzing cultural and discursive struggles within their socially organized fields. Myths of the West No critical research can avoid reflexivity at the level of method and epistemology. An adequate sociology of culture needs to reflect upon its own categories and ‘frames of meaning’ as products of philosophical traditions. Thus we have already implicitly invoked a ‘metacritical’ principle to isolate the role played by ideology and idealizations in scholarly reconstructions of the culture of antiquity. It is relatively easy to identify some of the more prominent narrative myths in this field; consider for example (i) the myth of the singular character of Greek/Western culture (metahistories of the ‘rise of the West’ and also ‘decline of the West’ in the sweeping accounts of Friedrich Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler (Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1919); The Decline of the West (1932), (ii) the Eurocentric narrative of Intellectual Progress from ‘savagery to civilization’: the Olympian perspective adopted by evolutionary history tracing the ‘rise of civilizations’ from barbarism to civil order (Giambattista Vico, 1744), from irrationality to reason as a linear, cumulative process (the atemporal temporality associated with Enlightenment philosophy of History—Condorcet’s Sketch for an Historical Tableau of the Progress of the Human Spirit—and its sociological equivalents in the writings of Saint-Simon, Smith, Comte, Spencer, Durkheim, and others), and (iii) the myth of the epochal struggle between West and East—the challenge-andresponse model of Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History (1934–61). 20

INTRODUCTION

Influenced by the human sciences, historians today would certainly reject these unlinear narratives for more multidimensional perspectives. This is associated with the tendency to overemphasize discontinuity, dissonance, and non-linear change in many paradigms of social analysis. Today the emphasis is typically placed on the contingent constellation of historical events and sociological conditions that have shaped European culture (Athens/Jerusalem; Graeco-Roman and Judaic-Christian culture; the impact of long-term historical structures, patterns, social, political, and military constellations in social change,—the history of ‘big processes’, ‘structures’, and la longue durée).30 Beyond the ‘intrinsic/extrinsic’ opposition: the realm of texts Theories of culture tend to be polarized into intrinsic readings—a one-sided emphasis on text-centred problems of meaning and interpretation—and extrinsic readings, emphasizing contextual approaches. On the one side, immanent analysis stresses the autonomy of the text and disparages contextual approaches to meaning, while on the other side, the text is often treated as a mere reflex of its social context. The main desideratum, however, is to cut through this opposition of immanent/external and explore the decisive transactions between text and context in specific cultural life-worlds (‘text’ here designates wider realms of signification, including material objects and artifacts). The nexus of ‘text-and-context’, of course, is shorthand for a whole range of disciplines concerned with establishing and analyzing the basic phenomena of hermeneutic scholarship: Among the technical ones are those of recording, repairing and preserving, of reading and deciphering the various scripts and languages, of dating and placing objects in chronological sequence, of classifying, identifying and so on. Each problem needs a whole discipline to solve it, and within Ancient History the specialists proliferate—epigraphists, papyrologists, numismatists, palaeographers—each of them working in a field that becomes more complex year by year. Even when the material is ‘processed’ by one or more of these the problems remain— the broader problems of interpretation. (Percival, in Rees, ed., 1970:64).31 Following Foucault we might approach the construction of concepts as the work of specific discourses and discursive struggles. But unlike Foucault, we need not think of traditions and discursive formations as exclusively constraining environments. The ‘origins of epic’, for example, are not to be taken as an unproblematic given from which we might derive speculations about preliterate Greece. The epic form is a creative innovation within the inherited discursive formation of Indo-European culture: ‘Today the Homeric poems are (or should be) read against the background of what we know about oral poetry, about Mycenaean Greece, and about other contemporary civilizations and their 21

INTRODUCTION

literature’ (Moritz, in Rees, ed., 1970:28). Greek philosophy, ancient Greek tragedy, and Homeric poetry as textual artifacts emerged at the intersection of particular Indo-European traditions (cf. Nagy, 1990; Meier, 1993). We consequently need to study the material embodiments and signifying media of ‘discourses’ in the context of the underlying processes of cultural production. In analyzing the evolution of theories, the primary materials are, of course, the surviving texts of ancient authors. But here a knowledge of the ‘modes of communication’ and ‘historical traditions’ in which these authors worked is indispensable if we are to understand the creative expansion of symbolism and language: ‘Even the most abstract theories, though ahistorical in intention and formulation, are historical in use: science and its philosophical predecessors are parts of special historical traditions, not entities that transcend all history’ (Feyerabend, 1987:121). The dual emphasis upon media of textual production and modes of communication reinforces the importance of studying the available techniques of cultural reflection in the institutional contexts of a given society. For example, given the overwhelmingly oral character of ancient politics and culture we must be prepared to suspend our own literary prejudices and enter a world that is more profoundly organized around rhetorical practices and face-to-face communication. But we also know that ancient Greece experienced the first major ‘literary revolution’ in Western culture. Here discourse must be researched in its specific historical modalities: Language is speech, and ancient literature (and especially ancient poetry) was written not so much for the eye as for the ear. The music of words is a very subtle form of music to which the ancient world was particularly sensitive. We can therefore not become fully aware of its literature if we do not hear it—and if we do hear it, it will help us to recapture a very deep form of enjoyment which is largely lost in the modern world. (Moritz, in Rees, ed., 1970:32) The interplay of innovation and tradition can be extended to the whole range of ‘rhetorical culture’ in Greek antiquity: Theoretical traditions are opposed to historical traditions in intention, not in fact. Trying to create a knowledge that differs from ‘mere’ historical or empirical knowledge, they succeeded in finding formulations (theories, formulae) which sound objective, universal and logically rigorous but which are used and, in use, interpreted in a manner conflicting with all these properties. What we have is a new historical tradition which, carried along by a sizeable false consciousness, seems to transcend human perception and opinion and human life. (Feyerabend, 1987:126) It is also important to bear in mind that discourses both codify and criticize the forms of life in which they appear. A culture is both revealed and constituted by the dominant modes of communication and rhetorics that transmit its 22

INTRODUCTION

historical traditions. In general a critical cultural history is one which rejects all linear-causal models of social processes in favour of non-objectivistic models of intrinsically temporal formations. In the particular context of the emergence of science and philosophy we need to study the creation of new forms of reflexivity, their media and instruments (modes of communication, the history of literacy, new genres, poetic and prose conventions, etc.), and the ways in which reflexivity was disseminated through powerful rhetorical forms. The task for future research is to develop a dialogical model of text-context formations and to investigate the ‘field’ of philosophical speculation in relation to its material preconditions and appropriations; this requires complementing the analysis of isolated texts by a social analysis of generic traditions, the situated interpretive activities of theoretical groups, and the particular activities of reflexive institutions.32 Synthesizing synchronic and diachronic analysis The synthesis of synchronic and diachronic analysis is another way of expressing this desideratum. Here it is important to be aware of the plurality of time-frames in historical and metahistorical discourse. In the reflexive paradigm, temporal schemas themselves are analyzable as cultural ‘frames’ produced by the dominant institutional order of a society, particularly by what Cornelius Castoriadis calls its ‘imaginary institution’ or what in Volume 1 I referred to as the generative ethos of a society or civilization. This essentially ‘pluralizes’ the basic time systems of societies (and different groups and traditions within society). In treating all narrative schema as social and logological phenomena—for example, as sources of identity—we subject them to critical appraisal, tracing their history and sociological functions. By transcending the obsession with linear period concepts and essentialist categories in cultural analysis we can begin to construct models of nonsynchronic relations, complexity, and variability. Consider for example Raymond Williams’ useful distinction between different rhythms of cultural change and innovation: ‘dominant’, ‘residual’, and ‘emergent’cultural elements, producing essentially non-synchronic discontinuities within a social formation—acknowledging the relative autonomy and ‘dissonance’ of practices such as myth, literature, and philosophical culture. In this context we might explore the complex interaction between ‘history’ and ‘metahistory’ (e.g. the metahistorical basis of Progress, Nostalgic, Cyclical, Contingent, and Discontinuous representations of history). Today this is often framed in terms of the role of metanarratives in socially constructing narrative formations of ‘time experience’. Compare, for example Braudel’s metanarrative summation of the world conceptions of science advanced in Western civilization: Since the thirteenth century, Western science has lived with only three 23

INTRODUCTION

general explanations or world systems: that of Aristotle, which although of ancient lineage entered the interpretations and speculations of the West in the thirteenth century; that of Descartes and Newton, which founded classical science and which is an original Western creation except for its decisive borrowings from the works of Archimedes; and finally the relativity theory of Albert Einstein, announced in 1905, which inaugurated contemporary science. (1994:365) At the level of social institutions, the configurational paradigm highlights the interaction of different ‘rhythms’ or ‘orders’ of temporality, from the personal ‘time consciousness’ of lived duration, to the local and individual frame of ‘events’, to the societal conjuncture (histoire conjoncturelle), and finally the longer institutional frames of the longue durée (the longevity of belief systems and philosophical frameworks informing the normative systems of whole societies and civilizations).33 Historical traditions as text-context configurations In moving toward a sociological theory of discourse we have commended a wider concept of ‘culture’ as the symbolic order embodied in social practices (in other words human activities become ‘practices’ through cultural meanings and the sources of these ‘meanings’ are situated in specific institutional formations). Changes in practices are dependent upon a wide range of factors— material, geographical, cultural, political, and so forth. In the language of the sociology of knowledge, we have to understand ‘ways of thinking’ as situated in ‘ways of being’. Instead of reifying the ‘realm of Ideas’ we pursue sociological researches into the history, contexts, and traditions in which concepts were shaped, used, and circulated. Elaborated into specific research perspectives this kind of holistic approach involves detailed studies of local cultures, the role of controversies within particular genres and genre systems, and the painstaking reconstruction of the emergence of intellectual problematics and traditions. It also presupposes a more pragmatic definition of ideas as conceptual tools developed for particular historical purposes within particular traditions. By moving away from the macro ‘History of Ideas’ we can begin to theorize all textual forms and practices as already embedded in contextual relations and institutional formations (for example, contextual scholarship exploring the development of ‘instruments’ and ‘institutions’ of reflection which make possible the production, reproduction and ‘consumption’ of different kinds of theoretical, aesthetic, or political discourses). Adapting insights from reflexive historiography, structuralism, the sociology of knowledge, hermeneutics, and related frameworks we might redefine the ‘unit’ of analysis as active processes of thought embedded in specific problematics and historical traditions. Here the fundamental directive is to study problems in the context of problematics 24

INTRODUCTION

and to situate problematics in the wider cartography of discourses. Only by adopting such a holistic perspective can we avoid asocial, acontextual, and ahistorical approaches to the investigation of knowledge formations. Heterogeneity In relation to the genesis of philosophy this attitude underscores the fruitful coexistence of different symbolic orders within the same tradition. This also requires that in studying the development of a specific science or philosophical tradition as a form of life we should examine their thematic practices in relation to a wider, operative horizon of practices. Thus it is necessary to relate the emergence of the field of philosophical reflection to wider social constellations (for example, historical investigations of the changes which fostered the pedagogic and political institutionalization of critical dialogue in Greek society; the struggle between Homeric culture and Presocratic reflection). As with the essays in Volume 2, these ‘soundings’ in Presocratic culture are intended to be read as first sketches of a complex landscape and not as definitive pronouncements foreclosing further discussion. As I have argued in earlier volumes, since language forms the constitutive medium of social life, the investigation of ways of thinking and theoretical practices is more than a specialism in the study of societies and civilizations. In deference to the centrality of language, selfhood, and the ‘logos’, I refer to the analysis of discursive formations—in this case the discourses of philosophical reflection—as logological investigations. As important differences between the theoretical positions of the Presocratics emerge from these readings, we will see that traditional ‘triumphalist’ accounts of ‘the birth of philosophy’ and the transition from Mythos to Logos need to be revised and rethought in relation to the complex reflexive possibilities still latent in some of the oldest discourses of European inquiry. What is most important here is not the invention of a method but the discovery of the idea of dialogue as the ethical medium and life of reflection. The genealogy of Presocratic thought enables us to raise questions about the early discourses of Western selfhood and intellectual identity—and thereby to adopt perspectives which open out upon fields of research in sociocultural history. We can thus also return to these texts to be instructed in the possibilities of reflexive thinking. This is also their relevance to the problems of reflexivity in contemporary social thought. Reflexivity is not an invention of the human sciences. Its history— however dispersed and occluded—dates back to ancient Greece. In the light of this ‘shock of the old’ we should revise the traditional history of intellectual culture by investigating the development of theorizing as part of the social, ethical, and political life of communities and reflexive traditions.

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INTRODUCTION

The history of self and identity formations: institutions of reflection All the above remarks converge on the task of making the social origins of the self, identity, and valorizations of otherness central to discourse analysis. We have suggested that questions of selfhood are necessarily linked to the emergence of rational practices, and thus to the instruments of reason and political life. But from another angle these ‘reflective instruments’ also shape and determine the possibilities of theoretical imagination. In the context of Archaic Greece, philosophical language was inseparable from the formation of civic culture, collective representations of public life, and wider patterns of identity formation. But here ‘theorizing’ (and cultural formations more generally) are seen as powerful articulations of social relations rather than their mechanical reflection. In principle, the logological attitude returns the philosophical text, its questionframes and problems to their sustaining order of social practices. By emphasizing the institutions of reflection we foreground the reciprocal linkages between culture, forms of subjectivity, and political order—thus the politicization of thought in Greek antiquity was already evident with the Homeric epics (see Volume 2, Chapters 1 and 2), but became culturally dominant with the spread of more systematic educational practices, philosophical schools, and more generalized techniques of civility. In this respect the Pythagoreans represent one of the most unusual and thereby exemplary trends in the intellectual life of the ancient world—a trend that must be reconstructed in the context of the beginnings of Utopian thought and political experimentation in antiquity.34 The social organization of the Greek polis provides an object lesson for cultural analysis, since everything that entered the field of the city-state was in some sense ‘political’. This had both positive and negative consequences; positive, in the vast investment of materials and capital in the production of ‘public culture’, and negative, in the denigration of ‘private life’ as an unserious realm of ‘idiotic’ thought and action, producing what some commentators have seen as an authoritarian ideology of public life and its correlate selfconcep-tions: masculinist individualism, élitist-aristocratic culture, and a totalizing and exclusive ‘public sphere’.35 In the ancient Greek case, moreover, access to the public sphere was defined exclusively by the control of oralaural cultural capital. As one writer has observed: The Assembly, Council, and juries, however, did not demand a high degree of literacy. Their business was conducted by voice, and they were dominated by skilled, trained orators. Nevertheless, the Western tradition of an educated electorate, schooling in literacy as preparation for citizenship, and the equation of literacy and democracy were born here. (Graff, 1987:23) We have a good example of what Oswyn Murray called the coexistence of oral and literate cultures in a period of functionally restricted literacy 26

INTRODUCTION

(1993:100). All of these facets of ancient political experience—the privileged role of oral discourse, the impact of literacy, masculinism, the coexistence of democracy and authoritarianism, the impact of military technology and organization upon the polis, the interaction between public institutions and ‘private life’, Greek ethnocentrism, and so on need to be studied in depth in future research. In concluding we may single out the importance of studying the impact of the institutions of the classical ‘public sphere’ and the internal dynamics of ‘class struggle’ and internecine war as a basis for comparative investigations of the origins and institutionalization of citizenship, political identity, and urban culture.36 This kind of configurational research is important as we know that in ancient Greece the socially organized sites of authority, intellectual forms, and political experience emerged together.37 We may even suggest that the idea of science and philosophy was constructed in the wake of the political reorganization of the democratic city-states: ‘the Ionians hit upon the notion of natural law by simply projecting the tight little world of the polis upon the universe. For it was a fact that the polis was regulated by law’ (McNeill, 1979:100);38 but we should also note that the contexts of critical argumentative consciousness that made philosophical reflection possible were equally well a necessary precondition for the ‘socialization of citizen consciousness’ accompanying the growth of the democratic constitution.

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1 PRESOCRATIC THOUGHT AND THE ORIGINS OF WESTERN EUROPEAN REFLECTION The first beginnings of European reflexivity cannot be a matter of indifference to the Logologist.1 With the Greeks and Greek civilization there developed for the first time in human history an insatiable demand for questioning the world around and the ways of men in the world. (R.H.Robins2) The Greeks…have been and will remain the foundation of the thought and culture of the West. (G.Reale3) 1 2 3 4 5

Introduction: the birth of theories The construction of the cosmos in early Greek philosophy Language and ‘the epoch of the Logos’ The Ionian revolution in cosmological thinking Greek cosmology as a form of life 1 INTRODUCTION: THE BIRTH OF THEORIES Almost all our philosophical language is unconsciously metaphorical. (F.M.Cornford, 1965:30) Contexts and orientations

Our analysis of the symbolic matrices of myth in Volume 2 led us to the conclusion that the heritage of Greek mythology already embodied the desire to articulate reality as a whole, and that this universalizing impulse was fundamental for the first projects of speculative theorizing and the emergence of concepts of selfhood implicit in these cultural forms. What we now regard as the distinctive humanism, rationality, and systematic character of Greek modes of thought originated in this particular cultural formation. But of 28

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course ‘Greek individualism’, like ‘Greek philosophy’, is embedded in a definite history and displays a complex social and political evolution over an extended period from the Archaic age to the Hellenistic period and beyond. To appreciate fully the significance of the ‘birth of Western rationalism’ and the earliest forms of self-understanding we need to extend our investigations to the emergence of science and philosophical culture within the larger structures and processes of a whole civilization. My aim in this chapter is to sketch out some of the preliminary context for a sociological understanding of the origins of European philosophy. In the Introduction above we have suggested that one of the weaknesses of existing histories of reflexivity is the lack of historical and sociological awareness of the mutability of ways of thought and intellectual systems more generally. In the following chapters therefore we will approach the genesis of philosophical reflexivity as a particular sociohistorical project of self-understanding. Given the range and variety of theorizing produced between the Archaic and the Classical ages we should speak in the plural of protophilosophical ‘discourses’. To appreciate the extent of this variability it is necessary to locate the texts and arguments of the earliest thinkers within the institutions and cultural contexts of early Greek society. Since the words ‘philosophy’ (literally ‘the love of wisdom’) and ‘philosopher’ (‘a lover of wisdom’) are much later descriptive terms, at the outset I will define the projects of the first philosophers as particular ‘rhetorics of reflection’. This is the sense in which Herodotus could describe Solon as a ‘philosopher’ (philosopheon at 1.30.2–5) and the usage is frequently traced to the Pythagorean communities of the late sixth century. But it is probably as late as the fourth century BC that the term philosophia is used with something like its modern meaning as an explanatory inquiry into the principles (archai) and causes (aitia) of beings—or as Aristotle (384–322 BC) stipulates in Metaphysics A1, the activity of determining the first principles of what exists in general, the analysis of the essence of being (ousia in Met. 1.1–2), or more simply, the empirical study of phusis (hence Aristotle’s description of the early philosophers asphusikoi or phusiologoi, ‘those studying nature’). Despite Aristotle’s authority, however, in what follows I will suggest that a critical reading of the earliest fragments of philosophical thought leads to the conclusion that theoria first began as a distinctive way of life rather than as a disembodied ‘science’ or ‘philosophy of nature’. The difficulties of framing a precise concept of ‘philosophy’ are compounded by the indeterminate origins and fragmentary state of the available texts of early Greek speculative thought. Every scrap of text we possess of Presocratic philosophy was transmitted through chains of intertextual citation and annotated quotation by later writers who appropriated the past from the vantage point of their own particular interests and values (cf. Fränkel, 1975:1–5). And understandably, the criteria and principles of interpretation employed to recover the thought of predecessors were influenced by the values and reading practices of later intellectual 29

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communities. We should also note that concepts as apparently self-evident as ‘nature’, ‘cause’, ‘being’, ‘knowledge’, ‘history’, ‘explanation’, ‘evidence’, ‘validation’, and ‘truth’ were constructed by the first European thinkers to define the question of the ‘beginning of thought’ during the Greek enlightenment. Indeed the intellectual practices we would today recognize as ‘scientific’ and ‘philosophical’—the beginnings of a secular attitude toward nature and the development of some of the orientations and methods of Western science for example—were invented during this period. In logological terms, therefore, it follows that a genealogy of early Greek modes of thinking is quite literally a self-analysis of the origins of our own conceptual legacy. From the logological perspective, then, it is important wherever possible to return to the texts themselves and study the changing discursive circumstances and strategic uses of arguments, paying attention to subtle changes of meaning as ideas are transmitted by later interpretive communities. It is now well established that reading the Milesian cosmologists as ‘philosophers of nature’ is already a particular interpretation of the beginnings of Western thought. Thus in the reading practices of the Lyceum, ‘works of the older philosophers were systematically excerpted, but only from the point of view of their relationship to Aristotelian problems’ (Fränkel, 1975:2; Cherniss, 1977:62–3). Like ordinary words with their different shades of meaning, theories are unintelligible when abstracted from their philosophical and institutional contexts. In fact we have argued above that such ‘contexts’ form the archaeological sites of intellectual history. Ideas, practices, and institutional contexts must be studied and reconstructed together—in Volume 2 we referred to this background formation as the ‘reflexive archive’ of a culture (Volume 2, Chapter 1). Following the methodological discussion in the Introduction above it is important at the outset to distinguish at least five different meanings of ‘context’ in a given knowledge formation. For analytic purposes these can be presented as different levels of analysis: (i) internal contexts, or the grammatical, semantic, and stylistic structures of a text (especially the appearance of semantic displacements, innovation, analogy and metaphor in theorizing), (ii) problematic contexts, relating a text to the ‘questions’ to which it is the response—its dialogic problematic—but also to the themes and questions it explicitly avoids or ignores, (iii) cotextuality, or the immediate verbal environment of a text, its cotextual references and allusions, (iv) intertextuality, or the network of relationships to other textual practices (for example, the adversarial situation of a discourse with respect to other discourses and their accompanying traditions), and (v) cultural contexts, the wider extra-discursive social, institutional, and communicative settings of speech and writing. While separated for analytical purposes, all of these ‘levels’ are typically operative in any particular dialogical transaction. In the following chapters we will see that a minor semantic inflection given to a single word by a later theorist can have disproportionate effects on the work of successors, creating repercussions which echo to the present day. 30

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Lexicographic innovations which initiate such revolutionary shifts in perspective are often the seeds of new theoretical frameworks and world-views. If understanding the thought of living contemporaries—even those known through face-to-face relationships—is difficult, we meet even more intractable problems in exploring the Ursprünge of early European reflection. Here all we have for ‘data’ are inscriptions. And inscriptions only ‘answer back’ if explicitly questioned. But ‘inscriptions’ are not simply material traces, they are more fundamentally crystals of dialogue—the fossils of once-living logoi. To understand the conversations that have shaped a way of life we need to know why others spoke, what they spoke about, how, to whom, and through whom they spoke. In other words we need to reconstruct the discursive matrix of a culture (or that part of a culture articulated in a theoretical problematic). In Harold Cherniss’ words: There is no more significant characteristic of a philosopher’s thought than the kind of question that he asks, the problems which he feels called upon to solve as contrasted with the assumptions that he makes; and it is just in this respect that the character of Presocratic thought is most thoroughly concealed and misrepresented as a result of the channels through which it has been transmitted. The doxographers listed the opinions of all philosophers as if they were all answers to the same questions asked in the same way; and each philosopher interpreted his predecessors, if he considered them at all, as if they had been trying to answer the same questions which he had posed for himself (1977:63). The shock of the old In explicit opposition to decontextual semantics, the logological perspective requires that we situate texts in the context of definite communities of interest and their associated discursive matrices. Analysis involves a process of cultural deconstruction and reconstruction. As Gregory Vlastos observed: A prime requisite of the historical interpretation of any philosopher, ancient or modern, is to determine the nexus with those of his contemporaries or predecessors who did the most both to supply him with a working-stock of basic concepts and also to provoke new questions in his own mind, calling for new answers and therewith new concepts. (1970:415) But the context-relativity of words, expressions, and problems does not lead to relativism. Cherniss’ and Vlastos’ directives are informed by the realist postulate that the words and expressions used to articulate philosophical questions derive their sense and referential capacities from the constellations of specific problematics and intellectual practices. Generalized to the realms 31

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of culture this ‘genealogical’ methodology leads directly to the programme of logological investigation. The first step in logological inquiry, then, is to bracket assumptions and preconceptions that are essentially the product of later ways of thinking in order to return to the idioms and ‘registers’ current in an earlier culture. More positively, we must understand the social attitudes and sensibilities which gave rise to particular cognitive orientations and language-games. The assumption that this kind of translation across vocabularies, practices, and traditions is possible is, of course, a leading axiom of this kind of cultural investigation. As one writer has noted, the ‘proper measure of a philosophical system is not the degree to which it anticipated modern thought, but its degree of success in treating the philosophical problems of its own day’ (Lindberg, 1992:67). We can, of course, only approach the problematics of the past on the basis of what we already know about the questions and problems informing contemporary theorizing. However, this duality of past and present is not an argument for relativism or absolute incommensurability; it is, more productively, an argument for the development of a practical text hermeneutics applicable to the whole range of transcription work in society. In intellectual history we have to attempt the difficult balancing act of holding our own assumptions and reading practices in abeyance while attempting fresh appropriations of the earliest projects of reflexivity. To achieve this ‘poise’, an understanding of the role of discourse and argument in their original linguistic and institutional contexts is indispensable (and of course, the ‘terms’ of the discourse matrix—who speaks? when? where? how? to whom? etc. are typically institutionalized and sanctioned by force). Philological and etymological reconstruction is sterile when abstracted from the ideological environments which authorized forms of thought as speech acts and performative events. In this respect Eric Havelock is justified in warning of the ‘textualist’ bias of Classical philology (1986:123). The reconstruction of past problematics requires the painstaking sifting of layer upon layer of meanings without the consolation of a final ‘origin’. Here bedrock is further layers of language. If this restoration of contexts is necessary when approaching the arguments and rhetorics of a Plato, Aristotle, or Plotinus it is even more imperative in studying the presuppositional background and intellectual efforts of a Xenophanes, Empedocles, or Heraclitus. Take, for example, the following lines from the late fourth century BC and consider the problem of interpreting its reference to ‘God’ (theos) or ‘the divine’ (to theion; theios, ‘god-like’). To set the scene, Aristotle is lecturing on the nature of First Philosophy (prote philosophia) as in some sense a ‘divine science’ given its concern for discovering the truth behind the physical order of the world: A science is divine if it is peculiarly the possession of God, or if it is concerned with divine matters. And this science alone fulfils both these 32

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conditions; for (a) all believe that God is one of the causes (aition or aitia) and a kind of principle (ton aition pasin einai kai arche tis), and (b) God is the sole or chief possessor of this sort of knowledge. Accordingly, although all other sciences are more necessary than this, none is more excellent. (Aristotle, Met. 1.2.983a5–15) The word ‘God’, of course, is already a modern surrogate for the Greek theos, bringing with it a dense semantic field overdetermined by Judaic-Chris-tian culture. Furthermore, ‘science’ does not correspond with Greek episteme. It is a modern gloss of the fourth-century idea of ‘knowledge’. And although ‘science’ and ‘God’ are not usually collocated in modern culture, there are definite genealogical relationships between late sixth-century uses of the expression ‘to theion’—say in Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, the extant fragments of Thales, or Anaximander’s texts—and Aristotle’s later usage which thematizes ‘the sacred’ as a definite domain of knowledge. Aristotle’s claim becomes unintelligible when abstracted from its cultural context. Without this background the reconstruction of the text would be a matter of intelligent guesswork. However, the text is already informed by cotexts (in our terminology above), and these cotexts are linked to particular problematics, which are in turn situated in a network of intertextual practices. Here the sense of this isolated ‘text’ depends on its place in a wider system. We might also find, in exploring this discourse matrix, that differences in presuppositions between texts may be more significant than we first imagined; where Thales’ utterance, ‘All things are full of gods’ appears to license a vitalist cosmology, Aristotle’s proposition is part of a comprehensive programme of metaphysical inquiry. Yet even this can only emerge from the genealogical work of reconstruction. Let us say, ignoring for the moment the historical and cultural evidence for this claim, that the signifier ‘theos’ served to carve out a domain of knowledge for Aristotle’s students and coworkers in the Lyceum. Thus when Theophrastus in his Metaphysics attempted to summarize the philosophical search for the ultimate explanatory principles of nature he accepts the idea that first principles must be both limited in number and ‘superior’ to the objects they govern. This property of governance leads him to invoke the concept of God as central to the philosophical project: ‘it is necessary, presumably, to recognize them [first principles] by some power and some superiority to other things, as if it were God that we were apprehending; for the ruling principle of all things, through which all things both are and endure, is divine’ (Theophrastus, Metaphysics 1.4, trans. W.D.Ross and F.H.Fobes). Aristotle’s style of talk indexes a long-term shift in the semantic structure of ‘theion’ and ‘theos’, leading from poetic and liturgical icons of ‘divinity’ toward more reflective, ontological predicates of ‘first cause’, ‘self-activity’, ‘highest genera of beings’, etc. Here we would anticipate both continuity and discontinuity. By occupying the same framework of verbal culture and using 33

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the same surface forms of expression later ideas about the sacred could still draw upon earlier ways of talking about ‘things divine’. As an innovative rhetoric of reflection the idea of contemplative theoria would still evoke some of the connotations of ‘divinity’ from the ‘god talk’ of an earlier tradition (see for example Met. 982b18ff.). It is evident, then, that ‘the sacred’ is not a stable structure across the texts of Homer, Pindar, Xenophanes, Aristotle, and Theophrastus. But heterogeneity and variation of usage does not mean incommensurability. To explicate the heterogeneity of this particular signifier would require a comprehensive deconstruction of the changing languagegames of Greek theology from the sixth to the fourth centuries (‘to theion’, to borrow Aristotle’s own idiom, is said in many different ways). How, without this background knowledge, can the existence called ‘God’ (theos) become the primary theme of philosophical inquiry? Recall that the very idea of framing ‘the gods’ or ‘the God’ as a topic of critical debate was a punishable offence in the civilizations of the Near East. This example suggests that the process of thematization and concept formation resembles a dialogue of critical reappraisal carried out across different theoretical and pretheoretical traditions (exemplified by Aristotle’s self-conscious respecification of ‘the divine’ as noesis noeseos in the later books of the Metaphysics). Did the students of the early Academy or Lyceum ‘wonder’ about the nature of ‘the divine’ in the same way as the Homeridae or the Milesian cosmologists (cf. Ehnmark, 1935)? How did different audiences at performances of the Persians or Antigone respond to the language of divinity? How-did theoria acquire attributes that were originally reserved for the source of ultimate value? What are the criteria of ‘sameness’ mandating these historical parallels (criteria which Aristotle takes for granted when he reconstructs his predecessors’ theories as ‘answers’ to problems set by his own paradigm of First Philosophy as theologike)? Was a Homeric expression like ‘theos’ or ‘the divine earth’ (Il. 14.346–7) still accepted as a meaningful formula and significant expression by the early Ionian thinkers? It certainly seems that the epithets of Homeric religiosity were treated as a familiar repertoire in a text like Plato’s Cratylus 397C: ‘Then is it not proper to begin with the gods and see how the gods are rightly called by that name?’ How were Plato’s students expected to respond to the Timaeus’ discourse on ‘the god’ (ho theos)? At what point did Greek culture replace the Olympian images of the God by viewing God as Nous, the Demiurge, or the Unmoved Mover? When Plato has Socrates orient his interlocutors to ‘the eternal (aeion) and the absolute’ as the true source for the ‘correctness of names’ given by ‘a power more divine than that of men’ (Cratylus 397B-C) are we still dealing with the traditional idea of ‘the divine’? Or consider the Hippocratean denial that anything like a ‘sacred disease’ exists. And what are we to make of the invocation of the logographer Lysias who addresses the Athenian jury: ‘medamos, o andres dikastai, pros theon Olympian …’ (‘In the name of the Olympian gods, gentlemen of the jury…) (Lysias, Against Agoratus XII. 95)? 34

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At what point can we say that ‘the sacred’ has been muted into metaphor or reduced to a secular formula in the civic discourses of the polis? The point we are labouring is that variations of meaning are related to different problematics which change historically and socially, but that change and transformation also presuppose pregiven discourses and traditions (it is not merely that the semantic field governing the English term ‘God’ is ‘incommensurable’ with the intertextual network indexed by the term theos, but that there are disparate interpretations already at work in Greek discourse and culture and, often, we might add, within a single work of a philosopher such as Plato, Aristotle, or Plotinus). To move to another contextual level: an audience without literate techniques for analyzing and checking the ‘text’ of Homer or Sophocles and a literate audience of ‘academic’ scholars are confronted with different ‘objects’. The former auditors have to make sense of the epic logos ‘on the spot’ without the apparatuses of anthologies, parchment, private libraries, and scholarly debate on the provenance and meaning of texts. For this to be possible, the original ‘scripts’ had to be overcoded (or formular, as in epic hexameter), dramatically crafted (as with the plots of Aeschylean theatre), or aesthetically stylized (in Sophoclean and Euripidean tragedy). As technologies of communication decisively shape the reception of texts and cultural information, a study of the beginnings of science and critical reflection requires an understanding of the changing conditions of reading practices relative to different means of communication. For example, one of the most significant contributions of the Platonic Academy was the introduction of a technique of ‘analytic criticism’ carried out by means of institutional reading procedures and embodied in relatively explicit technical concepts. The institutionalized protocol of analytic reading helped to create a new frame of reference with respect to traditional mythical, literary, and philosophical discourses (for example, a literate student might be given the task of reconstructing the ‘history’ of an important theory). In studying the form and content of Aristotle’s or Theophrastus’ texts it is important to locate their readings of predecessors within the institutional structures and interpretive stencils created by the lecture rooms and libraries of the Lyceum. In a still predominantly oral culture, the first academic theorists had become ‘men of letters’, socialized in the analytic skills of literary decomposition, polemical commentary, and criticism. No doubt their exegetical and critical skills functioned as a source of ‘cultural capital’ in actu exercito. To return to our main theme: new forms of reading, analytic attitudes, and interpretive strategies were made possible which changed the relationships between tradition and innovation, past and present, writers and their audiences. And on a larger time scale, some of the productive misunderstandings of analytic literacy actively redefined the past which, in its changed form, entered the fabric of later intellectual projects. To investigate these transformations we clearly require deeper and more wide-ranging 35

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contextual studies than those typically allocated to the ‘social background’ of Greek cultural life. At the very least we have to reactivate the specific economy of discourses and changing attitudes toward speech which shaped the thought worlds of ancient Greek culture. To advance toward this goal we need to abandon the dichotomic thinking which polarizes myth as a prerational foil to the superior logic of ‘rational’ thought. We should also suspend reading conventions which make the genesis of early philosophy a product of ‘Hellenic genius’ (le miracle Grec), the ‘rise of Greek individualism’, or resort to unexplicated ‘spiritual’ processes to account for the construction of theoretical praxes (‘Greek philosophy grew out of an exclusive national culture, and is the legitimate offspring of the Greek spirit’ (Windelband, 1956:3); ‘Greek philosophy has a good claim to be regarded as the most original and influential achievement of the Greek genius’ (Luce, 1992:9)). This type of ‘explanation’ simply recycles the explanandum in the explanans: ancient Greek civilization was in the ‘fortunate’ position of fully understanding and exploiting the ‘power of reason’—by living in an ‘enlightened epoch’ the Classical Greeks could abandon the symbols of mythology and pursue the new causal science of nature. Both of these positions beg the question of a genuinely reflexive investigation of the sociocultural matrix of philosophical thought. Philosophy’s agonistics There are important texts in the Aristotelian corpus which hold open the possibility of a critical ‘dialogue’ between philosophia and muthos—the two projects intersecting in a shared experience which Aristotle, following his illustrious teacher, called ‘wonder’. Aristotle’s remarks at the end of Metaphysics 12.8.1074bff. are apposite: A tradition has been handed down by the ancient thinkers of very early times, and bequeathed to posterity in the form of a myth, to the effect that these heavenly bodies are gods, and that the Divine (to theion) pervades the whole of nature. The rest of their tradition has been added later in a mythological form to influence the vulgar and as a constitutional and utilitarian expedient; they say that these gods are human in shape or are like certain other animals…Now if we separate these statements and accept only the first, that they supposed the primary substances to be gods, we must regard it as an inspired saying; and reflect that whereas every art and philosophy has probably been repeatedly developed to the utmost and has perished again, these beliefs of theirs have been preserved as a relic of former knowledge. To this extent only, then, are the views of our forefathers and of the earliest thinkers intelligible to us. The pedagogic purpose of the Lyceum was both to preserve and destroy the mythical and cosmological tradition of earlier Hellenic culture. And, of course, 36

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the supreme example of this ‘agony of interpretation’ is Aristotle’s own violent traduction of Ionian natural philosophy (in Book A of the Metaphysics, 983a– 993a) as a research programme investigating the four causes (aitia) of formal, material, efficient, and final substance (cf. Cherniss, 1935, 1945; McDiarmid, 1970; Kerferd, 1970:41–4). Unlike Aristotle’s story of the progress of Presocratic thought toward his own conception of fourfold causality, here concept formation will be approached in a constructivist perspective as achievements of particular communities in dialogic struggle with other language-games and discourses. From our earlier investigations of the expressive forms of Archaic culture we will take it for granted that the logic of derivation is rarely linear and never one of ‘either/or’, but more typically involves the sociological process of ‘discursive colonization’, that is of ‘both/and’: where, for example, an ambivalent or overlapping structure of argument and explanatory strategy is used to modify, extend, or occasionally reorganize a field of thought. The mistranslation of key words and phrases frequently plays a major role in the cultural process of creative misunderstanding. To illustrate with the conclusion of Volume 2: the attempt to deconstruct mythos in the name of rational explanation created a new mythology: the claim of the logos to rule over mythos is itself a mythical claim. Myth is thereby reinjected into the logos and gives a mythical dimension to reason itself. Thus the rational appropriation of myth becomes also a revival of myth. (Ricoeur, in Kearney, ed., 1984:40–1) We have seen many instances of this creative misprision in the idioms of epic and choral poetry. The logological perspective approaches semantic mutations as the product of rhetorical conflicts which often amount to discourse wars (the mythos/logos polemic internal to late Archaic culture for instance). It stresses the ‘agonies of interpretation’ in the transmission of a creative tradition (cf. Lefkowitz, 1976:4). And where conventional intellectual history excludes discussion of material circumstances and technological innovations, the studies which follow emphasize the profound impact upon thought of new forms of technopoiesis—the dissemination of Ionian natural philosophy and epic poetry for instance is unthinkable when abstracted from the institution of writing and the wider political and socioeconomic environment of Ionian civilization. In tracing the development of theories and systems of thought we never find an immanent development of ideas ‘in the air’. The birth of philosophy does not correspond with the Hegelian idea that ‘the nature of truth’ will force its way to recognition when the time comes, and that it only appears 37

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when its time has come, and hence never appears too soon, and never finds a public that is not ripe to receive it. (1977a: Preface) Rather we find a dialogical history in which material systems, technological innovations, and political environments play an active role in the evolution and transformation of ideas. The birth of concepts proceeds by imagining new questions, inventing different styles of thought, and exploring new techniques of argument. But contexts, traditions, and institutions are never ‘chosen’—they form the constraining background of thought and action. Thus Aristotle’s readings occlude some of the interpretive possibilities in his predecessors’ texts, but also empower another community of interpretation. But conceptual innovations should not be viewed exclusively in individual terms. Aristotle’s gloss of arche in terms of ‘causes’ (aitia) had been prepared by the work of two generations of theorists practising a unique institution of reflexivity— the mathematical speculation and physical investigation sponsored by the Platonic Academy. The secular idiom of causes and physical principles presupposes a definite social community instructed for several decades to hear talk about ‘grounds’ and ‘beginnings’ as ‘causal talk’ tied to the idea of explaining the world rationally and, to some extent, empirically. In this academic milieu, ‘to inquire with reason’ was synonymous with locating the underlying order or ‘legality’ of a specifiable region of phenomena. A ‘reasoned account’ (didonai logos) is then prescribed as the only way of explaining the causal fabric of some domain of nature. This in turn led to the conception of theoria as a’contemplative desire to explain Being through the procedures of rational analysis and debate. Here linguistic and social innovations are inextricably related. The pursuit of this type of ‘warranted assertion’ was conditioned by the development of alphabetic culture, analytical frameworks of perception, and scriptural paradigms of mathematical analysis. The domain of the expressible—what can be articulated, thought, and communicated— depends upon a repertoire of generic conventions which are themselves bound up with definite discourse formations. Given the availability of this universe of discourse, the late fourth-century intelligentsia would not hesitate to conclude that ‘Reason rules the world’. Inventing new ways of speaking and new forms of rationality is a collective achievement involving material relations and instruments that are more inclusive than the ‘research programmes’ of the early scientists or philosophers. Moreover, the social paradigms behind such conceptual innovations are inseparable from the vicissitudes which effect the transmission of practices and cultural traditions more generally. Aristotle’s claim that First Philosophy ‘must obtain knowledge of the primary causes…and there are four recognized kinds of cause’ (at Met. 1.2.983a24ff.) could not have been enunciated outside of a specific cultural milieu and an audience with ears tuned to this kind of 38

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statement. In general it seems that a ‘public’ for truth-claiming activities is not empirically separable from institutional innovations in social practices and media of reflection. The claim that ‘Reason rules the world’ makes little sense when abstracted from the values of a community which ranks evidence and rational argument above tradition and doxa. This analysis suggests that ‘traditions of inquiry’, ‘modes of explanation’, ‘reading conventions’, and ‘reception repertoires’ take shape in definite axiological constellations. While constructing a definite domain of objects, Aristotelian discourse was also actively instructing its audience in the ways of a new kind of intellectual praxis and a new attitude toward the received tradition: For clearly they too recognize certain principles and causes, and so it will be of some assistance to our present inquiry if we study their teaching; because we shall either discover some other kind of cause, or have more confidence in those which we have just described. (Met. 983a33ff.) Reflection upon origins will either confirm the notion of theorizing as an archaeology of causes or add to the inventory that has been a priori established—but it will not disturb the question-frame of so-reading-andinterpreting ‘prephilosophical discourse’. Once the student of Nature has uncovered these foundational ‘principles’, myth-making and poetic ‘wisdom’ can be dispensed with. Reason will then be able to anchor its projects in selfvalidating foundations. As a corollary, whatever had substance in myth, epic poetry, and prephilosophical speculation can be translated into the framework of First Philosophy. It is theoretical reason in its normative role which now judges the meaning and truth of tradition. This confirms the axiom of logological research, that social practices and traditions are also displays of identity and selfhood. The aesthetic origins of philosophy In the following chapters we will decline Aristotle’s invitation, difficult as this may be to implement in practice, and instead allow Presocratic thought speak in its own terms. We will be guided by a hypothesis of difference—that the questions of the Presocratics frame very different projects of theoretical speculation, that their modes of expression, choice of words, and explanatory rhetorics are not readily translatable into an unequivocal discourse without doing violence to the original forms of thought. In adhering to the directives of logological inquiry we should let our thought be instructed by the shock of the old. With Mikhail Bakhtin we accept that every utterance is an evaluative orientation functioning within a pregiven system of signifying practices. Given Aristotle’s pivotal role in appraising and transmitting his predecessors’ work, 39

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an analysis of Presocratic reflexivity will involve a critical demolition of Aristotelian hermeneutics. However, we deconstruct Aristotle’s reading practices only as a way of taking a fresh look at the adventure of Presocratic theorizing. In Volume 2 I have argued that ancient Greek mythology, the earliest works of epic and tragic poetry, and theogony as argumentative forms display common narrative patterns. We saw that aesthetic idioms provided the discursive site for new forms of speculative theory, civic religion, and even political action. Philosophical reflection, in other words, was not the first type of discourse to pursue questions of arche and telos. We therefore concluded that there was no necessary evolution of conceptual forms and categories (any more than there is an inevitable rationalization of social practices and institutions). In Max Weber’s cautionary words, ‘rationalism’ may mean very different things. It means one thing if we think of the kind of rationalization the systematic thinker performs on the image of the world: an increasing theoretical mastery of reality by means of increasingly precise and abstract concepts. Rationalism means another thing if we think of the methodical attainment of a definitely given and practical end by means of an increasingly precise calculation of adequate means. These types of rationalism are very different, in spite of the fact that ultimately they belong inseparably together… The rationalization of life conduct with which we have to deal here can assume unusually varied forms. (Weber, in Gerth and Mills, eds, 1948:293; cf. Schluchter, 1989: Part 2 chs 3–8) But ‘rationalism’ as a dialogic experience relies upon an even older value complex which we might call the agonistic spirit. And it is this spirit of contention that is such a powerful force in sixth-century Ionian culture. To understand the project of philosophical reflection we need to return to the axiological foundations of Greek dialectic. 2 THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE COSMOS IN EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY Only as an aesthetic phenomenon can the world be eternally justified. (Friedrich Nietzsche, 1967: §5) To formulate the conclusions of Volume 2 as a hypothesis, we are claiming that mythopoiesis or, in its epic, tragic, and lyric manifestations, aesthetic poiesis created the dialogical matrix for the earliest rhetorics of reflection: in asking the question of the whole, mythos becomes the mother of the logos. The most striking instance of the creative work of mythopoeic symbolism can be found in the semantic mutations of the word kosmos. The ‘discovery of the universe’— and with it the concept of the cosmos as an intelligible system—was the outcome 40

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of preliterate aesthetic practices and traditions. I will argue that the Presocratic quest for a unitary arche of Being—for the nature of being as such—was the legacy of an aesthetic vision of reality. In keeping with our earlier studies, we will also see that the ‘discovery of the Whole’ was also an experiment in selfhood. The Presocratic thinkers were not merely exponents of a particular theory of being, but advocated a new way of relating to and experiencing Being. This is analogous to one of the central claims of existential thought. In Jean-Paul Sartre’s formulation: ‘Since man is thus self-surpassing, and can grasp objects only in relation to his self-surpassing, he is himself the heart and centre of his transcendence. There is no other universe except the human universe, the universe of human subjectivity’ (1989:55). To appreciate the existential dimensions of early Greek thought we have to think ourselves back into a frame of mind where theorizing was understood as a way of both articulating and questioning the divine significance of the universe. We might say that theorizing—like tragic drama—began as a form of religious consciousness pursued by non-religious means. But unlike tragedy, which also sought the significance of life as a whole, it was also inspired by a new awareness of technique and the practical manipulations which knowledge technologies afforded. And even more fundamentally, cosmic theorizing was now required to justify its efforts through dialogue and discussion. The seminal idea of early Greek theorizing, then, is condensed in the mythopoeic word kosmos, which designated the world as a whole. But as we have observed in Volume 1, words move and have their being in polemical discourses prior to the language-games of philosophy or metaphysics. As we shall see below, the resonances of ‘kosmos’ became inextricably tied to the semantic field of ‘logos’ and the older vocabularies of ‘the divine’. And ultimately the network of relationships precipitated by this word helped to create the generative matrix for videological discourse for the next two millennia. Before turning to the Ionian cosmologists, then, it is necessary to sketch a brief history of the word kosmos. I will adhere to the logological axiom by tracing the verbal contexts of the term kosmos across a range of pretheoretical discourses. Given the limits of space, however, I will keep the collateral texts to a minimum and consequently make no claim to a comprehensive or exhaustive treatment of this complex topic. ‘Kosmos’ in the Archaic age The ancient Greeks called the world kosmos, beauty. (Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Nature’ (1836) in Emerson, 1981:9) Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold; There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st But in his motion like an angel sings, 41

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Still quiring to the young-ey’d cherubims: Such harmony is in immortal souls; But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it. (Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Lorenzo’s speech, Act V, Scene 1) How would a Greek living during the Archaic period have used and understood the word kosmos and its conjugates? Emerson’s and Shakespeare’s texts support our initial hypothesis. As Aristotle noted in the opening pages of the Metaphysics, the earliest mythologists were struck with the wonder of things, and were driven to give expression to the beautiful order of the visible universe. Homer preserves the same sense of awe as human beings bear witness to the powers of the Gods. Hesiod—equally impressed by Necessity governing the order of things— discloses a definite pattern in the genesis and appearance of the Gods. Greek tragedy depicts Zeus as the king of heaven, ordering and ruling the world (Sophocles, Electra 173–80). Analogous theophanic principles govern the lifeworld invoked by the earliest lyric poets. It appears, then, that the idea of ‘the order of Being’ was first imaginatively visualized before it was abstractly thought. We therefore need to enquire into the sustaining forms of talk which made something like cosmological speculation possible. Despite their obvious differences, the earliest rhetorics of reflection all gravitate around two interrelated themes—the experience of wonder as a loving involvement with the divine order of things, and the absolute conviction that beyond the totality of things reality forms a beautiful and harmonious Whole. In Emerson’s precise expression, the Greeks did not think of the world as an ‘object of beauty’, they experienced the world as beauty. To bracket our own epistemological paradigms and metaphysical discourses we should not say that they imposed ‘forms’ upon the evidence of experience, but rather that they experienced life as the manifestation of form. They did not view the universe as evidence of God’s existence, but understood the world as a shiningforth of the divine—as Earth, Sky, Sea, Air, etc. This fusion of aesthetic, moral, and cosmological ideas of order was already evident in such ancient words as themis, dike, and nomos (Fränkel 1975:131, n. 32). Like these older words, the word kosmos evolved as part of a preliterate discourse celebrating the visible order of manifestation enveloping individual beings. In this sense, a tradition of nascent cosmological and cosmogonical speculation preceded the later, theoretical meaning of cosmos as ‘world-order’. Again we must try to imagine a language where the concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘natural law’ are unavailable as terms for order. Even without these expressions, the idea of a divine ‘order’ was already present in some of the oldest uses of the Greek verb ‘phainesthai’ as an active process of ‘manifesting‘ (the ‘phainomenai’ as ‘what shows itself in experience’ being later sublimated 42

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and secularized in Plato’s Theaetetus 152A-C to form the expression ‘that which appears’, ‘that which shines’—from phos, light, brightness—the radiance of ‘things made manifest’—phainontai; cf. Philebus 38D). Although we cannot argue the case in the detail that is required here, the subsequent history of the term ‘phenomena’ is intertwined with the concept of ‘kosmos’ and ‘being’. To avoid anachronism, ‘phainomenai’ might be translated by the polysemic English word ‘presences’ in that the arche of things is interpreted as that which ‘brings all things to light’ and allows them to stand forth ‘unhidden’ as vivid ‘presences’. For speakers steeped in Homeric culture, before ‘falsity’ or ‘error’ can be ascribed to things, these ‘appearances’ must be generally accepted as reality-bearing manifestations—appearances issuing from the ‘gate of horn’ (Od. 19.560ff.). The beacon-light which flashes from the enveloping darkness to announce the victory and homecoming of Agamemnon is a paradigm case of phainesthai as a truth-bearing luminous event (Aeschylus, Agamemnon 20–1). Light (phaos) signals and announces the return of Agamemnon from the ‘gloom’ and ‘darkness’ of the Trojan war: ‘Firegod Hephaistos flashed out from Mount Ida/flame after flame bore the beacon’s dispatches’ (trans. Tony Harrison). The semiotic relay of promissory light also indexically expresses the ‘truth’ that the city of Ilium has fallen. The relay of light communicates the truth of death and darkness for those caught up in the coils of war. Signs, however, can convey ambivalent and misleading messages. The beacon evokes victory and defeat, announcing events that are now past and prefiguring events that are to come. Here only time will separate the ‘illusions’ that issue from the ‘gate of ivory’ from the ‘presences’ emerging from the ‘gate of horn’. Thus Ajax, in Sophocles’ Ajax, speaks of time (kronos) ‘in its slow, illimitable course’ bringing all to light and burying all again (‘kai phaneta kruptetai’ (Ajax 646–7)). Whatever is ‘brought to light’ is saved from the encompassing darkness for the realm of light (cf. Oedipus at Colonus 607–23). We find the same imagery of intermingling light and darkness—truth and its simulacra—throughout the poetry of Aeschylus, Pindar, Sophocles, and Euripides. And here there is no question of abstract thought or metaphysical ideality. The poetic word itself is frequently compared to a beacon of light which draws the memorable events of human existence out of forgetfulness into a ‘world’—for example in Pindar’s Isthmian IV. Aesychylean fire becomes an iconic flame, the symbol of memory’s revelatory power to illuminate existence. But the gleaming ‘torch’ of Agamemnon’s victory is also the ‘darkness’ of Troy’s fall and harbinger of Agamemnon’s own fate. The idea of ‘truth’ as an ambivalent structure of presence and absence still echoes in the visual grammar of the English expressions ‘seems’ and ‘appears’ (‘seeming’, ‘appearing’, ‘apparently’, etc.). We should emphasize that many of the earliest verbal contexts in which ‘phainesthai’ functions entail a non-representational understanding of appearances—Phainesthai is understood literally as the event of truth (a process of ‘truthing’, to stretch the semantics of the English word to accord 43

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with the temporal meaning of aletheia): the kosmos is not ‘like’ an organic order of beautiful appearances, it is a beautiful order glowing in the light of its unfolding appearances. Manifestations are appearances-of-Being. The eidos of things shines through their different modes of be-ing and becoming. We have argued in Chapter 5 of Volume 2 that Pindar already ‘theorized’ the heroism of the athlete in similar terms. Here the protophilosophers extend this theophantic vision to the universe as a whole. Applied to the Whole: as a divine order the cosmos is made manifest in the manifold appearances of things. In Greek myth, order and beauty are thus gifts of Helios, the pure source of light and illumination. Everyday things become manifest only by virtue of the gratuitous pouring forth of the Sun (cf. Aeschylus, Agamemnon 630–4; Sophocles, Electra 825, Trachiniae 94–7; Euripides, Bacchae 608–9). These texts suggest that the early Greek concept of reality is not that of a ‘One’ secreted behind appearances (in this sense the English term ‘appearances’ distorts the original Greek meaning). ‘Being’ does not, so to speak, send its representatives before the mind. Appearances are ‘animated’ by the radiant light of the Sun (heliosphaos). The Whole is immanent in each process of coming-to-be and passing-away. Thus the ‘appearance’ of the star-speckled Aither, the light and glow of the sun, and the radiance of the moon are not ‘dubitable appearances’—they are concrete manifestations of the Whole. And ‘passing-away’ is to be regarded literally as the collapse of manifestation (for example, an expression for dying in Sophocles is ‘He has left the light’, e.g. Philoctetes 415; cf. Hesiod, Works and Days 154–5). The generalized form of this everyday Greek locution produces the ‘insight’ of an Aeschylus or Anaximander: death is the debt paid by life; life pays reparation for the injustice of existence according to the ordered process of time. To fully understand these verbal contexts we have to enter a discourse— and perhaps a mentality or ‘world-view’—where the light of the sun is not considered as ‘evidence’ for deductive ratiocination, but accepted as a gift of Being, where ‘truth’ is revealed in and as a temporal process: whatever comes into existence stands for a brief moment within and then leaves the light of Being. More significantly for our present purposes the same ambivalent order of manifestation governing Being (on) and beings (onta), implicates the psyche which ‘receives’ these ‘presences’ as phenomena—the self that stands in awe before the regular motions of the heavens is itself involved in the cosmic process—precisely as a being for whom ‘presences’ are ‘made manifest’ in their radiant beauty and truth. Psyche is thus already a reflexive part of the Whole it aspires to know and comprehend. The kosmos literally ‘glows’ in the things that are made manifest to the senses—things seen, touched, tasted, and so on. For the earliest Greek poets and thinkers, to theion is most certainly in the detail. But unlike the things that appearances place before the senses (ta onta), the kosmos as a whole is not a concrete entity—like a horizon it withdraws as the undisclosed ground of manifestation. In Heraclitus’ maxim, phusis loves to hide. 44

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For the purposes of this preliminary presentation we should not ignore a large group of literary contexts where the verb phainesthai suggests ‘illusory appearances’ or ‘apparitions’. This is the distant ancestor of ‘mere appearance’ as erroneous semblance. For example, Cassandra’s foreknowledge of the death of Agamemnon at the hands of Clytemnestra has the status of an ‘apparition’: titode phainetai, which the English translator renders ‘What apparition’s this?’ (Agamemnon 1114; 1926:95). The wisdom granted to seers like Cassandra is a knowledge of ‘what appears to be the case’, an ‘insight’ which is not literally true in the here-and-now but which, in due time, will be shown to have become true—thus the ‘appearances’ at Agamemnon 1115–1250 will later be realized with the foretold death of Agamemnon: ‘You shall look upon Agamemnon dead’ (1245–60). What is prophesied will ‘come into its truth’—or to follow the Greek line literally—‘come into the light’. The prophetic vocation is thus one of enunciating utterances which will be subsequently proven true by a necesary train of events. A muthos which anticipates the truth is ‘fulfilled’ by its becoming real. The same schema is generally applied to the ‘unfurling’ truth of a story or logos. For example, in Aeschylus’ The Suppliant Maidens, we find the lines: ‘And men shall come to know the truth as my story proceeds’ (54–7). We have also seen that in Homer the Gods make themselves manifest in the ‘apparitions’ of dreams or disguised in human forms. In Book 1 of the Iliad, Athena ‘appears from the sky’ to restrain Achilles from killing Agamemnon (1.163–200). The text stresses that the Goddess ‘appeared’ to Achilles alone. Characteristically, many everyday locutions in ancient Greek use ‘real’, ‘apparent’, and ‘true’ interchangeably. Sixth-century contexts Let us ask once more, what would a Greek speaker in the late seventh century and early sixth century BC have understood by the word kosmos? We can, of course, only reconstruct a plausible answer given that our evidence consists of the sherds of contemporary texts and later glosses—particularly literary and to a lesser degree visual texts. Initially the word kosmos was not used to designate the universe as a whole, let alone ‘the essence of manifestation’ or the idea of a ‘ladder of Being’ (scala naturae) as an eternal order of fixed species. These glosses are products of much later philosophical theorizing. The earliest uses of the word ‘kosmos’ appear to have been very concrete, referring to social expectations and mores— kosmos (from the verb ‘kosmeo’) denoting phainomenai evincing a well-ordered, moderate, discreet mode of conduct (‘good behaviour’, ‘orderly conduct’, ‘decorum’, etc.) and were only later extended to the ‘behaviour’ of larger collectivities, communities, or the city as a whole—in expressions of the type ‘well-ordered city’, ‘well-governed polities’ (and eventually, in Ionian cosmology, ‘well-ordered universe’). Sophocles has the hero Ajax invoke an ancient gnomic saying: ‘Woman, for women silence is a grace (kosmos)’ (Ajax 292–3). Odysseus 45

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appeals to the same sense of ‘grace’ when describing the ‘right order’ of the singer Demodocus in praising the Achaeans’ adventures (Od. 8.489). The uncouth and ‘measureless’ speech of Thersites at Iliad 2. 21 Off. is characterized as ‘disorderly’ (‘akosma’) and valueless when compared with the balanced speech and graceful conduct of the kings. The Olympian gods who detest disorder and chaos cleave to those who respect the systematic rhythms of things, for the gods are themselves individuated in terms of the different regions and modalities of order. From these Archaic thought paradigms later thinkers would abstract a semantic structure, moving from the schema ‘whatever is valued is kosmos’ to the intellectual paradigm ‘whatever is kosmos is valuable’. But even in its earliest appearances the word kosmos invites secondary elaboration and creative extension as a term for ‘systematic coherence’ and ‘value’. For example, Aristotle praises the ‘orderly’ nature of public speech as the basis of the democratic Council (Athenian Constitution 28.3). What directions did this axiological polysemy take during the Archaic age? The dominant paradigm of thought and conduct was overwhelmingly ‘ethical’ (in the ancient Greek sense of ethos as normative custom). This encouraged the application of the word as a description of the formal arrangement of troops preparing for battle, and in later Greek usage was commonly applied to the manoeuvres of the hoplite phalanx and the superintendent function of the general (strategos) in ordering and regulating soldiers on the battlefield. In sixth-century Greek the commander of a tribal contingent was called the taxiarchos—a word which incorporates both aspects of ordering (taxis) and foundation (arche). The good strategos ‘marshals’ and ‘organizes’ his troops in preparation for the coming confrontation with an equally ordered collectivity—supplying the root metaphor for the idea of a ‘disciplined body’ of fighting men, a corps, or ‘body of troops’. But the organic imagery of a ‘body’ or ‘disciplined’ ordering of component parts goes even deeper; the confluence of visual metaphors helped to define the Homeric world-view.4 As we have argued at length in Volume 2, Homeric narrative encourages its audience to visualize war as an aesthetic spectacle, an ambivalently beautiful and hateful configuration of warriors aligning themselves for a life and death struggle. Aristotle would later use the military metaphor in conceptualizing the way in which the natural universe embodies goodness (Met. 10. 1075all—18: For the good is found both in the order and in the leader, and more in the latter; for he does not depend on the order but it depends on him. And all things are ordered together somehow, but not all alike,—both fishes and fowls and plants; and the world is not such that one thing has nothing to do with another, but they are connected. For all are ordered together to one end. By the sixth century the word kosmos and its conjugates were in wide use as terms for any kind of ornament, decoration, or embellishment of the body. In 46

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a warrior culture it was perhaps inevitable that the military meaning would suggest metaphors for political order in general—expressed most graphically in the fundamental word for political coexistence during this period, polis. Here a remarkable dialectic was already at work: the polis functioned as a primary model for the natural universe and, once popularized, the cosmos was troped back upon the city. The theme of ‘Law and Order’ for example was associated with the word ‘kosmos’ and became the watchword of the Greek aristocracy throughout the late Archaic period and into the Classical age (cf. Fränkel, 1975:416). Political images for stable order were also perfectly in tune with the older aristocratic sense of ‘what is appropriate’, ‘allotted’, or ‘apportioned’ to the different regions of reality which the ancient Greeks symbolized by the figures Themis and Dike. In Greek religion Themis apportions rights and duties in the ‘ordered world’ of customary morality and behaviour while the ‘justness’ of this distribution is sanctioned by Zeus. Each of these networks of meanings—decorous, polite, or appropriate social conduct, the structurations of war and military leadership, political organization, and ornamentation contains three overlapping semantic components: a disciplined order or intelligible arrangement of parts, a dynamic configuration or enhancement of the individual parts within the whole, and an aesthetically pleasing—even ‘moral’ or ‘ethical’—organization of elements. Whatever was deemed to be ‘kosmos’ displayed an aura of intrinsic ‘rightness’ and ‘naturalness’ (hence its association with the ideology of the ruling class). Whatever ‘ordered’ experience into harmonious wholes was considered to be good, and ‘evil’ was invariably symbolized by images of disorder (one important metaphorical source for the later idea of civil stasis). This movement between the domains of ‘ethics’ and ‘nature’—from Order, to Order of this Universe, to the Universe as Order (Peters, 1967:108)—would prove to be one of the fundamental rhetorical stratagems of Greek ethical, philosophical, and political theorizing. Indeed we will suggest that these metaphors provided the ‘depth grammar’ for the Classical Greek way of seeing the world. The receptive polysemy of the term kosmos allowed different logical, ethical, aesthetic, religious, and metaphysical connotations to resonate across different spheres of experience, encouraging the kind of utterance we find in Heraclitus’ Fragment 114 and Empedocles Fragment 134 where the idea of a logic or structure of the universe is first broached (cf. ‘For the God, all things are beautiful and good and just’ (Heraclitus, Fr. 102; cf. Fr. 30)). Heraclitus most probably derived the word kosmos from an older vocabulary dating back to the earliest Pythagorean communities in the latter part of the sixth century (‘we are told that he [Pythagoras] was the first to call the heaven kosmos and the earth spherical; though Theophrastus says it was Parmenides, and Zeno that it was Hesiod’, DL 8.48; cf. Aëtius 2.1.1). If we accept Diogenes Laertius’ observation, the use of the term kosmos as a descriptive term for the universe as a Whole (to holon, to pan), has Pythagorean roots—and was used to express the numerical rhythms and proportions (harmonla) of being. 47

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The other fundamental contribution to the concept of a divinely ordered world, of course, came directly from Greek religion, with the popular conception of Zeus as an order-bestowing deity; the idea of the living Dike of Zeusparticularly in its more ‘cognitive’ and ‘intellectualized’ forms in the cosmologies of Anaximander and Empedocles—may have been the most fundamental legacy which Presocratic thought inherited from Homer and Hesiod: the universe is organised by retributive principles of justice. If we need a religious prototype for Aristotle’s category of ‘efficient cause’ as the source of motion (kinesis) in the cosmic process, then the paradigm of ‘the Justice of Zeus’ is its most striking mythical analogue. Like the soul in the body, Zeus’ justice pervades the worldorder and the realms of human society and civilization (for further elaboration of these themes see Volume 2, Chapters 1–3). The videological universe from the fifth to the fourth century Just how kosmos is the essential type of an allegorical image will appear as soon as the term is defined. It signifies 1) a universe, and 2) a symbol that implies a rank in a hierarchy. As the latter it will be attached to, or associated with, or even substituted for, any object which the writer wants to place in hierarchical position. The classic example of kosmos is the jewelry worn by a lady to show her social status, or any other such sartorial emblems of position. As in English, the Greek term kosmos has a double meaning, since it denotes both a large-scale order (macrocosmos) and the small-scale sign of that order (microcosmos).5 An adequate translation of the term kosmos should preserve the word’s resonances while avoiding the mysticism of ‘Urworte’. Thus a kosmos is a visible (aisthetos) order, an intelligible whole (logos), and a beautiful configuration (kosmos noetos) displaying a regular course and rhythm. These three overlapping value domains—aisthetos, logos, and noesis—provided interpretive patterns for the pre-Classical experience of ‘the divine’. But we should also note a related feature of this vocabulary: as a divinely authorized gathering of a dispersed plurality of parts into an aesthetic Whole the process of ‘ordering together to one end’ implicates a sense of ‘otherness’—a sense of alterity and difference as the adversary of order and goodness. Themis and nomos stand opposed to chaos and adikia. Hesiod in the seventh century was the first to explore the darker side of kosmos: we experience beauty in the face of Chaos, unity within difference, order from disorder. As a seminal visual metaphor the figure of kosmos was perfectly suited to further allegorization to create paradigms of well-ordered moral and social phenomena. And one of the most resonant ‘sites’ of the kosmos—at least after the work of the Pythagoreans and Heraclitus—lay in the ‘depths’ of the psyche itself. The soul has a ‘nature’ which participated in the orderly workings of nature—the psyche possessed its own logos. 48

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In later Classical texts such as Plato’s Laws 898B, Phaedrus 286D, and Timaeus 29E3 or Aristotle’s Physics 188B15–20, 252a11–12, De Caelo 3.2.301a11–12, Metaphysics 11.2.1060a26–7, and Metaphysics 13.3.1078b1–5, kosmos had become virtually synonymous with the idea of an orderly arrangement of elements in a self-regulating system (taxis). Aristotle in particular would conflate the earlier connotations of the term kosmos with imagery from politics, aesthetics, and mathematics: The main species of beauty are orderly arrangement (taxis), proportion (summetria), and definiteness (orismenon); and these are especially manifested by the mathematical sciences’ (Met. 1078a35–1078b1). But the most immediate exemplar of order was the visible universe—the endless horizon of the earth, the star-speckled world of the planets, the mobile world of living things. By the end of the sixth century, the term kosmos was capable of expressing the idea of a self-differentiated natural order—a structured gathering of parts forming a Whole. The popularization of this radical idea is due to the Pythagorean order. Later commentators agree that the Pythagoreans were the first to make kosmos and logos convertible terms. Kosmos was now the visual embodiment of an underlying Logos: the universe is a ‘divine’ order governed by mathematical reason (Timaeus 28B). With this conception we are one step away from the idea of an ‘aesthetic logic’ governing the essence of Being. The life-world of visual space (khora) and spatiotemporal relationships were grasped as a surface effect of an underlying mathematical logos (Rep. 373D; Timaeus 52B). The word ‘taxis’ and its congeries, for example, helped establish this world-view as the generative theme of Aristotle’s philosophical lexicon, producing what later interpreters would call his hylomorphism: ‘what passes away in the making of the statue, or any other shapely work, is the unshapeliness of the material; for all such things are constituted either by the formative disposition or the combining of the material or materials’ (Physics 188b20). But after the Pythagoreans, the seminal figure in this conceptual shift was Heraclitus, c. 500–80 BC, one of the first Greek thinkers to view the world-order as a text to be deciphered like an enigmatic sign system (DK B 1, 2, 50, 107). His vision of the universe as a law-governed kosmos is rightly viewed as one of the most important innovations in early Greek philosophy. As Peters observed: Heraclitus called the law that ensured this order ‘divine’ (theios), but this is only one of several strands leading to a belief in the divinity of the kosmos; the others are the vitalism of the Milesians…and a belief in the divinity of the heavenly bodies. (Peters, 1967:108) The kosmos was both ordered and sacred. However ‘natural’ we may now feel this attitude to be, ‘the discovery of the cosmos’ was a revolutionary innovation which brought with it an unanticipated range of cultural possibilities. As Hugh Lloyd-Jones noted, the ‘notion of a cosmos, of a universe 49

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regulated by causal laws, was a prerequisite of rational speculation about cosmology, science and metaphysics’ (in 1971:162; cited by Kirk, 1974:299). All of these observations point to the conclusion that the obsession for patterned order, systemic classification, and organic configuration as icons of value originated in the period that saw the first literary epics. From here these ideas were elaborated in the discourse of the Pythagorean Order, Heraclitus’ cosmic theory, Parmenides’ great poem on the unity of Being, Socrates’ quest for the virtuous life, Plato’s ontology, and Aristotle’s metaphysics. The language of ‘law and order’ then spread into the great floodplain of later Graeco-Roman science and philosophy. The cumulative effect of these images was to reinforce the idea of a sacred order immanent in the cosmos—or as we have repeatedly observed, of the cosmos as a transcendent Order. Kosmos, in other words, came to be construed as the concrete materialization of Logos in every sphere of experience. There is surely enough evidence to doubt the late dating of Kirk and Raven concerning the semantic shift from kosmos as the ordering or marshalling of troops to the sense of ‘world-order’; they claim that the meaning ‘worldorder’ was not established until the second half of the fifth century BC (KR: 159). In the first decades of the fifth century Heraclitus had already elaborated a complex body of thought premised on the idea of a universe governed by the Logos. A similar concern with eunomia and kosmos can be found in the poetry of Hesiod, Theognis, and Pindar. By the end of the fifth century Leucippus and Democritus were speculating on the existence of multiple physical universes (kosmoi) created and destroyed in the process that eternally ‘composes’ and ‘refigures’ the Atoms (DK 67 Al). And by the time we reach Aristotle, the words kosmos and ouranos are well-established synonyms (e.g. De Caelo 280a21; Physics 212b2; even when they appear in constructions where a clear difference is marked—one important instance occurs at EE 1.5.9 (1216a10ff.) where Anaxagoras’ answer to the person who asks after the purpose of human existence is given as: ‘For the sake of contemplating the heavens (ouranos) and the whole order of the universe (ton olon kosmos taxis)’). To this inventory we might add the spurious etymology proffered by Socrates in the Cratylus where the ‘upward gaze’ is called ourania—or ‘looking at the things above’—opo ta ano, and that ‘as the astronomers (meteorologoi) say, that from this looking people acquire a pure mind (ton katharos nous paragignesthai), and thus Uranus is correctly named’ (396C). The same fascination for order led to another powerful idea: that the hidden structure of the universe forms a ‘scalar’ logic, but that such a graded arrangement is only visible to intellectual vision (theorem, noos/nous, gnosis). Moreover, in envisioning the kosmos the soul actively participates in the harmony of Being—the soul, as it were, becomes ‘orderly’ by bringing itself into resonance with the order of nature. Once we have imagined the cosmos as a circular heaven we are metaphorically primed to valorize the world in spatial terms, construing Being as a cycle or sphere (and Parmenides along with other 50

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Presocratic thinkers—Heraclitus and the Atomists for instance—commend the Sphere as the most appropriate icon of absolute Being). When this step has been taken we are close to the Classical concept of a spatially graded, divinely ordained universe—most emphatically expressed in Plato’s image of the Good as the source of all existence and value. The telos of human existence is to contemplate the order of the kosmos—for this is the precondition of the disinterested pursuit of wisdom: ‘God devised the gift of sight for us so that we might observe the movements which have been described by reason in the heavens, and apply them to the motions of our own mind’ (Timaeus 47B). Kosmos in later Greek thought This is the terrain of assumptions from which Platonic ontology and Aristotelian metaphysics proceeded. It is also the implicit presupposition for any kind of universal science. As a depth grammar, then, the vision of the world as an intelligible Whole helped to legitimate and motivate the vocation of philosophical speech (in the definitional sense that only a true logos can claim to recover the Logos of the Whole). The true philosopher must be a lover of wholeness. Truth, in Hegel’s famous conceit, must comprehend the Whole. One obvious model for such a harmonious configuration was the body conceived as a timeless archetype. In the Phaedrus, for example, Plato extends the analogy of the body to written compositions which possess the orderly structure of a cosmos: every discourse ought to be composed to have, like a living being (zoion), its own body, so as to be neither headless nor footless, but to have a middle and end, which are so written as to suit each other and the whole. (Phaedrus 264C6–9; cf. 286D; Timaeus 30B) Given the organic metaphor it was perhaps inevitable that the polis, the ‘body politic’, would be construed as an a priori structure governed by a hierarchical ordering and controlling integration of its component ‘organs’. It was equally inevitable that later philosophers would imagine the primary mode of being to be an independent living substance—defining Being itself as a living substance. From here it seemed natural to think of the good society as a social order modelling its institutions on paradigms of visual balance, completeness, and harmony. While the Pythagoreans attempted to implement this vision in practice, the most famous exponent of the figure in Classical literature was the author of the Republic. Plato extended the idea of a self-determining organism to the macrocosm, viewing the creation of the universe as the outcome of a harmonious plan (a myth which included a benevolent cosmic designer or Demiurge Grafting the realm of Forms from a blueprint of visible paradeigmata). In the Gorgias Socrates refers to ‘the wise’ who have grasped that Heaven and Earth, Gods and Mortals are held together by community and friendship, by orderliness, 51

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temperance, and justice—and for this reason they appropriately call the whole Universe a kosmos—a configuration—rather than an unprincipled Chaos (akosmia). God’s formative work holds the ultimate explanation for the existence of order in the visible and invisible universe. The perfection found in appearances is a visible imitation of the rational perfection of the original. As in Pythagorean cosmology, the beauty of the universe with its eternal and unchanging order resides in its pellucid mathematical structure, its hierarchically ordered relations and resonant harmonies. Socrates thus relates the world-order to its geometrical blueprint—a constitutive ordering which mortals ignore at their peril, failing to respect the immanent logic that governs thepolis and consequently replacing this by the ‘acosmic’ forces of greed and injustice (Gorgias 507E–508A; Rep. 500B–C). In the Timaeus the kosmos with its self-governing circular motion is identified as a living creature (zoön), created from a beautiful design by the wise and just Demiurge—‘maker and father of this universe’; and mankind and the City participate in this order to the extent that they embody rational principles in their social arrangements: there is, in other words, a homology between human reality and the cosmos, between the orderliness of the microcosm and the underlying logic of the macrocosm; mankind is a part of the Whole created by the instructor of the universe (ho theos paidagogei ton kosmon as Plato says at Laws 897B): If the World be indeed fair and the artificer good, it is manifest that he must have looked to that which is eternal…for the World is the fairest of creations and he is the best of causes. And having been created in this way, the World has been framed in the likeness of that which is apprehended by reason and mind and is unchangeable, and must therefore of necessity…be a copy of something. (Timaeus 29A) God now becomes the maker of the Whole (the word ‘demiourgos’ being the ordinary Greek term for a craftsman) who inscribes a soul (psyche) in his order (the ‘World-Soul’). While not being created from nothing—even the divine source makes use of pre-existing material and the ‘receptacle’ of Space— the kosmos betrays a designer’s purpose (Timaeus 30B). The celestial sphere is not only a ‘beautiful order’, but a world created after an aesthetic pattern of eide. Moreover, as a living creature, the kosmos is endowed with reason and beauty by God, the spectator of the Forms: dei legein tonde ton kosmon zoion empsukhon ennoun (Timaeus 30B; cf. Timaeus 28A–C4; Hippias Major 296Eff. and Philebus 26E, 28C-D, 28E; Laws 10.897B7–8): when He was framing the Universe, He put intelligence in soul, and soul in body, that he might be the creator of a work which was by nature fairest and best. On this wise, using the language of probability, 52

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we may say that the World came into being—a living creature truly endowed with soul and intelligence by the providence of God. (Timaeus, 30B; cf.Philebus 27Aff.)6 For Plato this is also the reason why the Whole has a derivative beauty. The Demiurge modelled the cosmos on the eternal archetypes—the original stencil of Beauty-itself from which all the forms of existence and modes of being are copied (Timaeus 28–9). Since the demiurgic traces of a creator-God are still immanent in the Cosmos the World Soul (psyche ton pantos) can serve as a paradigm for other spheres of being. The macrocosm is a reflection of the soul just as the microcosm is an image of divine Form. The basic elements of Timaeus 28B-C and 29E–30B, indebted as they are to Archaic patterns of thought, would subsequently have an enormous influence on European philosophy and theology; these texts are, in fact, one source of the figure of ‘God the Creator’: the Maker created the Cosmos motivated by goodness (‘Being devoid of envy, he wanted everything to be like himself, as far as possible’); as a benevolent World-Soul, God’s desire was to create a world that would contain good and avoid evil ‘as far as possible’; the Artificer models the cosmos on the basis of a pre-existing paradigm of Goodness and Beauty—in Platonic terms, the goodness of the cosmos is evidenced in its beauty which flows from the paradigm of the transcendent Good. It is known that Aristotle was a careful reader of the Timaeus (De Anima 1.2.404b, 1.3.406b 25ff.; De Caelo 297b14–17; On the Senses 43 7b 13–1 5) and the doctrine of benign creation prompts or at least confirms the theme at Metaphysics 1.2.982b30–983a10: ‘the divine power cannot be jealous’ (an echo of Phaedrus 247 ‘A: ‘jealousy is excluded from the divine choir’). The best of all worlds ‘emanates’ from the source of goodness, and the name for this source is ‘God’. We now have a richer verbal context for the Aristotelian text which opened this chapter: the most divine science is also the most honourable; and this science [the science of wisdom] alone is, in two ways, most divine. For the science which it would be most meet for God to have is a divine science, and so is any science that deals with divine objects; and this science alone has both these qualities; for God is thought to be among the causes of all things and to be a first principle, and such a science either God alone can have, or God above all others. All the sciences, indeed, are more necessary than this, but none is better. (Met. 983a4–10; cf. 1072a20ff.) Aristotle follows Plato in denying creation ex nihilo. The first heavens must be eternal. There is therefore also something which moves them. And since that which is moved and moves is intermediate, there is a mover which moves without being moved, being eternal, 53

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substance, and actuality. And the object of desire and the object of thought move in this way; they move without being moved. (Met. 12.7.1072a20–30) Aristotle’s God, like the Intellect of Plato’s ‘World-Soul’, is a self-reflexive Being, ‘the First Mover’: of necessity exists; and in so far as it is necessary, it is good, and in this sense a first principle… On such a principle, then, depend the heavens and the world of nature. And its life is such as the best which we enjoy … And God is in a better state. And life also belongs to God; for the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality; and God’s essential actuality is life most good and eternal. We say therefore that God is a living being, eternal, most good, so that life and duration continuous and eternal belong to God; for this is God. (Met. 1072b1–30) (Cf. De Caelo 279a-b; a similar argument is in play in the criticism of Plato in De Anima at 1.3.407a where the ‘self-movement’ of the Platonic ‘WorldSoul’ is called ‘thinking’: ‘For the movement of the mind is thinking, and it is the circle whose movement is revolution, so that if thinking is a movement of revolution, the circle which has this characteristic movement must be mind.’) Licensed by these speculations, the Great Chain of Being can be imagined as a teleological hierarchy, a complex interlaced structure of divinely ordained life, rationally distributed through the entire cosmos as a plenum formarum. As the Origin of the whole universe we find a benevolent creative intelligence, Nous or Intellect-God. Created existence ‘strives’ to fulfil exhaustively the potentialities of being seeded by the World-Soul. Although not directly convertible into the traditional deity of Judaism or Christianity, the conceptual framework of Aristotelian metaphysics would provide a receptive context for one of the central themes of medieval theology and science: that the orderliness of the world is a product of divine intelligence. God and not man is the measure of all things (Laws 4.716C, 886Aff.; Timaeus; cf. Philebus 28C-D and 30C); ‘It is clear then from what has been said that there is a substance which is eternal and unmovable and separate from sensible things’, Met. 12.7.1073a4–6). In the well-known image of Plato’s Republic, the Cosmos forms a hierarchy of values culminating in and organized by the ‘form of Forms’, the Good-itself as the principle of perfect presence (auto to agathon in Republic, Books VI and VII). Knowledge is motivated by the soul’s desire to reveal the immanent logos of the cosmos and by ‘imitating’ the logic of Being ascend to the Source of Truth, Goodness, and Justice. The metaphors of vision, transcendence, and spiritual illumination actively organize the narrative plot of Plato’s cosmological story. They also inform Platonic mimetology: the divine Demiurge creates beings by imitating the eternal archetypes; God copies the pure paradigms of being; analogously the ‘mimetic Artist’ imitates the work of productive artisans in 54

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painting and sculpting objects. The hierarchy of representations is anchored in the divine goodness of the Creator (Timaeus 38B-D). By acquiring noetic insight human beings ascend from the degraded realms of sensory aisthesis and opinion (doxa) to the region of pure intelligibility (appropriately called the kosmos noetos); and each step brings with it a proportionate experience of enlightenment; the soul on the path to the True, the Good, and the Beautiful is a soul increasingly bathed in the light of Truth. The figures of light and illumination are thus not merely ways of speaking or contingent illustrations of the project of pure theoria—they form the grammar which makes theoria possible. To enter the form of life of philosophy is per definitionem to turn toward the Good as the source of enlightenment. This is concretized in the Republic’s identification of the Good with the Sun. Platonic ontology traces out the implications of an ancient solar poetics. The pursuit of Truth is measured by a transcendent Idea beyond experience (Republic 507B, 508C, 508E). Things persist in their being only by virtue of the light of the ‘forms of the Good’. To grasp this is already to have taken a step toward a reflexive knowledge both of the principles of cosmic process and selfhood— the latter deriving its ‘divine’ capacity to reflect and pursue knowledge by participating in the cosmic order. From the Archaic precept ‘What is kosmos is valuable’ we have come to the Platonic generalization: the Good is the ultimate ground, the form of all Forms. If the various strata of knowledge represent different levels of knowledge, the source of whatever light is gained by inquiry emanates from the transcendent light of the Good. The Good is the pure source of illumination—the ultimate value a life of pure reflexivity would have to ‘imitate’. In the light of this conception, the Pythagorean definition of philosophia as the disinterested contemplation of the Whole came to be respecified as the process by which the soul is brought into harmony with the intelligible order of the kosmos. If the Sun is an icon of the Good then individuals become good by imitating the work of the Good. In a more reflexive mode, the Sun ‘draws’ the receptive soul back to itself—the Good does not cease from existing in a state where human recognition is dimmed or distorted, but its authentic work begins in the first act of recognition. Plato therefore speaks of knowledge as anamnesis. In the soul’s ascent to the Good, the mind regathers itself as a dependent part of the Whole—just as every creature owing its existence to the Sun is a part of the order of Nature. It is not, as the modern idiom has it, that the mind imposes ‘form’ upon a formless material, but rather that individuals become ‘mindful’ by turning (periagoge, Republic 518E), recognizing (anamnesis), witnessing (theoria), and unfolding the objective order of Being. We have strayed from the nascent videology of the Archaic age to the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle. It is possible to summarize our conclusions as follows: the primary figure of Kosmos subordinated the forces of difference, chaos, and suffering to a rule of order (but in sublimating the irrational it ‘contains’ difference as a momento mori). The fourth-century Christian 55

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Neoplatonist, Iamblichus, has Pythagoras formulate the videological perspective in the following terms: Heaven in its entirety, he said, and the stars in their courses, is a fine sight if one can see its order. But it is so by participation in the primary and intelligible. And what is primary is number and rational order permeating all there is: all things are ranged in their proper and harmonious order in accordance with these. Wisdom is real knowledge, not requiring effort, concerned with those beautiful things which are primary, divine, pure, unchanging: other things may be called beautiful if they participate in these. (Life ofPythagorus, 59) We can now define the basic elements of early Greek videology. The Classical understanding of the cosmos is profoundly visual, realistic, hierarchical, and teleological. The intelligent psyche is one part of the Whole that is directed toward the source of absolute Being: • The Kosmos is literally a beautiful order: a harmonious pattern of visible beauty accessible to the human mind, particularly that part of the mind which the Greeks celebrated as intellect (nous); the universe has been created by a rational Demiurge (a divine Nous working with eternal archetypes); in this respect the primary axiom of Aristotle’s vision of the world remained Platonic in its commitment to the teleological proposition that ‘nature makes nothing incomplete, and nothing in vain’ (Politics 1256b20); nature is a realm of well-ordered life, and the most perfect life is one lived in the presence of unchanging truth and goodness—self-manifest as Being-itself (Republic VII, 524E–525A). • Philosophia is a special kind of ‘mind seeing’ or intellectual intuition;7 the purely intelligible contemplation of the logos of the Universe in a categorial realm of pure, immutable, and indestructible essences (the activity of ‘mind’ or nous re-viewing ‘reason’ immanent throughout the world-order at Phaedrus 247C, and the solar metaphysics of Republic VI, 509B). • Spatial-hierarchical structures take precedence over temporal-processual relations: the World as Chora rather than Chaos. • Reflexive thought which conceives the universe as a World must be thinking in the mode sub specie aeternitatis (Sophist 250C; Timaeus 31B–37C; cf. Phaedo 75D and 103E); speculative theoria arises from the concrete domains of everyday sensory knowledge as it scales the pyramid of Forms toward the realm of true Being. • By disclosing the truth of Being, philosophical reflection ‘imitates’ the cosmic order, a thesis developed from the homology between human reason and the intelligible Kosmos as a nous-created Whole. Over the period from 550 BC to 400 BC we have seen the word kosmos extended from an everyday term for moral conduct and ornamental beauty 56

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to a technical concept for the universe as a whole. For the Pythagorean communities it expressed the ‘well-proportioned’ and ’justly limited’ mathematical order of things. With Heraclitus it evoked the uncreated and timeless world-order of the Logos. From here, as we have seen, it is a small step to view the Kosmos as a purposefully crafted Whole. Plato was the first to take this step, describing the universe as the creature (kosmos monogenes) of a divine artisan, a Demiurge constructing the universe in accordance with pre-existing rational paradigms or eide (Timaeus 28–9; 29E–30A; 38A-D). Substantially the same linkage between God, Nous, and rationality provided the leading idea in Aristotle’s theory of the world order: If reason is divine, then, in comparison with man, the life according to it is divine in comparison with human life. But we must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things, and being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us. (NE 10.7.1177b25–1178a1; cf. Timaeus 90A2–D7) But we should stress that the equation of a poeic divinity and productive Reason also had very specific sociological preconditions—rooted in the socioeconomic and political changes of the sixth and fifth centuries. The formation of Plato’s cosmology was shaped by the great tradition of Ionian economics and cultural experimentation as much as by Pythagorean number mysticism and Parmenidean ontology. Werner Jaeger has summarized this in a salient formulation: it is by our experience of the world-order as a constructive and purposeful organisation that we are able to grasp the nature of that divine intelligence which stands behind this world-order or is effective within it; and this new experience of the cosmos would be unthinkable if it were not for that peculiarly developed feeling for all kinds of mechanical and technical purposefulness which we find in the new era—a feeling that springs from the heightened technical knowledge and skills of the period. (Jaeger, 1947:171) It is at this precise historical conjuncture that the theological imagery of a created universe (kosmos), art (poiesis), craft (techne), death (ananke/ thanatos), and reflection (theoria, nous, phronesis, sophia) become intertwined. The whole semantic cloud is discharged in the figure of the worldcreating Demiurge. In forming the kosmos the Maker ‘had his eye on the eternal (aionios) for the world (kosmos) is the fairest of all things that have come into being and he is the best of causes’ (Timaeus 29A). God is no longer an incorrigible deity striking down unbelievers and sinners with thunderbolts from Olympus. He has become a rational craftsman, an intellectual worker organizing materials according to a pre-established plan. God is reason incarnate and His product—the Cosmos—is profoundly reasonable. In the 57

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last writings of Plato, God is Philosophy personified. In gaining knowledge of the cosmos the soul takes on some of the rational properties of the divine. The Pythagorean influence is evident from Plato’s earliest writings (the Phaedo and Gorgias) and returns with a vengeance in the last works. The final destination of the word kosmos, however, is the notion of a universe where the soul—as a microcosm—perfectly mirrors the order of the macrocosm, and behind this figure, the idea of a universe governed by a unitary system of laws.8 The basic elements for this construction were already in place in the Stoic philosophers of the third century and were certainly explicitly stated before the end of the first century BC.9 Philo, for example, working in Alexandria, could write of Chrysippus’ cosmology: This cosmos is a large scale state and is governed by one single constitution and by one law. And there is a law of nature prescribing what ought to be done and forbidding what ought to be left undone. Our natures are parts of that nature which constitutes the whole…universal law. (Philo, De Joseph., ii) Kosmos not only meant universal order; it was also applied to the structure, form, and functioning of the human body. The unity of the microcosm, the human body with all its diversity, may well have inspired the idea of an all-embracing unity in the macrocosm. (Glacken, 1967:17) Indeed Lucretius normally translates the idea of ‘atom’ using the anthropocentric term ‘shape’ or ‘figura’—the atoms conglomerate into the ‘figura’ of microcosms and macrocosms (De Rerum Natura 2.11.385, 682ff.). Two millennia later, essentially the same cosmic problem reappeared in Immanuel Kant’s speculative sketch for a ‘hypothetical theory of the heavens’ that would explain the formation of nebulae (Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, 1969). Speaking in support of Newtonian natural philosophy, Kant reinstated the project of physical cosmology in Milesian terms: I accept the matter of the whole world at the beginning in a state of general dispersion, and make of it a complete chaos. I see this matter forming itself in accordance with the established laws of attraction, and modifying its movements by repulsion. I enjoy the pleasure, without having recourse to arbitrary hypotheses, of seeing a well-ordered whole, produced under the regulation of the established laws of motion, and this whole looks so much like that system of the world which we have before our eyes, that I cannot refuse to identify with it.10 In his unpublished treatise The World, René Descartes—a century before Kant’s cosmological dissertation—also returned philosophy to cosmic speculation. The 58

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work which he began in 1629 but withdrew from publication in 1633 after the arrest and trial of Galileo, is summarized in his Discourse on Method (Parts 3 and 5): God is the arche of the universe; he has created enough ‘chaotic’ matter ‘somewhere in imaginary spaces’ to compose a ‘figured’ universe; like the Platonic Demiurge or Aristotelian Unmoved Mover, God acts to agitate the different elements of this matter so forming a chaotic mixture, and then leaves the world process to operate according to His prescribed laws; planetary motion is deduced from the properties of a swirling mass of homogeneous fluid matter; the laws of nature—for example, those of magnetic attraction—operate in our universe and in every other possible world God may have created. Descartes concluded his treatise with a genealogical account of the formation of the heavens, including inanimate and animate nature.11 These observations suggest that the framework first articulated by the Pythagoreans and Plato continued to operate as a generative matrix for later natural philosophy—shaping what we have called the videological worldview of Western culture. 3 LANGUAGE AND ‘THE EPOCH OF THE LOGOS’ We may argue on grounds of reason, and the same result will follow. For law is order, and good law is good order; but a very great multitude cannot be orderly: to introduce order into the unlimited is the work of a divine power—of such a power as holds together the universe. Beauty is realized in number and magnitude, and the state which combines magnitude with good order must necessarily be the most beautiful. (Aristotle, Politics 1326a29–35 trans. Jonathan Barnes) The videological metaphors used to express the idea of world-order in early Greek philosophy are themselves indebted to a much older vocabulary concerned with the ‘gathering’ and ‘articulation’ of things. According to the comparative linguist Emile Benveniste, certain primordial figures of order are shared by most Indo-European languages. In ancient Vedic, the root term for ‘order’ itself was rtá (or ritá), and in the Iranian group of languages, it is arta (or asha in the Avesta).12 The root metaphor behind these words carries the sense of a harmonious order of parts within a presiding whole exemplified by the regularity of seasons, harvests, and the periodicity of the human and natural order. Each element of creation is positioned in the ordered whole by the rhythmic law of the macrocosm. In turn, rtá, provided the root *ar-for the Greek word ararisko (and the Latin harmos, harmonia); its root has the meaning of ‘what is adjusted, fitted together, orderly’ (cf. the Latin ritus), but it also expresses the ‘right order’ of the social and moral cosmos—a cosmic configuration prior to any separation or opposition between nature (phusis) and society (nomos). Not unnaturally these primary metaphors or emblèmes (in Marcel Granet’s sense of the term) functioned in social and ideological 59

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contexts in which the ‘universe’ of objects and relations to which they referred and which they helped constitute and reproduce were both hypostatized and sacralized. As models of cosmic and social order such representations provided basic schemata for further narratives, social practices, and institutions. They served as generative actants for their respective cultures. Thus in Vedic Sanskrit the word dharma translates as both ‘law’ and as ‘what is maintained, and held fast’ (from dhar-‘to hold’). Man’s dharma would be fulfilled in following the laws prescribing his role in the cyclical cosmicmoral order (the doctrine of dharma, of course, became the metaphysical basis of caste rules and ritual practices by which individuals, families, and communities were required to organize their lives in keeping with the dictates of the cosmic order). Here ‘discourse’, social practices, and institutional hierarchies form an isomorphic constellation. Emile Benveniste also suggests that the Greek words themis and dike fulfilled similar social functions for ancient Greek tribal society: themis (from ‘foundation’ or ‘base’) speaks particularly to the moral order of the family, while dike (‘the just, upright way’) governs relationships between families as they constitute larger orders such as communities, tribes and poleis. Dike (‘the way’), diakaios (‘the right way’), and dikaiosune (‘justice’), like kosmos and logos all display the experience of being bound and ordered by a larger, all-inclusive configuration. Traces of these semantic networks can be found in the earliest Greek poets and thinkers (compare for example, DK B 10, where Heraclitus’ text speaks of ‘Things grasped together (articulations): things whole and not whole, coming together and separating; harmonious and dissonant; out of all things one, and out of one all things’.13 Hence any straying from Order is a source of transgression and evil. In Sanskrit the religious connection is even more emphatic: ‘evil’ is simply falling away from good order (anrita); for the ancient Greek, it is living beyond the ‘way’ (dike; hence committing ‘injustice’), by not following what is common (koinon), not acting in accord with phusis and the just order of things which is the kosmos.14 When we turn to explain the innovations in styles of thought and theoretical praxis during this period, it is necessary to remind ourselves that we do so only by means of concepts and language-games which were forged by Greek thinkers in the sixth century. Reflexive thinking and rational praxis would have no permanent form were it not for the rhetorics created by archaic culture. This, of course, does not mean that everything theoretical is contained in early Greek thought, but it does imply that the idea of a radically selfreflective relation toward experience, nature, language, and social and political community had its origins in this axial civilization. The Greeks at this early date not only discovered the idea of reflexive theorizing, but invented the idea of rational reflection as a self-correcting and self-generating process of dialogue. They invented, in other words, the idea(l) of unrestricted intellectual inquiry as an end in itself. The beginnings of Western episteme, however, was not a commitment to a narrow intellectual ideal. The life of theory arose not 60

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as a passion to transform the world but as ‘wonder’ drawing the self into a relationship with the order of being. Cosmology was as much about understanding the nature of human experience as it was concerned with the origins and motions of the planets; logic was not yet a purely formal instrument for regimenting thought but preserved the more generous virtues of clear argumentation and charitable debate; mathematics embodied a view of the Good; natural philosophy was not yet governed by the experimental deconstruction of nature. In fact the concept of ‘objective nature’ was not yet available to the Presocratic thinkers.15 In European thought the Presocratics are the first identifiable group of thinkers to commend the idea that human existence is possible only as reflexive life: that human experience must be grounded in an all-embracing Logos and articulated through the life of dialogue, argumentative discourse, and speculative theorizing. If Classical philosophy would eventually identify Logos with Reason or Nous, the pre-Classical thinkers prefigured the epoch of the Logos. While it is difficult to summarize in a brief formula what is involved in the Ionian discovery of the cosmos, we can say that Presocratic philosophy instituted an iconic logic in its attempt to specify the nature of the Wholecentring on different metaphorical icons: Phusis, Kosmos, Logos, and so on. This ‘iconicism’ is immediately apparent in the metaphoric language of early philosophy, where an element or part of the Whole (Water, Air, Fire, etc.) is used to symbolize the Whole. One of the central concerns of Presocratic discourse can be defined as the problem of articulating the Whole—how can one part of the Whole understand the unity of the world-order. And the generic ‘solution’ to this question lay in grasping reasonable speech (logos) and the Whole itself as moments of the manifest order of truth (Logos). This single assumption expresses the unlimited cognitive optimism of the early Greeks. It is the varied expressions of this reflexive relation between human discourse and the Whole which we will examine in the following chapters. I will argue that the Presocratic thinkers are among the first to grasp the constitutive role of metaphor in thinking. Phusis, Logos, and Cosmos became seminal icons for the European tradition of theorizing.16 And the common denominator of these three image systems is the idea of the visibility of the universe as an ordered configuration. Another fundamental aspect of the Whole is that the source of intelligibility does not lie exclusively in human speech or action; meaning derives from the Logos itself. All things, including determinate forms of reflection and action, follow the rhythms of the universal Logos. The ‘origins’ of intelligibility are to be traced back to the Whole as this is articulated in and by human expression. 4 THE IONIAN REVOLUTION IN COSMOLOGICAL THINKING The rhetorical figures of pure intelligibility (Logos), nature (Phusis), and order 61

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(Kosmos) underwrite the project of the great Milesian programme of fundamental ontology. The first Milesian thinkers pursued a single consistent account of the world totality which they called phusis. Without calling their enterprise ‘cosmology’ or ‘phusiology’, the Presocratics invented a new form of intellectual praxis by asking evidential questions about the origins, structure, and constitution of the world-order—a project that is still inscribed in the word cosmology. The desire for a unitary account of the Whole is what is profoundly original to Ionian thought, and through its subsequent dissemination, to the tradition of Presocratic thinking as a whole. It is evident that the ‘science of Being’ is very different from modern conceptions of ontology or scientific cosmology, constructed as they are upon an understanding of the world as a discrete ensemble of things or ‘domains of reality’; the Presocratic thinkers did not think of their ‘new science’ as a science of things, but as an inquiry into ‘phusis’ as a living whole embracing all beings in the unified principles of their differentiation and manifestation. They pursued a science of Wisdom. There is no doubt, then, that the Presocratic philosophers are of seminal importance for any history of reflexivity. The Ionians not only instituted cosmological reflection, but more significantly developed the symbolic forms of inferential thought in which all subsequent cosmological inquiry would be pursued. The beginnings of philosophy are thus rightly ascribed to the ‘thinkers and poets’ of the Ionian city-states. We should immediately caution that the term ‘Presocratic’ is doubly misleading: first, in suggesting that the thought of the earliest Greek thinkers follows a predetermined trajectory which culminates in the dialectical problematics of Socrates and Plato and, second, in glossing the fact that several of the most notable ‘Presocratics’ were Socrates’ historical contemporaries—Anaxagoras, Parmenides, and Democritus among the most oustanding. However, the expression usefully draws attention to something like a collegiate tradition of reflexive speculation dating back to more than a century before the Greek enlightenment; and in this way it generates questions about the nature and ‘effective historicity’ of this ‘prephilosophical’ tradition as the matrix for later Greek philosophy and science. Naturally, when turning to individual thinkers, we will discover that different Presocratic thinkers were engaged by different problems. Clarifying these differences and their consequences forms a central objective of the chapters which follow. As transitional discourses within the Archaic form of life, their accounts point backward to myth and epic and forward toward the idioms of science and Classical philosophy. There are a number of common themes which link all the Presocratics. First, the medium of reflexivity remained symbolic narrative—or at least a hybrid idiom saturated with the symbolic and metaphorical concreteness of earlier modes of mythological thought. By revising the radical metaphors of the mythic tradition the Presocratics created a network of symbols expressing their vision of the transcendence of Being. The paradigmatic example of this is the word logos itself, closely followed by 62

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the words kosmos, phusis, dike, nomos, ethos, arete, and their conjugates. Such words are imperfectly understood as intellectual ‘concepts’; they antedate the idea of a purely conceptual order. Second, Presocratic thought represents an adversarial struggle against the language-games of its precursors; and here there is both continuity and innovation within the field of discourse. This creative tension -at times generating convulsions and ‘monstrous’ hybrids— can be traced throughout the corpus of Presocratic discourse. Third, the quest to understand the unity of the kosmos—the primordial oneness of Being—is articulated in moral and religious idioms. The kosmos is not yet a neutral, homogeneous space of physical substances, governed by natural laws; it still appears as the manifestation of an order that binds things, mortals, and gods into a harmonious Whole. Even today the question of foundational thought remains: what mode of speech is ‘adequate’ to elemental matters? What kind of discourse can be uttered before the sacred and the absolute? How can finite beings aspire to name that which transcends all mimetic structure? The Whole displays reflexive characteristics which speech can only indicate—hence the significance of such sensuous-material iconic elements as Earth, Ocean, Sun, and Heaven. Cosmic thinking hollows out a new form, neither poetry nor philosophical argument—the hybrid genre we might call the ‘philosophical poem’ (Parmenides’ poem on the unity of Being, Empedocles’ book On Nature and the Purifications, and Heraclitus’ riddling texts). Given the sacred nature of the ‘object of thought’, the philosophical poem may have been purposefully constructed. We have already emphasized the cognitive optimism presupposed by the belief in the power of rational speech. This is not a natural attitude—it expresses a change of consciousness and confidence in the authority of selfreflection and discourse. Behind this attitude is a new assessment of the force of dialogue, argument, and evidence made thematic by the impact of alphabetic writing and literacy. In keeping with the logological perspective we approach the Presocratics as discursive innovators. We begin by examining their textual practices rather than by attempting to extract the abstract ‘content’ of their thought. Here more than in any other period of intellectual history the style of reflexivity is inseparable from the content of thought. Greek reflection, in asking the question of the Whole, tends to make the visible horizon of Being synonymous with ‘the true’. This is the point where Western philosophy imagined the idea of truth as self-standing totality, a single ‘knowledge’ comprehending the essence of the Whole. We may term this the logocentrism of the Presocratics, signifying by this term the faith that the logos was the origin, place, and medium of truth: Let us state for what reason becoming and the sum of things were framed by him who framed them. He was good, and in the good no jealousy of anything can arise. So being without jealousy, he wished everything to become as much as possible like himself. Desiring then that all things 63

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should be good and as far as possible nothing in a bad condition, the Creator took over all that was visible and not at rest but in discordant and unordered motion and brought it from disorder into order; for he judged order to be in every way better than disorder. The shape of the heaven must be spherical. That is most suitable to its substance, and is the primary shape in nature…since in every genus the one is by nature prior to the many…the circle must be the primary plane figure…the revolution of the heaven is the measure of all motions, because it alone is continuous and unvarying and eternal. An ideological history is implicated in these texts, a tradition begun in Ionia, but tracing its way through Plato down to the Peripatetics, and condensed in the authority vested in the word ‘must’.18 That logos is a domain of synthetic operations prior to everyday speech, logic, or any subsequent formalization is perhaps best explored in Heraclitus’ interpretation of Logos as self-differentiating and self-articulating movement. The interplay of identity and difference antedates human speech. For Heraclitus, Logos is the movement of phusis itself as a self-differentiating Whole. It is the eternally restless movement of displacement and temporality. This perspective precipitated the central problem of Classical Greek philosophy: what is the role of intelligible logos—identified with Reason—if the whole kosmos is an interminable process of differentiation and change? How can language identify, name, and capture the essence of things under such a dispensation? In Heraclitus’ text a kosmos is projected in which Logos preserves the play of difference which makes human speech and community possible. Sophia and sophrosune, wisdom and self-knowledge, are possible only in the moment of recognition where the psyche brings itself into a balanced relationship with the play of phusis (‘consciousness’—if we can use such a term in this context—is the comingto-self (sophrosune) of the inquiring self ‘listening’ to the Logos of Being). Prior to the idea of a logic of Being, phusis was interpreted as a living Whole. Consequently, the first attempts to think this order radically did not appear as a logic of nature, but as a logos of the cosmos. Kosmos and phusis became the guide-words for the fundamental elucidation of the meaning of Being as the horizon of every mode of being. This discourse of the Whole is not so much ‘speculative’ in the sense of an untrammelled flight of the imagination, but rather a prescientific attempt to ‘envision the Whole’ in thought, to draw the horizon of all beings into the circle of discourse, accepting that this Whole itself is the horizon presupposed by every discourse.19 To summarize the analysis at this point: Presocratic reflexivity articulated a version of language in which it was possible for an individual to approach beings in their proximity to the Logos of Being. The revolutionary assumption here is that one part of the cosmos—the individual thinker—could understand the truth of the Whole. Or said slightly differently, that critical thinking could reveal the truth of existence. It is not merely a ‘truth-claiming’ or ‘evidential’ 64

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speech act, but the discovery that only logos is the totalizing medium of disclosure (and manifestation is posited as already revealed and given to thought). To borrow Martin Heidegger’s idiom, it was this disclosure and gathering of Being as the event of phusis which these early thinkers projected as being most thoughtworthy. Early Greek reflexivity is thus a meditation upon the event of be-ing and not an inquisitive determination of the logic of beings. The Whole gathered into a unity through the presiding articulation of the Logos—this is the source of the ancient question of the One and the Many, of how the totality of things belongs together with the integrity of Being’s manifold forms and modes. However, the experience of the universe as kosmos was not itself philosophy; it is more like a ‘principle of hope’ in the presence of Being; and it cannot, without some violence, be placed in the series which gave rise to the history of modern reflection, science, and metaphysics. Yet the determination of the unity and identity of Being within the manifold forms and different modes of Being is the fundamental starting point of Greek reflexivity—from Presocratic thought to the Classical formulations of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. The idea of a unitary totality behind the multiple appearances of things inaugurated the tradition of Western European reflection. 5 GREEK COSMOLOGY AS A FORM OF LIFE The Hellenic faith in the presiding manifestation of Being was active in a range of discourses reflecting upon the primacy of immutable identity, centredness, and unity. We can prefigure the following chapters by briefly detailing some of these variations. The ‘science of wisdom’ Ionian natural philosophy foregrounds the question of the self-identical arche of all things and even where this is left indeterminate (as in the apeiron of Anaximander), it is never doubted that the essence of manifestation has a unitary ground or principle of ultimate justification. The quest for a global understanding of Being constitutes the science of wisdom (sophia). Again we are in a region prior to the Classical problems of Western metaphysics. With the Pythagoreans, the unity of the kosmos is sought in the One, the highest icon of totality and absolute self-presence. The Eleatics deny difference and becoming in the name of the oneness of Being and Thought (most notably in Parmenides’ poem on Being and Zeno’s logical defence of the unreality of motion, change, and plurality). Each of these images of unity is a variation on the idea of one absolute source of intelligibility. From this point of view the Platonic doctrine of the absolute reality of the Forms and Aristotle’s doctrine of unitary substance (ousia as ‘being qua being’) are notational variations of earlier ontological positions. Exceptions to this picture— Heraclitus and, perhaps, the Atomists—are more apparent than real 65

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(Heraclitus celebrated the invisible order of Logos within change, while the Atomists adhered to a version of the immutable ‘being’ of the atoms and the unitary gathering of atoms and void). Being or what is The Presocratic ‘science of wisdom’ began a tradition of ontological reflexivity posing questions about the Whole. It begins with the question: what is Being? (what exists ultimately? or what is really Real?) The problematic of the earliest thinkers directs attention away from the multiplicity of existent entities and centres upon the question of being as such. Animated by wonder and the spirit of inquiry the early cosmologists asked: how is the unity of Being (qua phusis) to be understood? Is the kosmos eternal or has it a beginning? How and why did this kosmos come to be? How does the kosmos manifest itself as an intelligible order throughout its fields of difference and transformations ? What is the principle of the kosmos as a whole? Can Reason (logos) provide a true account of the totality of What Is? The emergence of this form of speech characterizes the beginnings of European philosophy which, not surprisingly, centres upon questions of truth and being. And the idea behind radical reflection is necessarily deeply adversarial. The nobility of the Whole must find a form appropriate to its own integrity. From the perspective of the Whole, mythos is no longer adequate as a medium of truth-telling. In fact cosmological discourse must distance itself from the language of traditional beliefs, everyday persuasion, and Homeric poiesis. Everyday consciousness with its focus on particulars must be transcended by the vocation of pure reflection. The discourses of thinkers like Anaximander, Xenophanes, and Heraclitus mark a crisis in Greek religious thought. In both their form and content they dedicate themselves to another way of life—or as we would say, another rhetoric of reason as a process of isolating and formulating explanatory accounts. The self which asks ‘What is the nature of things?’ discloses a different form of life—one which persists in the sciences and technologies of our own time. The etymology of ‘dedication’ captures the two aspects of commitment and proclamation: to pursue truth involves a life devoted to aletheia, and such a life must strive to express the truth of the whole. Philosophy is a way of life in speaking about what makes all speech possible. It respecifies thinking as the quest for the intelligible ground of nature. The shift of attitude toward ‘the divine’ as an icon of the Whole can already be found in the first tragic poets. Aeschylus’ self-question-ing in the Agamemnon may be taken as an exemplary instance. At Agamemnon 160–6 the voice of the protagonist invokes Zeus, ‘whose power is over all’. But even this invocation is not exempt from reflection—as the text speaks of ‘Zeus, whoever he may be’ and ‘Zeus, if this is the appropriate name’. The earliest Ionian texts are written in the same questioning spirit. Anaximander, for example, marks the transition in refusing to indicate the 66

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matrix of beings by using the traditional ‘names of God’, and instead chooses to speak of the source of all things as the Indeterminate (to apeiron). Aeschylus’ still-traditional doubt about the ‘name of Zeus’ has been extended to divinity per se. Xenophanes also illustrates this conflict in his strategy of downgrading the culture of bodily prowess in preference to the mind culture of reflection and theoretical judgement as a new civic ideal (Fr. 2). Anaxagoras calls the Reason governing the whole world process Nous—Mind as the faculty of intellectual discourse writ large. Xenophanes’ criticism of Homeric religion and Anaxagoras’ radical proposal prefigure a new ideal of the theoretical life. In fact the creative tension between a sacred and profane representation of the Whole pervades early Greek thought and provides another source of creative tension in its explanatory paradigms. On the one hand, cosmology celebrates the event of manifestation by which the Cosmos as a Whole was wrenched from Chaos. On the other hand, a rational logos should be more than a hymn; cosmology makes different and more extreme demands on the self and community of thinkers than traditional mythology. It seeks to reveal the reasons and causes of particular things. In fact the new discourse makes astonishing epistemic claims about the ultimate nature of beings and the grounds of coming-to-be and passing-away. ‘Reason’ not ‘Zeus’ is the court of ultimate appeal in deciding ontological questions. Inquiry, in other words, should be able to defend itself with evidence and rational argument. Where these criteria are compatible with the divine constraints of Just Order, Justice, and Fate—the supreme functions of Zeus—well and good; but where they take questioning beyond the traditional predicates of the divine, thought must follow reason rather than tradition. The telos of philosophical reason creates a different kind of audience and new possibilities of intellectual community. The Many and the One: appearance and essence Ontological speculation first appears in the question, ‘How, given the multiplicity and heterogeneity of particular modes of manifestation, does Being preserve its unity and integrity?’ How can there be one ‘nature’ behind the endless mutations of existing things? These questions are not dualistic or sceptical: they do not polarize particular modes of existence and the unity of Being as opposed categories, but rather ask how manifestation and essence are gathered together in the Whole. Plurality is traced to elemental differences operative in phusis. The first cosmologists pose the question of how the One can self-differentiate into its many modes of appearance while still remaining a unitary Whole. How does the One preserve its unity while also being the ‘One-in-the-Many’ ? This is the phenomenological question that institutes Greek reflexivityBeing is interpreted as the configuration immanent in its manifestations. By emphasizing the ‘aspectival’ character of appearances we come close to the meaning of the early Greek concept of existence: phusis is the essence of 67

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manifestation. And only on the ground of manifest being can there be speech which aspires to a comprehensive understanding of the processes of manifestation. The phenomenological status of the Many-One structure is common to all the Presocratics. When Anaximander came to frame the relation of the One (Apeirori) to the Many he borrowed the icon of Justice and the tragic hubris of finite things; Heraclitus construed this tension as a dialectical process involving both Being and Non-being; both themes are incorporated into the Platonic dialectic of the One and the Many to avoid the standard objection that ‘being’ is not a generic predicate. For Plato the ‘ancients’ are ‘our betters and nearer the gods than we’, for they understood that all things are formed of the One and Many—having ‘the finite and infinite implanted in them’. And since this is the order of the universe, we too ought in every inquiry to begin by laying down one idea of that which is the subject of our inquiry; this unity we shall find in everything…the infinite must not be suffered to approach the many until the entire number of the species intermediate between unity and infinity has been discovered,—then, and not till then, we may rest from division, and without further troubling ourselves about the endless individuals may allow them to drop into infinity…the wise men of our time are either too quick or too slow in conceiving plurality in unity…they make their one and many anyhow, and from unity pass at once to infinity; the intermediate steps never occur to them. And this, I repeat, is what makes the difference between the mere art of disputation and true dialectic.20 Dialectic is a more refined method for handling the architectonic relationships mediating the One and the Many. However limited Plato thought his predecessors to have been in collapsing the intermediate structure between the One and the Many, without the discourse of the ancients dialectic would have had no object nor measure. And despite the obvious refinement of the question and language, the basic theme of Plato’s later thought remained Presocratic: dialectic strives to think the Many from within the necessary limits of the Whole. Ontologically, dialectic moves from plurality to totality by gathering essential diffferences, by the synoptic apprehension of the Many from the vantage point of the One (in Plato’s language, from the Good that is beyond Being and Non-being). And the synoptic life of dialogue is still inspired by a reverential love of the Whole (Rep. 537C). Later interpretations of this phenomenological structure move in the direction of dualism, positing a radical distinction (rather than a difference) between ‘true Being’ (Reality) and surface appearances. Once this move is made, philosophical knowledge is misconstrued as a transcendence of illusory appearances in order to reveal the meta-physical Absolute. Plato’s later thought with its view of sensory appearance (aisthesis) as a realm of Non-being and the One as the sole object of reason is already well within this framework 68

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(Timaeus 27D–28A). Such a metaphysical opposition, however, is alien to Presocratic thought. At root it is based on misrecognizing an ontological difference as a categorial duality (and the occlusion of Presocratic phenomenology is marked at every step by the rise of dualist ontologies). What metaphysics occludes is the more radical notion of phusis as the power of manifestation in all its articulations, forms, and differences. Where cosmology interprets phusis as the appearance of Being (the manifestation of the Whole), metaphysics treats every mode of being as an illusory veil behind which the Absolute lies hidden. The One-in-the-Many The observation that the terms ‘being’ and ‘one’ do not function as universal predicates does not disturb the Presocratic question of the nature of the unity of Being. From the perspective of the latter question the problem of the Onein-the-Many is radically different from the question of the unitary manifold of individual beings. ‘Being’ is not the sum of its parts; as phusis it is the process of limitation and self-differentiation which is already presupposed by this partwhole imagery. The horizon of Being has already to be manifest for there to be anything like a problem of ‘the one and the many’. Whether or not this should be formulated in the language of ontological difference (after Heidegger: the Being of being(s) is not itself a being) remains questionable. The earliest Greeks appear to have cast this problem of problems in the imagery of horizonality and emergent Form (the Milesians), of Limit and Limitlessness (Anaximander), of divine presence and absence (Heraclitus), and the One operative within but separate from both the unities and differences it gathers (the Pythagoreans). Aletheia: Being-in-manifestation In Martin Heidegger’s well-known interpretation of the Presocratics, Being is presented as the manifestation of beings or the presence of Being in beings. Manifestation or ‘unhiddenness’ is not a contingent property or predicate of Being (phusis), but its essence (as emergence, showing, disclosing, but correlatively as hiddenness and foreclosure). The Greeks used the word phusis for this ambivalent process of manifestation and hiddenness, drawing upon the metaphoric root phy/pha (from phein, to ‘grow’, ‘show’, or ‘come into manifestation’). According to Heidegger, early Greek thinking formulates the essence of Being as phusis in the sense of the ontological power of emergence or revelation (aletheia). The importance of the Presocratics is to have given this tensile experience of Being qua manifestation a definite discursive form. Heidegger refers to this experience of the radical difference between a knowledge of beings standing within the already open horizon of Being and a knowledge of the event of Being qua phusis as the ontological difference. In articulating the full force of this difference, Greek thought 69

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discovers a more primordial sense of ‘truth’ which calls for a mode of thinking in tune with the Being process itself: for things to be—to exist—they must already stand forth from a horizon, gathered together in self-presence. ‘Being’ is the process which lights itself up so that particular beings can ‘come to be’. Before ‘predicates’ can be ascribed or ‘claimed’ of a concrete being, that being must be disclosed in its manifest ‘beingness’. The structure of manifestation is thus a process of presencing. Presence is interpreted as the ontological event of truth: to be as a concrete thing is to be ‘in truth’, as only what is already disclosed in its beingness or quiddity can claim truth. Yet the power of the manifestation process lies unconcealed: ‘Truth is inherent in the essence of being’ while non-being is what withdraws from appearing manifestation. Non-being is primordially non-presence, absence.21 If truth is understood as un-concealment or un-hiddenness (a-letheia), then our everyday understanding of truth as a feature of things, a semantic linkage of subject and predicate, or a correspondence between proposition and object is not originary. Truth in the Greek sense is not a property of beings, but a relation made possible by an ontological interplay of presence/absence. Being is self-manifest in the manifestation of beings. According to Heidegger the thought of Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides can teach us to think more reflexively. The early Greeks created the possibility of radical reflexivity by thinking the ontological difference of the Being of beings: thinking as the commemorative task of recovering the ground of manifestation within the modalities of manifestness. A number of important critical themes can be raised using Heidegger’s account of the beginnings of Greek thought. First, from his perspective the fragments of the Presocratics tend to be interpreted as a single collective perspective upon Being. The experience of Being qua manfestation belongs to early Greek thought as a whole. Specific differences fall away in Heidegger’s global ontology of presence. In formulating the central words aletheia, logos, and phusis as an account of presence, Heidegger reconstructs the fragments of this tradition using videological metaphors. Indeed, the key root pha-(as in phainesthai, from which the word phainomenon derives) is one of the central terms in the language of visibility. The ‘Being-process’ is depicted in metaphors of light, illumination, and revelation. Etymologically, ‘phenomena’ express that which ‘shines’ or ‘shows’ in appearances, that which comes to appearance and grants visible presence. The word phainesthai names the essence of Being in manifest phusis.22 Second, Heidegger’s distinction between ‘truth’ as it applies to present beings and ‘truth’ as the emergence of presence involves a parallel distinction with respect to human speech. Everyday language reflects the whatness of things in ontic terms, while ontological speech is attuned to the logos of Being. Everyday talk takes the givenness of particular beings as an unreflective presupposition, while ontological speech turns reflexively toward the presence of Being. Heidegger assumes that the authentic mode of human speech lies in those modalities of saying where the manifestation of Being itself 70

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is articulated. But again this relation is interpreted videologically: through the saying/showing structure of discourse the Being of beings comes to presence. Third, a theory of occlusion flows from the notion of truth as revelation. If Being presents itself it also conceals and withdraws. Absence is the videological definition of untruth which Heidegger glosses as ‘error’. If phusis is the essence of manifestation, it is also the inevitable process of occlusion as an interweaving of presence and absence. In Heidegger’s hermeneutics, Presocratic thought thinks this ‘dialectic’ of illumination and opacity as a primordial feature of truth: Appearance, deception, illusion, error stand in definite essential and dynamic relations which have long been misinterpreted by psychology and epistemology and which consequently, in our daily lives, we have well-nigh ceased to experience and recognize as powers.23 At this point Heidegger conflates dialectical and videological discourse. Thinking is neither reflection nor contemplation, but a commemorative preservation of the ontological difference. Heidegger, however, does not articulate a phenomenology of error nor a dialectical analysis of the relations of manifestation. Instead thinking is thematized abstractly: ‘The thinking and being-there of the Greeks were a struggle for a decision between the great powers of being and becoming, being and appearance. Inevitably this struggle molded the relation between thinking and being into a definite form’.24 Heidegger avoids raising the question of this ambivalence and its historical contextuality, offering no way of explaining how the structure of logos and phusis as concrete discourse formations decisively ‘moulded’ subsequent Greek philosophy. By decontextualizing the Presocratics and reading each as a variation of one essential theme Heidegger effectively ideologizes these texts. This move allows him to elaborate the most far-reaching conclusions concerning Western European metaphysics and its Seinsvergessenheit, beginning with the Platonic apotheosis of eidos. Universal reflexivity Let us return to the Ionian thinkers. The projects of the Presocratics display two distinctive features. First, their inquiries are manifestly self-involving: the One arche behind the divine kosmos must also govern the project of inquiry and the language which articulates the ground of the cosmic unity. Uncovering the order of Being qua ordered manifestation is also the self-disclosure of the being who exists in pursuing knowledge of Being. Second, the question concerning phusis is intrinsically universal. It does not ask after a particular being or part of Being, but of the essence of Being. Being’s universality is linked to the universality of that being that is driven to ask for the ‘whole truth’ of things—which is, of course, human being. In experiencing wonder and thought, human reality discloses its own telos as rational desire, as a form of life which projects itself as a reasonable existence. In other words, the ‘discovery’ of the 71

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Kosmos is correlatively a disclosure of the self-reflexive possibilities of human being and of language as the nexus between Being and Logos. Logocentricity The fusion of logocentric and the cosmocentric icons gave a uniquely ‘phenomenological’ orientation to early thought. Of course by ‘phenomenology’ we have in mind the literal meaning of this compound expression. The Cosmos is the manifestation of an ordered sense or ‘meaning’. Cosmological reflexivity therefore must represent the world as a visible order. It licenses a reading of reality in which phusis comes to be viewed as a visible kosmos. Logos and Reason are implicated in the idea of Being as the encompassing totality of its forms of manifestation. Yet ‘Being’ and its modalities are only thinkable in the forms provided by discourse. Theorem depends on language. This ‘reciprocity’ of Being and Logos is the distant ancestor of the modern speculative proposition which articulates the intentionality of thinking and being (whether in Hegelian or Husserlian forms). We might say that the beginnings of philosophy arise in pairing the differentiated unity of Logos and Being in simultaneously recognizing the logos of Being by asking the question of the being of Logos. The question ‘How can reason represent the Whole given the vagaries of language and human finitude?’ was resolved by making language and human existence iconically part of the Whole. This is another reason for speaking of the beginning of reflexivity as ‘logological’ (theorizing in its earliest forms does not begin with either logos or being, but with their site of articulation). When pressed further the unity of thought and being turns inquiry back to the concrete ‘site’ of its manifestation in human existence. Ontological reflexivity, in other words, entails a version of selfhood as life lived within the horizon of truth, later symbolized by the imperative ‘Know thyself. Writing philosophy Another important aspect of the critique of their predecessors and contemporaries lies in the fact that the Presocratics were literate thinkers. Along with the epic and Greek tragedy, Presocratic philosophy is one of the first products of the new technology of alphabetic writing. In this respect the universalism of theoria is not merely a renewed eros for the traditional paths of myth and epic totality, but a desire which seeks its consummation in the written text. Ionian (h)istoria takes advantage of the ‘dialogical’ freedoms made possible by written texts. Literacy is thus one of the necessary preconditions for analytic self-re-flection—although by no means the single most important factor in the genealogy of philosophical discourse. But it is undoubtedly the case that the Presocratics belonged to a self-conscious literate milieu. By both speaking and objectifying their thought in writing the Presocratics 72

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project a new sense of community, the community of critical discourse which we have called reflexivity. The audience created by philosophy has to be socialized into new and different obligations and mind-sets. The logos of the philosopher who ‘tells the truth’ through reason and evidence creates a different ‘horizon of expectation’ in its audience. For example, a literary simulacrum of the philosopher’s theorizing will be judged by criteria that go beyond the oral claims of poetry. The idea of judging a written text and ‘running over’ its arguments first enters European thought with the Milesian philosophers. The universality of critical reflection prescribes a novel range of appraisal criteria: Intersubjectivity: the logos must be publically appropriated (i.e. ‘circulated’ to literate readers versed in the new genre of philosophical prose) and intersubjectively validated as an anonymous written text. Criticism: what the text posits as a universal truth is now subject to more universal standards of critical inspection. Evidence: only rational discourse admits evaluation in terms of evidentially warranted judgements (which, of course, are frequently incompatible with traditional measures of veracity and epistemic order). Universality: the truth of a rational logos aspires to be universally valid. Unity: philosophical discourse promises an insight into Being as the unitary ground of phenomenal appearances. System: the logos itself should follow an ordered sequence and present itself as a coherent and cogent ‘argument’; if Being is a kosmos, any logos of Being must be (re)presented systematically. Objectivity: truth entails a commitment to an objective prose, uncovering the structure of the kosmos which must be ‘the same for every rational soul’. Simplicity: the imposition of aesthetic criteria prescribing the most parsimonious explanation for the totalizing logos. The community of reason Philosophy emerged as a temporary resolution of the crisis in early Greek thought. Its existence as a cultural practice is inseparable from the Presocratic critique of ‘traditional theory’ and, more broadly, of everyday beliefs and myth. The strange idiom of this new universal discourse is as evident today as it must have been to fifth-century Greek readers. If ‘myth’ now appears in a negative light as the temptation of allowing speech to lose itself in imagery, 73

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anthropomorphic narrative, and epic plot, then the new imperatives of cosmological discourse may not only mark a critique of the mythological form of life but also index the dangers that are endemic to human speech. It is important to underline the fact that Archaic Greek philosophy began as a self-critique of its own tradition. Nascent philosophy condemns myth not for using symbolism or metaphor, but for failing to speak of the Whole in universal terms and for myth’s inadequate sense of the kind of self-reflexivity required for this project. The idea of contemplative theoria as a total dedication toward ‘the truth’ is symptomatic of this attitude. Philia is the desire we translate as ‘love’; philos as a noun means a ‘friend’ or ‘lover’ (from the verb philein); hence the philosopher is ‘a friend of wisdom’ and his desire is to live toward the Whole of wisdom (sophia). In the last of the Presocratics this new ideal is interpreted erotically: the philosopher is a ‘lover of wisdom’, animated by a passion (eros) for inquiry and truthful discourse. Wisdom is love’s knowledge. Finally, if the ideal of a rational life has its telos in truth, then truth is now a possible way of life for all rational creatures. The Presocratics discovered the principled universality of truth. To wonder and inquire is a unique speciescharacteristic of human beings. The democratic promise of philosophical reason prefigures new kinds of social and political involvement. A truthful polis would be one where every member lived truthfully toward the horizon of Being. In this way the ideal of philosophy suggested a new model of community and human association. And because the Whole is One and can only be articulated in a universal logos, so a polity can be imagined that would perfectly incarnate this knowledge. Behind the idea of theorizing lies a transcendental conception of the political. Philosophia promises an ethical and political transformation of the world. To disclose the One in the Many, to transcend appearances by returning the soul to the unitary arche of things will lead the person to a new synoptic awareness of the relationship between the self and the Whole.

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2 THALES AND THE ORIGINS OF IONIAN COSMOLOGY

Know thyself. (Thales) A seeker for truth must dare to be wise—he must dare to be a revolutionary in the field of thought. (Karl R.Popper)1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Ionian natural philosophy as cosmology The golden triangle of Ionia and the Odyssean spirit The discovery of reflexivity Self, self-knowledge and reflexivity The sociological origins of philosophy and cultures of critical discourse A comparative analysis of ancient institutions of reflexivity Conclusion: the concept of a philosophical movement 1 IONIAN NATURAL PHILOSOPHY AS COSMOLOGY Out of all things the one and from one all things. (Heraclitus, DKB10)

Western philosophy is said to have begun with Thales. Thales of Miletus lived from around 625/4 BC to the middle of the sixth century (c. 548) and is regarded as one of the three greatest Ionian philosophers of the Archaic age—the others in this triumvirate being his fellow Milesians, Anaximander (c. 619–546 BC) and Anaximenes (c. 585–526 BC). Historians of philosophy usually regard these figures as the first great ‘students of nature’ (phusikoi or phusiologoi, from phusis, ‘nature’), the ‘founders of European natural philosophy’ (Guthrie, 1977:132; Reale, 1987:35–7), or rational cosmologists (Guthrie, 1962: vol. 1, 72). Taken together they initiated the project of theorizing about the origins and nature of the kosmos as a whole. By assuming a fundamental intelligibility throughout the physical world they invented the framework of cosmological inquiry as an intellectual endeavour. Thales thus invariably appears in the list of the so-called ‘Seven Sages’: Thales of Miletus, Solon of Athens, Pittacus of 75

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Mitylene, Bias of Priene in Asia Minor, Cleobulus of Lindus, Periander of Corinth, and Chilon of Sparta (DL 1.13; 1.40; cf. DL 2.2; Plato, Protagoras 343A; Plutarch, Solon 3.5; Cicero, Rep. 1.12; Diodorus Siculus, 9.1–13). By developing a simple, unified explanation of the world process, Thales is said to have anticipated the idea of a global ‘science’ of phusis or nature. He was also the first identifiable critic of the mythological tradition and the founding father of rational modernity. In this interpretation of the origins of theory, then, the Ionian thinkers are portrayed as philosopher-scientists searching for the underlying logos of the kosmos. They are geometers, engineers, astronomers, ‘men of science rather than philosophers in the strict sense’ (Burnet, 1921:62; Kerferd, in Rees, ed., 1970, 42–3). Before examining this traditional picture in the light of what is known of Thales’ philosophy of phusis we should understand something of the social and political life of late seventh-and sixth-century Ionia as the historical setting for the new genre of speculative inquiry. And the following analysis must be viewed in configurational terms, in the sense that there is no single ‘factor’ that was responsible for the invention of philosophical reasoning; when we speak of ‘the Ionian revolution’ this should not be interpreted literally as a total break with the past or a completely new beginning. We know that the ‘revolution’ required several generations and that it involved a critical reworking of existing literary and intellectual traditions. Theorizing as a distinctive intellectual project was constructed from a field of existing practices and discourses. And no single element of the Ionian constellation—whether the institutions of the polis, the liberating effects of colonialization, the use of alphabetic writing, changes in religious sensibilities, the use of coined money within a dynamic commercial economy—is sufficient to provide an adequate explanation of the earliest beginnings of Western theorizing. 2 THE GOLDEN TRIANGLE OF IONIA AND THE ODYSSEAN SPIRIT To understand the beginnings of Ionian reflection, then, we need to relate Thales’ praxis to the larger social, religious, and intellectual contexts of Ionian civilization c. 600 BC. In the seventh century, Miletus in southern Ionia formed one corner of a ‘golden triangle’ of powerful trading city-states, each at the centre of a complex material and intellectual culture. The apex of this triangle was formed by the Ionian cities of Colophon and Ephesus (and perhaps Clazomenae), the other ‘corner’ being the island state of Samos. Within a range of fifty miles or so it is possible to locate the major intellectual innovators of early Greek philosophy and science: at Miletus, Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes; directly north at Ephesus, Heraclitus and Xenophanes (Colophon), and later Anaxagoras (from Clazomenae); and finally, Pythagoras, a native of the island of Samos. Miletus, Colophon, and Ephesus around 600 BC to 500 BC were expansive 78

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commercial cities on the Ionian seaboard of Asia Minor. Many of the cities of Asia Minor were colonies—some, like Miletus, being colonial allies of the Athenian polis. Of these, however, the pre-eminent ‘city of philosophy’ and centre of Archaic Hellenism in the sixth century was undoubtedly Miletus. It is here that we find the first authentic revolutionary in Western European thought, to whom tradition assigns the name ‘Thales’. As we have noted, Thales is conventionally regarded as the first thinker to systematically reflect upon the physical world as a whole, asking questions about its origins, structure, and dynamics. The socioeconomic system of the Ionian poleis created the material basis for the whole Aegean power structure in the late eighth and early seventh century. And as the ‘metropolis of Asia’, the prosperous city of Miletus was the point of confluence of Western and Eastern civilization, a site of socioeconomic, diplomatic, and cultural contacts connecting the worlds of the great Near Eastern empires to the universe of the sixth-century city-states. The earliest paradigms of intellectual reflexivity, then, were rooted in an urban, commercial, and mercantile soil. Social differentiation in economic and political life was also reflected in the emergence of novel forms of inquiry and their accompanying ‘knowledge systems’—among these, the beginnings of mechanical technology and physical science. We can thus view Miletus as the focal point of an intersecting network of ‘discourses’ generating a critical mass of discussion and critical debate in the latter part of the seventh century. It was this ‘magma’ of cultural innovation which precipitated the counterintuitive speculations of figures like Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. As colonial outposts at the mouths of rivers (the rivers Granicus, Scamander, Hermus, Cayster and Maeander in particular), these trading complexes owed their prosperity to the elementary law of continuous commercial exchange (Miletus became famous for its fulling industries and the export of woollen textiles, along with a wide range of other commodities—including slaves); Lesbos, Chios, Samos and Thasos were reknowned for their fine wine and olive oil. Corn—perhaps the single most important commodity of the ancient world—was also distributed through the Ionian states from the hinterland and the Black Sea zone of ancient Thrace and Scythia. The expansion of wine, oil, and grain production provided the decisive stimulus for the production and export of amphora and large earthenware pots. And we know from archaeological evidence that this ‘mobile’ culture of material artifacts played a fundamental role in transmitting mythic and philosophical ideas throughout the Aegean world. But these export markets paled into insignifi-cance when compared with the processing and export of wool and textiles, an industry that created one of the first powerful groups of ‘plutocrats’ in the ancient world (the Milesian party of ‘the Rich’ (Ploutis)). Here we find the beginnings of something like ‘factory production’ and small-scale capitalist industry, which in turn created 79

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a large working-class population and stimulated the development of new forms of social organization and technical innovation. The expansion of multiple, interlocking markets helped to create a this-worldly, pragmatic, survival ethos of continuous interdependence—both between the home city-state and the colonial regime and between the colony and its surrounding social and political environment. Economically, an independent city-state like Miletus or Ephesus was only viable as one element in a network of exchange relationships with its relevant ecologies. Every colonial economy depends upon a web of social interdependence whose continuity and consolidation is a necessary basis of civil existence. In this sense the shape of political and legal relations are constrained by basic economic forms. The new polis was no longer an armed stockade like the Mycenaean palaces, but a node of flowing relationships of many different intersecting social systems. And not surprisingly, a measure of cultural distance, conflict, and criticism invariably followed the lines of societal differentiation—from passive borrowing to syncreticism and the conscious rejection of old practices and ideologies. While honouring the gods and traditions of the mother country, the distant colony -and spatial distance may be the crucial element here—must go its own way and learn to innovate in order to survive and expand in a different geographical and social environment. Frequently the tried and tested ways of the home polis—the doxa of customary practices—proved inadequate to meet the demands of a colonial economy. New practices, religious beliefs, languages, and social forms had to be developed to respond to the uncertain environments of colonial existence. The laissez-faire attitude toward alien and heterodox forms of life would prove to be an indispensable training-ground for the development of new forms of free speech (cf.Plutarch, Greek Questions 32). This new self-critical spirit formed one of the necessary preconditions for the project of speculative inquiry. The situation of the Ionian colonies in the seventh century exemplifies these general observations—on the one hand Ionian culture experienced a linguistic and verbal continuity with a ‘heroic’ past, but spatially and geographically it had been cut free from traditional social forms; in the latter respect Ionia was indeed a country without a past, open to new ideas and cultural influences (Burnet, 1930:14). Breaking the grip of the past was facilitated by the existence of alternative languages and ways of life. Ionian civilization was thus forced by historical and geographical circumstances to be innovative and future-di-rected in every department of social and cultural life. Indeed the violence of forced mobility that characterized Greek colonization may have been one of the key factors encouraging the development of a more disinterested and secular attitude toward the world (we know that the ancestors of the Ionians settled in Asia Minor after being violently expropriated by waves of ‘Dorian’ invaders at the end of the Bronze Age). It would not be an exaggeration to see the waves of colonization in the Aegean and Mediterranean as the formative context for later Greek civilization (cf. Murray, 1993: ch. 7). 80

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The deracination and alienation experienced by a colonial society is seen most vividly in its attitude toward land and land ownership; a community that has occupied the same piece of land from time immemorial has very different ideas of property than a society that has been uprooted and displaced. We find a striking contrast between the relatively conservative attitude toward commerce and mercantile trade in the home city of Athens (where in the late seventh century and sixth century commercial institutions appear to have been suffered as a necessary part of political autonomy) and the openness toward economic experimentation which was such a marked feature of the ruling oligarchies of the Milesian city-states. One of the most enterprising members of the Ionian league was the mercantile city of Phocaea—a powerful centre of colonizing ventures in its own right during the seventh century. Where the Athenian home state regarded commerce and increased consumption as a necessary evil to be contained within the traditional framework of property ownership, a colony like Phocaea produced the first mercantile capitalists of Asia Minor. Where Athens tried to control and discipline the pursuit of wealth—particularly agrarian wealth—by maintaining the traditional distribution and stratification of landed wealth, Miletus and Phocaea saw wealth in secular terms as the basis of new forms of political and cultural power. The iron law behind forced emigration was starkly simple: even land is not sacred and can be ‘alienated’ as an exchangeable commodity. If the legitimacy of property can be questioned, then all other beliefs and presuppositions may be subjected to critical scrutiny. Where the Athenian state derived its values relatively unchanged from the aristocratic ethos of the Archaic age, Miletus forged a new commercial, consumerist, and hedonistic urban culture. Miletus and Ephesus became the Hong Kong and Singapore of antiquity. The same deracinated attitude toward traditional customs and property relations was readily extended to other orders of ethical, political, and intellectual life. And by the end of the seventh century the ‘defamiliariziation’ of received practices and beliefs had became something like a normal state of affairs. Radical experiments in critical discourse and free speech were also encouraged by more immediate geographical and institutional factors. Thus the opportunity to examine at close quarters the cacophany of cultures which flowed into the city-state of Miletus—Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Scythian, Phoenician, Lydian, Carian, and so forth—encouraged the arts of systematic comparison, abstraction, and criticism (recall the immense influence of Eastern culture flowing between Lydia and Samos in the seventh century—a socioeconomic pattern that helps explain the rise of both lyric poetry and early speculative philosophy in this island kingdom). G.S.Kirk has suggested that the sustained comparisons of the mythic cosmogonies of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece, may have prompted Thales to extract and theorize their common denominator: ‘it was his assumed concentration on the rational common essence of Enki, Nun and Okeanos as an actual world constituent, rather than his choice of water as such, that was significant for the future’ (1974:295–6). 81

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Two necessary ingredients for the birth of reflexive criticism were present: the existence of powerful commercial home markets and the international circuitry of goods required to sustain an advanced urban economy. Already a great trading entrepôt in the Mycenean age, Miletus was to expand exponentially as a site of international speculative exchange and colonial enterprises. Where the aristocratic and oligarchial city-states of mainland Greece sacralized the predicates of stability and identity, a city like Miletus made the valorization of instability and difference into an economic imperative. In the process it became the first great consumer culture of the ancient world and supplier of the variegated economic needs of its neighbouring kingdoms. It is no accident that these first great entrepreneurs of the ancient world made Odysseus—the ‘wandering’, ‘many-sided’, and ‘wily’ hero of the Odyssey—their national hero. Miletus in fact represented the Odyssean spirit writ large—a definition of the human condition as homo viator was in effect institutionalized by the great Ionian experiment in trade, commerce, and speculation. Many of the earliest Greek colonists had intermarried and merged with the native populations, evolving even more complex hybrid forms of belief and culture (compare the linguistic experiments that we have seen in the poetry of an Archilochus and Hipponax, Volume 2, Chapter 4). Rational comparison of alternative ways of life, criticism of inherited beliefs, and a generic scepticism about received commonsense perspectives was encouraged and—we will suggest—institutionalized by the particular socioeconomic and political circumstances of Miletus within the Ionian seaboard economy; if we add to this the impact of different languages and the conflict of different ethical and religious narratives we have some of the prerequisites for a ‘culture of critical rationalism’: the demystifying impulse which led Xenophanes to reject all anthropomorphism and personification in the traditional accounts of the Gods was also at work in the work of criticism associated with the name ‘Thales’. If social practices shape modes of consciousness, we have a pure case of this in the poleis of ancient Ionia. Here critical comparison, careful reflection based on first-hand observation, and the painstaking quest for empirically grounded ‘truths’ became routine features of urban life. If the old practices could be questioned, why not the old systems of belief and what passed for knowledge and wisdom? If the social and political practices required modification and transformation, could we not also perform the same operations upon traditional ideas and beliefs? The intellectual strata of Miletus and her neighbouring city-states appear to have led the way in answering these questions positively. The Milesian experiment The great Milesian experiment in speculative thought, however, did not last long enough to produce a school or tradition that outlasted its three major exponents. In 500/499 BC Miletus led a revolt of the Ionian cities against 82

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Persia; the bitter and prolonged struggled continued for five years until it was suppressed with great violence in 494 BC. In this way Persian expansion brought an end to the Ionian confederation and terminated its revolutionary civilizing experiment: the greatest commercial city of the later seventh and sixth centuries BC was razed to the ground by the Persian army of Darius (522–485 BC) and Miletus never recovered its place as the intellectual centre of free thinking and philosophical inquiry—after the 490s the centre of gravity of Greek thought moved westwards, to Athens and, further afield, to the mathematical and logical schools of southern Italy. The collapse of Ionian civilization at the hands of the Persians in 494 BC had a more immediate effect on Athenian popular consciousness: The Athenians showed their profound distress at the capture of Miletus in a number of ways, and in particular, when Phrynichus produced his play, The Capture of Miletus, the audience in the theatre burst into tears. The author was fined a thousand drachmas for reminding them of a disaster which touched them so closely and they forbade anybody ever to put the play on the stage again. (Herodotus 6.21) With hindsight we can see the destruction of an independent Ionia as a dress rehearsal for the invasion of Greece ten years later under Darius’ son, Xerxes. The ensuing power vacuum left Athens a free hand in the commercial and political exploitation of the islands of western Greece—a fortuitous situation which helped consolidate her growing commercial hegemony during the following decades. Without the continuity of scholarly rationalization and formal transmission, Miletus could not sustain the great experiment of the sixth century—the ‘beginning of philosophy’ remained like a rare and delicate flower frozen in amber for the next two generations of thinkers. It would only become historically effective by being exported westward to Italy and Athens where the Ionian impulse of theorem was reshaped and given a different meaning and orientation. We have the unusual situation that these great export cities on the Asian seaboard would, in the fifth century, export the idea of reflexive inquiry back to the home polis. Philosophy—along with history, science, and the new spirit of learning—migrated to Athens as one of a range of consumer goods shipped from the ports of Asia Minor. At the turn of the century Athens was an unlikely soil for what was at the time an essentially foreign and exotic institution of reflection. To summarize the essential points: Ionian civilization was the first ‘Western’ culture to experience the full impact of an expanded monetary economy centring its operations on the trade cities of the Ionian seaboard, each representing a link in the chain of trade routes between East and West (Miletus, Teos, Ephesus, Sardis, Mindos, and so on). The markets created by this process 83

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encouraged specialization and intensive manufacturing and commercial activities. As one writer has suggested: Industry and trade had brought wealth to the city and had blessed its inhabitants with comfort and leisure. The citizens traveled widely, imbibing from Egypt and Babylonia and elsewhere the full richness of Oriental thought. The Milesians saw their material prosperity as evidence of what they could accomplish unaided by the gods; and gradually a few bold spirits dared to believe that the universe itself is an intelligible whole, accessible to the human mind.2 The mercantile revolution in Asia Minor had promoted five basic changes in the traditional socioeconomic structure of the Western Greek economy, each of which had a major impact upon the reordering of everyday life and thought in the city-states of Ionia: • the long-term rationalizing effects of exchange relations; • with rationalization, specialization, and differentiation in the economic sphere, the emergence of a secular and questioning outlook toward inherited beliefs and traditions, many of which now take on the appearance of ‘superstitions’, ‘ungrounded faith’, ‘magic’; • the invention of coined money and its increasing use for commercial purposes; • surplus—if not excess—wealth (evidenced by the considerable export of highly crafted coins from the Ionian city-states during this period) and the creation of leisure for the higher echelons of Milesian society (Aristotle’s thoughts on the link between leisure and theoretical speculation in Metaphysics 981 b17–24 might have been formulated with Miletus in mind); • innovations in patterns of warfare following in the wake of the polis organization and new wealth: the expansion of the ‘means of production’ to build and sustain a large mercantile fleet and a state-controlled naval force to protect trade routes; the increasing use of large mercenary armies; the shift from local to more prolonged ‘national’ wars across the borders of empires; and, on a longer time-scale, the growing antagonism between the Greeks and neighbouring Eastern empires. The combined effect of these changes accelerated the processes of social differentiation and institutional innovation in the realms of technology, law, civil architecture, and administrative organization. One immediate consequence of the rapid economic expansion was the growth in the division of labour and the creation of expanded networks of social interdependencies which brought in their train new forms of wealth, luxury, craft techniques, and technologies (one of the most fundamental of these being the mental technology of alphabetic writing and literacy—initially developed in response to economic, particularly mercantile needs, but then extended to non-economic spheres such as poetry (Homer), history (Hecataeus and Herodotus), and 84

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medicine (the early Hippocrateans), architecture (for example, the design and construction of the monumental Temple of Artemis at Ephesus), sculpture (a major export trade of the cities of Miletus and Ephesus), painted pottery, poetry, the transcription of laws, the rationalization of war, and so forth). The social organization necessary to build and sustain a vast naval fleet was perfected during this period by the city-states of Samos and Miletus (one of the preconditions for the ‘rise of the tyrants’ was the ability of military leaders to dominate traditional groups and classes by controlling the sea-ways— think also of the long history of conflicts between the Greeks and Phoenicians and later, in the West, between the Greeks and Carthaginian forces). Unfortunately, the enormous wealth of these enterprising city-states led to repeated outbreaks of bitter class conflicts and political violence and, on a longer timescale, was one of the key factors in attracting the interest of the Persian empire, culminating in the conquest of the Near East inland kingdoms and coastal cities and the fateful struggle with the Greek poleis in the fifth century.3 Miletus was also the entrepôt of the east Aegean slave trade in antiquity— and we can assume that complex business organizations and commercial instruments were created in the late seventh century to handle the transportation, sale, and shipping of slaves from the interior (the Ionian, Carian and Phrygian regions) to other areas of the Aegean. The organization and monitoring of these multilingual enterprises encouraged the development of the arts of translation and the search for a ‘common medium’ through which very different ethnic cultures and linguistic groupings could communicate—initially for practical and commercial reasons; this may also have stimulated the development of a common set of alphabetic symbols, mathematical codes, and translation devices which could be later extended to other non-economic uses. It is also highly probable that the primary function of the Phoenician-Greek alphabet was to facilitate the political economy of slavery. It is known, for example, that many of the oldest records of the nearEastern civilizations are lists of economic transactions involving the circulation and storage of commodities. Thales’ life Thales, then, is more than a singular individual, located in the rich mercantile city of Miletus; he is an emblem of the beginning of the project we have called cosmology. From the perspective of intellectual history, Thales was perhaps the first known individual to name and conceptualize the universe with the word kosmos and the first to try to articulate the essence of the physical world under a single generic concept, an effort at generalization which inaugurated the European quest for a universal explanatory principle, a comprehensive logos that would facilitate the reduction of the Many under the rule of the One. Quite simply, he invented the art of speculative generalization and, some 85

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would maintain, the generative question-frame of physical science. In identifying the nature of the physical universe as ‘water’ he became the first self-conscious genealogist of the world as phusis—the first to comprehend the power of categorial and, we might speculate, ‘deductive’ thinking, the first ‘natural philosopher’ to propose a non-mythical explanation for the existence of natural regularity, supporting his logos with a series of inferential arguments and probative evidence. Unfortunately none of his writings have survived, and historians have had to speculate about the precise nature and functions of his proposed explanatory principles. What we know of Thales’ activities derive from the accounts of later commentators and thinkers such as Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Simplicius, Diogenes Laertius, and Eudemus. Diogenes (c. AD 225) provides a not untypically laconic picture of Thales’ scientific and philosophical achievements: After engaging in politics he became a student of nature…Aristotle and Hippias affirm that, arguing from the magnet and from amber, he attributed a soul or life even to inanimate objects. Pamphilia states that, having learnt geometry from the Egyptians, he was the first to inscribe a right-angled triangle in a circle, whereupon he sacrificed an ox. (DL 1.1.23, 24–5; cf. Herodotus 1.170) His doctrine was that water is the universal primary substance, and that the world is animate and full of divinities. He is said to have discovered the seasons of the year and divided it into 365 days. (DL1.1.27) The Babylonian moment Thales is often cited as the earliest Greek thinker to have made advances in astronomical knowledge, turning astronomy from magical and astrological speculations to purely theoretical, explanatory ends. We know that early astronomy in the Middle East was tied to religious institutions—geared in particular to magical and utilitarian practices in the royal courts (dating back to the period 1500–1700 BC). We also know that Thales is credited with having predicting the eclipse of 585 BC (28 May 585 BC in the modern calendrical notation), reported by Herodotus as the event which stopped the war between Lydia and Persia (1.74.2). Kirk and Raven claim that it is ‘overwhelmingly probable that Thales’ feat [in astronomical predictions] depended on his access to these Babylonian records’; in addition, we have the well-attested evidence that many cultivated Greeks visited Sardis at this period, and relations with Ionia were naturally particularly close (1971:80; also Herodotus 2.109.3; Pliny, Naturalis Historia 7.57). Thales was said to have made the study of the physical world an important part of philosophical activity and to have gathered and compiled astronomical data (DL 9.1.27); indeed some ancient commentators have attributed a 86

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Nautical Star-Guide (or Nautical Astronomy) to his name (Simplicius, Physics 23.29–33). But Diogenes was already questioning this ascription, attributing the work instead to Phocus of Samos. More realistically he has been credited as the first named individual to whom specific geometrical discoveries can be attributed. Appropriately these all involve demonstrations and deductive proofs: that a circle is bisected by its diameter, that the base angles of isosceles triangles are equal, the vertical angles formed by two intersecting lines are equal, two triangles are congruent if they have two angles and one side in each respectively equal, any angle inscribed in a semicircle is a right angle (DL 1.27; Proclus, Commentary, 157, 250, 299, 352). If this concern for apodictic method, proof sequences, and the deductive organization of geometrical theorems can be accepted it provides further support for the explicitly theoretical and universalizing character of Thalean reflexivity.4 Unlike the particularistic mathematics of Mesopotamia and Egypt, the Ionian theorist had begun to formulate propositions and generalizations that were intended to be valid for all geometrical objects. The Egyptian moment Practical arithmetic and geometry used in the context of everyday mensuration and calculation were well advanced in Egypt during Thales’ lifetime. Artisanate mathematics was primarily used in civil engineering and in the redivision of fertile land after the annual flooding of the Nile (cf. Pliny, Naturalis Historia 36.82; Herodotus 2.109)—often, we suspect in more precise and abstract forms than the traditional picture of rules of thumb transmitted along with the craft knowledge of local building skills, surveying, and construction would suggest (cf. Diodorus Siculus 1.81.1–6). But the central point remains—the starting point and basic orientations of Greek speculative geometry originated in Egyptian intellectual culture. Later commentators like Hippolytus and Diogenes Laertius are quite emphatic that the mathematical ‘knowledge’ of Pythagoras and Thales was derived from Egyptian sources (Hippolytus, Ref. 6.21–8). Thales supposedly visited Egypt and returned with the ‘new geometrical learning’ and on these grounds is frequently described as the earliest Greek geometer (Herodotus 2.109ff.). Whatever the impact of Egyptian geometry and astronomical speculation upon Ionian science, it is sociologically more appropriate to think of Thales less as an individual creating outside of a tradition of inherited epistemic practices, than as a place marker for a dialogue between the great speculative achievements in science and mathematics of Egyptian, Lydian, Babylonian, and Phoenician culture. Here, of course, ‘science’ has little in common with the experimental programmes that have become identified with the word since the seventeenth century. Yet Thales and his fellow Milesians did begin a process which would create new problematics from this fateful conversation— generating question-frames and practices that would eventually enter the 87

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mainstream of European speculation through the Pythagorean communities and Platonic Academy. To this extent the traditional image of ‘Thales’ as the first philosopher is correct. To critically appropriate this insight, however, we have radically to revise the traditional Eurocentric account of the relationship between Greek and Egyptian scientific culture in the ancient world. The traditional account can be condensed into the following story: Egypt was the home of geometry, but this ‘geometry’ was essentially focused upon the tasks of practical mensuration invented for particular social needs—the regular demand for land mensuration following the annual flooding of the Nile, the most important force of production in ancient Egyptian society. More significantly for the later development of rational thought it was a technique of land measurement monopolized by the royal scribes and tax officials (the Pharaoh’s ultimate symbolic function as the King who guards and measures out the sacred land of the Nile—a role he derived from the God Theuth—the source of Geometry and Arithmetic as well as Writing and Astronomy (cf.Plato, Phaedrus 274C-D)). In his commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements, Proclus Diadochus writes that geometry owed its existence to the Egyptian practice of recurrent land measurement: For the Egyptians had to perform such measurements because the overflow of the Nile would cause the boundary of each person’s land to disappear. Furthermore, it should occasion no surprise that the discovery both of this science and of other sciences proceeded from utility…The progress, then, from sense perception to reason and from reason to understanding is a natural one. And so, just as the accurate knowledge of numbers originated with the Phoenicians through their commerce and business transactions, so geometry was discovered by the Egyptians for the reason we have indicated.5 The fifth-century Neoplatonic philosopher Proclus is an important source of evidence for the sociological argument that one of the basic preconditions for the construction of ‘science’ lies in the act of imaginative transcendence which relativizes the pragmatic concerns of everyday life in its two most dogmatic traditional forms: immediate practical-instrumental interests and ritualpriestly institutions. The cultural conditions for the creation of systematic inquiry (in this case, the ‘science’ of geometry and abstract mathematics) presupposes a civilization in which speculative questioning is not dominated by the time-bound customs of case law or by a powerful priesthood monitoring every sphere of social life. Intellectual techniques developed as ancillary procedures of practical craft (techne) or ritual praxis, once transplanted in another social context and environment, become, in effect, qualitatively different practices. The suggestion is that Thales performed this mutation using the component elements of Egyptian geometrical knowledge. It is natural, then, that Proclus 88

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should speak of Thales as the first individual to introduce geometry into the Greek world after an extended visit to Egypt: ‘Not only did he make numerous discoveries himself, but laid the foundations for many other discoveries on the part of his successors, attacking some problems with great generality and others more empirically’.6 Rigour, systematicity, theoreticity, single-mindedness, abstraction, generality, proof, generalization of results, cosmological significance, and— above all—the uncertain promise of speculative risk-taking. These, for Proclus, are the necessary attributes of the scientific attitude. Inquiry that is wholly enclosed in pragmatic, commercial, or instrumental interests may produce eminently successful bodies of ‘practical knowledge’, but it cannot advance to the level of sustained abstraction and systematization which are the necessary preconditions for theoretical knowledge. Only the Ionians pursued theoretical argument as an end in itself (cf. Plato, Rep. 435C; Laws 747B-C; Timaeus 22B; Proclus, Commentary 34). Thales’ interest in abstract theorizing and generalized proofs led to the strict separation of abstract mathematics from the practically-oriented geometrical knowledge derived from Egyptian mensuration and Babylonian astronomy. In these older civilizations the development of abstract concepts was precluded by the predominantly magicoreligious and practical interests of the wider culture—limiting mathematics to land measurement and surveying in Egypt and calendrical calculations and ‘magical’ ends for the Babylonians (Aristotle, Met., 981b23ff.; Herodotus 1.74; Proclus, Commentary 33–4). The Phoenician moment The mercantile civilization of ancient Phoenicia—associated in the Bible with Canaan, but in reality a great urban, patrician culture centred in the wealthy cities of Tyre, Byblos, and Sidon—is frequently mentioned as one of the crucial factors in the birth of Thalean philosophy. Thales himself was said to have been of Phoenician parentage (‘Thales was the son of Examyas and Cleobulina, and belonged to the Thelidae who are Phoenicians’, DL 9.1.22; Herodotus also mentions his Phoenician descent at 1.170.3). He is pictured as a welltravelled commercial figure (sojourning in Mesopotamia, Egypt, perhaps Crete and the Phoenician city-states—cf. the similar voyages of Herodotus, a native of the neighbouring Carian city of Halicarnassus). Whatever their veracity, these anecdotes draw attention to the unique geographical position of the Ionian cities at the confluence of a number of great second-millennial civilizational complexes during this period (Egypt, Phoenicia, Babylon, Assyria-Persia); the creative babel of tongues following trade and commercial activities encouraged speculative thought across a range of fields from ethnology and practical ethics to linguistic theory and cosmology. We must also briefly mention the fundamental role of the Phoenician alphabet and alphabetic script in seventh-century Ionian culture (I will return 89

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to this theme in Section 5). The modified Greek alphabet was, we recall from our analysis of Homeric poetry in Volume 2, a product of Ionian creativity. Several Ionian cities in fact claimed the honour of being the birth-place of Homer—Chios, Ephesus, and Miletus among these. But undoubtedly the Western alphabet and the ancient Hebraic script were gifts of Phoenician civilization. With this new technology of reflection and in the context of the transition from orality to literacy it is no accident that Ionia produced the great epic form, a historian with the encyclopaedic interests of Herodotus, and the first speculative philosophers. Literacy, created by the new alphabetic technology, provided a major spur to the the new powers of abstraction circulated by this civilization. A parallel ‘civilization of the book’ elaborated a composite Canaanite dialect script to write out the cosmogony and histories which form the core texts of the Old Testament. Are we so sure that there were no Phoenician Homers (Finley, 1981:141)? The moment of Praxis A picture of Thales emerges from the surviving testimonia as an individual with a history of practical, surveying, and engineering skills, accomplishments which he put to effective use in aiding the campaigns of Croesus against the Persians.7 Once more these traditional stories may reflect the Phoenician connection, given that Phoenician builders and architects were highly valued in the ancient world (Solomon seeking the help of no less a figure than King Hiram of Tyre, importing Phoenician craftsmen to help with the design and construction of his Temple—I Kings 5:7–18, 15–25; cf. Ezekiel 27:12–24 and Josephus, Antiquities VII, 66; VIII, 79–90, 144–9). In later Greek culture the expression ‘the man’s a Thales’ (Aristophanes, Birds 1009 and Clouds 180; cf. Plato, Rep. 600A) became proverbial for anyone with mathematical, surveying, or engineering skills (see KR: 76; Cherniss, 1977:65; Burnet, 1930:46–7, 47, n.1). The moment of Theoria Thales’ thematization of the cosmological horizon and his apparent disregard for the concrete world of practice is traditionally dramatized in the story of how his fascination with astronomical observations led him to stumble and fall into a well: a witty and attractive Thracian servant-girl is said to have mocked Thales for falling into a well while he was observing the stars and gazed upwards; declaring that he was eager to know the things in the sky, but that what was behind him and just by his feet escaped his notice. (Plato, Theaetetus 174A) The story of Thales’ absentmindedness provides an allegory of the value of 90

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theoretical reason. Theoria appears absentminded only to those who are firmly grounded in the doxa of common sense. It is distracted in abstracting from the concrete immediacy and empirical manifestations of reality; in its interest in knowing the truth, the mind is engaged—for only through thinking can we become fully ‘mindful’ of the kosmos. The laughter of the Thracian girl dramatizes two different ways of life: the mindless ‘wisdom’ of unreflexive practical life and the mindful life of speculative knowledge (what Greek culture later calls theoria). Theorizing invariably appears as superfluous, supplementary, or paradoxical to those whose lives are limited by immediate material interests. In relation to doxa, theorizing moves against the grain of everyday speech and quotidian belief. Philosophy appears groundless and aimless; but the quest initiated by Thales is a response to a different calling, the vocation of the theoretical life. In another context, Thales demonstrated the power of theoretical reason as the basis of practical action in the world of everyday life. He is said to have used his astronomical knowledge to predict a great olive harvest, and forewarned by his insight, cornered the market in olive presses which, when the time was ripe, he leased out at an increased premium, making a fortune from the venture. Aristotle records the famous anecdote in the following words: There is the anecdote of Thales the Milesian and his financial device, which involves a principle of universal application, but is attributed to him on account of his reputation for wisdom. He was reproached for his poverty, which was supposed to show that philosophy was of no use. According to the story, he knew by his skill in the stars while it was yet winter that there would be a great harvest of olives in the coming year; so, having a little money, he gave deposits for the use of all the olivepresses in Chios and Miletus, which he hired at a low price because no one bid against him. When the harvest-time came, and many were wanted all at once and of a sudden, he let them out at any rate which he pleased, and made a quantity of money. Thus he showed the world that philosophers can easily be rich if they like, but that their ambition is of another sort. (Politics 1259a5–25) Another word for ‘absentmindedness’ is, of course, wonder (thaumazein), that very unpractical amazement before the being of things which temporarily paralyzes quotidian concerns. Thales is the archetypal figure who, under the influence of wonder, pursues purely theoretical knowledge. Those interested in constructing genealogies of philosophy would have invented a figure of this type—so it is understandable that the name ‘Thales’ came to signify a kind of ‘culture-hero’ of philosophy (Cherniss, 1977:66). And it is fitting that tradition traces the origins of cosmological speculation to his door, for, as Aristotle noted, it is because of wonder that men both now begin and at first began to theorize.8 91

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3 THE DISCOVERY OF REFLEXIVITY Philosophy begins where the universal is comprehended as the all-embracing existence, or where the existent is laid hold of in a universal form, and where thinking about thought first commences. (G.W.F.Hegel, 1955:1.94) Astronomical model-building, mathematical calculation, and the solution of relatively complex geometrical and algebraic equations were not unique to the Greeks; by the second millennium such techniques were well developed and linked to astronomical calculation in the great Middle Eastern empires. Yet Sumerian astronomy, Babylonian mathematics, and Egyptian geometry showed little theoretical development—they remained techniques of instrumental praxis, constrained by ritual and mythological practices. It appears that few, if any, of these mathematical innovations were approached as speculative domains in their own right; whatever systematization occurred was largely tradition-bound and speculative generalization and formalization remained rudimentary. Thales’ problematic Tradition credits Thales with the discovery of the founding question of philosophy. He is the first known individual to ask the question: what is the nature of the kosmos as a whole ? Human beings in every civilization have asked questions of the type: where do things come from? From what are things made? What is the structure of an object? What makes X precisely X and not Y? What happens when things are destroyed? Are things made from one material or many ? Is there an ultimate stuff out of which everything emerges ? Thales asked a similar question but directed it not toward a particular domain or objects or region of being, but toward the horizon of Being itself: how did the kosmos as a whole come to be? His own answer— that the arche of all things is Water-is less important than the possibilities contained in the new question-frame. It is the attitude informing the question, not the particular solution, that is intellectually consequential. Aristotle was thus in no doubt that Thales was the first thinker to have located a primary ‘principle’ (arche) for the totality of all things, identifying this with water: Thales, the founder of this type of philosophy, says the principle (arche) is water (for which reason he declared that the earth rests on water), getting the notion perhaps from seeing that the nutriment of all things is moist, and that heat itself is generated from the moist and kept alive by it (and that from which they come to be is a principle of all things). He got this notion from this fact, and from the fact that the seeds of all things have a moist nature, and that water is the origin of the nature of moist things… It may be uncertain whether this opinion about nature 92

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is primitive and ancient, but Thales at any rate is said to have declared himself thus about the first cause.9 What was the question-frame for which Thales’ proposition constituted an ‘answer’? ‘Water’ is Thales’ response to the questions ‘What is the essence of every particular being?’ ‘From what did everything originate?’ ‘What is the arche of reality?’ Perhaps ‘arche’ might be better translated as ‘sustaining source’ or ‘power of being’ rather than ‘first principle’ or ‘cause’. We know that Aristotle’s term ‘arche’ was a later interpretive construct superimposed upon a more Archaic expression. But it remains true that Thales’ generic answer posits a meaningful ‘unity’ or intelligible ‘oneness’ at the heart of plurality, a definable order of simplicity behind the multiplicity of things. Yet the logic here is iconic and phenomenological: Thales speaks of ‘water’ as a material-like source and not of ‘being’ (to on) or essence (ousia). The source of the kosmos is no longer a personalized God or mythical agent, but a generic context of experience. Thales seems to have rejected Homeric and Hesiodic symbolism by choosing a neutral medium of world production. He does not speak of to hugron as an encircling Stream of Okeanos bounding the earth in its embrace, nor even of Water as a vast Abyss from which creation proceeds, but rather of water as a universal medium of things and, if we accept Aristotle’s gloss, a first cause, a universal sense. His quest for an aboriginal physical source of everything would have struck his contemporaries socialized in the language of Homer and Hesiod as a profane answer: Thales believes that an ‘element’ or ‘substance’ and not the Gods is at the origin of all things. The universe is steered and supported by water, not Zeus. ‘The moist’ rather than the gods is the unitary aition of the manifold appearances of things (Nietzsche’s rightly intuited that Thales’ single sentence, presupposing the proposition ‘All is One’, ranks him as the first Greek philosopher, and by implication, the question which elicited this universal proposition is logically the first philosophical problem formulated by any Western thinker: What is the hen panta?). We can imagine Thales musing that there must be one simple logos—one universal meaning—that can account for the manifest complexity of experience. The ‘hen’ might sustain the ‘panta’ on the model of an inexhaustible material with manifold transformations (hence the choice of Water and its three main forms—solid, liquid, and gas). Thales’ response has more than a hint of scepticism about it: you may believe the world to be heterogeneous, manifold, a creature of the Gods, etc., but I tell you that the whole universe is primordially One. The manifold objects of everyday perception only appear to be a multiplicity of objects, events, and structures; the manifest complexity is an effect of one underlying stuff. Common sense and everyday perception obscure the true nature of things. In fact the essence of manifestation lies in a single unitary principle. In the aphorism credited to Periander of Corinth, we are to ‘look to the whole’ (‘meleta to pan’). Thales’ intuition articulated one of the fundamental presuppositions of the logological form of life: if Logos is the key 93

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to the intelligibility of reality, philosophy must be able to render one unified account of the Whole. The Thalean discovery is thus also a vindication of the creative purpose of philosophy—to envision the One in the Many. As Nietzsche observes: Thales had seen the unity of all that is, but when he went to communicate it, he found himself talking about water!’ (1962: §3, 45). Three interpretations of the word ‘arche’ What possible meanings can we legitimately ascribe to Thales’ derivation of all things from a unitary arche? The dangers of anachronistic interpretation of his proposition ‘All is Water’ were already apparent to Hegel, who chides previous historians of philosophy for this error and, more generally, for failing to understand the contextual principle that ‘every philosophy belongs to its own time and is restricted by its own limitations, just because it is the manifestation of a particular stage of development’. He illustrates this hermeneutic principle with a reference to Thales as the ‘originator’ of Western philosophy: Aristotle states that Thales has defined the principle (arche) of every thing to be water. But Anaximander first made use of arche, and Thales thus did not possess this determination of thought at all; he recognized arche as commencement in time, but not as the fundamental principle. Thales did not once introduce the determination of cause into his philosophy, and first cause is a further determination still. There are whole nations which have not this conception at all; indeed it involves a great step forward in development. And seeing that difference in culture on the whole depends on difference in the thought determinations which are manifested, thus must be so still more with respect to philosophies.10 There are at least three main senses of the Thalean ‘water-principle’: (i) everything is water (water is the principle in the sense of empirically forming the substance of everything); in the great German histories of philosophy written during the hegemony of materialist positivism this reading of arche as ‘world-stuff’ (Weltstoff or ‘world material’) tended to predominate, e.g. Windelband, 1956: §§14–16, 36–45); (ii) everything originates from water (water is the substrate or point of origin of all things); this genetic or ontogenetic sense appears to be close to Aristotle’s gloss in which arche refers to a material-physical process of ‘coming-to-be’ and ‘dissolution’; (iii) water is the ontological matrix of all things (as an unchanging matrix: the underlying principle of existence); again there is textual evidence to suggest that Aristotle thought of the Thalean arche in these terms—as the underlying hypokeimenon of all beings (as in the text of Met. 983b9ff.). We can say that the idea of ‘Ionian material monism’ enters European discourse at Metaphysics 983b6–11, 7–27, and 984a3–5 where Aristotle designates 94

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Thales as the founder of a school of thought which sought out the first principle of all things, identifying this with a ‘material cause’. According to this reading Thales was the first to promote a systematic materialist answer to the question ‘What is being qua being?’—and therefore can be nominated the founding father of ‘material monism’. The appearances of diverse things (phainomenai) are in fact products of an elementary stuff— a material substance. But as Kirk and Raven note, ‘it is important to realize that [this interpretation] rests ultimately on the Aristotelian formulation, and that Aristotle, knowing little about Thales, and that indirectly, would surely have found the mere information that the world originated from water sufficient justification for saying that water was Thales’ material principle or arche, with the implication that water is a persistent substrate (KR: 92; cf. Cherniss, 1977:64–5; McDiarmid, 1970:182–5). There is also a fourth sense, perhaps less anachronistic than these three reconstructions, a meaning which resonates with the theological horizon of early Ionian cosmology, where the logos which uncovers the ‘secret’ of the Whole participates in the ‘divinity’ of the kosmos: all existence is ‘animated’ like ever-moving Water. This suggests an interpretation of the ‘the divine’ as the centre of Thalean thought, a reading which supports a conception of sophia or wisdom as the love of the Whole. Thales’ hylozoism: the ubiquity of the gods Thales…from what is recorded of him, supposes that the soul is productive of movement (kinetikon), where he says that the magnet has a soul in it because it moves the iron. (Aristotle, De Anima 1.2.405a19–21) The kosmos empsychos We learn from a later tradition that Thales thought that everything was full of gods (panta plere theon einai); divinity is, so to speak, ubiquitious (Plato, Laws 899B; 967A; Aristotle, De Anima 1. 5. 411a7–8, cf. 2.405a19; Atius, Placita 1.7.11 (DK 11 A 23); Cicero, De Natura Deorum 1.25). While we might be tempted to attribute to Thales a thesis that God is the ‘mind of the Cosmos’ or Water is the ‘life force’ or ‘energy’ of everything, we can also follow another path. Thales’ contention can be construed in a naturalistic or even ‘atheistic’ vein. If there is divinity everywhere then there are no special spheres of divinity, no Olympus, no gods. Everything that exists is animated by living forces. From this perspective, Thales is often taken to be advancing the claim that the distinction between animate and inanimate nature has no real foundation; ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate’ 95

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(empsuchos and apsuchos) are ascriptions we apply to things; but as nominal abstractions they fail to comprehend the underlying ‘life’ of reality. Against common sense we should uphold the general principle that everything has a soul (that is, a definite principle of movement or ‘animation’, though not, of course, a principle of consciousness (De Anima 405a19ff.)). Stated most simply: everything that exists is in some sense alive. The Kosmos is simply the largest horizon of this all-pervasive life force. As a textual fragment the proposition ‘All things are full of gods’ (like the claim ‘All is Water’) clearly requires careful contextual specification. It is obvious that the interpretation of these propositions presupposes a larger horizon in which this kind of universal speech act was contextually embedded. And yet we have no secure cotextual or contextual assistance to ‘reconstitute’ its generative problematic. We can only conjecture hypothetical questionframes. To imagine a plausible pretext, let us say that its cotext of collateral principles was the following rule-like procedures: (i) dismantle the hierarchical opposition between objects and gods, animate and inanimate, things with life and lifeless entities as a product of received common sense which fails to look beyond the manifold spectrum of particular things to their ‘source’; (ii) Formulate the underlying source of both sacred and profane orders as parts of a single unitary process; for this purpose the Greek equivalent of universal quantifiers had to be explicitly defined—centring on the operator ‘All’. This facilitated universal propositions of the logical type: ‘All things are “ensouled”’; (iii) interpret the source of ‘animation’ as a homogeneous process of ‘causation’ operating across every domain of reality rather than a theological intervention (again this is a directive to ignore forms of everyday language which divide experience into discrete entities, events, objects, etc. and to isolate a common ‘element’ in these ‘manifestations’). This cotext, of course, need not have been formulated as an explicit set of rules or quasi-algorithm. It may have been implicitly embedded in a more amorphous cognitive attitude, perhaps associated with a simple Gedankenexperiment of the type ‘Consider what is shared by different categories of objects’. As a sceptical attitude, the question-frame would have encouraged the demythologizing of the traditional theocentric language-games, downgrading the gods into causes and perhaps even articulating something like an atheistic cosmology.11 Returned to its problematic context—in the sense outlined in Chapter 1the propositions, ‘All things are full of gods’ and ‘Magnets possess psyche’, appear to be generated by cognitive principles that are indicative of a radically disenchanted view of the world as a universal process of change. Yet we can take another tack. The Milesian philosopher can be interpreted as advancing a theistic claim with the thesis that everything in the universe is alive. ‘Water’ 96

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is a generic icon for the soul or life process of phusis. The archai at work within phusis are ‘divine’ in being eternal and indestructible sources of growth and change. Whatever our preferred reconstruction, either problematic suggests that Thales had reasoned from the particular movement-inducing force of the lodestone to the general conclusion that the magnet possessed a psyche—the traditional Greek term for animation, vital experience, and consciousness. Applying the schema of analogy and universalizing the ‘deduction’ produces an elementary model of the kosmos: like the psyche, the magnet is a vital force or ‘power’ over its field of influence (Aristotle’s word is kinetikon—‘what produces motion’). The magnet induces motion in other objects but remains motionless. Like a god it has the kinetic capacity to move things at a distance, setting objects into motion by the power of ‘mind’. Thales’ ‘deduction’ uses the mundane fact of magnetic directionality (a commonplace for the merchant mariners of Miletus) to propose a deeper logos behind observational appearances: all experience is ‘animated’. The magnet is ‘ensouled’, since it produces movement in iron objects. ‘Hence’ the magnet (and perhaps other objects in the natural world) is wrongly classified as an inert object—it displays one or more of the criterial features of ‘animation’. This outlook is derived from an explicit cognitive schema: if anything has movement, then it possesses psyche. Things which appear to the untutored eye as ‘inanimate’ may still possess ‘psyche’. A similar pattern can be found in Hesiod. For example, the passage in Works and Days where the Boeotian poet proscribes uncontrolled and excessive talk, concluding that ‘measure’ is most important in human discourse for ‘even talk is in some ways divine’ (Works and Days 764). This type of reconstruction is fully compatible with what the Aristotelian and doxographical tradition record of Thales’ basic idea of the divine nature of the kosmos: the universe as a whole is alive (the theory is usually called hylozoism). It may also have been thoughts such as these that led Thales to the water principle, given that water in its endless motility is the animated element: the sea is the great source of life, change, and transformation. In this way we may see Thales’s strategy as one that begins with particulars to reformulate these as instances of a universal pattern—the magnet and the transformational states of water then become ‘interpretations’ of a wider underlying pattern.12 Another of Thales’ innovative physical insights reported by Aristotle (De Caelo 13.294a28–34; Met. 3.983b21)—that the earth floats upon water—is today one of the central theoretical ideas of geophysics. The theory of plate tectonics assumes the crust of the earth to be literally ‘floating’ upon stratifications of moving rock, striated with faults, and periodically pocked with lava outflows and volcanic eruptions. Perhaps Thales based his theory upon direct observation of geomorphic phenomena such as the gradual elevation of the Ionian coastline and visible evidence of rock deformation (e.g. crustacean fossils found high above the water-mark). It is also relevant to note that the modern theory of ‘plate movement’ (or continental drift) has 97

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received confirmation from evidence relating to the Aegean coastline. To resurrect a Thalean paradigm, we might say that the earth’s surface is still full of ‘psyche’, being transformed and stretched into new displacements and morphological structures. Contemporary geophysicists and vulcanologists might well benefit from a rereading of the Presocratics. 4 SELF, SELF-KNOWLEDGE AND REFLEXIVITY Mind (Nous) is the swiftest—for it runs through everything. Necessity is the strongest—for it controls everything. Time is the wisest—for it discovers everything. …death is no different from life. (Thales(DL1.35)) —What is most difficult? —To know yourself. (Thales) In the light of this analysis let us make another beginning in reconstructing the verbal matrix of Thalean thinking. We should question the Peripatetic interpretation of Ionian speculation as physical science by returning Thalean reflexivity to its specific material and sociocultural contexts. We first need to explore the ‘iconic content’ of the Thalean Nous in the cultural contexts of early Greek language and thought. One way of moving toward this larger task is by examining Thales’ images of reflexivity as abstract mind, fluid exchange, and ‘mobile intellect’. Thales’ interrogation is predicated on a difference between concrete description (mythical, religious, common sense, empirical, etc.) and cosmological analysis, between asking about the nature of particular entities and inquiring into the nature of the horizon of all Being: what is the cosmos as a Whole? This further assumes the intelligibility of abstracting from particular modes of existence to reveal a more universal pattern or structure. As we have seen above, this is traditionally interpreted as a sign of Thales’ rationalism in pursuing a demythologized account of natural phenomena. As an act of reflexive discourse, however, Thales’ account also assumes the universality of the inquiring self as the mind withdraws from particular involvements in order to think what pervades all beings. Where science takes one part of phusis as its object, Thales interrogates the origins and meaning of the cosmos itself. It would be more accurate to say that cosmology created an imaginative matrix from which scientific projects might be constructed. Thales posited a concept of self as a reflexive part of being that is concerned with the Whole. His generic questionframe precipitated a new sense of selfhood as the capacity to transcend and relativize all particularity. If ‘fluid’ psyche is the unity of intelligent forethought, recollecting the past, judging the present, and anticipating the future, then the selfhood implicit in philosophy (Nous) is both the most intangible and the 98

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most valuable part of human being—a knowledge which gathers the psyche within the One. A later example of this belief in the powers of self-re-flection can be found in another Ionian theorist, Diogenes of Apollonia, a student of Anaximenes. We might note the absolute confidence of the authorial self announcing the following claim: My view is that all things are differentiations of the same thing, and are the same thing. And this is obvious: for, if the things which are now in this world—Earth and Water, Air and Fire, and the other things which we see existing in this world—if any of these things, I say, were different from any other, different, that is, by having a substance peculiar to itself; and if it were not the same thing that is often changed and differentiated, then things could not in any way mix with one another, nor could they do one another good or harm. Neither could a plant grow out of the earth, nor any animal nor anything else come into being unless things were composed in such a way as to be the same. But all these things arise from the same thing; they are differentiated and take different forms at different times, and return again to the same thing.13 Thales was the first to inquire into the One that gathers the Many into a comprehensible Whole. This extraordinary work of self-reflection brought with it as its correlate a new question-frame, specifying ‘insight’ or ‘wisdom’ as a reduction of manifold appearances to a unified explanatory frame. We can reasonably speculate that in positing experience as a reflexive totality and in defining some of the essential conditions for a rational account of existence, Thales also included the Nous within his terms of reference. From the later doxographical fragments it seems highly probable that Thales believed that Nous was the most important human faculty in seeking knowledge of the ‘fluid’ Whole. In returning to the aboriginal matrix of Being, we are also disclosing the nature of the self as a mobile, inquiring, truth-seeking agency. The human psyche is continuous with the vital ‘psyche’ of the kosmos. It would follow from this insight that inquiry which realizes the imperative ‘know thyself is also an integral part of the movement of the Whole. And the singular place of the possible revelation of truth is the human soul, most pertinently, that rare part of the soul that aims at wisdom what Aristotle would later call the Active Intellect. Thales’ project is manifestly reflexive: how is it be possible for one relatively insignificant part of the cosmos to investigate the sources and nature of order? What must the kosmos ‘be’ to make such reflexive activities as thought, self-questioning, and inquiry possible? If the Ionians can be approached as reflexive theorists, then they are rightly described as revolutionary thinkers. ‘Unity’ is located in a ‘divine’ order which accounts for the processes by which worlds are created and destroyed. The universe in which we live is simply one of many possible world-orders, all of which have their origins in the ‘deathless and imperishable’ process of world creation. Quite obviously the ‘physics’ of the Milesians does not fit our modern 99

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understanding of ‘physical science’, even though Ionian reflexivity is still alive in the contemporary cosmology which is drawn to ask questions of the origins and history of the universe as a way of framing the philosophical question of the origin of all possible worlds. We can summarize this analysis by diagramming the discourse matrix presupposed by Thales’ metaphorical logos. We have reconstructed Thales’ simple proposition as a product of a novel question-frame, one which implicitly contests the doxa of religion and common sense:

Figure 1

Figure 1 can be fleshed out by postulating a number of ‘discourse strata’ of background assumptions and presuppositions which sustain the meaning of the proposition, All is Water. A simplified diagram of this matrix can be set out below: Level 1 Level 2

Thales’ thesis: ‘All is Water’ Pretextual questions

2.1 Adversarial discourses (‘solutions’ implicitly rejected by Thales’ response: e.g. ‘Things are governed by the gods’, ‘Things are Many’, ‘Things have no genesis’, etc.). 2.2 Facilitating discourses providing the ‘pre-texts’ for Thales’ text (alternative versions of the quest for the One in the Many). Level 3 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6

Figural matrices

Explanations containing universal statements are intelligible. Universality presupposes Unity. The world of appearances manifests a ‘divine’ cosmic Unity or One. Genuine ‘knowledge’ is knowledge of the One-in-the-Many. The One must animate a living universe. The One itself must be animate. 100

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3.7

Thought (Nous) must be consistent with the terms of a reflexive cosmos.

Level 4 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4

Cultural presuppositions

The availability of alternative beliefs about the world. Controversy over traditional ‘solutions’ about the nature of things. A cultivated audience as recipients of this type of question-frame and utterance A culture of competing explanations (a community of critical discourse). The construction of universal reflexive discourse

Thales’ logos marks the discovery of a new form of discourse occasioned by the method of essential questioning. Before Thales ‘discovered’ the method of scientific philosophy, he prefigured a new attitude of inquiry toward the nature of the Whole. What is still more extraordinary about this mode of questioning is that it places a demand upon the self and community of knowers which can ultimately never be satisfied. It inaugurates the interminable project of pure reflection, the search for foundational truths that would unlock the secret of the Whole. The phusikos is ‘the man of reason’ who desires to know the absolute truth of the Whole. It is useful at this point to recall more traditional interpretations of Thales’ revolution in thought. Kant and Hegel in particular delineated three important moments of early Greek reflexivity. First, universality. For Kant, speculative inquiry distinguishes itself from the common sense only when it attempts to articulate the universal in abstracto. The Greeks first cultivated speculative universality and proceeded to formalize its underlying rules and principles. Thales is a forerunner; but the possibilities of conceptual universality remained dormant until the time of Aristotle. Similarly with Hegel: Water presented itself to Thales as a concrete universal, that is, as a particular standing proxy for a universal substance. Hegel, however, isolated a second aspect of Thalean reflexivity, its transcendence of everyday knowledge and perception. At the level of the concept thinking transcends immediate existence with its figural thought-determinations. Abstract transcendence is necessary if we are to comprehend nature in ‘a simple sensuous essence’. The Ionians refused to resort to anthropomorphic, mythical, or extrinsic forces in explaining natural phenomena. Finally, both Kant and Hegel stress a third aspect, the moment of unity. Thales’ question is animated by a vision of the One or, as Kant would say, a synthetic intuition of the integrity of Nature. As all things are dependent upon the One, the unitary ground or first principle, any explanation must demonstrate how the part relates to the systematic whole. For these reasons, Thales’ elementary proposition is philosophy—it seeks first principles by means of a parsimonious selection of ‘pure concepts’. Thales disclosed the centrality of rational logos in pursuing a single, abstract, comprehensive account of the 101

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whole cosmos. The heterogeneous manifold of the perceptible world can be explained by means of a parsimonious language of simple elements.14 Yet Thales’ vision of the cosmos remained premodern and prescientific. Phusis is not ‘physical nature’. Soul or psyche pervades the universe as an immortal form of being. Thales’ expression, to pan empsychon is frequently taken as the origins of Greek ‘panpsychism’ and his overall philosophy presented as ‘hylozoism’ or ‘hylopsychism’ (the doctrine dates back to the original Peripatetics, and is clearly stated in the later commentator, Alexander of Aphrodisias; see also Zeller, 1969:27; Luce, 1992:22). But it appears more probable that far from expressing a mystical identity of divinity and nature, Thales simply followed the logic of his central intuition: the divine is not localized above or behind the kosmos; all things possess the aspects of divinity, particularly self-movement, change, and transformation—and in this sense the whole continuum of existence is ensouled. We are now in a position to cast our net wider and investigate the sociocultural contexts of Thalean reflexivity, asking what social forms could provide the pattern for this view of mind as self-reflection. 5 THE SOCIOLOGICAL ORIGINS OF PHILOSOPHY AND CULTURES OF CRITICAL DISCOURSE On account of this general connection between political freedom and the freedom of thought, philosophy only appears in history where and in as far as free institutions are formed…therefore Philosophy first begins in the Grecian world. (G.W.F.Hegel, 1955:1.95–6) We can use Hegel’s thesis as a general framework in studying the material, sociocultural, and political configurations facilitating the development of critical reflexivity. The urban-civilizational context of theorizing To speak of ‘civilizations’ (from civis, civilis) in a sociological sense is to speak of urbanization. In what follows ‘urbanization’ will be taken to designate the historical processes that brought into existence urban networks, city-states, or town-centred empires with a correlative development of differentiated social groups and classes, a growth of technical-administrative cadres following from an increased specialization of labour functions, and the invention of centralized political mechanisms for organizing productive labour, coordinating surplus wealth, and distributing surpluses to strategic functional groups and strata (military organizations, priesthoods, bureaucracies, skilled crafts and guilds, dependent élites, and so forth). Of course, cities existed in antiquity which did 102

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not possess all the elements of this ideal-type—the most dynamic cities to function almost entirely without a complex administrative apparatus being precisely the poleis of the ancient Greek world. From the logological perspective cities can also be viewed as organized systems for articulating, coding, and transmitting information—and many of the most typical material artifacts and institutional innovations of urban experience depend upon the processes by which culture is centralized and circulated through elaborate mechanisms of intellectual production and reproduction. For example, only highly organized urban political institutions can command the necessary material resources to construct technologies of collective recollection. The most creative ages of the great riverine civilizations of the ancient world— Egypt, the civilizations of the Tigris and Euphrates in the fourth millennium BC (Sumer, Akkadia, Chaldea, and Assyria around 3200 BC), the great citycomplex of Mohenjo-Daro on the Indus or, further north, the Harappan civilization, the Chinese military cities on the Hwang Ho and Yangtze—all cluster in the periods that saw the movement toward urban-centred political structures, associated in turn with the growth of engineering, the state construction, maintenance and monitoring of vast drainage and irrigation networks, and the invention and extended use of writing as a technology of reflexivity—and with writing, of course, the monopolization of literacy by priestly groups and castes. Many of these ‘proto-urban centres’—such as the metropolis of Ur or Susa in Mesopotamia—became the symbolic focus of state power in the societies of the ancient Middle and Far East. From the sixth to the second millennia the forcing ground and creative matrix of reflexive institutions and practices lay wholly outside the European continent. Indeed, we know that the institutions which eventually created what we now call ‘Europe’ were developed by non-Western civilizations. The long-term direction of European culture, beginning in Sumerian Bablyon, may be said to move from central Asia to Asia Minor, Egypt, Greece and finally, through the Greek southern tip of Italy, to Western Europe at the time of the Roman Empire. This global shift is unified by the continuity of urban creativity, writing systems, and the material means to transmit ‘discursive formations’. The product of this process was the construction of the Mediterranean civilization of the Graeco-Roman world (Rostovtzeff, 1963:12–13), upon which contemporary European—and increasingly—world civilization has been built. And, it should be said, not every ‘stage’ in this development can be seen as progressive—for example, the obstacle of Hellenic philosophy in blocking earlier speculation in the field of algebraic mathematics, a process not rectified until the renaissance of Indian and Arabic mathematics in the Middle Ages (cf. McLeish, 1991:ch.6). Once underway, urbanization provides an optimum environment for a series of powerful—and often violent—transformations: the destruction or incorporation of non-urban peoples, increasing class differentiation, the bureaucratization of everyday life, and the militarization of external relations with its surrounding environment. These are patterns that are common to eighth103

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century Kyoto, sixth-century Miletus, and fourteenth-century Venice. Cities became the crucibles of power, repositories of material resources, and collective archives. It is the social process of urbanization that produces the seed-bed for societies possessing a ‘sense of place’ in historical time. The ‘timelessness’ of so-called ‘primitive’ or non-literate peoples—the anonymous groups who occupied the ancient world before the fourth millennium—gives way to ‘temporal civilizations’, societies which increasingly map their power and histor(icit)y in time as well as space. The civilizational complexes mentioned above are thus also the first societies to represent themselves in chronological series, to record dynastic sucession, and to begin the project of documenting their own genealogy. And the instruments of scribal recollection are essentially urban inventions. For example, the arts of systematic mensuration and calculation (observations of the heavens and planetary bodies, or more mundanely, land measurement and taxation systems) were incorporated into the religious institutions of these civilizations—and in dialectical fashion, further helped to consolidate and centralize the state apparatus. Over many generations, the core institutional orders of the ancient city-complexes came to depend upon a class structure composed of a range of ‘knowledge specialists’. If it is true that the human senses have developed historically, then a major impetus for this self-formative experience emerged from the division of labour created by such urban social systems. The city is itself a ‘force of production’, a human artifact or ‘megamachine’ through which definite groups of human beings relate to nature and thereby to themselves in imaginative ways. If we cannot posit an undifferentiated and homogeneous ‘urban consciousness’, we can construct ‘part histories’ of the different ways urban configurations have typically educated and modified the senses. Urbanization, then, is one of the necessary preconditions for the growth of literacy and the creation of social groups specializing in literary techniques and literate practices. Not surprisingly these groups tend to generate elaborate cosmologies and ritual systems to legitimate their special interests. Finally, the city is the seat of luxury industries and other supplementary institutions stimulated by the emergent needs of urban life. One such ‘luxury’—speculative theorizing—forms the topic of the present study. Cities, in sum, are the forcing ground of the ‘civilizing process’ through the unintended effects of four interconnected social processes: the militarization of society, the development of literacy and numeracy (accompanied by new symbolic and cultural specialists and new forms of social control based on public record keeping, taxation, the creation of written ‘scriptural’ traditions, codified cosmologies, etc.), the expansion of consumer industries (indexed by the growth of international trade), and the crystallization of more centralized religious cosmologies, legal codes, and guilds of professional theorists—lawyers, astrologers, astronomers, physicians, philosophers, and so forth. The impact of these material and cultural innovations took very different courses in different cultural and geographical settings, and these differences in turn were often decisive in determining the 104

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pattern of civilizational development. We must therefore study the various shapes of consciousness and self-consciousness in relation to the specific social dynamics of these historical configurations. To focus on the geographical region of western Asia after the collapse of the great Bronze-Age monarchies and Middle Eastern empires—from the seventh to sixth century BC—we can see that there have been five ‘pure cases’ of creative urbanization involving a rapid expansion of critical practices and technologies of reflection (computation practices, engineering, mechanical inventiveness, rationalization of weights and measures, urban architecture, commercial and financial practices, theoretical sciences, and so forth): (i) the city-states of Archaic Greece (Miletus, Ephesus, Colophon, etc.); (ii) the poleis of Classical Greece (Athens, Thebes, Corinth, Megara, Abdera, Crotona, Elea, Syracuse, etc.); (iii) the Hellenistic cities (Alexandria, Pergamum, Rhodes); (iv) the urban centres of the medieval period (Baghdad, Basra, Toledo, Cordoba, Paris, Oxford, Bologna, Cologne); and (v) the Renaissance communes, independent states, and late medieval municipalities of northern Europe and Italy (Florence, Rome, Milan, Venice, etc.). We follow the ideal-type hypothesis that the creation and development of theoretical reflexivity and its effective institutionalization is possible only in the context of complex, commercially-oriented urban civilizations; that a separation of theoretical and empirical enquiry has been a feature of most civilizations that have had a stratified agricultural character. Before the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century, science had been promoted most vigorously in commercialized civilizations, such as those of ancient Greece, and Renaissance Europe. The Chinese never had such a civilization, the politics of their rulers being directed constantly against the independent merchant and producer.15 To substantiate this claim we can return to the Ionian urban economy during the two centuries before its destruction by the Persian empire. The Ionian renaissance: the commercial revolution in the Ionian city-states in the seventh century Herodotus was reworking earlier Ionian legends when he traced the origins of the twelve Ionian city-states—Chios, Samos, Phocaea, Clazomenae, Erythrae, Teos, Lebedos, Colophon, Ephesus, Priene, Myus, and Miletus—to the migrations following the Dorian invasion of mainland Greece (the division of twelve cities, he believed, reflected the ancient Achaean division of tribes). Essentially the same story is repeated by Thucydides, where the fall of Troy is given as the symbolic starting point of two centuries of social upheaval, 105

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invasion, revolution, and bitter warfare. The coveted prize of these Dark Age struggles was the rich coastal strip of Asia Minor and its fertile hinterland. In Roman times the ‘Dorian invasion’ of the Peloponnese was regarded as an established truth; the Roman orator Aelius Aristides (b. AD 117) assumes the fact as a commonplace in explaining the origins of Ionian Greece (Panathenaic Oration 54–5, 67–8; Aristides being himself a native of the Ionian town of Smyrna). These stories may have preserved a core of sociological truth, especially in their sublimated references to the tribal—and perhaps ‘racial’—violence implicit in Herodotus’ description of the conflict between the Achaean invaders and the indigenous Carian people. We learn, for example, that the Athenian colonists did not bring wives with them to their settlements, but married Carian women whose parents they put to death. For this slaughter, these women made a custom and bound themselves that none would sit at meat with their husbands nor call him by his name, because the men had married them after slaying their fathers and husbands and sons. (Herodotus 1.145–6; cf. Thucydides 1.12) Appropriately, the Carians fought on the side of the Trojans against the Achaeans in the Iliad. Miletus can be singled out as the symbolic and material centre of these events, culminating in a period of great social change from 850 to 700 BC. By around 700–650 BC, however, the invading ‘Achaeans’ no longer regarded themselves as colonists; they had forged a new syncretic culture with its own distinctive political and intellectual traditions. By this period they were proud of being citizens of rich and powerful Ionian states, clinging to the precarious borders of the Lydian and Persian monarchies and their satrapies to the east. Miletus had become rich enough to finance her own colonial expeditions, spreading Ionian institutions, government, and civilization to the Black Sea Coast and its Thracian hinterland (Abydos, Cyzicus, Sinope, Panticapaeum, and Istrus for example) and, in her southern sphere of influence, to outposts of empire as far south as Naucratis in the Nile delta. Sybaris on the Gulf of Tarentum in southern Italy is also thought to have originally been a Milesian colony, proverbial in the ancient world for its wealth and luxury (from where we derive the expressions ‘sybarite’ and ‘sybaritic’).16 By the sixth century up to eighty daughter-states radiated from the Milesian metropolis (Farrington, 1947:19). Miletus was optimally sited as both a hub of southern and western seatrade and also as a commercial centre for the lucrative slave trade with the interior. It marked the intersection of the trade routes with Lydia and other Near Eastern cultures and the sea routes from Rhodes, Egypt, and the islands of the Aegean. The Lydian dynasty from Gyges in the seventh century to the last great monarch, Croesus, in the sixth appears to have been of crucial 106

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importance as a conduit of wealth and capital—in the form of precious metals— from around 650 BC to 550 BC. The fifty-year period from 650 to 494 BC can thus be regarded as the most creative epoch of this cosmopolitan culture and may well be called the golden age of Ionian civilization.17 It was during this period that Miletus became the cradle of Greek science and philosophy.18 The Phoenician world To describe the extent of the impact of Phoenician civilization upon the earliest Ionian cities we would have to rank first their legendary skills in shipbuilding and construction;19 then, flowing from these accomplishments, their supreme achievements in trade and commerce which produced the first relatively universal medium of exchange—originating in small ingots of precious metals and later developing into minted coins (in Lydia); third, the prevalence of a spirit of creativity and speculation evidenced in their mercantile proclivities, colonial explorations, and cultural and intellectual achievements—for example in the fine art dating from this period that has been recovered from Phoenician centres by recent archaeology; fourth, a resolutely this-worldly attitude toward human existence—as Max Weber observed,20 the ‘religion of the noble plutocratic class in the Phoenician trading cities was entirely this-worldly in orientation and, so far as is known, entirely non-prophetic’; and finally, but in the long term perhaps the most critical innovation of all, the efforts they made to rationalize their language by inventing an economic system of writing known to scholars as the Phoenician-Canaanite alphabet.21 Economy and speculative adventure—two apparently antithetical valueswere fused into an expansionary ideology by the Phoencian kings and merchant traders at a very early period.22 The ‘Phoenician moment’ in antiquity was made possible by the decline of the Mycenaean domination of the Aegean after 1100 BC, a process which created a commercial vacuum that was eagerly filled by the expanding mercantile fleet of the Phoenician princes. As in other comparable situations the decline of a great civilizational complex presented opportunities for its neighbouring societies. Undoubtedly ancient Ionia and the city-states of Phoenicia rose to commercial power in the wake of the ‘unravelling’ of Minoan and Mycenaean sea power. It is known, for example, that the intrepid sailors which the Greeks called Phoinikes extended their trading empire to include Sardinia, Kition in Cyprus, North Africa, southern Spain (Cadiz and Malaga), and the southern seaboard of France, that they founded the cities of Utica and Carthage in the eighth century (c. 750–720 BC), had long-standing trade links with Sicily and even at a later period (late seventh century?) circumnavigated Africa. In the Archaic period they played a crucial role in supplying the growing market in slaves in Babylon and Assyria (a trade which also decisively stimulated the growth of the merchant citystates of Ionia during the seventh century). This unlikely economic and cultural synthesis appears to have been in place 107

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before 1000 BC and there is well-documented literary and archaeological evidence of earlier trading connections between the Phoenician kings and the dynasties of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Phoenicia exploited the fact that the civilizations of the Two Rivers were forced to engage in international trade by virtue of the paucity of their poor natural resources, particularly in mineral wealth, metal ores, and timber (cf. Whitehouse, 1977:37ff.; Edey, 1974: chs 3, 4). Phoenician craftsmen and engineers are known to have worked on the construction of Egyptian temples and monuments in the second millennium. The constellation of mercantile trade, speculative adventure, abstract exchange, the formalization of language, the simplification of media of exchange, and the accumulation of surplus wealth (with its domestic effects on distribution relations, urban growth, the growth of population, the division of labour, the creation of professional and literate guilds, and so on) may well have been experienced by the Phoenician city-states of Tyre and Sidon centuries before they were to become features of such mercantile poleis as Miletus, Paros, Chalcis, Halicarnassus, and Corinth. If economic interests shape political and cultural life, then the origins of Ionian civilization in the eighth century were profoundly indebted to the wide-ranging achievements of the Phoenicians from the ninth to the middle part of the eighth century. It is from the Phoenicians that the Ionian and through them, later, mainland Greeks took over, expanded, and creatively developed the material culture and intellectual civilization that had been forged over a thousand-year period. Ironically Greek literary history flourished by suppressing a culture which made literate civilization possible. Once more the Ionian Greeks were proficient borrowers and creative users of ideas and innovations which they had not themselves devised (from the basic Phoenician alphabet to the technology of naval architecture). If we accept the dating of Joseph Naveh (1975: Section 1, 14–22), the protoCanaanite script of the Phoencians dates back to the twelfth century BC and may have influenced the earlier scripts of Minoan Crete (Linear A and B) as well as being the paradigm for the return of writing in the eighth century Aegean world: We should consider, therefore, that some Greeks might have learned the Proto-Canaanite script when Canaanite merchants visited the Greek islands or the Greek mainland during the late 12th or early 11th century BC. At that stage the Proto-Canaanite alphabet had been reduced to twenty-two letters… Most of the archaic Greek letter-forms resemble the West Semitic letters as they looked about 100 BC. (Naveh, 1975:56; but cf. Burkert, 1992:27–8) We may legitimately regard the Phoenician city-states—and within them, the mercantile class of entrepreneurs and trading élites—as the great cultural mediators of the ancient Near Eastern world, a prosperous and energetic culture locked precariously between the great empires of Egypt, the Hittites, Assyria, and the growing power of the Hebrew confederation in the interior. The 108

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commercial structure of the Phoenician-Syrian mode of production functioned as a vast communications network of trade and cultural exchange at the crossroads of the European and Asian worlds. But we also know that the matrix of Phoenician life and thought was eclipsed by the rising star of Greek civilization. For the Phoenicians there was no Dark Age until the rise of Greece finally destroyed their economic control of the Mediterranean trade network in the late sixth and fifth centuries. From a Phoenician time-frame the Dark Age coincided with the rise of Ionian civilization and the hegemony of the Athenian navy in the eastern Mediterranean. Finally the Phoenician commercial domination of the Mediterranean was irreversibly destroyed at the time of Alexander the Great. For these reasons, however, the Phoenician traders were ideally placed to become the ‘transmitters of all sorts of remarkable Near Eastern legacies to the West’ (Boren, 1976:77; Burkert, 1992: ch. 1).23 The maritime-commercial context Alongside the Phoenicians, the merchants of the Ionian states were the first to undertake exploratory expeditions covering the whole Mediterranean, trading (and occasionally conquering) wherever they went. Thus colonies were founded on the Black Sea coast as early as the seventh century. The founding of Carthage, as we have noted, dates back to the last decades of the eighth century. It was common practice for the Phoenician merchant adventurers to sail through the Pillars of Hercules, north to Britain and south down the west coast of Africa. Colonies from Phocaea were established in Naples, southern Italy (at Elea), Maenace (near present-day Malaga in Spain), and in Marseilles; mixed Phoenician and Greek soldiers founded an inland colony in the mountainous region of southern Spain, at a site of present-day Rhonda. Phoenician traders had regular trade agreements with native peoples from the Black Sea to Cornwall.24 We may assume that the navigational, astronomical, and technical skills accumulated in these amazing journeys led to a range of new problems; that a continuous dialectic between economic and theoretical needs became routinized and transmitted from generation to generation. With the late eighthcentury reinvention of alphabetic writing (the prototype sign system for consonants being of Phoenician origin) word-of-mouth lore would frequently be committed to parchment (in the form of secret trade maps, agreements, trade notations, itineraries, records of commercial transactions, and the like, mapped into the ‘abstract’ roots of the Byblos alphabet). The Phoenician script was based on a graphic matrix with signs for consonants, leaving vowel sounds unmarked; sound values for vowels were thus determined contextually by individual users of the script. These consonantal graphs were the prototypes of later maps, written inventories and, eventually, scripts.25 The Greek innovation was to add symbols for both consonants and vowels. But the Semitic table of twenty-two letter signs was retained as the basic syllabic 109

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grid. And in this respect Western European culture owes its single most precious ‘technology of reflection’—the phonetic alphabetic—to lost and anonymous traditions of Phoenician merchants plying their trade between the commercial centres of the eastern Mediterranean before the rise of the Jewish confederation or the hegemony of Greek civilization. It is thus correct to speak of the Phoenician alphabet as that ‘masterpiece of brokerage’ (Sarton, 1952–9: vol. 1, 109) and to reflect upon the observation that ‘in no Greek writer do we meet any expression of wonder at the most wonderful invention of antiquity, the alphabet’ (Sarton, 1952–9: vol. 1,111). In sum, the cosmopolitan mode of exchange and commercial production produced a practical laboratory for new analytical skills constructed over a relatively short span of about two hundred years (c. 800–600 BC). It is no exaggeration to say that these two centuries represent one of the most significant periods of technological innovation in the history of European culture-its ultimate fruit being the world-changing technology of the alphabet and the sociotechnical process of cultural alphabetization. It was this heterogeneous, expansive tradition that supplied the intellectual capital for Milesian science and philosophy. A culture that produced individuals who dared to sail out of the Mediterranean and into the Atlantic could also produce individuals with a refined taste for argument, speculation, and theorizing.26 Ionia, then, experienced a rapid renaissance of economic and cultural life following the dark age after the Dorian invasion of northern Greece. The great diaspora of the ninth and eighth centuries had ended; shipping, commerce, war, and a new spirit of adventure sought outlets and new forms. Miletus, in particular, was at the forefront of these developments appearing even to other Ionian cities as a crucible of new modes of production and cultural experiment. Significantly it stood at the cross-roads of two worlds, one Hellenic (and particularly Athenian), the other Persian. In Miletus every traditional solution seems to have been an occasion for careful scrutiny and reconstruction. Change became something of a way of life. And, above all, Miletus became the greatest urban centre of the ancient world from which Hellenic civilization was spread throughout the Aegean and beyond. To find a parallel case we would have to look to Athens in the decade before the Peloponnesian War or Florence under the Medicis. Thales—or, rather, the Thalean type—became the Leonardo da Vinci of the ancient world.27 We observed at the beginning of this chapter that for later writers, the name ‘Thales’ appeared in the list of the so-called Seven Sages of Archaic Greece. However, Thales was much more than a proverbial figure of wisdom; he was also a map-maker, a geometer, legislator, and man of political praxis, a patrician merchant, astronomer, and engineer in an age of nascent mechanical technology. As a patrician legislator his political interests would have been aligned with those of the landed aristocracy of Miletus; but as a rich merchant he may well have advanced the cause of mercantile expansion and international commerce— the material basis of the nouveaux riches which formed the plutocratic élite of 110

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the Ionian city-states. Perhaps it was in the role of merchant prince within the commercial patriciate that he acquired his legendary knowledge of Egyptian geometry and Babylonian astronomy. If we follow the precedent of tradition, the name Thales symbolizes a new humanistic form of life combining practical success (‘What is most pleasant?’—‘Success’) and theoretical speculation (symbolized by the saying ‘Know Thyself’). Why did this new form of life emerge in Miletus during the sixth century? Thales’ lifetime coincided with the cultural and economic hegemony of Miletus, the flourishing port of the trading city of Ephesus. City-states like Miletus, Colophon, Clazomenae, and Samos formed an ideal setting for speculative innovation in every sphere of life. Economic growth, rising standards of living, an increasingly elaborate division of labour, and an expansive mercantile capitalism introduced creative contradictions and structural instabilities into an already fluid historical situation. The same period witnessed fascinating developments in physical speculation, mechanical inventions by the score, geographical discoveries, and major innovations in mathematics and astronomy. And against this background, Herodotus’ story of Thales’ prediction of a solar eclipse at the height of the five-year struggle between the Medes and Lydians (28 May 585 BC) may not be wholly incredible. Thales may not only have been the first philosopher, but also the source of the first recorded date in western astronomy.28 Herodotus depicts Thales as a wealthy, politically active aristocrat and practical man of the world. As if to clinch these qualities -writing for an audience which would understand the subtext of the linkage -he invokes a piece of genealogical information, reporting that his family were originally Phoenician.29 Prior to the annexation of the Ionian cities, Thales advised the Ionians to forget their differences and establish a single political federation at Teos, making the other city-states into dependent townships (Herodotus 1.170). With Bias of Priene (who also urged the Ionians to abandon their cities and form a unified Ionian city at Sardo), Thales foreshadowed the idea of a panHellenic confederation to resist the growing hegemony of Persia. Thales’ pupil, Anaximander, may have later taken the most dramatic step of leading a community of Milesians to found a colony on the Black Sea coast. Diogenes Laertius also provides evidence of Thales’ ambivalent and, perhaps, marginal role in Milesian politics: when the last great king of an independent Lydia— Croeusus—sent ambassadors to Miletus, with the object of forming an alliance, Thales vigorously resisted the proposal, effectively saving Miletus when Cyrus came to power and defeated Lydia on the battlefield in 547 BC (DL1.25–7). If Miletus was one of the critical margins of the Greek and Persian worlds, the cusp between two growing empires, Thales was a member of the élite groups of cosmopolitan intellectuals created by the new wealth. Politically he appears to have shifted his allegiances away from the traditional landed aristocracy of Miletus toward the hoplite-supported merchant party that consolidated its power in the city at the end of the seventh century under the ‘tyranny’ of Thrasybulus.30 111

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Philosophical reflection and the expansion of the universal form of commodity exchange in the Archaic Greek city-states The classical scholar G.S.Kirk has emphasized the importance of understanding the emergence of philosophy in its social contexts: The development of philosophy in Greece was not the result of a sudden ‘discovery of the mind’, a dramatic unleashing of reason over five or six generations. It was closer to a spiritual and emotional Odyssey lasting for many hundreds of years, in which story-telling, social preoccupation, migration, literacy, conservatism and religion all played their part.31 In his inventory, however, he curiously omits one of the most profound developments at work in Ionian civilization—the impact of a developed system of monetary exchange and its use in financing building and engineering projects (and their associated urban institutions). In fact the two great ‘technologies of reflection’—alphabetic literacy and monetary exchange—operated as reciprocal forces of change and secular differentiation. The successful institutionalization of these media powered Milesian economic and technological development. It is certainly not accidental that commercial and mercantile relationships—and perhaps, as Benjamin Farrington has argued, mechanical technologies—should have provided some of the earliest thinkers with models of natural processes. The implicit concept of ‘exchange’, for example, as it appears in the cosmologies of Anaximander and Anaximenes and, even more explicitly, in Heraclitus’ famous image of the universal flux of nature as a cycle of monetary exchange, provides important cultural evidence from the Ionian vocabulary of the late sixth century: ‘All things are an exchange for fire, and fire for all things, even as goods for gold and gold for goods’ (Heraclitus, Fr. B90). The complex relationships between urbanization, monetary wealth, alphabetization, abstract exchange relations, engineering techniques, and the stimulation of abstract forms of spatial and temporal thought is well documented: the nascent numerical and quantitative logic of the exchange relationship, especially when translated into the mathematical proportions of monetary exchange, encouraged a more abstract definition of other domains of experience. A formal logos (in the sense of ‘measure’, ‘ratio’, or ‘proportion’) may well be at work beneath the surface manifestation of things, just as numerical proportions govern the surface relationships between men and communities and a finite inventory of signs could be used to decompose and reconstruct the sounds of speech. Already in the late seventh century we can find poets decrying the reduction of customary relationships to the anonymous workings of the cash nexus. The social and cultural functions of money (and precious metals more generally), no less than its manifest economic and political consequences, may well have been as important for Greek speculative reflexivity 112

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as innovations made in the field of religion, law, or literacy. We must, therefore, say something about money as an important medium of reflexivity. The money form as the metaphoric foundation for the principle of universal equivalent and speculative identity Mercantile capitalism with its economic base in shipping, import-and-export transactions, long-distance markets, and a monetary system based on units of abstract exchange produced new social practices and institutional relations. The mercantile ethos tended to be materialistic, utilitarian, extroverted and— in the broadest sense—humanistic. What a person does rather than what he is begins to be regarded as a source of value as opposed to the traditionally ascribed roles of birth and breeding. A world-view gradually emerged which emphasized personal excellence and success in an array of different markets rather than ascribed status in the established status hierarchies. The expansion of commodity exchange into international markets was accompanied by an increasing flow of ideas and technical knowledge. Navigation, geography, and astronomy were ‘brought down to earth’ as invaluable commercial skills— technai rather than arcane magical lore. While the larger part of production still remained predominantly argrarian, in the cities, manufacturing capitalism based on the small-scale ‘workshop’ (the prototype of the ‘factories’ which appear later in Athens, Corinth, and elsewhere) posed a threat to traditional agrarian social structures and occupational hierarchies. Wealth was increasingly symbolized by more fluid commodity forms: first by movable symbols of value—bars of iron or bronze, gold and silver coin, etc. and then by manufactured luxury commodities (tripods, statues, armour, and the like), and finally by pure monetary equivalents; finally land itself was drawn into these expanding commodity markets. Over several centuries the growth of a distinctive mercantile capitalism created a new economic class whose power was derived from an ability to accumulate wealth in the form of money capital. Once in existence, this mercantile stratum expanded its interests from transport and commodity exchange to the primary process of manufacture. It is certainly possible that the growth of craft guilds involving specialist technical knowledge and simple machine technologies was one of the avenues of Ionian creativity (efficient systems of metal-casting and bronze foundries are cases in point). We would add that such technological experiments brought with them new social organizations and new styles of thought and practice— one expression of this being the adoption of a much more positive attitude toward mechanical technology. And perhaps this new faith in the practical applications of technology encouraged the intelligentsia of these dynamic city-states to view the universe as a machine-like construction (see Chapter 4 on Anaximenes’ preference for a mechanical account of physical processes). In economic, political, and cultural terms, the effects of this historical development were complex and profound. We are dealing with the first great 113

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‘cultural revolution’ of the ancient world. Economically, these revolutionary changes tended to disrupt traditional patterns of production, displacing old practices and trades while valorizing new artisan and commerce-based occupations. Many spheres of traditional life were reorganized and commodified. Politically, the spread of the commodity form meant that the new ‘middle-class’ mercantile groups had an increasing influence over political agendas (particularly where this new stratum of commercial wealth bought or married into the land-owning élite). Culturally, the new groups confronted the traditional class system with alternative values and attitudes. Parallel changes can be traced in the sphere of war technology, tactics and organization. Under their combined impact these diverse forces acted as a catalyst for rapid social change. Not surprisingly we find that ancient Ionian history is teaming with political experiments, the rise and fall of unstable tyrannies, and various hybrid constitutions emerging from the self-interested collaborations between aristocratic, commerical, and artisanate classes. The traditional aristocratic domination of politics derived from land tenure was complicated by new constellations of urban politics. Over several generations this climate of change and innovation socialized the citizens of Ionia to the new ethos of secular experiment. New beliefs, new structures of power and authority, and new ideas evolved as responses to these contradictory social processes. As more secular sensibilities encroached upon traditional religion, poets began to turn away from Homeric epic to their own personal experience for inspiration (Archilochus, Mimnermus, and so on); faced with these long-term changes many would attempt holding actions by replacing the traditional Greek pantheon by one great high God or, like Anaximander, locate divinity in an abstract and conceptually austere source. At the heart of this argument is the Marxist thesis of the shift from a traditional society based on use values to a social system organized around exchange values. The long-term reorientation of the social structure is a phenomenon marked by conflict and social struggle. It has been stated most directly by George Thomson: ‘The old relations and ideas were dissolved and replaced by new relations and ideas, which being based on money, were abstract. This was the origin of philosophy’.32 To avoid economic reductionism and a crude unmediated understanding of the dialectical relations between the genesis of philosophical reflection and its specific institutional contexts we must study the emergence of urban economic and social relations from a more dynamic, multidimensional and configurational standpoint. It is well known that changes in the seventhcentury economy brought the Greek dark ages to a rapid end. Cosmopolitan trade and particularly the great expansion in shipping based on the streamlined fiftyoared commercial craft—prototype of the famous fifth-century battle trireme -threatened to displace agriculture as the sole source of wealth and power. Imported supplies of metal ores (iron in particular) generated homebased metalwork industries which further encouraged technical inventiveness 114

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and mechanical experimentation in smelting, casting, soldering, and bonding. These foundries provided the material basis for an exchange economy—the minting of durable coins on a large scale. We know that systems of coinage based on standardized, minted metal coins played a significant role in the fiscal organization of state policy both in Ionia and in the empires of Lydia and Persia. The massive circulation of liquid wealth in the form of minted coin appears to have coincided with an increase of socioeconomic and cultural relations between Ionia and these two great empires in the period from 600 to 560 BC. The only comparable case of a massive injection of bullion and coin occurred in the period from 320–300 BC in the aftermath of Alexander’s eastern campaigns. And both periods were marked by major political and economic instabilities, flowing from chronic inflation and debt slavery. Originally coinage had been introduced to simplify the state’s growing demand for wealth and to rationalize the payment of mercenaries. The political economy of war during this period holds one of the keys to the expansion of the seaboard states. As the state became more involved in the lucrative proceeds of the retail and mercantile economy, the system of coinage also shifted away from gold and silver bullion toward smaller denomination units—creating what we now recognize as coined money for general circulation purposes. Money was increasingly regarded as a generalized medium of exchange independent of the use values it could purchase or appropriate. Thus the Lydian gold stater was already circulating as an international commercial medium between 600 and 560 BC. The first mass-circulation coins were made from electrum, a naturally-occurring alloy of gold and silver. Miletus appears to have been in the vanguard of this shift toward more generalized and privatized uses of the money-form (under Thrasybulus its coins displayed the symbol of a lion). Once exchange relations were institutionalized, money was seen as a ‘repository of value’ to be acquired as a means of empowering its possessors. In effect, money became a visible means of symbolizing a tyrant’s power or recording the authority and independence of a state. The impact of these changes in stimulating thought about the novel concepts of exchangeability, pure equivalence relations, and abstract thought is direct and profound.33 Problems of monetary equivalence and calculation of relative values provide a major stimulus to the development of numerical procedures and number theory. Indeed it is possible to say that a monetary system, in Georg Simmers lapidary formula, is nothing but the pure form of exchangeability (1990:130). In another direction, the development of exchange relations is also one of the key historical forces promoting human individualization (Marx, 1964:96). Ultimately, however, these changes were long-term responses to needs created by an international retail system—to have a unit of wealth that would be generally recognized as a common measure of value; coins minted from gold or silver provided the optimum combination of immediately recognizable ‘intrinsic value’ coupled with a state-warranted ‘abstract measure’.34 States themselves could now enter the lucrative world of retail trade and exchange. 115

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As in other cultural spheres, the early Greeks were virtuosos in borrowing a practice from another culture and developing it in radically novel ways. We have seen this process already in relation to Babylonian astronomy and Egyptian geometry. It is also evidenced by the way the Ionians adapted the invention of coinage, probably originally developed by the Lydian monarchs around 570–550 BC. This single innovation effectively revolutionized commerce and financial life more generally: The Babylonians, Phoenicians, and Egyptians made use of weighed gold and silver as a medium of exchange, a certain ratio being fixed between the two metals. A piece of weighted metal becomes a coin when it is stamped by the State and is thereby warranted to have its professed weight and purity. This step was taken by Lydia, where the earliest money was coined somewhere about the middle of the seventh century, probably by Gyges…Miletus and Samos soon adopted the new invention, which then spread to other Asiatic towns…This invention, coming at the very moment when the Greeks were entering upon a period of great commercial activity, was of immense importance, not only in facilitating trade, but in rendering possible the accumulation of capital.35 As with other elements of their ideological outlook, the Ionian city-states rapidly turned the Lydian invention to more secular and mercantile uses. They immediately saw the limits of large-denomination coins and so began minting smaller coins which rapidly entered the mercantile system connecting the poleis of the region. Characteristically they detached the new invention from its political-military and religious contexts: And so the types of Greek coins are rarely religious. Some states chose their civic badge such as the bee of Ephesus, the lion’s scalp of Samos; others made good propaganda by illustrating their exports—the tunny fish of Cyzicus, the silphium of Cyrene, the grapes of Matonea; others recall local legends, the Pegasus of Corinth, the labyrinth of Cretan Cnossus.36 Over the next century there is a strong historical association between the development of the polis system of government in Greece and the spread of coined money stamped with the symbolism of a city or community. Money became a powerful symbol of the growing autonomy of individual city-states as self-governing political units—indeed it was the most visible emblem of their individuality. The history of early coinage leaves an illuminating trace of these developments as we move from the Lydian stater of the sixth century to the Persian Daric of the fifth and Punic stater of the fourth century. Coins were in effect the mobile symbols of power and civic individualism—expressed most powerfully in the spread of the Athenian tetradrachm after 525 BC.37 Aigina, an island mint off the coast of Attica, began issuing its famous 116

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silver staters, with obverse type sea-turtle, about 600 BC. Athens itself produced its first coinage not long after this, but the well known silver tetradrachms with head of Athena, reverse owl, only appeared in the latter part of the sixth century, circa 525 BC. Other important cities of Greece which commenced issuing coins at about this time were Corinth (with obverse type pegasos), Thebes (Boetian shield) and Chalkis (front view of four-horse chariot)…Within the space of a century the idea of coinage had spread, from its primitive beginnings on the eastern fringes of the Greek world, throughout Greece and the islands, to the western outposts of Hellenic culture in Magna Graecia.38 If the constellation of mercantilism, the money-form, and the growth of democratic institutions was decisive—if the development of an efficient system of coinage was a necessary precondition for mercantile expansion and economic growth—we might look for negative cases to support this generalization among similarly developed societies in antiquity which, for ideological reasons, refused the modernizing force of monetary exchange. The paradigm case of this occurs in late seventh-century Sparta. From an earlier creative beginning, Sparta evolved a spirit of rigid traditionalism, one feature of which was its rejection of coinage and consequent failure to rationalize its economic institutions. Sparta, in Bowra’s words, ‘refused to conform and continued to use cumbersome iron rods as monetary exchange. Sparta refused to take up commerce on any serious scale, preferring to remain an agrarian society, dependent on serf labour’.39 The consequences of this crucial decision would prove extremely damaging for Spartan culture as a whole which, after about 600 BC followed a long drawn-out process of decline, despite its powerful military machine and expansive periods of hegemonic rule. Sparta provides a good example of a society whose fundamental ideology and value system prevented it from evolving a dynamic economic system which ultimately contributed to its own social collapse. Sparta could not opt for the commercial alternatives of a Miletus, Corinth, or Athens primarily because its land-locked polis had become inextricably dependent upon the helot system of exploitation; this in turn reinforced the need for an ever-vigilant standing army to stifle the discontent and recurrent revolts of a servile population. Gradually these military imperatives became the raison d’être of the whole mode of production, a system grounded upon the belief that its survival could only be secured by rejecting all innovation and change. The Spartan state, in other words, could not—short of dismantling its own political base—disengage itself from helotry and its ancient system of corporate land ownership, the most distinctive feature but also the Achilles heel of its socioeconomic structure.

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The spirit of techne As economic and cultural competition increased between the Ionian citystates the new wealth flowed into what had been previously defined as extravagant and unnecessary sectors of production. However, surplus wealth also had the effect of creating new kinds of social action and public space. One major instance of this is the expansion of public building works and the creation of the technological infrastructure of civil engineering. Even in antiquity Miletus was famous for the imaginative reach of these engineering works. Georgio de Santillana mentions the architect Eupalinus who drilled a tunnel through a mountain at Samos to construct an aqueduct, Mandrokles— a bridge-maker, Rhoikos, Chersiphron, Theodores ‘on whose name tradition accumulates the invention of such various devices as the water-level, the lathe, and the key’ (De Santillana, 1961:24). Geometrical instruments such as the level and square, methods of map-making, and methods of fast-casting bronze are all attributed to Theodoros. Glaucus of Chios is also supposed to have invented the soldering iron. In addition we should also note the way in which the cultural revolution created a new interest in the workings of the human body. Cnidos, along with Rhodes, Cyrene, Crotona, and Cos, was one of the great centres of ancient medical practice and teaching. It is well known that the later tradition of Hippocratic medicine was decisively influenced by the Ionian medical guilds, and Hippocrates even modelled his own texts on the so-called ‘Cnidian sentences’ associated with Euryphon of Cnidos.40 However apocryphal, these facts underline an important feature of Ionian culture. In this mercantile civilization commerce, manufacturing industry, engineering, and the technical praxis which it encouraged were not devalued. Mechanical techniques and the new exchange economy based on exchange markets developed symbiotically. The fascination for ‘mechanisms’ even suggested mechanical metaphors for the human body, the political community, and the cosmos itself. Here the crucial facilitating element was the underlying ethos of innovation and experimentation. Only a vital, artisanate civilization sustained by mercantile wealth could articulate the idea that the world itself was governed by a machine-like regularity (Anaximenes believed he had discovered the mechanisms of all natural change with his law of rarefaction and condensation; Anaximander compared the earth to a solid, cylindrical shape and the heavens to revolving wheels; Thales spoke of the universe as a world created by God’s craftsmanship). In Ionia, the world of techne was given new authority in the status system of the powerful seaboard cities. A new breed of individuals had been brought into existence by the mercantile mode of production and exchange—no longer the strict division of patrician, peasant, and unskilled workers, but a division of functions that included engineers, commercial entrepreneurs, shipping insurers, financiers, explorers, military craftsmen, legislators, tax officials, and skilled artisans. The economic history of these unknown revolutionaries 118

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was, however, lost with the double catastrophe of Milesian civilization: its physical destruction by Persia and its cultural repression by the work of a victorious aristocratic and mandarin stratum of later Greek intellectuals. Yet the forgotten revolution in mechanical experimentation and speculation is coded and remembered, in the name ‘Thales’. We began this chapter looking for the individual, Thales, but have come to see that ‘Thales’ is a cipher for a vast period of practice-theoretical innovation and creativity. Thales represented a form of life in which theory, technical reason, and political practice were combined. Its ‘carrier’ was the mercantile stratum of patrician traders. However, we should not reduce philosophy to techne understood in a one-sided and reductive form. The radical separation between intellectual and manual labour was a product of a later period. It is more accurate to see theoretical praxis as grounded in new modes of production embodying more knowledgeable craft skills and practical reflexivities (in the same sense that the Greek word mathemata has a much wider range of connotations than ‘knowledge’). Important new urban craft sectors encouraged experimental observation, manipulation, and control. Perhaps Thales’ model of the earth floating like a log on water, his knowledge of magnetic materials, his attempt to measure the dimensions of pyramids, his ‘river-divert-ing’ proclivities (Herodotus 1.75), and his exploitation of the olive trade all contain oblique references to the ‘new technology’ associated with this vital social stratum. In the century prior to Thales’ lifetime, productive, mechanical, mathematical, and artisan skills had become central to social production and from here they entered into the physical fabric as well as the social imaginary structures of the culture at large.41 The transformation of the Phoenician alphabet c. 750–700 BC The other indispensable catalyst in this cultural revolution was the dissemination of alphabetic script—the material basis of literary reflexivity. Although forms of writing had been around for more than a century, Ionian society was probably the first civilization to apply writing techniques for purposes other than the traditional interests of the state and religious institutions. From the practical needs of trade and commerce, writing passed into the hands of the first historians and theorists. Training in the new mental technology fostered an analytic attitude toward experience (the general relationship between the element-focused faculty of alphabetic writing and early Greek mathematics, for example, has been well documented). As well as Homer and Thales, Ionia also produced the mathematician Hippocrates of Chios, who is said to have written a major mathematical treatise one hundred years before Euclid with the exemplary title, Elements (Stoicheia). One of the greatest Greek mathematicians—Eudoxos—was also born on the same coast of Asia Minor, in the city of Cnidos.42 A major obstacle to cultural change in the great civilizations lay in the 119

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complexity of their basic writing systems and scriptural practices. The extreme complexity of the Hittite script, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Sumerian cuneiform in ancient Mesopotamia undoubtedly placed a brake on the process of democratizing literary skills as it served to enhance the social power and prestige of tradition-bound intellectual groups whose material existence was dependent on maintaining rigorous control of literacy as a powerful means of intellectual production. Access to the scribal caste became a path to social power and authority. These practices, allied with the way in which language was tied to religious and liturgical functions, created strongly conservative, traditionpreserving, and ritualistic cultural classes and strata. The intelligentsia of the ancient Middle East could be described in Gramscian terms as paradigms of conservative, ‘organic intellectuals’, articulating the dominant interests and values of a ruling group (in ancient Egypt there is some evidence that scribal schools and colleges carved out powerful demesnes within the sacredotal order and at times threatened the power of the priesthood and Phaoronic kingship). When compared with the simplicity of the Phoenician-Greek alphabetic scripts, these older writing systems take on a forbidding and monumental aspect (not without parallels with the architectural imagination of Egyptian, Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian civilization). Compared with these cumbersome writing systems, the Phoenician consonantal alphabet and the rapidly evolving Greek script of the seventh and sixth centuries were both simpler to learn and more pragmatically designed for uses beyond the control of the priesthood or state apparatus. Indeed we can speak of the ‘completion’ and ‘formal perfection’ of the Greek alphabetic script by the end of the seventh century. Progress here took the form of spreading the new mental technology and socializing individuals born into a primary oral culture to the ways of abstract, phonetic inscription. In this sense the full alphabetization of Greek consciousness was probably not completed until the end of the fourth century BC and even then the majority of the population of a typical city were never completely literate. Unlike the tradition-preserving media of its competitors, alphabetic script positively encouraged the social processes of rationalization and democratizing, facilitating, for example, a much shorter period of training for those who would acquire the basic semiotic skills of the new mental technology. As Cottrell observes, in Archaic Greece literacy swiftly took on a public purpose; it allowed the polis to disclose to its citizens the machinery of government as well as the code of law. Magistrates could never again evoke traditions in order to declare that their opinions were correct. (1985:158) It was, in other words, a powerful democratizing instrument. And symbolically one of the first known alphabetic inscriptions—found on a cup from a grave 120

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of a Chalcidian trade at Ischia, c. 750–720 BC—includes a self-reference: ‘I am Nestor’s cup. Whoever drinks will be struck at once with desire for faircrowned Aphrodite’(Cottrell, 1985:142;Burkert, 1992:33; Murray, 1993:95). It was this remarkably efficient system that became the prototype for all subsequent European scripts, still recognizable in the Western alphabets in use today.43 Writing and the rationalization of law in the sixth-century polis In 1941 the jurist Hans Kelsen proposed the thesis that the Greek concept of nature had both its proximate origin and immanent content in a unique institution, which he identified as the normative discourse categories of the ‘authoritarian community’—or what we would today recognize as state power. The Greek interpretation of nature as universal legality, so Kelsen believed, was the ‘projection of the law of the state into the cosmos’. This social construction is then occluded and subsequently reified, leaving the husk— ‘the lawful cosmos’ as though it was a self-standing object for thought. In this way the implacable legality of the universe was freed from its social origins and ‘given a fully independent meaning’: ‘The law of the state, the norm, on the one hand, and the law of nature, the law of causality, on the other, become two totally different principles’ (1946:233). In Kelsen’s theory, the idea of the remorseless lawfulness of ‘nature’ was socially constructed from figures and metaphors of political and ethical interdiction which were themselves rooted in older mythemes and discursive practices woven about the rule of retribution and the implicit social cosmology of retributive justice.44 Kelsen’s basic idea is that the category of cause was historically developed from social ascriptions of guilt, that a law-governed view of the cosmos was derived from sociolegal paradigms. The basic categories informing a naturalistic image of nature are political in origin: The inviolability [of law] consists in the fact that violation of the law is always and without exception punished. For the universal law, as a legal rule, is a norm laying down sanctions; this norm is, according to its tenor, a law of retribution and, as such, the unshakeable will of a deity. The logos of Heraclitus is Dike, the goddess of inescapable revenge. The inviolability of the causal law, so contested in modern natural science, the absoluteness of its validity, originated in the inviolability which myth and the philosophy of nature evolving from it attributed to the principle of retribution as the substance of a divine and thus absolutely binding will. From this principle of retribution the earliest natural science worked out its law of nature.45 Thus the retributive power of justice (Dike) guarding the logos of nature in Heraclitus, the law of cosmic retribution in Anaximander, the fates (Moirae) and necessity (ananke) in Aeschylus, themis in the Homeric poems, all define principles 121

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for the sanctionable course of things, rules of conduct that govern the right ordering of all things. From this standpoint, the naturalistic kosmos was a social construction, a metaphorical projection of the moral and legal rules of the Archaic Greek city-state. In other words the Presocratics were simply tracing their own language-games and treating these as though they were the framework of the world itself. The ‘natural universe’ is a mythic projection of sociomorphic operations, a socialization of nature on the model of the authoritarian community. If ‘necessity’ is thought to rule the whole universe, we are simply elaborating the sedimented rules of an hegemonic social system: The cause is ‘responsible’ for the effect. This is the internal connection between the two elements of the law of causality; and the idea of such an internal connection between cause and effect has not yet entirely disappeared from the thinking of modern natural science. (Kelsen, 1946:248) A less speculative, though complementary, sociological thesis claims that this imaginative interplay between societal and cosmic legality was facilitated by one very particular development which served as a homology for both the microcosm of moral order and the macrocosm of the universe itself. This was the idea of the self-governing city-state or polis and its juridical objectification in public tables of laws (those of Zaleukos of Locri, c. 675, Draco of Athens, c. 625, and Dreros of Crete in the second half of the century (cf. Murray, 1993:96ff.)). Here it was the configuration of political, legal, and literate institutions which formed the optimum social context for the development of the idea of a world totality governed by law-like principles, of the Many subject to the dictates of the One (law). And not coincidentally, the period of Presocratic thought was the great epoch of the city-state.46 6 A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF ANCIENT INSTITUTIONS OF REFLEXIVITY The sociological generalization linking technologies of reflexivity (such as writing systems) and forms of knowledge to dominant occupational types and modes of production drifts toward reductionism; stated without qualification it applies to sixth-century Ionia as well (or as badly) as it does to sixteenth-century Europe. But despite its crudeness and generality it does foreground important connections. It suggests that an economy encouraging the manipulation of mechanical technology in arisanate manufacture—with concomitant traditions of technical training—may also create the idea of predicting and controlling natural forces by ways other than through magic, rite, or religious ritual. The history of Ionian civilization also supports a related generalization: that the material and technical infrastructure of rationalized science is insufficient to produce anything like a ‘scientific revolution’; that technical inventiveness and 122

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projects of amazing creativity and imagination come to nought without a seedbed of reflexive consciousness involving a new attitude toward the world. Ionian science had little institutional support for its experiments, the requisite institutions of reflexivity were unavailable, the necessary training or socialization practices were too fragile and dispersed to sustain the revolutionary implications of Ionian science. But most important of all, the immanent constraints of the speculative ethos—what I have termed the videological culture of Classical Greece—were already at work in the audiences and patrons of Ionian technology. The Milesian philosophers were in fact acting and thinking against the grain of aristocratic cultural ideals. Where they were later remembered, they are classified as ‘sages’ or ‘mechanics’. Speculative theorizing and technological theory and experimental praxis were thus dissociated and followed their separate ways. Under the influence of videological ideology, Classical Greek mathematics and philosophy followed more speculative directions. The spiritual obstacle which blocked instrumental application on a larger scale may have been the contemplative ethos of Greek culture itself.47 These observations call for a sociology of the conditions of knowledge production that would isolate the factors that blocked the development of geometrical science and philosophical theory in civilizations like Egypt and Babylonia while encouraging pure inquiry in Greece. A comparison with ancient Egypt is illuminating. Both Egypt and Greece used geometrical techniques in navigation and civil engineering programmes; both had artisan crafts and—though relatively undeveloped—manufacturing industries; both engaged in international trade; both developed analogous conceptions of the society of gods. However, key differences are apparent. Egyptian mathematics was controlled by a centralized class of scribes under the watchful eyes of state priests and administrators; technical knowledge was confined to closed guilds, organised hierarchically with exclusive entrance requirements (writing, for instance, became the sole prerogative of the priesthood). In Ionia such skills were largely available to any citizen with the resources necessary to acquire them; mathematics, writing, and literacy were not vested in a sacred office controlled by the state (recall Aristotle’s sentence: ‘it was in Egypt that the mathematical arts were first developed, for there the priestly class was set apart as a leisured one’ (Met. 981b23–5)). On a more theoretical plane, Egyptian mathematics was almost exclusively concerned with problems of land measurement and surveying (two activities that were of central importance for an economy dependent upon the control of irrigation networks), while Babylonian mathematics was preoccupied with astronomical calculations serving astrological purposes. The political systems of both Egypt and Babylonia effectively controlled and repressed the mathematical imagination. Egyptian society was highly stratified and in some of its most powerful dynasties, displayed an almost caste-like rigidity. In Ionia, by contrast, patterns of occupational mobility were encouraged as a normal condition of its commercial and mercantile economy. Theoretical knowledge 123

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was not radically separated from practical application; the two, in fact, were allowed to interact fruitfully. Specialization of knowledge followed the market forces which made trades and industries divide and expand. No heavy-handed system of state control tried to monopolize and regulate these developments. In practice the skills of the new occupations of builder, metalworker, physician, engineer, astronomer, and so on were integrated within the wider social system. Analogous considerations apply to the writing notations of Egypt and Ionia. Where the former could take a lifetime of specialized training, the system of alphabetical elements could be acquired in a matter of months or years. The striking efficiency of the phonetic alphabet acted as a further democratizing force. In ethical domains, utility and calculability frequently displaced traditional moral yardsticks (just as the calculation of costs and losses of mercantile and war enterprises played a key role in perennial struggles between city-states); new forms of commercial exploitation and colonization went hand in hand with the evolution of the arts of war. Where the Phaoronic bureaucracy and its priestly guilds controlled knowledge in Egypt, in the Greek world we find a dynamic interaction of markets, commercial activity, and war. These institutions are among the necessary preconditions for the experimental attitude we have ascribed to the early works of Ionian philosophy and science and, more generally, to early sixth-century linguistic innovation. Language, of course, does not change in any linear, monocausal manner— and certainly not as a simple reflection of technological changes. As always there is a dialectic at work in social life. Yet the language of speculation and theorizing did indeed change radically around this period—and nowhere more markedly than along the Ionian seaboard: Language began to change. Prephilosophical staples like eros and chronos (both of which myth had already appropriated for its own purposes), eidos, physis, and the already mentioned arche developed new connotations, while other older worlds like hyle and stoicheion were expropriated for radical new purposes. The concrete yielded to the abstract, as poion, ‘just such a thing’, gives way to piotes, ‘quality’ (in Theaetetus 182 A Plato apologizes for the awkward new term)…The combinatory powers of the language are tapped to describe the new complexities (hypostasis, hypokeimenon, symbebekos, entelecheia), and there appears a veritable treasure trove of abstract terms to identify newly isolated processes (apodeixis, synagoge, phronesis, genesis, kinesis, aisthesis, noesis).48 As we have suggested above, such linguistic innovations are only intelligible when seen in the context of larger sociocultural changes. The comparison with other civilizations is instructive. No one now doubts that ancient China, for example, was vastly superior in certain fields of mathematics, technology, and practical science than the Near Eastern or Hellenic civilization and—if we accept Joseph Needham’s painstaking analyses—even more sophisticated than Western European science at the onset 124

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of the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century; nor can we deny the deeper roots of the Greek world itself in the face of contemporary archaeological evidence concerning the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods. Well before the Greeks arrived on the historical scene, Egypt had well-founded accounts of geometry and geometrical mensuration; Babylonian science compiled exhaustive empirical charts of planetary motion. Yet these civilizations did not develop theoretical science and pure mathematics as generative, relatively autonomous institutions. What was lacking was not merely a receptive intelligentsia, a fruitful social, economic, and political context, but also a speculative attitude toward the universe. The videological value complex which authorized individuals to ask bizarre questions and to follow those questions with equally unorthodox theorizing freed from traditional solutions, the freedom to engage in speculative reflexivity as an end in itself, appears to have been unique to Greek Ionia during this axial period. Only Ionia—among the Middle Eastern civilizations -evolved into a ‘risk culture’. In Ionia we find a class of marginal intellectuals -merchants, technicians, poets, and philosophers—eager to question the inherited beliefs about the world and to replace these with a new vision of order. What was required for this cultural leap was the freedom of radical imagination. The Ionian scientists were the first Utopian thinkers in the Western canon. And the basic premise of Utopian thinking is the imaginary transcendence of past and present, a willingness to suspend belief, to imagine alternative arrangements or radically different forms of life. What is left out of the traditional accounts of early philosophy is the spirit of Utopia: only in the Ionian city-states did this desire coalesce with the material conditions to produce that most astounding of human activities—speculative theorizing. This orientation draws our attention to the question of the historical ‘carriers’ of reflexivity and the concrete social preconditions conducive to the development of risk consciousness. Even a superficial analysis of the main knowledge producers and codifiers of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt strongly suggests the presence of a pervasive conservatism produced by the fusion of two spheres of interest: one religio-magical (the Pharaonic priesthood and the Mesopotamian astrologers), the other, instrumental-practical (Pharaonic tax gathering and Mesopotamian canal administration). Moreover these practices were completely integrated into the centralized temple economies of Egypt and Mesopotamia. The temple complex formed the bureaucratic core of the whole social system. Here religious forces made for a fusion rather than a differentiation of economic, political, and religious spheres. And the institutional dynamics of the bureaucracy encouraged more rather than less centralization and regulation (exemplified by the vast archives of written inventories processed by the temple bureaucracies of ancient Egypt and Sumer). The combined effect of these structures was to privilege stable techniques, magical formulae, and practically-oriented technologies as well as encouraging a strict separation between scribal guilds professionalizing in religiously sanctioned knowledge (concentrated in hands 125

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of the temple bureaucracy) and the craft skills transmitted by independent artisans and technicians. We have literary evidence for such a hierarchized division of labour between the ‘mind crafts’ and ‘hand crafts’ in Egyptian texts dating back to the second millennium.49 It is necessary, of course, to check these generalizations by examining other comparable civilizations where a literate guild or clerical corporation achieves a relatively powerful position in the directive apparatuses of society. The theory suggests that the intellectual monopoly and control of socially effective systems of knowledge—or ‘cultural capital’—forms a fundamental dimension of power and authority in complex—particularly urban—societies; and, more significantly, that the axis of symbolic power should be viewed as an independent factor in exploring the changing economic fortunes and spiritual directions taken by civilizations at crucial points in their evolution. The pragmatism, traditionalism, and guild conservatism of such strategic groups and institutions provides negative evidence, when posing questions about the social conditions which encourage speculation, innovation, and reflexive experimentation. This does not mean that there is a simple linear correlation between the structural and motivational characteristics of influential ‘symbol-producing’ intellectual groups and intellectual change, and certainly not that this is the only causal factor in cultural innovation. Rather we are claiming that in certain historical contexts such groups can act as instigators or obstacles to a range of socially possible developments and forms of consciousness (for example, the institutionalization of a dominant script-qua reflexive technology—in a culture-producing corporation (say, cuneiform in Mesopotamia, hieroglyphic writing in Egypt) positively discourages a shortening of the time period required for literacy and hence considerably devalues change and innovation as normal features of cultural apprenticeship and learning). Thus although Egypt and Mesopotamia created advanced forms of mathematics, astronomy, and mensuration systems (for example, a calendar year divided into twelve lunar months, a decimal system, and the division of the circle into 360 degrees), and also sophisticated bodies of ‘demagicalized’ medicine, they produced nothing analogous to speculative reflexivity or theorizing as an autonomous way of life. The singular conception of the pursuit of knowledge as an end in itself does not seem to have taken root within the institutional core of these great civilizations. Similar considerations extend to the intelligentsia of ancient India and China. We come into the vicinity of Max Weber’s famous question: why, given that the ancient civilizations of the Near and Far East created advanced systems of knowledge, constructed vast architectural projects, and elaborated complex legal and political structures, did these social formations not follow the path of a more universal rationalization? Why did the cultural revolution that began in Archaic Greece and produced some of the basic institutions of science and technology not happen outside of Western Europe?50 126

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When posed in this global form, however, the question is unanswerable (it translates: why was Egypt, China, India, Mayan civilization, etc. not the West? or it presupposes a teleological understanding of universal rationalization). However, when broken into more manageable parts, it suggests important questions for comparative cultural history. The contrast between ‘East’ and ‘West’ is clearly overdrawn and ideological: we know of the complex patterns of material and cultural exchange across the great riverine systems of the ancient world; the Indus valley civilization created the root language (Indo-European) from which many other cultures would subsequently draw; bodies of knowledge were imported and exported along with the expansion of international commerce, and so on. It is also clear that this contrast should not be posed solely in terms of the absence of ‘abstractive abilities’ or the lack of an appropriate ‘theoretical attitude’ (if only for the fact that Indian and Babylonian mathematics and Chinese technology remained far more advanced that anything the Greeks produced—Babylonian mathematicians had already ‘abstracted’ the fundamental principle of place positions for numerical calculation, a principle the Greeks never understood or adopted; Chinese mathematicians had discovered the decimal number system; Indian mathematics was far more ‘digitallized’ than any of the comparable Western systems-possessing, for instance, a symbol for zero, one of the great advances in mathematical theory).51 Differences should not be overdrawn or timeless archetypes substituted for historical research. What does seem generally true, however, is that cultural differences should be explored in the context of their underlying institutions and forms of life, rather than derived from putative ‘psychological’, ‘spiritual’, or ‘metaphysical’ propensities. To take a concrete instance: Greece moved rapidly in the seventh and sixth centuries toward an economy based on commodity markets and extended mercantile exchange. And we have suggested that, ceteris paribus, generalized systems of exchange tend to accelerate the spread of abstract monetary practices with a range of unintended consequences: the growth of the money-form, the increased premium placed upon abstract calculation of values, the emergence of the idea of contextindependent symbolism and measures of ‘value’, the accelerated spread of market institutions, the accentuation of individualism, and so forth. Abstract exchange relations encouraged individuals to look beyond the common sense of appearances for an abstract, unitary measure of symbolic equivalence. Analogous patterns would then be sought in physical, moral, and political experience: beneath the variety of experience lies a set of equivalence functions governing the world of human existence and nature. Money was a prototype of the pure ‘unity’ that could resolve all heterogeneity into a common standard of exchange. Philosophers like Anaximander, Parmenides, and Xenophanes created the maximally general form of this insight, searching for the universal ‘logos’ that gathered all things into an intelligible Whole. 127

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Greek institutions of reflexivity A comparative sociology of the intelligentsia—that is, of those organized groups specializing in the production and reproduction of knowledge—must necessarily begin with this unique civilization. It is only Greek society in the late Archaic period that produced anything like an identifiable sequence of intellectual schools, research and teaching academies. Many other civilizations have produced intellectual strata, with various degrees of power and influence; yet very few are known by the names of their founders or by lines of genealogical descent and conceptual influence. We have to shed our own habitual frames of reference to recall how strange such a community is in the history of earlier civilizations. The historical fact of an organized group of scholars dedicated to a life of knowing is unusual in itself. How doubly strange is an organized community of thinkers, scholars, and experimentalists committed to a radical overthrow of tradition and dogma, groups committed to the Utopian project of redrawing the world picture as a whole? The hierarchical imperatives of hydraulic economies and their correlated power structures acted as an obstacle to the development of more polycentric systems of social, cultural, and political institutions. Consider, for example, the centralized social systems evolved by the Aztecs of Mexico, the Maya of Yucatan, or the Incas of Peru. These autocratic civilizations survived for centuries without such primitive technologies as the wheel or a refined writing system (literacy remained minimal—ignoring the quipu and the still-undeciphered pictographic scripts). A naive sociological response is to say that such cultures had no need for these particular technologies—they were functionally unnecessary and ‘hence’ never evolved. But this evades a major problem by not attending to these ‘absences’ and locating the specific contexts which led whole civilizations to evolve from scattered, belligerent tribal groupings into large-scale, centripetal empires without the use of writing and other technological apparatuses. Reducing these questions to functional needs evades the task of a sociological analysis of the crucial groups and classes involved in the production of knowledge and power. It also fails to address the complex interconnections between state power, imperial symbolism, and the religiousmetaphysical context which legitimated and defined the awesome power and authority of these ‘immobile empires’. Furthermore, we now know that in some respects their knowledge systems were not only different from Western systems but even more differentiated and ‘advanced’—for example, Mayan calendrical and astronomical knowledge. The evidence suggests that it was precisely the underlying value complexes and metaphysical orientations that were crucial ingredients in the specific evolution of different epistemic formations (the astronomical systems developed by the Maya and Aztecs are inseparable from their solar cosmology and related metaphysical beliefs). In a closed civilization such as Pharaonic Egypt or Incan Peru change could only be imagined as a rectification of evils within the rigid stratification 128

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structure. To change the structure of power and religious authority from within was all but impossible. Change occurred with the death of the divine head or with the usurpation of power by a member of the ruling class seeking to restore the divine order in times of crisis. And even the change of a dynastic lineage typically left the priestly hierarchy in place. A similar deference for tried-and-tested guild rules and rigorously observed traditional rules also seems to have been the norm in such spheres as medicine, calendrical calculation, tax-farming, and literacy. The institutionalization of severe penalties for any deviation further acted as a block on risk and creative innovation—the two essential ingredients of scientific development. Consider the report of Diodoros of Sicily, writing at the time of Julius Caesar: They [the Egyptians] treated diseases according to the written precepts of the famous physicians of old. If by following the rules of a sacred book, they failed to save a patient’s life, they felt free of any blame or reproach; if, on the other hand, they ignored the written rule, they could be prosecuted and condemned to death. The law considered that few men could discover a better method of cure than that practised for so long, and one established by the best practioners. (1.82) As one writer has observed, we cannot imagine the emergence of prophets in ancient Egypt who could ‘challenge the legitimacy of a pharaoh’s rule on moral grounds. The hydraulic basis of this rule was no doubt too patent an ethical justification’.52 Also consider the changes in values and intellectual attitudes that would be required in ancient Mayan civilization to suggest the idea of an alternative to the heliocentric cosmology with its cyclical system of human sacrifice and priestly observance. What is crucial in all these instances, then, is the presence of a specific value complex, a specific logological matrix in terms of which non-traditional orientations and objectives can be experimentally framed and directed by groups and collectivities. This leads to an important set of sociological questions. How was the logos—the discourses and rhetorics of early Greek science and philosophy—organized and transmitted? What were the characteristic social practices and institutions of the logological form of life? And equally important from the perspective of the present work, how did ‘reason’ and its attendant sceptical consequences become a significant praxis, a tradition and material force ? What were the characteristic sites of scientific and philosophical discourse in the ancient Greek world? A number of general forms are clearly distinguishable: • where the recitation or singing of Homer has its natural site in the central palace of a rich patron, aristocrat, or king, Presocratic science and philosophical speculation is located in characteristically urban and secular environments—the Presocratic observatory, the workshop linked to 129

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•

•

•

•

•

technical innovations and inventions (cf. Aristophanes’ Clouds), the teaching precinct, the agora;53 by the time of Socrates and the Sophists the pursuit of knowledge has shifted to the public market-place, the agora, and to the houses of individual patrons of philosophy and the new learning; but the most characteristic environment of Socratic reflexivity is the gymnasium (training ground) and the palaistra (wrestling school); Plato has Euthyphro, in the dialogue of the same name, refer to the Lyceum Gymnasium as one of Socrates’ favourite haunts; with Plato and more especially Aristotle, scientific and philosophical research has adopted a more technical vocabulary and, appropriately, shifted toward a more specialized institutional locale—the enclosed space of the Academy or Lyceum (which were themselves originally the site of gymnasia); it is in these new ‘research institutes’ that we find the beginnings of a training programme in the various scientific disciplines, particularly mathematics, logic, and—after Aristotle and Theophrastus—biological and physical inquiry; this important development was continued in the Hellenistic world, where the philosophical sanctum acquired a quasi-religious significance, as in the enclosed Garden of Epicurus, the Colonnade of the Stoa, and the enclosed terrace of the patrician villa (the pre-eminent site of Roman Stoicism); running parallel with the privatization and professionalization of philosophy the ‘amateur’ philosopher, wandering sophist, and Cynic ascetic ply their trade in the market place or at the cross-roads of urban centres; by the end of the third century Philosophy had been fused with Rhetorical training (originating with the Isocratean school at Athens); its locus once more moved indoors to the school of ‘grammatical instruction’, the élite professional schools of the Rhetor, and the private villas of wealthy Roman patrons; finally, toward the end of this period at Alexandria we find the unique institution of the philosophical library and scientific museum—the prototypical research centre of the ancient world, prefiguring the archive systems of the modern scientific academies, libraries, and research departments: as an employee of the state, the ‘philosopher’ becomes the incumbent, translator, commentator, expositor, teacher, and adapter of a Classical tradition (with the concomitant changes in philosophical responsibility, practices of reflection, and literary style). 7 CONCLUSION: THE CONCEPT OF A PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENT

While these developments have parallels in other civilizations the emergence of something like a recognized institution of speculative inquiry, mathematical, medical, and scientific communities, and philosophical movements is unique 130

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to Graeco-Roman civilization. While not wishing to reduce intellectual structures to the reflexes of material processes or modes of production, we must still be able to account for the materialization of knowledge by uncovering the local conditions of knowledge production, circulation, and transformation. For this purpose ideal-types such as ‘civilizations’, ‘society’, or ‘cultural production’ are of little use. We have been forced by the historical materials and extant evidence relating to Presocratic intellectual history to move to lower levels of abstraction—specific groups of intellectuals, schools, guilds, professional intelligentsia, and self-conscious philosophical movements. In the following chapters we will see that philosophy is first and foremost an intellectual activity resulting in the production of texts and discourses, communicated within specific communities and directed to particular audiences. We have also argued that philosophy did not begin as a purely intellectual activity, but was connected with other practices, particularly from the spheres of work, technology, law, ethics, and religion. For example, the great Ionian thinkers were also engaged in practical work, technical innovations, civic projects, architectural construction, and so forth. All of these findings strengthen the initial directive of logological investigations: to study the activities of theory and theorizing as dialectical elements of a dynamic configuration of practices; and, of equal importance, to study the reflexive uses and contexts of what passes for knowledge in a given society and culture. The processes we have outlined fit the description Antonio Gramsci gave of a philosophical movement, so called when it is devoted to creating a specialised culture among restricted intellectual groups, or rather when, and only when, in the process of elaborating a form of thought superior to ‘common sense’ and coherent on a scientific plane, it never forgets to remain in contact with the ‘simple’ and indeed finds in this contact the source of the problems it sets out to study and to resolve. Recall the practical innovations and technological inventions that tradition ascribes to figures like Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes. Only by this reciprocal contact does a philosophy or ‘science’ become ‘historical’, entering into the texture of social life and history itself, and thus ‘purify itself of intellectualistic elements of an individual character, and become “life”’.54 In Gramsci’s sense, philosophy is a definite mode of intellectual production, tied by multiple threads to its social and political environment— more particularly to the economic imperatives of a specific mode of production, the political conditions of social hegemony, and the ideological values of powerful ruling groups. From this perspective there is no such thing as ‘disinterested knowledge’ or a neutral culture of intellectual production that grows and accumulates by its own logic. Knowledge is constructed by social groups within a contested field of ideology. As a body 131

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of discourse it remains embedded in the conflicts and struggles of particular institutions and traditions. These observations underline the importance of exploring the specific genealogies of conceptual ‘specialists’ and the manner in which social reflexivities are concretely institutionalized and put to work in a given society. For example, the complex connections between developments in the institutional practices of ancient medicine, technological praxis, and theoretical knowledge still remain relatively unexplored. Gramsci provides the leitmotif: Critical self-consciousness means, historically and politically, the creation of an élite of intellectuals. A human mass does not ‘distinguish’ itself, does not become independent in its own right without, in the widest sense, organising itself; and there is no organisation of intellectuals, that is, without organisers and leaders, in other words, without the theoretical aspect of the theory-practice nexus being distinguished concretely by the existence of a group of people ‘specialised’ in conceptual and philosophical elaboration of ideas.55 Accepting the obvious limitations of this cursory analysis it is now possible to summarize the material and sociocultural factors that appear to have been indispensable conditions for the creation of ancient Greek cosmology and science. We can disentangle the multicausal complex under the following headings: Socoieconomic institutions (i)

the development of highly individualistic mercantile enterprises in the late seventh century, linked with innovations in war, shipping, mercantile trade, and commerce; (ii) the concomitant social and eocnomic changes initiated by a marketoriented economy in Ionia; (iii) the disruptive effects of the money-form as a generalized medium of exchange (economic diversification, new economic relations, and utilitarian practices); (iv) physical and geographical influences on economic activity (seaboard location, climate, the pre-eminence of mobile commodities such as olives, wine, wool, and pottery); Political institutions (v)

the new institution of the polis, particularly in its more democratic forms emphasizing autarchy, polycentrism, and interdependence; (vi) the growth of new types of ruling class and legitimation (oligarchies, military élites, ‘tyrants’ and the concomitant weakening of traditional aristocracy—a process accelerated by the expansion of money-capital); 132

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(vii) development of pan-Hellenic political alliances and trade agreements (for example, the pan-Ionian confederation opposed to the Persian empire as a precursor of the Delian League); (viii) the positive role of political heterogeneity in encouraging different constitutions and forms of political authority; Religious institutions (ix) a pluralistic and systematized pantheon of gods (anthropomorphized and disseminated through the media of mythical and epic narrative forms); (x) magic and ‘mystery’ religiosity as merely one element rather than the foundation of religious experience; (xi) absence of a sacred, traditional priesthood with a controlling monopoly over the instruments and techniques of reflexivity (and cultural production more generally); (xii) the relatively unimportant role of religious persecution and ‘heresy’ on the part of the central state authority; Cultural institutions (xiii) the spread of non-Greek bodies of knowledge (particularly Babylonian and Egyptian mathematics) as a consequence of trade and political interchange; (xiv) the growth of individualism and humanism during the seventh century; (xv) the invention and spread of the phonetic alphabet (c. 750–600 BC) and with it new skills in ‘analysis’, especially in viewing problems in terms of elements and their combinatorial rules; (xvi) the generalized cultural influence of epic and lyric poetry; (xvii) pan-Hellenism (Greek language and cultural continuity, ideological continuity represented by Homer, the Pan-Hellenic Games and, later, tragic drama and poetry); (xviii) increased specialization of cultural workers and intellectual division of labour, especially in the emergence of medical guilds (forerunners of the Hippocratic fraternities), guilds of science (the Pythagorean brotherhood at Croton and Metapontum) and philosophical schools (at Miletus, Elea, and later Megara, Athens and elsewhere); (xix) development of a naturalistic, videological culture (in literature, architecture, statuary, and so forth). By way of contrast, material conditions and institutions that were relatively unpropitious in Egypt and the Near East during this period included:

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Socioeconomic institutions (i)

the presence of powerful bureaucratic administrations linked to the management of water-ways and irrigation systems (especially in Sumer and Mesopotamia); (ii) primacy of state-controlled agricultural production; (iii) the massive drain of wealth and diseconomies accompanying the expansion of a theocratic administrative class and bureaucratic system of tax gatherers, surveyors and surveillance institutions; the tendency to obstruct the development of independent commercial and manufacturing cities in favour of urbanization as taxation and consumption centres; (iv) socioeconomic regression following the monumental architectural projects which drained the economy of labour, capital, and raw materials (further reinforcing an ethos which viewed physical labour as work fit only for slaves); (v) the instability of palace economies and large-scale empires as effective distributional mechanisms in times of war, economic scarcity, or rapid political change (for example, the failure of the Minoan-Mycenaean empire to respond to rapid environmental and social changes in the thirteenth century BC); Political institutions (vi) totalitarian political systems based on absolute, centralized monarchical power, having an overdetermining effect on controlling and directing economic activities along rigidly predetermined lines—political arrangements which penalized economic innovation and change; (vii) sacredotal authority vested in kings and royal priesthoods (in extreme instances leading to caste-like dynastic succession and theocratic forms of oriental despotism embodied in the person of the absolute ruler); (viii) concomitant development of one-directional systems of authority and inflexible centric political and military hierarchies (fossilizing into hereditary, caste-like social strata); (ix) global ideological legitimation exemplified in the divine kingship of pharaonic Egypt: the Pharaoh as both supreme ruler and incarnate God; (x) the consequent failure to institutionalize political institutions of ‘criticism’ and ‘change’: criticism of the palace-economy or king-god system is by definition an act of revolt and treason; (xi) repression of independent municipalities, autonomous mercantile centres, or ‘polis-type’ organizations; Cultural institutions (xii)

the sacralization of all aspects of everyday life (expressed by the 134

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(xiii)

(xiv)

(xv)

(xvi) (xvii)

(xviii)

progressive ritualization of cultural practices, polytheism, and the ‘magification’ of nature); the hegemony of the sacred blocked societal development by strengthening the dedifferentiation of social activities, practices, and institutions; the dominance of centralized priestly-administrative strata, monopolizing writing as a means of communication, control, and power—thus creating a power base formed around the control of the arts of literacy and, thereby, the literary canon; the complexity of hieroglyphic and cuneiform scripts reinforcing the closed guild-pattern of intellectual communities designed to preserve tried-and-tested ways and methods of knowing and obstructing speculation and innovation; linked to this, the radical separation of the bureaucratic systems of scribal literacy from everyday economic realities and technical processes (written language as an otherworldly, sacred, and arcane intellectual technology); the dominance of thanatonic and ‘other-worldly’ ethics in ancient Egypt; the primacy of ‘global’ images of the regularities and cycles of existence, inseparable from the divine principles of Natural order—hence the pre-eminence of ordering principles which stress Balance, Order, following the eternal Principle, or bringing the mind into consonance with an unchanging Whole (for example, the ‘ethical holism’ of Confucianism, the mystical principles of Taoism, the wheel of Karma in Buddhism); the restriction of mathematical inventiveness and empirical science to practical and instrumental contexts.

We shall have occasion to return to these themes in exploring the different shapes taken by later Presocratic thought. Here they may serve as pointers for the investigations in the following chapters. Of course each of these ideal-typical factors represents a cluster of further problems and questions which require more detailed and systematic analysis—for example, how do we explain the absence of priesthood as an institutionalized profession in the ancient Greek world? How did the ethos of individualism and competition enter the practices of different cultural fields? How did the Homeric texts foster criticism and more secular attitudes toward the gods? What were the specific effects of monetarization upon traditional practices and civic associations?

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3 ANAXIMANDER’S COSMOS

Wise are they who do homage to Necessity (Adrasteia). (Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 936) It was Anaximander who created the framework within which early Greek philosophy developed from start to finish. This framework was subjected to severe strains…but the framework held, and the history of Greek philosophy is largely the history of the exploration of the possibilities inherent in it. (John Mansley Robinson)1 The universal sweep of Anaximander’s genius had drawn a cosmological picture, the general outlines and major motifs of which determined the limits and the direction of all subsequent Presocratic speculation in this field. (H.F.Cherniss)2 1 2 3 4 5 6

Introduction The text of Anaximander: the Apeiron-Fragment Anaximander’s discourse Anaximander’s cosmos The cosmic vortex After Anaximander 1 INTRODUCTION

Anaximander was twenty to twenty-five years younger than his teacher Thales, giving a date for his birth c. 611/610 BC (Diogenes Laertius cites the Chronology or Chronicles of Apollodorus of Athens which dated Anaximander’s birth to the second or third year of the forty-second Olympiad—the same dating being repeated by Hippolytus at Ref. 1.6.13). According to Apollodorus, Anaximander was 64 years old in the second year of the fifty-eighth Olympiad, dying shortly afterwards around the time of the fall of Sardis, making 547/546 BC the most likely date for his death.3 Diogenes 136

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Laertius, Simplicius, and Hippolytus all refer to him as the son of Praxiades, a Milesian. Being both natives of Miletus, tradition connects Thales and Anaximander as teacher and disciple—a genealogical link which was accepted by Aristotle (384–322 BC) and his most important student in the Lyceum, Theophrastus (c. 371-c. 287). It was from Theophrastean accounts—probably teaching compendiums of the central doctrines of the Milesians—that later interpreters such as Hippolytus of Rome derived their information on the lives of the early thinkers. If we accept this periodization, Anaximander would have been active about two decades after Thales’ mature work. Anaximander probably came from a wealthy social stratum, evidenced by his extensive travels and his political influence in Miletus. Like Thales he lived at the acme of Milesian culture and as statesman and legislator was believed to have been the founder of a Greek colony at Apollonia. He is said to have been one of the first to draw a map of the known world which, engraved on a bronze table, was still in use at the time of Eratosthenes.4 In antiquity he was regarded as a polymath, making fundamental contributions to astronomy, geology, meteorological studies, mathematics and physics, biology and zoology, and even the technology of measuring instruments. According to Diogenes Laertius—relaying the report of Apollodorus (c. second century BC)—Anaximander was not only the first to write a prose work with the title On Nature (Peri Phuseos), but was, with Thales, a geographer, technologist, and practical experimenter. He invented the gnomon—a modified set-square originally used by carpenters—which he had set up as a sun dial at a place called Skiotherai in Lacadaemon in order, ‘as Favorinus in his Miscellaneous History (Universal History) states’, to determine the solstices and the equinoxes (cf. Burnet 1930:26, n.1 on the artisanate origin of many Greek mathematical terms; cf. Burnet, 1930:51, n. 4; Farrington, 1947). Some historians have claimed that Anaximander visited Sparta in the midsixth century—perhaps in connection with the astronomical activities of the Spartan Ephors (‘An inscription of the middle of the second century BC from Cyrene mentions a sundial in connection with a list of Ephors. It is possible then that the Spartan Ephors made use of the Milesian’s astronomical knowledge’, Huxley, 1962:76). He constructed instruments (perhaps ‘clocks’ or cogged mechanisms) for marking the hours and, as we have observed, began the tradition of map-making—being the first to draw a map containing outlines of the land and sea. Apparently he extended this experimental project to include the problem of constructing an accurate globe or ‘global chart’ of the sky, presumably for use in astronomical research. Diogenes’ account (DL 1.2.1–2) is also substantiated by the report of Agathemerus, who links Anaximander’s map-making activities to the geographical work of his successor, Hecataeus of Miletus.5 Hecataeus revised the cartographic tablet of Anaximander making it more precise and usable, an innovation which was a ‘source of wonder’ to those who saw it. In the light of these glosses, Anaximander may even be regarded as one of the originators of physical geography (evidenced perhaps 137

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by the later phenomenological concern for detailed geographical information in the work of Herodotus and the Hippocratean writings). From these accounts we can reasonably assume that Anaximander investigated the respective properties of a spherical and a cylindrical earth and constructed experiments in geometrical representation to correspond to such ‘thought objects’. Diogenes explicitly states that Anaximander held that while the parts undergo change the whole is unchangeable; that the earth, which is spherical, lies at the very center of things; and that the sun is as large as the earth and consists of purest fire. (DL 1–2) Supplementing this with the extensive evidence from the doxographical tradition which unanimously depicts Anaximander’s earth as cylindrical in shape, we might reasonably speculate that Anaximandrian geometry followed patterns developed from experiments with cylindrical representation—an intuitive ‘visual’ solution of the complex problem of translating three-dimensional ‘outlines’ of a sphere to a two-dimensional plane can be constructed by transferring information on a solid cylinder to a two-dimensional materialparchment or papyrus—rolled around the sphere.6 Anaximander went even further, claiming that the diameter of the earth was three times its depth and estimating the sun’s orbit as twenty-seven times the earth’s diameter. These discoveries make Anaximander and the Milesian tradition in general an early source of projection theory, topology, and diagrammatic representation. The link between this work on representation and astronomy is direct: the Anaximandrian idea of constructing a ‘map of the world’ was most probably a generalization from the more ancient activity of constructing star maps for astrological and religious purposes. Here once more, the city-state of Miletus, with its crucial trade routes to Lydia and Mesopotamia, acted as a conduit for pre-Greek speculative ideas and technological innovations. Like his Milesian contemporaries Anaximander compiled a book with the title Peri Phusis (or Peri Phuseos);7 the central part of this work appears to have been conceived as a rational cosmogony based on the idea of the ‘unbounded’ or Apeiron. We can also conjecture that the work was intended to be read as a critique of Thales’ earlier cosmological theory in the sense that unlike Thales, who speaks of water as the source of the Whole, Anaximander returns the cosmos to a more abstract arche—appropriately signified by the privative expression ‘a-peiron’, ‘that which cannot be limited’ or ‘that which comes before all differentiation’. 2 THE TEXT OF ANAXIMANDER: THE APEIRON-FRAGMENT Peri Phuseos/Peri Phusis 138

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At some point in the second decade of the sixth century, Anaximander wrote the first prose text with the title Peri Phuseos—literally On Nature (a title that would become the paradigm for later works such as Empedocles’ Peri Phuseos (Fr. 8) and Parmenides’ metaphysical poem, On Nature). Of the first book of the European tradition, only one fragment remains, which we shall refer to as the Aperiron-Fragment. The work appears to have been a rare collector’s item even during the Classical period; and we are not even certain that its main source in antiquity—the Aristotelian commentator Simplicius (AD 500–540)—had access to an original manuscript. The ApeironFragment has been translated: That from which all things are born the beginning of all things the first foundation of things is the Unlimited (apeiron); The source from which coming-to-be is, for things that are, and for their passing away in accordance with necessity. For they give justice and pay retribution to each other for their mutual injustice according to the ordered process of time. This text is frequently referred to as the fragment of Anaximander. It appears as Fragment 1 in the Diels-Kranz collection (DK 12 B 1; cf. DK 12 A 9–15; DL 2.1; Dox. Gr.:, 476). It was cited by Simplicius in his Commentary on the Physics of Aristotle 24.13–25 (Anaximander A 9), but Simplicius, in turn, most probably lifted the text from Theophrastus’ encyclopaedic work on the Physical Opinions of his predecessors (Theophrastus, On the History of Natural Philosophy, Fr. 2, Dox. Gr.; DL 5.46; cf. Hippolytus, Ref. 1.6, 1–7; and Pseudo-Plutarch, Stromateis 2 (DK 112 A 10)). Recalling our methodological observations in Chapter 1 we should immediately note that the preservation of this isolated fragment from Anaximander’s work is indebted to the literary activities of later Aristotelian scholars working two centuries after Anaximander’s death. The ApeironFragment is an ‘embedded citation’ within the larger literary context of the Aristotelian corpus. For example, the very title of Theophrastus’ book, Physical Opinions (On the History of Natural Philosophy), is a Periptatetic translation of what the Presocratics called ‘On Phusis’, framing their questions and problematics in the language of fourth-century natural science (the Milesian project, as we have argued in Chapters 1 and 2, meant something more like a total account (logos) of the ‘coming-to-be of Being’, and the Ionians most probably described their own research with the word ‘(h)istoria—which is closer in meaning to ‘inquiry’, ‘research’, or ‘investigation’). Simplicius undoubtedly interpreted Anaximander’s theorizing through Theophrastean question-frames with their stock terminology of ‘principles’, ‘causes’, and ‘elements’; thus we learn that Anaximander determined the ‘first element of things’ [te kai stoicheion…ton onton] as ‘to Apeiron’, ‘the limitless, 139

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infinite, or indeterminate’. Anaximander’s Peri Phusis is thus seen as a contribution to the empirical study of nature: The material cause (arche) and first element (stoicheion) of things was the Infinite…and into that from which things take their rise they pass away once more, of necessity, for they make reparation and satisfaction to one another for their injustice according to the ordering of time.8 The first text of Western philosophy, then, is contained in a commentary of Simplicius—a sixth-century AD Alexandrian Aristotelian (fl.c. AD 500–40)on the lost work of Aristotle’s own student, Theophrastus (The Opinions of the Natural Philosophers or Physikon Doxai).9 While a library of secondary commentary has accumulated on the question of the meaning and authenticity of this passage, it is now generally accepted as the opening words of Anaximander’s Peri Phuseos, which, as we have noted, is the first philosophical text in European literature: Of those who hold that the first principle (arche) is one, moving, and infinite (apeiron), Anaximander, son of Praxiades, from Miletus, who was successor and pupil of Thales, declared that the Infinite to be principle and element of existing things. He was the first to introduce this word ‘principle’. He says that it is neither water nor any of the other so-called elements, but some different, infinite nature, from which all the heavens arise and the worlds (kosmoi) with them; out of those things whence is the generation of existing things, into these again does their destruction take place, according to what must needs be. For they make amends and give reparation to one another for their injustice in accordance with the ordinance of time—speaking of them thus in rather poetical terms. It is clear that, having observed the change of the four elements into one another, he did not think fit to make any one of these the material substratum, but rather chose something else apart from these. He explains coming into being not by the alteration of the element but by the separating off of the opposites by the eternal motion.10 3 ANAXIMANDER’S DISCOURSE Our first task is to recontextualize Anaximander’s thought by returning the Apeiron-Fragment to the pre-Aristotelian thought-world of Milesian cosmology. When Hesiod gazed toward the stars and heavens he perceived a divine cosmos violently torn from a primordial Chaos and formulated his vision in terms of a self-differentiating pantheon of elemental forces, Gods, Titans, and suffering mortals all bounded by the horizon of Sky and Earth. Mortals, Gods, and Nature are gathered together and coexist by grace of a divine ordination, tied by the fetters of Zeus into a harmonious order or Whole. Human beings are neither things nor gods. As Pindar would say more 140

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explicitly, mankind is the unstable mediator stretched between the necessary demands of dark Earth and the luminous vocation of divinity. For the Greek poetic tradition, human reality is ‘existence-in-the-world’. The older poetic vision of the cosmos was transformed in the direction of cosmological theory in Anaximander’s thought. Meditating beneath the lucid night skies of Miletus, Anaximander spoke of the ground of the cosmos as the Apeiron. When Anaximander scanned the heavens he perceived neither gods nor mortals; he looked beyond particular things to what he called ‘the boundless’ or to apeiron; in naming phusis as ‘the unbounded’ he transformed the prose of the world by a more imposing thought, the vision of the cosmic order as a process emerging from the invisible and the infinite. Yet, like Hesiod’s Dike, in the endless appearance and disappearance of things Anaximander detected the workings of ‘justice’ (‘diken…tisin…kata ten ton chronou taxing DK B 1). It was this change of attitude and new way of envisioning the Whole as a law-governed process which elicited Giorgio de Santillana’s judgement that Anaximander’s thought marks one of the most momentous breaks in the career of humanity, comparable only to the discovery of fire. For it is not a paradox to say that Anaximander’s system is as much an innovation on the way of thinking that came before as the whole of science has been since, from Anaximander to Einstein.11 The paradigm shift in thinking—to borrow Thomas Kuhn’s terms—helped crystallize the intellectual change from the concrete to the abstract, from the anschaulich to the begrifflich (Windelband, 1956:40; Hölscher 1970:320– 2). The resonant words of Fragment B 1 with their austere conception of compensatory justice punishing the ‘crime’ of existing beings literally invented the concept of abstract thought: whatever exists is universally subject to justified destruction. In the wake of this thesis, the world of the chthonian deities and the ancient gods of myth are no longer acceptable as guides to reality. Now the kosmos is perceived as a vast process of coming-to-be and passing-out-of existence. Every existing thing is a site of expiation for its violation of the apeiron. With this insight Anaximander began a train of thought that would continue into the fifth century and help create the intellectual systems of the Greek enlightenment. In keeping with logological methodology, let us return to the discursive context of the Apeiron-Fragment. In its original setting there appear to be three critical words which require careful sifting and explication. We have seen that the text abandons the images of myth and speaks of the arche of all things, of the cyclical time of ‘coming-to-be’ and ‘passing-away’ of all beings, of the necessity of whatever exists having to pay retribution for the injustice of existing (aitia), and of the matrix of phusis which the text indexes with the privative expression to apeiron (‘the boundless’). Before we can enter the space of Anaximander’s interpretation of the kosmos we require a more precise 141

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analysis of the key words of this text in the contexts of their use in sixthcentury Greek discourse. We need to recover and reconstruct the verbal and ideological field into which the ‘somewhat poetical’ words—in Simplicius’s description-arche, phusis, dike, aitia, and apeiron, were woven. In the text of DK B 1, the three key words drawn upon to articulate the apeiron are arche, phusis, and aitia. 3.1 Arche He [Anaximander] was the first to introduce this word ‘arche’. (Simplicius, Physics. 24.13) From our investigations in Volume 2 we can anticipate a great deal of semantic overlap between the idioms of myth, epic poetry, and the early experiments in philosophical abstraction. This is even more evident when we consider that Thales’ project to think the unity of Being in non-mythical idioms provided the immediate context for Anaximander’s text. For its problematic context, Anaximander’s text has two adversaries: the mythopoeic tradition and Thalean reflexivity. We can view Anaximander’s project as an attempt to continue along the path of his great predecessor in coining words and metaphors to define the nature of Being or the Whole as that which ‘encompasses’ all particular beings.12 The Thalean revolution in abstract thought was to be continued by an even more austere vision of Being. Here the distinctive style and rhetorical character of the Apeiron-text are crucial to his radical critique of the prephilosophical tradition. Perhaps the most pivotal word in the Apeiron-Fragment is arche. The polysemic word has numerous senses. Liddell and Scott give ‘beginning’, ‘origin’, ‘first cause’ as primary senses and ‘power’, ‘sovereigny’, ‘domination’ as extended meanings. One of the examples they cite is Aeschylus’ expression, arche-genes, ‘causing the first beginning of a thing’. The Peters lexicon extends this list to include: beginning, starting point, principle, ultimate underlying substance (Urstoff), ultimate undemonstrable principle (Peters, 1967:23 and analysis, 23–4). In early Greek culture the word arche (arkhe and its plural form archai) evoked a rich and often contradictory spectrum of meanings, encouraging the term to be appropriated for a wide range of metaphorical uses and analogous constructions. We have already seen that the opening sentence of Diogenes of Apollonia’s work On Mature utilizes the polysemy of arche to great effect: ‘it seems to me that the author, at the beginning of any account (logos), should make his principle or starting-point indisputable, and his explanation simple and dignified’.13 We can begin our analysis with the most concrete meanings of the word. In the language of the Archaic period, arche (or archai) designates the source, origin, or root of things that exist (in the simple sense that the arche of a plant lies in the soil from which it is nourished). If a thing is to be well-established or 142

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founded, its arche or starting point must be secure, and the most secure foundations are those provided by the gods—the indestructible, immutable, and eternal orderings of things. The quest for the arche of something—say a noble family, dynasty, or polis—is the search for well-established foundations. We can imagine the term being used in locutions analogous to the English paradigm ‘Individuals need roots’—in the multiple senses of being ‘racinated’ in familial, communal, and political contexts. By the sixth century the term was also a commonsense figure for commencing an action, ‘making something begin’, or ‘generating’ something in relatively quotidian and straightforward contexts (e.g. Pindar, Pythian 1.2.33–4). From here the sense of the word could be readily extended to more abstract domains and more complex functions. However complex, arche did not, in either everyday or poetic usage, have the meaning of ‘causality’ or the first term of a causal sequence in the modern sense of these terms. We know that the ‘causal’ meaning was a later innovation, popularized by the philosophical texts of Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle. Closely allied to this older meaning is the sense of birth or generation; things that have been produced or brought into being must have a beginning and thus to inquire into the arche of any thing is to ask after its beginnings or origins (we still appeal to this meaning when speaking of archaeology, literally the story of beginnings). In Archaic Greek the term simply refers to ‘beginnings’, as it frequently appears in the poetic tradition from Hesiod to Pindar with reference to the poet’s opening invocation to the Muses and gods prior to beginning his song: the poet must initiate a first beginning (arche) for his poem.14 Because of their shared allusions to time we might legitimately group the obstetric and source senses of arche together and speak of the temporal uses of the term. A related group of meanings moves a further notch in the direction of abstraction. Here arche has the sense of ‘foundation’ or ‘ground’, whatever institutes and sustains the site for a thing’s existence—the ground from which something proceeds (for example, the foundation of a building, the ground upon which I stand, the background out of which a figure arises, the premises of an argument, etc.). The ground in the literal spatial sense of ‘sustaining Earth’ is also what makes a building or superstructure possible as a stable arrangement. This non-temporal group of uses can be called the foundational meaning of arche. A third semantic group shifts from the concrete senses of founding and foundations toward the more generalized and abstract meaning of ‘grounding’. Here arche can mean the element or principle of a thing which, although undemonstrable and intangible in itself, provides the conditions of the possibility of that thing. This was the meaning that Aristotle would later foreground in pursuing the archai of things in terms of their causes (aitia, or causal principles—bearing in mind the much wider connotations of ‘aitia’ than the modern word ‘cause’). With an eye on this later metaphysical development we might call this group the causal or ‘first principle’ group. A 143

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hyletic or materialist interpretation naturally identifies arche as the ‘first stuff (Urstoff) or underlying substance from which things are generated or produced. And as we have seen in Chapter 2, many historians of early Greek philosophy view the first philosophers as hylozöists on the grounds that they regarded the arche of things as both material and animate or, in Aristotle’s terminology, as conforming to both material and final aitia. Yet this semantic structure was not generally available until the fourth century. By then the everyday meanings of arche had been shaped into a more abstract significance, so that the term could be used for any process of ‘physical generation’. We find Aristotle—one of the key architects of this semantic transformation— speaking of the archai of all substances (ousiae). Once respecified it could be used to construct abstract propositions of the type: ‘Everything either is an arche or arises from an arche’15 or his anachronistic interpretation of Anaximander’s arcbe as an uncreated and indestructible first principle: arche is the divine horizon of substance that encompasses and rules all things. By distinguishing between founding and what is founded we separate arche from elements, the latter being the principles or oppositions which separate out from the ground of the primordial arche.16 Finally, a fourth group of meanings can be isolated (and, for certain purposes, divided into a number of suBCategories). Here arche takes its sense from political, ethical, or customary discourse. In Archaic Greek, archein, from which arche derives, means rule, governance, or political direction (as in ‘steering all things’). Thus the person holding public office, the ruler, leader, king, or tyrant is the Archeon (or Archon) understood as an embodiment of the Ruling Principle (Pythian I.1.7). Apologists for aristocratic rule such as Alcman and Pindar frequently linked the metaphor of arche to the activities of ‘navigation’ and ‘steering’: only those who are high born and best, aristocrats by nature and breeding, should be given the authority to ‘pilot’ cities. We recall that Anaximander’s Apeiron rules and steers (kubernan, to steer) all beings. Only ‘natural’ aristocrats deserve to hold the office of Principle (princeps, as magistrates would be called from the Archaic age down to the end of the Roman imperium). The polis must be steered by the wise and the good (those fortunate few who know the true measure of things). Only those with insight into and understanding of the true ends of the individual and community should be allowed to govern the state. Here ‘steering’ is an ancient metaphor for active, intelligent direction. By implication this is the necessary function of every ‘first principle’. The idea can be found in conservative arguments supporting rule by ‘natural’ élites from Alcman’s choral poetry to Pindar’s odes (Pythian X.70–3) down to the political theories of Plato and Aristotle. We have, then, one of the basic linguistic figures for the rhetorics of authoritarian governance in the European political tradition (ship of state, state machine, commanding, leadership, authority, hegemony, and so forth).17 As a foundation, such a ‘first power’ requires no further ground or support -the power to govern is vested in the office of governorship (in Homer, as we 144

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have seen, Agamemnon is the ‘first power’ or overlord of all the other warlords assembled before Troy). As a ‘principle’ the One should be the controlling nexus of the Many. In an ethical context, the term refers to obedience to those who command legitimate power. As a symbol of authority we owe obedience to the power of the Archon (this meaning shades into older notions of the authority vested in customary rules, themis, and tribal ‘ways’).18 Such a principle determines everything else but is not itself determined; it is as Aristotle observed at Physics 203b10–15 the divinity itself. And God (like all first causes and principles) is used to explain processes of causation but is ‘prior to’ or ‘independent’ of those processes. Like the political Archon the arche stands aloof from the manifold it organizes and structures. It follows that to seek to honour and exemplify respectfully the archai of ethical and political life was to reproduce a way of life; while to doubt, criticize, or in any other way contest the auspicious archai of customary morality and belief, was tantamount to dishonouring the divine auspices of the community and transgressing the principles of social order. In the latter part of the fifth century this would be one of the charges directed against the Sophists as it would also form part of the official indictment filed against Anaxagoras, Protagoras, and Socrates. We can refer to this set of uses as the political meanings of arche. Naturally, in response to different verbal and social contexts, different senses of the word—temporal, foundational, causal, or political—would be activated as core meanings. This semantic ambiguity continued to play an important role in the writings of Greek philosophers well into the fourth century. In the Phaedo (at 97C), for instance, Plato describes Socrates’ disappointment at discovering that Anaxagoras’ doctrine concerning the Mind (Nous) as the principle (arche) of all things in reality speaks only of material causes (aitia). In the Menexenus Persia’s autocratic rule is described with the term arche: ‘the rule of Persia’ or, in some translations, ‘the yoke of the Persian Empire’ (Menexenus 240A). In later Roman writers, the political significance of imperium (domination or hegemony) is characteristically made the criterial meaning. The Roman historian Appian (c. AD 95–165) uses the term in referring to the history of Roman rule and imperial power.19 Here (h)egemonia and arche are all but synonymous: ‘the Greek power, ardent as it was in fighting for the hegemony never established itself beyond the boundaries of Greece’ (Appian, 13; the word is already used in this sense by Isocrates in his Panegyricus 4.20: ‘even as in times past Athens justly held the sovereignty of the sea, so now she not unjustly lays claim to the hegemony’). If we take an author closer to the language and culture of Anaximander we find uses of the term which holophrastically conflate all four semantic subsets. Aeschylus’ Supplicants provides an illuminating example; at Supplicants 51 arche is qualified by ‘matros’ (‘mother’) to produce the expression matros archaias, which might be roughly translated, ‘the primordial mother’. It is perhaps this older meaning that best illustrates the kind of polysemy arche performs in Anaximander’s text. Taking our direction from 145

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Aeschylus we might translate arche as matrix. The Apeiron now becomes the source from which all things are born, the ‘womb’ and point of origin of beings. One of the advantages of this translation is that it also evokes its other connotations: a matrix provides the foundation of things, the ‘cause’ and ruling principle of whatever is made manifest; arche also continues to ‘govern’ and ‘rule’ whatever proceeds from the Apeiron.20 3.2 Phusis Unlike Thales’ Water, Anaximenes’ Aer, or Heraclitus’ Fire, Anaximander’s cosmos has its source in an indeterminate Matrix. In Hegelian language, he moves toward a concrete universal concept, separated from sense-perception, yet sufficiently intelligible to function as an icon of the cosmic process. But like earlier efforts in theorizing the ultimate ground of Being, a range of perceptual images still clings to the word Apeiron.21 Despite the leap of abstraction toward thinking of Being as radical otherness, the indefinable Infinite may still have been construed as a material plenum or substantial Whole (hence the appropriateness of the word matrix for this strange concept).22 This point can be clarified by comparing the idea with the later and more abstract thought of Parmenides. Parmenides’ basic project was to strip away every sensuous aspect of ‘being’ and to interpret existence wholly as Being or pure unity (a project of radical negativity that also necessarily fails to the extent that the icons of the One—to on, hen—are continuously metaphorized in the concrete imagery of a perfect Sphere). Even though the conception of this extraordinary quest may have been intrinsically flawed, the Parmenidean project moves even further into the region of pure, conceptual thinking. In this respect Parmenides’ thought radicalized Anaximander’s question-frame to articulate a concept which posits the absolute ‘negation of the finite’, producing the most abstract category in the philosophical lexicon, the notion of absolute Being qua Being. Another reason for translating Anaximander’s arche as matrix relates to the Ionian theory of world formation. Unlike the Parmenidean universe in which Non-being has absolutely no place and where change is a logical impossibility, Anaximander’s cosmos is essentially a process of world generation and destruction from an unnameable horizon of Being. Anaximander thinks phusis as a genesis of worlds from within the Apeiron. Here his philosophical vision of the Whole is closer to the eternal flux and temporal genesis to be found in Heraclitus (see Chapter 6 below). The word matrix—with its concrete imagery of procreation or the production of being from an indeterminate source—preserves this resonant difference. Change and becoming, for Anaximander, does not represent the absurdity of the me on—the Non-being that somehow ‘is’—but the creative process of interminable world transformation. In this context it may be correct to surmise that Anaximander 146

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was the first man to have a presentiment of the oneness of divine matter in the universe, and to stand amazed at its infinity, the first to seek words with which to tell how the eternal cycle of birth and death follows a natural law. The image of penalty, taken from civil law, helped him to give a concrete form to the inexpressible. Thus cosmology, one aspect of men’s ideas of the universe, was won for the science of physics.23 But let us return to our philological analysis. We have seen that arche does not originally have the meaning of ‘cause’, but rather that of a divine or at least animate ‘matrix’. How does the wordphusis relate to this? How did Anaximander manipulate the resources of Greek expression to speak of the cosmos asphusis In translation, this term is usually rendered by the Latin word natura (and later by the English word Nature), although, of course, it is clear that none of the Presocratic thinkers used the term phusis in the way that became standardized after Aristotle’s respecification. If the concepts of phusis and nature inform the metaphysical concepts of the European tradition, the Presocratic word phusis must be regarded as a premetaphysical concept. Indeed, the concept of nature has itself undergone a complex cultural-historical evolution since Aristotle’s exercise in redefinition, coming to a temporary resting place today in the mathematical sciences of nature (in ‘physics’ which takes as its programme the objective analysis of the structure and dynamic principles of ‘physical nature’). This standpoint was, of course, unavailable to the early Greek thinkers. Where the contemporary referent of ‘nature’ is dead, mechanical, and lifeless, for the Milesians phusis appears to have been regarded as living, organic, and, at least to some extent, ‘spiritually’ animated. To clarify this we should return to the earlier semantics of the wordphusis. In Homeric Greek, phusis is an everyday term for birth, growth, and genesis. Homer uses the term quite promiscuously to refer to the ‘nature’ or ‘organization’ of that which makes things what they are: phusis is the ‘natural course’ of a thing’s growth, development or function; it designates whatever is essential to a thing being that thing and not another. What exists ‘by nature’ has the power to develop, flourish, and change by virtue of its own immanent organization. Phusis is the ‘dynamic’ of living beings—things which follow their intrinsic nature. The root of the word is the verb phuein which refers to the growth process as the emergence or opening-out of a thing’s possibilities (literally phuein means ‘to give birth to’, to procreate, engender, or let grow). Here the accent is placed on the temporal processes of genesis, or as Empedocles and Aristotle would still continue to say, of ‘coming-to-be’ and ‘passing-away’ (Empedocles, Frs 8, 63; Aristotle, Physics, 193b: ‘na-ture (phusis) is etymologically equivalent to gene-sis and (in Greek) is actually used as a synonym for it; nature, then, qua genesis proclaims itself as the path to nature qua goal’). In its widest sense, phusis simply meant growth or living development (a meaning preserved in the Latin nasci, from whence natura; Philip H.Wicksteed, 147

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the translator of Aristotle’s Physics observes in a footnote: ‘So, too, in Latin na-tura derived from the na of na-scor and na-tivitas. [In fact (g)natura is derived from the same root as gi-gno, gi-gnomai]’, 114, note c; cf. Heidegger: ‘phuein means to let grow, procreate, engender, produce, primarily to produce its own self. What makes products or the produced product possible (producible) is again the look (eidos) of what the product is supposed to become and be. The actual thing arises out of phusis, the nature of the thing’, 1982:107). Thus Homer’s famous comparison between the course of human life and the ‘generations of men’ to the waves of natural growth: ‘one generation of mortals grows, another ceases’ like the leaves of trees (Il. 6.149). In everyday use the term also included the ‘stuff from which things grow or even the ‘source’ and underlying pattern (logos) of that productive process (Heraclitus in B 123 plays on this in referring to the phusis that loves to hide; cf. Democritus, Fr. 242). However, throughout these variations, the procreative metaphors of origins and foundations are never far from the surface: ‘to give birth’, ‘to bring forth’, ‘to bring out of darkness/concealment’, ‘to let stand’, ‘to come into existence’, and so on. What is natural has the power to bring itself into the light, to develop and unfold its possibilities. Every part of phusis displays this dynamic tendency toward ‘manifestation’. Natural things ‘develop’ out of the inner necessity of the ‘nature of things’. And different species of things are possessed by very different ‘natures’ (Od. 10.302ff.). Aristotle is summarizing a whole tradition in isolating the teleological structure behind this ancient metaphorical complex: ‘Towards what, then, does it grow? Not towards its original state at birth, but towards its final state or goal. It is, then, the form that is nature’ (Physics 193b20). And it is this dynamic idea of ‘nature’ which remained in force down to the Hellenistic period. It is this idea which still informs Epicurus’ idea of natural inquiry (as Phusiologia; cf. ‘Letter to Herodotus’ 1.37, in Epicurus, 1975:20). Classical philologists have also linked the etymology of the word phusis with an Indo-European root for ‘dwelling’ or ‘inhabiting’. Here phusis has the sense of a ‘growing-dwelling’, a lineage of productive living orphunai. It would be an error, however, to think of phusis as a self-conscious extension of the everyday Greek term. The later semantics associated with the word developed by accretion, habitual usage, and the creative colonization of earlier, prephilosophical meanings (as in Aristotle’s teleological revision of the word phusis in Physics Book II which formed the fundamental presupposition of his systematic theory of natural processes in terms of Matter and Form). For example, it has been noted that in the early part of the fifth century phusis is a general term not merely for the process of being born, but also for one’s station in society or diachronically, in a genealogy. ‘One’s high or low birth, together with all the material advantages or disadvantages that an individual derives from his being born into a particular station in society.’ This meaning is still alive in Sophocles’ use of phusis for a line of descent or family tradition (Electra 609). In such contexts phusis denotes ‘birth and breeding’ and serves 148

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to underline the traditional system of arete, based on aristocratic lineage and values: Traditionally, most agathoi were agathoi by birth, phusis, and their arete might be said to be theirs by phusis too’.24 We can say, then, that from its earliest uses phusis did not refer to ‘nature’ in the sense of ‘physical reality’ (let alone ‘physical being’), but was used in more concrete contexts to designate the living, growth process of ‘what-is-beingrevealed’, and then subsequently extended to the processes of bringing the potentiality of being into existence. The latter uses were typically modelled upon artisanate production. When we reach the Lyceum, Phusis could be used to designate something like the matrix of normal teleological differentiation from within an ever-receding magma of undifferentiated experience. Given its importance for the subsequent development of Greek reflexivity, we should examine the rhetorical structure of the word in greater detail. Phusis as manifestation In many of its earliest appearances phusis can be translated with terms that stress both the genetic-maieutic and the ‘phenomenological’ meanings of the original expression: both the ‘arising’ or ‘becoming’ of beings and their temporal ‘gathering presence’. This recalls our remarks in Chapter 1 on the profound hold of videological imagery in early Greek philosophy and in the Greek language more generally. The English words ‘manifestation’ and ‘appearance’ are particularly resonant as candidate terms, involving as they do the dual sense of temporal emergence and self-standing presence. Thus we might translate Anaximander’s apeiron by saying that it is the matrix of all coming-into-being and passing-away, of infinite worlds that have come-tobe and disappeared, but also the origin of all manifestation, the ‘essence of manifestation’ which holds itself back in ‘indetermination’, the dark matrix of coming-into-Being. Phusis as ‘emergence into presence’ Martin Heidegger invokes this idea of presencing when he writes in his Introduction to Metaphysics that ‘Being discloses itself to the ancient Greeks as phusis’, and that the etymological roots phu/phy-and pha-designate the same thing: Phyein, the rising up or upsurge which resides within itself is phainesthai, ‘lighting-up, self-showing, coming-out, appearing forth’ Heidegger, 1973:13–14; also see 15–17, 70–2, 98–103, 109–10, passim). Manifestation is a dynamic process of disclosure and concealment, translating the Greek word aletheia (or a-letheia if we stress its original construction incorporating the prefix ‘a-’ for ‘un’ or ‘not’ and the word lethe, ‘veiled’, ‘hidden’). Phusis originally had the sense of ‘Being-made-manifest’ or ‘comingto-be-from-concealment’. Thus individual entities—beings—are both manifested (qua things, under different forms and modalities) and are 149

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manifestations-of the be-ing process—they shine forth and radiate the process of disclosure. Things are entities that are ‘not hidden’, but visibly present in their thingness. Being is what illuminates beings in their ‘uncoveredness’, in their dual status as ‘being(s) manifest’. It is this complex structure of ‘openness’ or revelation which, Heidegger argues, was lost around the time of Plato and in the post-Platonic systems of thought. The outcome of this occlusion is what Heidegger calls ‘metaphysics’, a world-view in which the originary sense of phusis and aletheia as unconcealedness is itself covered up and the dynamic meaning of Being (and truth) as world disclosure is forgotten. Heidegger’s basic contention is that the ‘ontological difference’ between Being and beings is preserved within the Greek wordphusis and, derivatively, in the Greek word for ‘appearance’ or ‘manifestation’—phainesthai (as ‘coming-intoappearance’, phainesthai is semantically linked to aletheia, or that which is revealed or brought to presence). The ‘presencing’ of phenomena is precisely what gets overlooked in the shift toward a metaphysical concept of experience. Whereas to speak the truth of things in the Ionian sense is to render an account of how things are revealed within the Whole. If the early Greek thinkers were the first to formulate Being as phusis, they were also the first ‘to experience and think of phainomena as phenomena’: ‘phainesthai means to them that a being assumes its radiance, and in that radiance it appears. Thus appearance is still the basic trait of the presence of all present beings, as they rise into unconcealment’.25 In this context the premetaphysical concept of truth is twofold: the primary disclosure of things as ‘not being hidden’ and the articulation of their ‘unhiddenness’ in language. Heidegger’s early formulation of the Greek concept of aletheia stresses the first structure—the ontological difference between beings and the process of their be-ing or ‘coming into presence’. We can restate the argument by saying that the Greek language of ‘phainomena’ not only grasps the manifestation of beings from the horizon of Being (the arche), but also simultaneously grasps beings as manifest beings, as modes of Being’s self-disclosure. The constitution of metaphysics forecloses this view of the presence of Being. In its place, Plato—followed by his pupil, Aristotle—began to theorize phusis as the causal order of nature. What tends to be marginalized from Heidegger’s reconstruction, however, is the social and discursive conditions of sayability and truth—the disclosure of ‘phenomena’ as ‘phenomena articulated’ in speech by concrete speakers in specific dialogic traditions. We learn nothing of the verbal or contextual situation of Anaximander’s thought from these etymological reflections. Phusis as the causal and telic order of nature By the fourth century BC many of the earlier senses of the term have been displaced and phusis is used to designate the telic principles (archai) and causes (aitia) of things; in effect phusis is used to designate the universe of 150

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material genesis and change—an interpretation which reformulates the philosophical quest to understand the phusis of Being as a science of the causal essence of things (Plato, Rep. 410E; Aristotle, Physics 2.192b; Met. 5.4.1014bff.). Throughout the Classical period, of course, older senses—like sedimented layers of meaning—would frequently resurface. And it should be noted, to correct Heidegger’s one-sided analysis, that Plato continued to use the term in texts which we would have to approach using the older Presocratic sense of ‘character’ or ‘inborn nature’ (as ‘in keeping with one’s nature’). In the Theaetetus, for example, Socrates speaks of the noble and philosophical phuseos of Theaetetus, a characteristic disposition especially marked by his ability to wonder (thaumazein) and question (Theaetetus 155D). Other equally important texts suggest the older meaning of ‘propriety’; for example, in the definition of philosophy as an inquiry into the essence of human being and what is proper for such a nature (phusei at Theaetetus 174B). But it appears to be true that by the fourth century the Presocratic meaning of the word for ‘emerging Being’, the becoming or manifestation of things, was increasingly replaced by the meaning of ‘essence’, the invariant structural possibilities of a mode of being. When phusis is troped as the constitutive essence governing the behaviour or activity of a thing, philosophy would respecify itself as an inquiry into the whatness of beings, and reflection then could assume the role of determining the eidetic possibility of the various ‘parts of being’. With Aristotle the inquiry into phusis becomes ‘physics’, a science inquiring into the underlying causes of things: their material beginnings (hyle), their initiating impulse to develop, function and decay, their eidetic pattern (eide, morphe, nomos), development (genesis), and entelechial fulfilment. Aristotle has, as it were, translated the Presocratic idea of principled genesis (arche) into a teleological theory of natural causation. This process of redefinition sediments in his theory of explanatory aitia as the fourfold causality of phusis.26 3.3 Aitia In the Archaic period, the word aitia is most commonly found in contexts where a breach or transgression of traditional conduct, mores, or ‘the order of things’ (themis) is at issue. During the sixth century the word has not yet been narrowed down to the paradigm case of a violation of legal rules; it has a broader range of meanings referring to culpability and ‘guilt’, expressing the publically recognized failure to respect traditional values and customary practices (dikai, nomoi, etc.). The normative uses of aitia played a central role in the sanctioning practices of earlier moral codes (for example, the failure of one party to respect the implicit moral terms of an oath or exchange agreement, the omission or commission of an act that has disrupted the principle of mutuality governing the ritual symbolism of exchange). In its oldest functions the term aitia fused the moral, ethical, and legal senses of rule-breaking or violation to the extent 151

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that a breach of prescribed conduct, a failure to respect ceremonial norms or familial duties all had direct political as well as moral and ethical significance. This can be compared with the word’s later use during the Classical period where not only have these contexts been differentiated, but the word itself has shifted in the direction of legal responsibility. The well-known shift from the language of ‘phusis’ to that of ‘nomos is indicative of these changes. Examples of this process can be found throughout the texts of the earliest Athenian dramatists. Sophocles, for instance, has Oedipus ask the exemplary self-reflexive question in the opening dialogue of Oedipus Tyrannos, responding to Creon’s identification of evil behind the current ill fortunes of Thebes: ‘Where are they? Where in the wide world to find the far, faint traces of a bygone crime (aitias)?’ (Oedipus Tyrannos 107–8). Here aitia singles out the individual locus of guilt, the person responsible for the misfortunes that have descended on Thebes (the guilty party, as Sophocles’ audience already knows, turns out to be identical with the questioner: the origin of the blood-guilt, the ‘cause’ of Thebes’ dire situation, is none other than Oedipus, murderer of Laius his father, husband of his own mother). Aeschylus invokes still older connotations when linking the fate of individuals and the city to the ‘governance’ and ‘responsibility’ of Zeus (for example, in Seven Against Thebes, 4ff.) or in an even more Anaximandrian setting, in the wisdom spoken before Prometheus by the collective voice of the Chorus: ‘Wise are they who do homage to Necessity’ (Prometheus Bound 936). In this text Aeschylus replaces the conventional term for necessity or ‘fate’—ananke—by the term adrasteia, which is also linked to transgression, especially the ineluctible punishment following immoderation and hubris;27 thus Xerxes’ hubris in The Persians brings destruction upon himself; and Agamemnon must accept responsibility for slaughtering his own daughter, Iphigenia. In general, for Aeschylus, aitia also refers to the source of responsibility for some action or state of affairs, an exemplary instance occuring in lines 228–9 of Prometheus Bound: ‘touching your question for what cause (aitia) he torments me, this I will not make clear.’ During the latter half of the fifth century, the word aitia gradually settles into its predominantly legal sense of ‘transgression’, in contexts where juridical issues of personal guilt and responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions are in question. The nomos which rule-breaking transgresses is increasingly identified with the conspicuous sites of civic order. To give a logos of the aitia of an act is to explain the grounds and responsibilities of a sanctionable activity. A person has violated a law or customary norm; his actions were motivated by greed, anger, personal gain, political ends, and so forth. Citing these as ‘aitia’ or ‘causes’ places the action in its motivational context, embedding the act in a wider pattern by giving ‘grounds’ for its origins, nature, and effect. Individual agents now assume ‘guilt’ for knowingly perpetrating a criminal act and, as such, they become the living cause or attributable source of their misdemeanours. The law requires that they ‘own’ and ‘become 152

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responsible’ for their conduct. Thus in Sophocles’ Antigone (written around 441 BC), Antigone’s sister, Ismene, tries to accept a shared responsibility for her sister’s act of burying their brother Polyneices (and thus violating the edict of King Creon): ‘I did the deed, if she will have it so, and with my sister claim to share the guilt’ (Antigone 536–7).28 The basic schema of interpretation here is that the cause and consequences of violating nomos or dike must be ‘owned’ by a responsible self, creating a prototype of the concept of ‘legal personality’ as this went on to be developed in Athenian—and later Roman—legal theory. 3.4 To Apeiron In the seventh book of the Iliad Homer uses an expression that was common to the epic tradition. The world is described as apeirona gaian, the boundless Earth (Il. 7.446; cf. ‘the boundless sea’ at Il. 1.350). The same expressionapeirona gaian—also appears in the Odyssey, for example at 15.79, ‘the traveller should dine before he goes forth over the wide and boundless earth’, at 17.418, ‘so would I make your fame known to all over the boundless earth’, and at 19.107, ‘no one of mortals upon the boundless earth could find fault with you’ (it is repeated by Hesiod at Works and Days 160, 487 and at Theogony 187). Anaximander may have been struck by the same vertiginous thought, for he uses the same adjectival term, placing it in a syntactical frame of definite article and neuter adjective; this allows him to call the arche of all things, to apeiron, ‘the unbounded’. Of course, the grammatical transformation of adjectival expressions through nominalization is a distinctive, if unremarkable, practice in ancient Greek. By the fifth century it has become a commonplace of reflexive discourse; Parmenides’ construction, to hen (‘the One’) and Plato’s to agathon (‘the Good’) are notable later examples of this syntactical device. The word ‘apeiron’ itself is simply the negation of ‘peras/peiron’ or ‘limit(ed)’ (with the associated normative connotations of being ‘bounded’, ‘definite’, and ‘determinate’). Hence ‘to apeiron’, literally means the Unlimited, the Boundless, Indefinite, or Infinite. More technically, a-peiron is the a-oriston, the indeterminate (which also carries connotations of ‘disorder’ and ‘chaos’). In Anaximander’s text, however, these ambivalent connotations—already active in Homer—are fused to create an abstract vision of the world process: the apeiron is not only the vital matrix out of which the cosmos has been generated; it is also the divine power of governance guiding and ‘steering’ all things through cycles of creation and destruction (Aristotle, Physics. 203b6–13; De Caelo 303b10).29 Paradoxically, the neuter adjective with the definite article designates something like a transcendent reality that exists without having referential properties or attributes. The ‘unknowable’ matrix of all articulation is itself indeterminate (and as such, indefinable). The ultimate ‘nature’ of phusis as the origin of all things is precisely ‘not to be a thing’ and not to display 153

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‘thing-like’ properties. Here we meet one of the first instances of a paralogical mode of thinking which modern writers have described as thinking under erasure (sous rature), in that the neologism ‘a-peiron prepares its auditors for the fact that ‘reference’ and ‘predication‘ in reflexive research on the grounds and rhetorics of theorizing is a deeply problematic enterprise. Anaximander’s discourse strives to make reference to that which makes all reference possible by saying that it is ‘the indeterminate’, the infinite horizon out of which every particular thing and mode of being emerges, and to which all existence is bound to return. This singular feature of Anaximander’s discourse blocks the traditional association of Apeiron with a corporeal ‘substance’ (as in Aëtius, DK 12 A 9, 9a) or with a chaotic magma of substantial elements (as in later Epicurean and Lucretian atomism). In its original motivation it is closer to the Heideggerian and deconstructive idioms of contemporary postmetaphysical thinking. What is ‘named’ by this ‘non-concept’ has no concrete boundaries, form, or predicative organisation—even saying that it is a ‘non-entity’ or ‘nonthing’ is misleading. Anaximander, as it were, puts the word ‘apeiron’ into circulation ‘under erasure’ as the ‘otherness’ from which all beings arise and draw their being. As with the prephilosophical logic that led Thales to posit a concrete arche, Anaximander advances toward an iconic logic of the Whole, only here the ‘icon’ he selects to express his vision is openly paradoxical and self-reflex-ive. We may be sure that Anaximander chose his words carefully; perhaps the choice of this abstract figure was connected with the language that his teacher, Thales, had used when speaking of the Whole. By renaming the Whole ‘a-peiron’ he self-reflexively returns his audience to the impossible yet necessary task of naming what is utterly transcendent, of conceptualizing that which is beyond all predication. By coining the privative noun of peiras (‘limit’), Anaximander self-consciously brackets every concrete predicate that might be applied to the primary process that gives rise to differentiated beings: whatever the origin of all things may be, it is not itself ‘peiron’, bounded, concrete, thinglike: to apeiron as ‘the Infinite’ transcends the realm of objects. The Ground of all beings is not itself a thing; the perata are produced by the dynamic work of the apeiron; the matrix of all coming-to-be cannot be said to exist itself—since it has no attributes and nothing determinate can be said of it (it is to aoriston, a-horos). This, ultimately, is the occluded question and problematic secreted in Anaximander’s linguistic innovation. The question of the whole and the semantic paradoxes associated with it are still embedded in the reconstructions of the Lyceum; according to Aristotle, Anaximander derived the contrastive oppositions of the elements from an indeterminate prime substance (Physics 187a20, 204b22; cf. Met. 1007b27– 9). Paradoxically, the well-formed and immortal kosmos has its origins in an amorphous, limitless, indestructible, and eternal matrix. The puzzling reflexivity of Anaximander’s innovative thought is still visible in the testimony of Theophrastus: 154

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Anaximander of Miletus…said that the first principle of existing things is the unlimited (apeiron), introducing for the first time the term ‘principle’ (arche); and he said that it is neither water nor any other of those things that are called elements, but another of an unlimited nature (phusis) from which arose all the heavens and the universes contained in them.30 4 ANAXIMANDER’S COSMOS With these preliminary elucidations in mind we can return to the ApeironFragment and attempt a more resonant translation of the idea from within its original logological texture. We have suggested that ‘to apeiron’ connotes a qualityless ‘indeterminate’ matrix—‘the Boundless’ or ‘the Infinite’, without beginning or principled termination. Apeiron is the ‘non-name’ for the Whole that forms the topic of ontological thinking. This interpretation suggests a version of the first sentences of Anaximander’s text as ‘The matrix of all coming-to-be is the indeterminate plenum’. This has the virtue of providing a more illuminating context for Anaximander’s account of transformation by way of opposite forces or qualities: as the Apeiron is also ‘the divine’ (to theion), every process of manifestation as a limitation of the sacred is necessarily a transgression or ‘injustice’; by virtue of being ‘finite’, each emergent world must recompense the Apeiron with its own dissolution and destruction. Only the Apeiron endures in its awesome transcendence—indefinite, ageless, deathless, and indestructible (cf. Phaedrus 245C-246A; Phaedo 96A7). With this semantic framework in place we can now attempt a detailed reconstruction of the text, paying particular attention to the impact of Anaximander’s form of expression upon the development of philosophical reflexivity. 4.1 Apeiron to theion First, we can now understand why Anaximander’s Apeiron is not a ‘cause’ in the Aristotelian sense of this term; although his visionary conception transcends the horizon of his mythological predecessors and may be considered to be part of an axial ‘entzauberung der Welt’, it still projects the matrix of Being as a vast plenum encompassing our kosmos and all possible kosmoi. Anaximander is certainly not, contra Aristotle, a straightforward scientist or ‘physiologue’ (Physics 187a12; 203b). Anaximander’s Apeiron is eternal, uncreated, generative, and divine (as Aristotle recognizes at Physics 3.4.203b7– 15). In blocking all concrete identification with individual or particular modes of being, the Apeiron would be the divinity itself (to theios): immortal (athanaton) and indestructible (anolethron); all existence emerges from an inexhaustible matrix; being ‘to theion’ it must be immortal ‘as Anaximander and most of the physicists declare it to be’; cf. Met. 5.1.1012b33–1013a23; 155

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Hippolytus, Ref.1.6.1); and, in keeping with the political imagery of ‘rule’, it is said to ‘embrace’ and to ‘steer’ or ‘govern’ (from kubernai) all things (Physics 203b6–13). From Aristotle’s Platonic perspective what seemed essential in Anaximander’s vision was the idea of a regular process or rule of cosmogenesis: the innumerable worlds brought into being have a genesis from the indeterminate plenum—an ‘unlimited store’ of being out of which things are drawn into existence (Physics 203b 20). Anaximander had discovered the underlying order of coming-into-being. This, for Aristotle, is the critical context for the latter poetic sentences of the fragment: everything finite must make just recompense to one another for the ‘injustice’ of being created according to the universal ordinance of time (kronos). Given what we know of Anaximander’s physical theories we may assume that this thought was given an ontological turn: for every mode of being there is an irreparable ‘crime’ associated with cosmic emergence. This injustice is displayed in the ubiquity of opposites in every sphere of experience. Finite realms of existence must therefore pay recompense ‘to one another’ as the ‘cost’ exacted by the emergence of individual beings from the divine Apeiron. It may be possible to reconcile the various readings proposed for the term apeiron within the framework of this translation. The most common translations are as follows: (i)

the apeiron is physically and quantitatively indeterminate, in the sense of being an infinite source of things which ‘come-to-be’ and ‘pass-away’ (Aristotle, Physics 3.203b); (ii) it is spatially and/or temporally infinite, as that which exists ‘without spatio-temporal limit(s)’; (iii) it is also indefinable in any straightforward sense (in the sense of not being identifiable with any one of the standard Milesian ‘elements’— i.e. transcending things and their component elements—a paradoxical ‘indefinite substance’); (iv) being indefinable it is strictly speaking unthinkable in ordinary language, having no concrete qualities, properties, or predicates—being ‘that beyond definition’ which forms the matrix of the definite and the definable; (v) as a divine arche it encompasses everything and forms the source from which all worlds derive their existence; divinity (‘deathless’/steering all things/eternal matrix of being and becoming (Physics 4. 203b4–15, esp. 203b7–10, 204b 20; and 204b22–35)). The apeiron, therefore, is not an ‘infinite substance’ (Physics 203b), but an ‘infinite non-substance’, a matrix from which all ‘things’ are formed. 4.2 Ananke: ‘in accordance with Necessity’ (‘kata to chreon’) Anaximander distinguishes his cosmology from the speculations of the mythological tradition by explicitly dispensing with the hegemonic god Zeus 156

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as the source and cause of all being. The power to create endless cycles of kosmoi from within its own vortex of forces is itself spoken of as ‘the divine’. Yet while the arche of beings is not literally a god, it is still depicted as a divine, creative source. But now creativity belongs to the laws of the plenum itself; and unlike the mutable earth and heavens, the self-motion of the Apeiron is left indeterminate: in the existing texts we are only instructed about its primordial function—to generate, encompass, and steer the visible universe through time and space. However, with this framework certain other problems become ‘thinkable’: first and foremost, the problem of the relationship between the invisible matrix and its finite ‘creatures’; second, the problem of phusis as an unbounded creative power; third, the problem of the genesis and plurality of worlds; fourth, the question of the underlying order or ‘law’ of the cosmic process; and fifth, the question of the precise nature of spatial and temporal infinity. The Apeiron-Fragment strongly suggests that Anaximander articulated these questions by resorting to political and ethical metaphors. Ananke (Necessity) is said to govern all things by meting out justice and retribution (Dike and Tisis); the parts or elements (stoicheia) of created being make reparation to one another for their mutual transgression committed by the very process of generation (genesis-phthora is conceptualized as ‘injustice’ and transformation and dissolution is thought in terms of ‘expiation’). In Burnet’s summary: as dike is regularly used of the observance of an equal balance between the opposites hot and cold, dry and wet, the adikia here referred to must be the undue encroachment of one opposite on another, such as we see, for example, in the alteration of day and night, winter and summer, which have to be made good by an equal encroachment of the other. (1930:54, n. 1, 57–8) 4.3 Atonement/Expiation: ‘according to the ordered process of time’ (‘kata ten tou chronou taxin’) By definition, finite beings overstep or transgress the divine Apeiron; by existing at all they violate the sacred source of undifferentiation. Perhaps the appearance of difference and opposition symbolized by the clash of opposed ‘elements’ was seen as a source of anomia. Dike requires that the Whole be restored, that finite things and ‘encroaching’ opposites be returned to the Infinite ‘according to the ordered process of time’. Time is personified as the process through which the ‘imbalance’ of the elements is regulated. Cominginto-existence and passing-away are subject to the ‘order of Time’ (cf. Sinnige, 1968:5). In other words, the differentiation of the world process is interpreted in the language of ethical transgression.31 157

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4.4 Dike It would be understating the case to say that Justice represents one of the great themes of ancient Greek thought and literature. It makes its first explicit literary appearance in Homer’s portrait of Archaic society in the Iliad, where it is associated with Zeus, traditional customary law, and the norms of moral conduct (ethos). Dike regulates the everyday practices of a stratified society by bringing social conduct under a sacred canopy of customary regulations and strict rules of moral conduct (nomos). All social relations are governed by what is ‘natural’ or ‘the way of things’—it being understood that every activity has its own order or ‘limit’. During the Archaic period ethos frequently means ‘nature’ in the sense of what is appropriate, or what follows from an ‘inborn endowment’ or disposition; it is also used to refer to the ‘tribe’, ‘group’, class of things, men, or gods. We find Pindar speaking of the ‘race of mortals’ in this latter sense (‘we, the race of men’, Nemean III.70–5), but he also uses ethos where ‘nature’ might be more appropriate (‘the fox nor the lion can change his nature (ethos)’, Olympian XI 16–21; or when speaking of the difficult struggle to alter an inborn endowment, Olympian XIII. 13). But Dike was itself preceded by a much older idea of justice embodied in the figure of the matriarchal Goddess, Themis. Themis was associated with the immemorial obligations of clan and tribe, with the unwritten prescriptions revealed to mortals by the gods (such ‘decrees’ were often called themistes) and represent quasi-legal, ‘contractual’ relations that regulated the societies of Bronze Age Greece. Understandably, the guardians and mouthpieces of the themistes were priests and oracular ‘prophets’—later forms of this office appear in the Iliad as ‘interpreters’ and ‘diviners’ of oral wisdom. These figures were frequently touched by the charisma that attached to tribal law-givers and became the preservers and enunciators of dikai, the unwritten laws governing the conduct of everyday life. Each themis defined a rule of expected behaviour—and is often translated as ‘ordinance’ or ‘moral guidance’. Many of these themistes govern the relationship between men and Gods as well as between human beings.32 The older notion of justice changed as the Archaic world of warrior aristocrats and feudal obligations disintegrated and was replaced by the more formal laws of the sixth-century polis. Themis suffered the fate of the tribal system itself: it declined with the crisis of the aristocracy, and by the seventh century had been displaced by the new order represented by Dike. Dike also changed its form and content, now referring to orderly relations of governance and moral conduct necessary for a stable state. Significantly, Dike is now much more closely linked with the patriarchal order of Zeus. And with the spread of Homeric religion, legality came under the protection of Zeus, until finally even Zeus would find his authority delimited by an even more encompassing order of natural justice (for example, where the earliest Greek 158

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dramatists formulate Dike in the sense of dikaiosune as a Law governing all transgressive acts, whether these be committed by mortals or gods): Ideally, then, in Hesiod, as in Homer, a dike is a true demonstration of the ‘way things happen’, resulting from honest, intelligent application of a themis, truly discovered and rightly selected, to the facts of the case… dike is that quality of all true dikai, namely, that they accord with the real order of things.33 Before Dike evolved into the fourth-century concept of rational ‘justice’ it operated as the lynchpin of the ideology of an aristocratic class structure. The normative heart of this social order was grounded in a sacralized system of ethical exchanges and ‘just balances’ between ruling and dominated strata. And like the Mosaic law of lex talionis, Archaic justice demanded ‘just compensation and recompense’ for transgressions. Dike is the ‘deep-set’ foundations of the community and the guardian of order and wealth (cf. Olympian XIII. 1–10). In other contexts Pindar will appeal to Nomos as a sacred ground of the polis (in Fr. 169, 1919:603 Nomos is a divinely-ordained order ruling both mortals and gods). In functional terms, nomos and dike perform the same role: hierarchically ordering human relations and preserving the aristocratic structure of the community. The end point of this evolution is a conception of one supreme divinity—Zeus—who is personally responsible for the good order of the city and the justice of the world-order. By the fifth century, divine and moral order were effectively interchangeable. Between the world of Homer and Anaximander we find two fundamental changes; the collapse of the old aristocracies and the rise of the world of the polis and the invention and spread of alphabetical writing. Together these changes transformed the meaning of ‘justice’ in the direction of more reflexive paradigms of order and legality. On the one hand, justice was generalized to all substantive and formal relations securing the existence of the city-state (a process which invariably led to the differentiation of previously undifferentiated spheres of moral, ethical, and legal norms and to an increased rationalization and formalization of different regions of social responsibility and civic duties), and on the other hand, the availability of a readily understandable, videological script, encouraged the formulation of codified, written bodies of law, frequently carved onto stone or bronze plaques and displayed for public inspection in the city square. By dispensing with the oral ‘wisdom’ of traditional authority—interpreters and oracular interpreters of the themistes—the written law substituted a visual map of the ‘objective prescriptions’ governing the social world and the sanctions that will be visited on transgressors. The citizen can now see—and occasionally read—the graphic inscriptions of justice and apply personal judgement to the issue of whether these new dikai ‘fit the case’. Once crystallized in a written medium laws can be debated, modified and, where necessary, changed; the older world of tribalphusis is now subject to the rationalizing pressures of civic nomos. 159

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The combined influence of these two changes led to an increasing objectification of legal awareness and a greater consciousness of the presence of ‘just’ (dikaios) relations both within and between civic communities. It is not accidental that the externalization and objectification of legal codes (whether in ancient Egypt, the Confucian prescripts, or the written laws of the Greek city-state) should also be ‘internalized’ as a model of ethical self-consciousness. The emergence of explicit concepts of individual self-consciousness and ‘conscience’ as a ‘space of interior judgment’ is directly linked with these technical innovations in legal and political life. The social visibility of legal rules and prescriptions not only accentuated a greater sense of generic moral and legal awareness, but also encouraged the growth of more reflexive forms of self-con-sciousness. This process seems to have accelerated in the Greek world with the crisis of the aristocracy during the seventh and sixth centuries BC. And it is in this ‘axial period’ that we have located the first great experiments in reflexivity. These material and institutional changes provided the necessary, though certainly not a sufficient, condition for the growth of legal and political reflexivity (cf. the use of similar law tables in the Mesopotamia of Hammurabai). And it appears that the later Greek term for ‘law’—nomos— developed its Classical connotations during this period. To phrase this in another way: the Homeric social order governed by Dike was reconstructed as a written corpus of ethical prescriptions and proscriptions, many of which formed the beginning of what we recognize as civic or public law. The metaphor of cosmic transgression—the violation of Themis and Dike—was secularized as a model for the civic violation of the laws governing the City. Dike gave way to Nomos in a process of dialectical incorporation as older notions of ‘ethos’ were reworked as questions of ‘ethics’, ‘excellence’ (arete), and self-control (sophrosune). The latter formed the lingua franca for a new civic ideology, the early Greek equivalent of what Norbert Elias has described as the civilizing process. And between the Cleisthenic reforms and the Periclean democracy, the laws of civic order were effectively identified with the norms of the legal system itself—still, of course, enmeshed in their older, religious meanings. The ‘discourses of justice’ which emerged from this crucial process of legal reflexivity provided new models of moral and political order and, correlated with them, novel configurations of human conscience and moral reflection—precisely what we have called ‘rhetorics of reflexivity’.34 Once this movement of ethical rationalization was underway two further projects of universal reflexivity became possible. First, the relations governed by Dike and Nomos were generalized from their natural place in the fateful Necessity of Zeus (ananke) to become part of the fabric of the whole kosmos. Transcribable laws of cosmic necessity held the world-order within prescribed limits. Second, the law-governed kosmos was used to rethink the social universe as an order governed by prescriptive law. What had been metaphorically projected upon Nature as ‘justice’, ‘righteousness’, ‘good behaviour’, and so forth, was returned to the human life-world as a metaphor 160

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for political order (a modern parallel to this complex dialectic can be found in the history of the vicissitudes of the word ‘revolution’). If the Law of phusis could be presented as the decrees of Fate, as Whitehead observed, this rested on the prior projection of moral models upon the kosmos. This set the stage for a long and convoluted history in European science and philosophy of the idea of the lawfulness of the natural and social worlds.35 Eventually the idea of justice emerged as an autonomous power in its own right, a complex system of written and unwritten laws; we are then already within the semantic space of modern conceptions of legality and justice. The precise history of the Greek concept of justice is not immediately relevant beyond these remarks; it has been traced in great detail by others.36 Dike and the injustice of existence Aeschylus’ tragedy Prometheus Bound and Anaximander’s work On Nature provide two exemplary instances of the creative work of metaphoric projection. Both texts reflect an ideological shift toward the notion of ‘natural causality’ modelled on civic relations and personal responsibility. Yet both preserve the earlier Greek experience of an intrinsic moral order and the consequences of its transgression. Anaximander accounts for transformation and passing-away by referring to the workings of fate (ananke) and justice (Dike). Ironically, the basic categories of later physical science (law, cause, causal relation, and so on) draw their meaning from a social dramaturgy offate, tragic transgression, and culpability. Even that most remorseless of scientific techniques—axiomatic logic—is not free from dramaturgical auspices. For ‘theorems’ in an algorithm follow from the necessary entailments of orderly axioms with the consistency of fate (axia also became the Greek term for ‘Value’ more generally; cf. Aristotle, NE 1119b26ff.). In the Apeiron-Fragment, it is the ‘ordinance’ or ‘assessment of Time’ that carries out the penalty of necessity against all finite existence. Injustice is compensated by necessity (kata to chreon) which exacts the ultimate punishment—to return that which is ‘bounded’ to the matrix of the Unbounded ‘according to the ordered process of Time’ (kata ten tou chronou taxin). It is not Zeus who exacts retribution, but the cosmic process in its orderly or lawful movement. It is the interdict of the Apeiron that every created world must suffer the ultimate penalty of non-existence. For Anaximander it is by the decree of Necessity that worlds should be dedifferentiated into the vast realm of the indeterminate. Not surprisingly later interpreters detect something like a primitive form of the law of nature in this imaginative conception. Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound provides an analogous exploration of the endemic conflict of divine Law (Dike) and free praxis. Prometheus’ theft of Fire transgresses divine Themis and he must pay the necessary recompense for his deviation. Prometheus must suffer the consequences of his wilful reflexivity. Even Zeus, father of all the Gods, is subject to the iron law of 161

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Necessity (Ananke)37 Aeschylus envisioned the whole cosmos as steered by Fate (Moira), a remorseless fatality presiding over mankind and the Gods, guarded by her agents, the ‘ever-mindful’ Furies (or Erinnes). Zeus is ‘Air, Earth, Heaven’; Zeus is all things and whatsoever is higher than all things (Aeschylus, Heliades, Fr. 70), and yet he is subject to the overarching Moral Order. Moira is fickle for man and God and the retributive violence of the Furies can fall anywhere. Together they ‘measure’ and ‘portion’ life and death to all beings, ordering and steering the cosmos, binding things together into a harmonious system. In a word, Necessity even binds the Gods to the kosmos. An analogous text can be found in Pindar’s Olympian 11.55–60 where those living without justice will be punished by Zeus, who passes sentence ‘stern and inevitable’ (ananke).38 It is, important to observe that already with Aeschylus, tragic legality has been separated from blind fatality. Although bound by Ananke, Prometheus chooses to act, freely transgressing Dike. This most human god steals the secret of divine knowledge (Fire, Technology, Self-Knowledge). The implication is that Order can be violated, and that Justice is called upon to repair the damage. In the transaction at the centre of Prometheus Bound we can detect the seeds of a later dialectical understanding of the links between Necessity and Praxis, Law and Freedom. Aeschylus, then, provides a literary parallel to Anaximander’s vision of the kosmos; both focus on the interplay between Limits, Transgression, and Self-Consciousness. Reflexivity arises through the transgression of Limits. For Anaximander this is the reflexivity that brings entities into existence; for Aeschylus, human self-knowledge has its roots in tragic suffering: ‘Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom arrives at the price of suffering’.39 Suffering is the inevitable price human beings must pay for transgression: in Aesychlus, the hubris of ‘divine’ knowledge (Prometheus, as it were, is the thief of knowledge that makes self-knowledge possible); in Anaximander, the hubris of existence temporarily freed from the matrix of the Apeiron. For both thinkers it appears that self-consciousness is granted to those that recognize and understand the necessary consequences of Dike. In Anaximander’s text, as we have seen, it is the very existence of beings or the process of coming-to-be as an opposition within the Apeiron that is ‘injustice’. Anaximander projects the ethical model upon the kosmos as a whole, viewing the existence of entities, the opposition of elements, the manifestation of nature itself through the terministic screen of ‘guilt’. Where gods are the protagonists of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, here it is Being itself—the presence of opposite forces within the Infinite—that must be rendered explicable. But a commonality is apparent. Dike works in regions far beyond the human context, in a vast panorama of anonymous oppositions beyond the power of Zeus to understand or control. An intangible, all-steering Law governs all Being, including the gods. Only the Logos gathers world and human community into a Whole. And from here we are in the vicinity of 162

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Heraclitus’ basic insight into Logos as the gathering, measuring, ordering Law of all change and becoming.40 Perhaps it is for the same reasons that Anaximandrian philosophy and Greek tragic drama—especially in its Aeschylean form—crystallized around the interrelated figures of Necessity, Transgression, and Recompense precipitated by the act of violating the Order of the Gods. Whether in the form of a dramatic or philosophical rhetoric, ethical metaphors are used to codify cosmic order: all things, in manifesting themselves from within the Apeiron must pay recompense; they have violated the unity of the Whole and for this ‘unrighteousness’ (which is also philologically associated with opposition and otherness) they must be absorbed back into the Infinite. Ananke, kata ten ton chronou taxin, requires punishment for the violation of existence. In logological terms, the icons of political community serve to map the geography of the cosmos. Injustice is not a conflict between the Apeiron and determinate beings, but a relation of conflict between opposites separated out from the Infinite—it is their ‘social struggle’ which gives rise to the need for reparations ‘according to the ordinance of time’. Here ‘they’ refers to the opposition responsible for wrenching forth beings from indetermination. Ananke is tied to Time: Kronos appears as a force extracting payments for an injustice; so finite oppositions and differences are erased by the assimilation of being to Being as temporality. For Anaximander, the processes of Time are as cold and relentless as Fate. Dike has achieved the zero degree of its anthropomorphic prototype.41 5 THE COSMIC VORTEX Anaximander’s Apeiron is not a substantial reality like the arche of Thales or Anaximenes. It is an indeterminate creative power within which elemental properties and oppositions separate out, exist for a time, and pass back into the matrix: the heavens arose from a fiery sphere encompassing a cylindrical earth like the bark of a tree; sun, moon, and stars are created from the vortex of this fire; opposing forces such as warmth-cold and moist—dry separate out; by condensation the earth precipitates from its original fiery magma; our own universe is one of innumerable worlds created in the cosmic cycle. At this point we see the deep affinity between Anaximander’s physical speculations and the image of the cosmic process in Heraclitus. The cylindrical earth Anaximander speculated about the actual disposition and circular rotation of the earth—which he argued was freely suspended in space ‘supported by nothing’ and equidistant from the circumference of the vortex. The cylindrical earth is formed with proportions similar to the shape of a drum or column, sustained by no further substance, but held in space by a dynamic equilibrium of equipollent forces (De Caelo 294a28ff.). He also suggested that the human 163

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race inhabits one side of this drum-shaped Earth and gave a poetic account of the stars and planetary phenomena such as eclipses (De Caelo 13.295b10ff.; Hippolytus, Ref. 1.6.1–7, esp. 3–5; Aëtius, 3.10.2). As Burnet notes: ‘The shape given to the earth by Anaximander is easily explained if we adopt the view that the world is a system of rotating rings. It is just a solid ring in the midddle of the vortex’ (1930:66). Plutarch’s gloss of Anaximander’s cosmology runs: [Anaximander] says that that which is productive from the eternal of hot and cold was separated off at the coming-to-be of this world, and that a kind of sphere of flame from this was formed round the air surrounding the earth, like bark round a tree. When this was broken off and shut off in certain circles, the sun and the moon and the stars were formed.42 Natural evolution Anaximander also theorized about the evolution of life forms, suggesting that the human form had evolved from an earlier fish-like ancestor. Links are frequently made between this attitude toward natural phenomena and later evolutionary theories (it may have been Anaximander’s insight into the phenomenon of universal change and transformation that directly influenced the thought of Heraclitus). Presumably the existence of fossilized remains of creatures in quarries and mountain-sides at a great distance from the sea—frequently of extinct flora and fauna—led Anaximander to speculate about the process of world creation and the evolution of forms of life.43 In different ways these observations complement and generalize Thales’ geophysical theory about the origins of the earth from water. Unfortunately, however, their protoevolutionary implications do not seem to have been systematically developed until Aristotle carried out research in comparative anatomy and biology and, as we know, Aristotle viewed the whole of nature as a fixed ‘chain of forms’ rather than as a developmental process. In this respect his biological thought fell behind the speculative advances made by Thales, Anaximander, and Xenophanes.44 Because of the damaged and derivative character of these texts, many interpreters have reconstructed Anaximander’s work as the product of a visionary physicist, theorizing the cycles of cosmic birth and destruction. Giorgio de Santillana claimed that Anaximander’s idea of the all-steering Apeiron replaced the teleological view of divine intervention with a physical mechanism, an instrumental conception ‘natural to a seafaring civilization’. The word ‘steering’ (kybernan) is drawn from navigation, its Latin equivalent, gubernare, being the source of the idea of ‘governor’: our mechanics speak of the ‘governor’ of a steam engine, whence in our time arose the science of cybernetics. The term of governing, retranslated 164

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into Greek by Wiener, turns out to be Anaximander’s very own. But it implies now what he meant and could not express—automatic control. (1961:39)45 Cosmic differentiation The eternal motion of the Apeiron separates out individual parts from the Whole, particularly the opposed natural elements. As Hussey says: A kosmos, by contrast with the Unbounded, was essentially not divine, though it was produced by creation by and from the Unbounded; it was finite, both in space and time, having both an origin and an end. Here the obvious problem is to explain how a kosmos is created and how it is kept going, agreeably with the observed facts and with theology. All the Milesians were concerned with this problem, and gave different answers which can be partly reconstructed with greater or less probability. (1972:18) One solution to this problem of the temporary dynamics of created worlds was by appealing to the emergence of Opposites (hot-cold, moist-dry, etc) and citing their ‘strife’ as the source of all change. Note the principled ‘dialectic’ of opposites as existing elements arise and are ‘opposed’ by their opposite number: Earth-Fire, Air-Water, the Dry and the Moist, Hot and Cold. Anaximander may have thought that each finite part was not only an ‘alienation’ of the Whole, but a self-alienation, a becoming-other of the Infinite, formulated as the strife of elemental opposites; the ‘atonement’ of these polarities is the restitutive work of a cosmic legality: the lawful emergence and destruction of beings and opposite qualities according to Necessity. In political metaphors the ‘just’ balance of opposites are seen as paying recompense to one another (like the ‘blood price’ of Homeric warriors recompensing for death by an equivalent gift). But this is simply an icon for a larger vision of the universe where ‘death’ or negation is seen as an endless cycle of manifestation and reabsorption in the Whole.46 Infinite worlds? If the cosmic process is one of self-differentiation, then the Apeiron is the source of the basic elements and their oppositional dynamics. A succession of worlds is one consequence of this cosmic law. The periodic creation and destruction of whole universes may have been one of Anaximander’s most important themes: this present world is only one of an infinite number of actual and possible ‘heavens’ that have been created and destroyed during the course of ‘coming-to-be’.47 165

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A lawful universe Anaximander formulated the concept of an orderly process of differentiation and individuation, a view of the cosmos governed by law, but without any teleological implications. Here the key theme is orderly genesis—the manifestation of worlds by differentiation. This mechanism accounts for the origin of the sun, moon, stars, and earth.48 Because of these protoscientific speculations, Anaximander may have been the first European individual to conceive of a non-anthropomorphic conception of ‘necessity’: The inherent rule is only the result of the necessary behavior of parts, just as we would think today in thermodynamics…it is no longer viewed as an image of society, but much the reverse… Physis, whose justice, has become identifed with abstract reason, has become autonomous, even more, automatic.49 The process of desacralization begun by Anaximander reached its full development in the work of Leucippus and Democritus who read Anaximander and Anaximenes quite literally as propounding a view of the cosmos as a purely mechanical order composed of irreducible elements governed in their movements through empty space by a lawful mechanism of ‘necessity’. At this point Dike, Themis, and Nomos have become naturalized— perhaps even ‘scientized’—into the process of physical causation. In logological terms, the secularization of the Archaic language of Justice was a precondition for the use of one of the basic metaphoric principles of natural and social inquiry—the concept of natural causation. Without the speculations of Anaximander on the balance of nature, perhaps Aristotle would not have explicitly proposed his own naturalistic account of justice. Consider the sociological perspective he adopts in the first book of the Politics: ‘But justice is the bond of men in states; for the administration of justice, which is the determination of what is just, is the principle of order in political society’.50 6 AFTER ANAXIMANDER Anaximander’s secularization of the Homeric-Hesiodic world-view created a new kind of cosmological reflection released from the authority of tradition. As we have found in our analysis of Thalean reflexivity, the metaphoric style of his thought is as important as its results. The problematic of cosmic creation and plural worlds created a further spectrum of ‘physical’ problems, taken up in subsequently by Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle. The idea of the Apeiron also suggested a new conception of theoretical cosmology as an attempt to apprehend the Whole purely in conceptual terms, advancing the idea of reflection as a pure meditation on the endless cycles of creation and destruction. For later philosophers the inner affinity between the mind (or thought) and 166

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Infinity was broached and Anaximander was reinterpreted as one of the first to suggest the kinship between cosmological inquiry and the self-disclo-sure of the infinite. Perhaps in the final analysis it is the paradoxical nature of Anaximander’s thought that stimulated his successors to inquire further and deeper. It is a measure of his importance that the notion of the ‘infinite’ is still at the centre of contemporary scientific and philosophical speculation. The presuppositions behind Anaximander’s ‘solution’ were laid out with great clarity by Aristotle, in the third book of his Physics (3.4.203b6–25). The unlimited was postulated by all the early philosophers as in some sense an arche of actually existing things (203a2). The ‘indeterminate’ or ‘infinite’ is the ‘principle’ of all existing things, and as such, cannot be an immaterial arche. If the apeiron is not immaterial, then, we must consider it to be some form of infinite matter, a kind of infinite undifferentiated body (204b22– 205a8) which, of course, Aristotle finds unacceptable (an unlimited body cannot exist, 206a). The crucial text must be cited as a whole: It is with reason that they all make [the infinite] a principle; we cannot say that the infinite has no effect, and the only effectiveness which we can ascribe to it is that of a principle (arche). For everything is either a principle or is derived from a principle. But the infinite has no principle, for that would limit it. Further, as it is a beginning, it is both ungenerated and indestructible. For there must be a point at which what has come to be reaches completion, and also a termination of all passing away. That is why, as we say there is no principle of this, but it is this which is held to be the principle of other things, and to encompass all and to steer all… Belief in the existence of the infinite comes mainly from five considerations: 1 2 3 4

5

From the nature of time—since it is infinite; From the division of magnitudes (mathematicians actually use the infinite); If coming to be and passing away is not to give out, it is only because that from which things come to be is infinite; Because the finite always finds its limit in something, so that there must be no limit, if everything is always limited by something different from itself; Last, and most importantly, a reason which is peculiarly appropriate and presents the difficulty what is felt by everybody—not only number but also mathematical magnitudes and what is outside the heaven are supposed to be infinite because they never give out in our thought.51

Aristotle translated Anaximander’s cosmology as a proto-ontology determining the first cause or physical principle of things. In this reading, arche becomes a ‘cause’ and apeiron becomes ‘hypokeimenon’ or the underlying substance of things. Anaximander’s reflexive distinction between Infinite and Finite, One and Many, and Difference and Heterogeneity are 167

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posed as questions for the regional science of physical ontology. Anaximander takes his place as a ‘physiologist’. Anaximander’s apeiron is treated as a groping attempt to isolate the material cause or matter (hyle) of things, a project still burdened by myth.52 Aristotle, in other words, reads his predecessors from the question-frames of his own hylomorphism and with a set causal paradigm in mind. Naturally, Anaximander emerges as a failed metaphysician. It is particularly instructive to follow the text and see how Aristotle assimilated his predecessors by translating arche and apeiron. The mechanism is most visible in Book 3 of the Physics (203b1–25). Here arche is rendered as principle and apeiron as an ungenerated and indestructible beginning. There is no beginning to the apeiron for the apeiron is itself the principle of all beginnings, steering and encompassing all things ‘as those assert who do not recognize, alongside the Infinite, other causes, such as Mind or Friendship’. Anaximander is singled out as identifying this ‘cause’ with ‘the divine’: ‘for it is “deathless” and “imperishable”, as Anaximander says, along with the majority of physicists’ (cf. Met. 1.2.983a8—10: ‘for God is thought to be among the causes of all things and to be a first principle’). He concludes his discussion by suggesting the five possible contexts for introducing the idea of the infinite (above). By naturalizing Anaximander’s thought, Aristotle reduces the cosmological figure of Apeiron to a physical hypokeimenon and even to a material cause. What was divine and self-creative now becomes materialized to fit the fourfold causal schema (Met. 1013a–1014a). Anaximander’s interrogation of the matrix of Being is rewritten as an inquiry into the physical ground of beings. The texts of this translation thus represent one of the most important places where the Presocratic arche is displaced from its concern with the matrix of being to become the question of the causation—or ‘causalities’—of physical things, where the inquiry into the Logos is interpreted as the search for the first principles of logic (cf. An. post. 2.94a). In logological terms, Aristotle translates Anaximander’s effort to think the question of the Ground of being into the terminology of ground as hypokeimenon.53 Anaximander’s speculative cosmogony fares no better. Here too, at the level of physical speculation, we find Aristotle underplaying the notion of the infinity of possible worlds born from the womb of the Apeiron through difference and ‘strife’, to make way for a static, hierarchical view of nature in keeping with the Classical principles of closure and form. We move from Anaximander’s infinite worlds to the closed universe of Aristotelian physics. This work of textual interpretation would have a profound effect on the development of cosmology, and we know that the doctrine of infinite worlds was not revived until the time of Epicurus. Epicurus followed Anaximander in declaring the universe to be boundless or without limit. But unlike the Milesian, he combined this idea with an atomic theory and conceptualized a world that is infinite both in the number of its constituent atomic bodies and in terms of the void in which they move. For Epicurean physics 168

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there are infinite worlds both like and unlike this world of ours. For the atoms (atomoi) being infinite in number…are borne on far out into space. For those atoms, which are of such a nature that a world could be created out of them or made by them, have not been used up either on one world or on a limited number of worlds, nor again on all the worlds which are alike, or on those which are different from these. So that there nowhere exists an obstacle to the infinite number of worlds.54 The concept of an infinite cosmos was—under the weight of Aristotle’s authority—repressed until the late medieval period, resurfacing in the speculations of men like Giordano Bruno and Nicholas of Cusa. However, it was only with the publication of Immanuel Kant’s Universal Natural History (Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels) in 1755 that the original idea regained some credibility. Using Newtonian principles Kant tried to demonstrate the formation of infinite worlds from an originally dispersed matter and a limitless void. Behind the speculative physics echoes the voice of the Milesian theorist: ‘I present to the imagination the infinitude of the whole creation, the formation of new worlds, the destruction of old worlds, and the boundless space of chaos.’55 Kant speculates that ‘the whole of space will be animated with worlds without number and without end’ (1970:140). But unlike the Presocratic model, Kant’s universe is governed by a benevolent God, an infinite World-Creator and Destroyer (the ‘Wisdom, Goodness, the Power which have been revealed is infinite’ (1970:65)). In scholastic terminology, ‘the field of the revelation of the Divine attributes is as infinite as these attributes themselves’ (1970:139). Yet the earlier theory—particularly with regard to the infinite dimensions of space and time, in whose womb endless words are created and destroyed—is not completely lost: ‘Millions and whole myriads of milllions of centuries will flow on, during which always new worlds and systems of worlds will be formed after each other in the distant regions away from the centre of nature’ (1970:145). And if this is the case, then our universe must be decentred in an infinite cosmos populated by an infinite number of galaxies. Here Kant anticipates the basic idea of relativity physics, a theme that sits uncomfortably in his otherwise orthodox Newtonian frame of reference. Kant even anticipates one of Einstein’s central ideas when he notes that in such a cosmos—situated as it is in an infinite space—‘no point can properly have the privilege to be called the centre’ (1970:142).56 In the nineteenth century, Kant’s speculative universe received support from an unusual source—the ‘Epicurean’ figure of Friedrich Engels, cof ounder of Marxism. For Engels, the ‘stuff of the universe—matter—is constant and preserved under all its permutations and transformations, but it is subject to an infinite number of changes, changes which stochastically suggest the ‘eternal return’ of the same worlds: the eternally repeated succession of worlds in infinite time is only the 169

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logical complement to the co-existence of innumerable worlds in infinite space… It is an eternal cycle in which matter moves…a cycle in which every finite mode of existence of matter, whether it be sun or nebular vapour, single animal or genus of animals, chemical combination or dissociation, is equally transient, wherein nothing is eternal but eternally changing, eternally moving matter and the laws according to which it moves and changes…we have the certainty that matter remains eternally the same in all its transformations, that none of its attributes can ever be lost, and therefore, also, that with the same iron necessity with which it will again exterminate on the earth its highest creation, the thinking mind, it must somewhere else and at another time again engender it.57 It appears that the fascination with the endless cycle of creation and destruction—the ‘eternal return of the Same’ and the dialectic of mind and matter—was a recurrent theme in nineteenth-century philosophy. Hegel formulated a similar idea with his concept of the dialectic of the Idea. In his Logic, for example, we find a variant of Anaximander’s basic idea: All things, we say—that is, the finite world as such,—are doomed; and in saying so, we have a vision of Dialectic as the universal and irresistible power before which nothing can stay, however secure and stable it may deem itself.58 We also know how important this thought was to the later writings of Nietzsche. Nietzsche appears to have been particularly taken by the Anaximandrian figures of finitude and injustice: It may not be logical, but it certainly is human, to view now, together with Anaximander, all coming-to-be as though it were an illegitimate emancipation from eternal being, a wrong for which destruction is the only penance. Everything that has ever come-to-be again passes away, whether we think of human life, or of water, or of hot and cold. Wherever definite qualities are perceivable, we can prophesy, upon the basis of enormously extensive experience, the passing away of these qualities. Never, in other words, can a being which possesses definite qualities or consists of such be the origin or first principle of things. That which truly is, concludes Anaximander, cannot possess definite characteristics, or it would come-to-be and pass away like all the other things. In order that coming-to-be shall not cease, primal being must be indefinite. The immortality and everlastingness of primal being does not lie in its infinitude or its inexhaustibility, but in the fact that it is devoid of definite qualities which would lead to its passing. Hence its name, ‘the indefinite’.59 From this brief summary of Anaximander’s influence upon later science and 170

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philosophy we can see that the Apeiron-Fragment has played a seminal role in the course of European speculation. Anaximander’s conceptual language did indeed create the framework within which early Greek philosophy developed from start to finish. And, more significantly, it has successfully resisted easy formulation and remained a source of controversy and dialogue throughout the development of Western thought. Perhaps this is what gives his vision its universal significance for Western philosophy. In fact the first voice raised against Anaximander’s vision was that of his own student and disciple, Anaximenes. And Anaximenes’ critique of his teacher’s cosmology proposed an even more radical perspective on the nature of the cosmos and created paths of thought that would continue to be pursued into the modern age.

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Just as our psyche—being air (aer)—holds us together (synkratei), so breath (pneuma) and air encompass (periexei) the whole cosmos (kosmos). (Anaximenes B 2) 1 2 3 4 5 6

Introduction Anaximenes’prose and its deconstruction Anaximenes’ cosmos: Anaximenes as a natural philosopher? Natural philosophy as critical theory The self-deconstruction of Anaximenes’ text A reflexive pneumatology? 1 INTRODUCTION

According to Diogenes Laertius, Anaximenes, the son of Eurystratus, ‘flourished’ around 540–548 BC—close to the period that saw the capture of Sardis by Cyrus (546/545 B.C). He was younger than Thales and Anaximander and is traditionally pictured as a somewhat critical pupil of the latter. Diogenes, quoting Apollodorus, gives his dates as 585 to 524 BC (DL 2.3). However, we know less of Anaximenes’ life and social background than any of the other Milesian thinkers. Here almost everything is conjecture: that he was a well-known intellectual, wrote at least one book, worked with Anaximander and perhaps collaborated with him on his encyclopaedic projects, rejected the theories of Thales and Anaximander, and was critical of cosmological discourse written in a poetic style. Anaximenes’ critical attitude toward the style of his immediate teachers is an important rhetorical clue to the nature of his thought. 2 ANAXIMENES’ PROSE AND ITS DECONSTRUCTION Anaximenes’ choice of terminology and unpretentious style displays a distinct sense of the difference between his work and Anaximander’s Peri Phusis. This is most marked in the manner in which he abandons the ‘poetic’ icons of 172

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Dike, Apeiron, Ananke, Chronos, and the like, and envisions a kosmos governed purely by physical processes and mechanisms. His choice of expression suggests the existence of polemical debates within the Milesian tradition concerning matters of form and content. By deliberately choosing to write in a prosaic and laconic style, Anaximenes may be regarded as the first self-con-scious stylist of ‘scientific’ prose. He may be regarded as the true harbinger of the ‘age of prose.’1 His immediate Milesian audience would have recognized his choice of language as a polemical device marking an ideological difference between the new logos of phusis and the existing genre which sanctioned a logos of theos. Anaximander’s absorption in the idiom of ‘divinity’ (the Apeiron qua to theion) may have been the specific target of Anaximenes’ theorizing. In terms of the evolution of philosophical prose, however, this local attack on the favoured genres of his main teachers and traditional lexicon initiated a fundamental change of textual practice which would have radical consequences for the future of Classical Greek thought and science. Anaximenes’ decision to adhere to the prosaic idioms of empirical experience helped to further the secularization of language which was already native to the spirit of Milesian science. When Aristotle came to construct the basic rules of logic and naturalistic philosophy— setting out the grammar of metaphysics—he followed Anaximenes’ precedent of writing in a straightforward and purposefully concrete style. Of course, this literal style was not without presuppositions; it was grounded upon particular assumptions concerning the ideal of a cognitively adequate language designed to ‘correspond’ with the essential nature of things. This in turn implicates deeper assumptions concerning the nature of language, the processes of cognition, and mimesis more generally. With respect to these themes, it was Anaximenes’ prose style which would exert a profound influence on later Greek science and metaphysics. As we will see below, Anaximenes’ choice of arche—or what Aristotle called the underlying material substance of ‘infinite air’—activated decisive logological presuppositions; these eventually became the taken-for-granted horizon for rational inquiry into the nature and principles of things. The arche of things is no longer indeterminate; it is a concrete, corporeal ‘element’ and its physical transformations. Not surprisingly, Anaximenes’ was retrospectively interpreted by Aristotle’s students as one of the founding fathers of naturalistic explanation, analyzing the structure and movement of phenomena wholly in terms of physical mechanisms. And by the fourth century, this conception of language and the world would be hardly distinguishable from the discourse of science itself. Anaximenes—as reconstructed in the reading practices of Aristotle and Theophrastus—is thus the distant ancestor of the ‘objective’ paradigm of scientific discourse. Needless to say, Anaximenes’ innovation did not pass without contestation and, indeed, explicit and equally resolute deconstruction. We will see that Anaximenes’ own thought is internally contested by the operation of non173

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cor-respondential principles and metaphoric figurations within the text itself. The key Presocratic figure in this immanent deconstruction and the central exponent of a non-representational understanding of language and the Logos was Heraclitus, whose own assumptions concerning inquiry, self-knowledge, discourse, and language will form the theme of Chapter 6. And two hundred years later, Aristotle would mount a critique of the substance of Anaximenes’ theorizing by using the very instruments that Anaximenes had invented. As with the other instances of early philosophical writing we have examined, the surface propositions of Anaximenes’ text are not our primary concern—rather we are interested in the matrix of presuppositions underlying and warranting his claim that ‘All is Air’: Anaximenes of Miletos, son of Eurystratos, who had been an associate of Anaximander, said, like him, that the underlying substance was one and infinite. He did not, however, say it was indeterminate, like Anaximander, but determinate; for he said it was Air. (Theophrastus, Physical Opinions, Fr. 2 in Burnet, 1930:73) It is the state of mind and implicit culture of critical dialogue sustaining this kind of utterance as a rational claim that deserves our special attention. As in previous studies, we can begin by first examining the verbal and dialogical matrix presupposed by the Anaximenean proposition: ‘All is air’. What are the problems for which this is an answer? 3 ANAXIMENES’ COSMOS: ANAXIMENES AS A NATURAL PHILOSOPHER? In what ways can Anaximenes be described as a natural philosopher? According to Theophrastus, Anaximenes’ theory of infinite Air belongs to a tradition of naturalistic theorizing. Being a native of Miletus Anaximenes is usually represented as a pupil of Anaximander preserving the line of succession of the Ionian tradition of naturalist monism (for example as late as Augustine, Civitas Dei, VIII.2; see Burnet, 1930:78, n. 4; Cherniss, 1951). His only known work has the typical Milesian title Peri Phuseos and this, we suggest, was probably written as a critique of the earlier Peri Phuseos of Anaximander. Given his commitment to the simple ‘language of things’ he would be expected to continue the process of ‘dedivinizing’ the theological vocabulary of his famous teacher in the direction of a more corporeal and abstract ‘principle’. Anaximenes contested Anaximander’s Apeiron theory by ‘secularizing’ the Dike metaphors which form its explanatory heart. ‘Justice’ belongs to the sphere of morality and human conduct; and can only be extended to the world process as a simplifying and misleading metaphor. Objective analysis presupposes a discourse completely cleansed of metaphor and anthropomorphic reasoning. We should strive to eliminate all talk of ‘punishment’ and ‘retribution’ in studying natural processes. This patricidal act of demythological criticism proceeds on three 174

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fronts. First, with respect to the nature of the cosmic ‘substance’: we must abandon the indeterminate Apeiron as still too embroiled in the theological figures of earlier mythology and return physical inquiry to the dynamic world of the four primordial elements, selecting infinite Air as the most appropriate matrix and first principle; this revision also ‘corrects’ Thales’ choice of ‘first principle’ and the cosmology based upon it (cf. Aristotle, Met. 984a6; Hippolytus Ref. 1.7.1; cf. Aristotle, Met. 1071b27, 1075b26–27). Second, the characterization of processes of change must be defined solely in material and, if possible, quantitative terms: the cosmic cycles of ‘coming-to-be’ and ‘passingaway’ are no longer pictured as the workings of Cosmic Justice, but as the outcome of a naturalistic, perhaps even a mechanical, process—the endless transformations of condensation and rarefaction within a ‘neutral’, formless, originless Air. Anaximenes’ alternative model consequentially privileges the material and polymorphous element ‘Air’ as the most fitting ‘stuff’ behind the genesis of worlds. Finally, ‘Air’ has the additional virtue of ‘unifying’ the domains of life, human reality, and the cosmic process under one basic principle. All of these apparently separate domains are in reality different states of one dynamic substance. 3.1 Aer: ‘…kai holon ton kosmos pneuma kai ar peierchei’ Anaximenes son of Eurystratus, of Miletus, declared that air is the principle of existing things; for from it all things come to be and into it they are again dissolved. Just as our soul, being air, holds us together, so do breath and air encompass the entire cosmos (Aëtius 1.3.4) [or ‘As our soul, being air, holds us together and controls us, so does wind [or breath] and air enclose the whole world’].2 Anaximenes certainly appears to have formulated his views with an air of conviction. The fragment ascribed to him by Aëtius speaks from a secure sense of knowledge: his listeners are urged to recognize the truth about phusis—that all is Air (pneuma) or material configurations of Air, and by gaining this insight, to alter their ways of thinking about natural phenomena. In Anaximenes’ cosmology the microcosm and the macrocosm are both derivative domains of a larger unified scheme, parts of a common homogeneous totality governed by an intelligible legality. This is nowhere more true than in the harmony of the living human body—which exists and flourishes by means of the constant cyclical exchange of Air: breathing, exhaling, respiring, etc. as elemental rhythms present in every form of life. Here lies the continuity of human and non-human life forms. The next step was simply to apply the art of universal generalization developed by Thales and Anaximander: the whole Kosmos is a process of rarefied and condensed Air. As we have observed above, Anaximenes requires his listeners to abandon the indeterminate Apeiron of Anaximander and embrace instead a concrete 175

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arche with more affinity to the Thalean general principle of elemental Water. For Anaximenes, it is Air that holds the Whole together, just as air is the secret of the human psyche and life in general. Air is the vibrant living medium which governs the totality of existence. If phusis is alive and dynamic, then only a nature constituted by mobile Air can be an original cause. And like the arche of other Presocratic thinkers, Anaximenes’ Air itself has no cause, origin, or further explanation. It is the abysmal ‘beginning’ which accounts for all beginnings and all worlds. Hence the epithet ‘divinity’ which is still attributed to this primordial process. As a primary element, Air is a world medium that is continuously in motion and transformation; yet by virtue of its protean volatility it can provide a methodic explanation of the whole spectrum of differentiated being and becoming in the physical world. The many individual things and opppositional processes experienced in everyday life are to be explained by means of the simplest principle: every mode of being is the product of a binary process of Condensation and Rarefaction. In this world picture the One has been identified with the totality of its possible transformations (as aether, fiery air, frozen air, ‘materialized’ air, and so on). Anaximenes made another important discovery—the motions of Air are law-governed. They obey, in Heraclitus’s words, an orderly pattern—a logos. This is the wider significance of the conjoint mechanisms of condensation and rarefaction. Condensation explains how air cools and precipitates into winds, clouds, water and, eventually, earth. Rarefaction accounts for the opposite process, explaining the dynamic genesis of the rare, fiery elements of the world. Clouds are the product of compressed air just as Fire represents rarefied air and Stones the most dense state of Air: When it is dilated so as to be rarer, it becomes fire; while winds, on the other hand, are condensed Air. Cloud is formed from Air by felting; and this, still further condensed, becomes water. Water, condensed still more, turns to earth; and when condensed as much as it can be, to stones. (Hippolytus, Ref. 1.7) With an unswerving commitment to his unitary mechanism, the earth—like a discus—is said to rest upon a sphere of Air, encompassed by a vast celestial vault studded with crystalline stars revolving around a flattened base. Planetary motion and meteorological phenomena are thus also reduced to empirical configurations of air. It was this simple model of the cosmos which would become a dogma in the work of Aristotle and later—especially through the writings of Leucippus, Democritus, and Ptolemy—serve as the basic picture of the physical world down to the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century in northern Europe. 3.2 Anaximenean critique By moving from the surface text to its presuppositional logic we can appreciate 176

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the important discovery of reflective criticism implicit in the Anaximenean conjecture: the ‘critique’ of his predecessors is contained in the explicit naturalism of Anaximenes’ theory; of all the Ionian cosmologists mentioned by later doxographers and commentators it is Anaximenes’ logos that is selected as the paradigm of scientific speculation: the motion of an invisible, underlying element provides the simplest explanatory mechanism for all natural phenomena—indeed for the dynamic totality of phusis. Phusis is best explained by a process of material transformation, and Air fills the role perfectly, being the stuff of all other basic elements and the principle of life itself—in the form of ‘breathing’, air is the very life of the soul. According to the ancient testimonies the Infinite or Apeiron is never mentioned—a peculiar situation given that antiquity records Anaximenes as Anaximander’s greatest pupil and successor: the arche or ‘principle’ of all things is now a pure, insubstantial, and invisible element (moreover, it is the element which common sense appeals to in speaking of the psyche as a ‘breath soul’). 3.3 Phusis as a totality of natural phenomena Like his Milesian predecessors, Anaximenes abstracted from the heterogeneous differences of the Many to isolate a unified logos of the One, the matrix of their intelligible unity. As with earlier cosmological thought, he articulated his intuition in an abstract metaphor interrelating psyche and kosmos: ‘Just as our psyche—being air (aer) holds us together (synkratei), so breath (pneuma) and air encompass (periexei) the whole cosmos (kosmos). Yet what is most striking about the proposition contained in Fragment 2 (DK 13 B 2, from Aëtius 1.3.4) is its textual ambiguities and ambivalence. Despite his attempt to transcend the tradition, the thesis is still the product of an intertextual fusion of ancient pre-Homeric images with naturalistic theorizing. The fragment preserved by the doxographers may also, as Kirk and Raven suggest, have been contaminated with older texts (‘for the sentence is not in Ionic, and it contains one word, synkratei, which could not possibly have been used by Anaximenes, and another, kosmos, which is unlikely to have been used by him in precisely this sense’ KR: 159; cf. Peters, 1967:160). They judge the word periexei as a genuine Milesian expression for the encompassing element. Psyche as ‘breath’ also dates back to pre-Homeric Greece. On the basis of these philological considerations they come to the conclusion that the ‘degree of re-wording’ is probably not very great, but that ‘unfortunately we cannot determine whether, or how far, it affected the exact point and degree of the comparison’ (KR: 159). Presumably Aëtius constructed this sentence from a number of different textual sources, producing a composite summary of Anaximenes’ central thought. Yet even in its damaged and ‘synthetic’ state we glimpse the outlines of a revolutionary idea. The underlying thought seems to be that whatever explains the life of the soul can also account for the genesis of the kosmos. The heart 177

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of this proposition rests on the interplay between psyche and kosmos; both ‘participate’ in the gathering process that encompasses and orders these phenomena as wholes (expressed by the word periexei). The originality of this word-play provides further evidence for the kind of semantic inventiveness at work in the Milesian tradition. As Peters observes: ‘The identification of air and breath, implicit in the analogy of Anaximenes, is made explicit by the Pythagoreans when they maintain that pneuma and void are inhaled by the universe’ (Peters, 1967:160). Anaximenes uses Archaic words—Psyche, Pneuma, Aer, Kosmos—to craft one of the first universal statements in Western philosophy. Where epic and myth had thought of psyche as a divine gift of life, Anaximenes transformed air—the psyche of the universe—into the deathless source of all existence. Rather than the analogy being a later imposition (KR: 160), is it not possible to see it as a creative extension of a much more ancient understanding of the functional role of the psyche andpneuma? (The fact is that the idea of the soul holding together the body has no other parallel in a Presocratic source, or indeed in any Greek source earlier than Stoic ones and some of the later Hippocratic works. The concept involved is admittedly not a complex one: for when the life-soul departs, the body, or most of it, obviously disintegrates, it is no longer held together. Nevertheless the absence of parallels, together with the knowledge that Anaximenes’ terminology has certainly been tampered with at this point, makes it unwise to accept the sense even of sunexei here’ KR: 160). But this is surely letting the philology do the thinking; the notion of the soul-breath leaving the body at death, its functional role in defining the person, its dynamic relation to the ‘integrity’ of the body and recognition, etc., are all standard themes in Homeric narrative (see Volume 2, Chapter 2). The abstract idea of the psyche ‘embracing’, ‘controlling’, and even ‘directing’ the affairs of the body is simply a generalization from these well-known Homeric paradigms. The Milesian project of universal generalization discovered by Thales was set to work upon an everyday figure of speech; from this conceptual beach-head Anaximenes had the imagination to extrapolate the functionality of air in respiration and animation to the entire cosmos; the microcosm of breath is then grasped as the key to the pneumatic processes of the macrocosm itself (Aristotle, Physics 4.213b). He generalized and elaborated an older allegorical motif into a cosmological metaphor. Why should this soul theory have been so ‘unlikely’ (KR: 161) in the mind of an individual who claimed that ‘Everything was Air’, and viewed every phenomenon, whether terrestrial or ‘astral’ as the product of condensation and rarefaction? It is simpler to read Anaximenes’ discovery of rarefaction and condensation as a limited mechanical model that was applied with impressive consistency to all the details of his cosmogony, astronomy, geology, and meteorology. His analysis of all objects and 178

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events in the physical world as aspects and functions of a single quantitative process is the ultimate achievement that characterizes the orientation of Milesian philosophy. (Cherniss, 1977:72; see also Burnet, 1930:74–9; Jaeger, 1947: 29–30; and Vlastos, 1970:424, n. 19) We should dwell on the staggering sense of transcendence implicit in Anaximenes’ universal generalization. First, its naturalism: Fragment B 2 affirms that there is but one mechanism underlying all natural processes. Second, its explanatory simplicity: we are to explain all phenomena by referring them to an underlying principle or cosmic substance. Finally, its rationalism: the reduction of all phenomena to a regular sequence of causes, or, as it is customary to say today, a mechanism of ‘causal powers’. It is thus Anaximenes rather than Anaximander or Thales who is the founding father of naturalistic (if not scientific) realism: behind the whole world process lies the infinite motion of cosmic Air, governed by a quantitative law of rarefaction and condensation. The explanatory structure and presuppositions of rarefaction and condensation In asserting that pneuma binds and encompasses the whole cosmos, and in proffering a causal mechanism behind the cosmic cycle, Anaximenes takes a great step in the direction of a purely naturalistic explanation of phenomenal appearances: not only is phusis in need of some unitary explanation, but this explanation is given a protomaterialistic form (we should remember that the term ‘pneuma’ in Presocratic Greek still had very strong connotations of a material or corporeal nature: ‘Air’ was undoubtedly considered to be a material plenum). Pneuma, of course, continued to be described in divine terms—as the omnipresent source and origin of things that come to be and pass away— yet the mechanisms behind these cyclical processes are already modelled on well-known physical processes. In other words, Anaximenes abandoned the poetic language of ‘injustice’ and ‘retribution’ which served to organize Anaximander’s account of natural differentiation in favour of a purely mechanical theory. It may well have been this extreme naturalist revisionism that attracted the likes of Diogenes of Apollonia (fl. 440–430 BC) and, much later, Aristotle and Theophrastus to the kind of explanatory structure embedded in Anaximenean theorizing. Consider the following ancient account of how such a mechanism worked: [Air] is differentiated into various substances according to the differences in rarefaction and condensation; and thus by dilation it gives origin to fire, while by condensation it gives origin to the wind and then to the clouds; and because of greater amounts of density it forms water, then 179

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the earth and hence the rocks; the other things are then derived from these’.3 More important than the proposition that aer is the arche of all things is the use of this element in a comprehensive explanatory context embracing all forms of being, human and extra-human. Air is a principle of eternal motion for the soul and the kosmos. The things which come into being and change are animated by the interminable motion of the Air. The motion of Air is the primary cause of the reality and identity of things. Anaximenes discovered the idea of using such a category as an explanatory key to natural processes. The general orientation is well-known: Being made finer it [Air] becomes fire, being made thicker it becomes wind, then cloud, then (when further thickened) water, then earth, then stones; and the rest comes into being from those. He, too makes motion eternal, and says that change, also, comes about through it’.4 From these fragmentary texts we can produce an Anaximenean table of transformations, such as the following: Rarefaction Heat Fire Rarefied ‘objects’

Condensation Cold Water Condensed ‘objects’

It is, then, this theory of the workings of quantitative differences in one medium or ‘quality’ that is Anaximenes’ great discovery: quality is a direct product of definite quantitative differences in the phenomenal field. The famous ‘law’ of rarefaction and condensation—perhaps the first clearly presented account of ‘lawful’ process governing all natural phenomena—is the nearest any Milesian thinker came to the idea of a ‘law of nature’ in the modern sense of that expression; all the elements of nature are quantitative variations of one qualitative root substance (this is certainly the interpretation given to Anaximenes’ texts by Simplicius in his Commentary on the Physics of Aristotle, 24–6: Anaximenes says that the cold is the matter which contracts and condenses, while the hot is the matter which expands and loosens (this is the expression which he used). Hence, it is not without reason, according to Anaximenes, that a man lets go from the mouth cold and hot: the breath, in fact, is cooled if it becomes compressed by closed lips, but instead if it leaves from the open mouth it becomes hot by dilation’.5 4 NATURAL PHILOSOPHY AS CRITICAL THEORY All the main commentators—Theophrastus, Simplicius, Aëtius, Hippolytus, and Plutarch—approach Anaximenes’ theorizing as a naturalistic account of 180

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the world process, the formation of celestial bodies and the earth. It is important, however, to return their reconstructions to the ‘reception-horizon’ of fifthcentury Greece and, more particularly, to the world of fourth-century Athens. The link appears to have been the popular philosophy of Diogenes of Apollonia. It was Diogenes who first grasped the revolutionary significance of Anaximenes’ explanatory structure, and with perfect confidence of its universal validity, extended and systematized the underlying ontology by making Air the stuff of the world, the mind (psyche), and intellect (nous or noesis).6 It is probable that during the early part of the fifth century Anaximenes’ theories, mediated by Diogenes and other popularizers, were considerably more influential than those of his fellow Milesians. According to John Burnet,7 Anaximenes marked the culminating point of the whole Milesian tradition. From the lost works of that tradition the theory of a natural cosmos was spread through the Greek world, and became particularly influential in the dynamic culture of Athens. Anaximenes’ writings formed the starting point for Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Diogenes of Apollonia and perhaps even the Atomists, Leucippus and Democritus. Not surprisingly it is the Air cosmology that is parodied by Aristophanes in his aptly titled comedy, the Clouds.8 Aristophanes presents the young Socrates as a partisan of this ‘aery’ philosophy, even going so far as suspending Socrates from the ‘clouds’ in a basket. It is evident that by the middle of the fifth century the ‘philosophy of Anaximenes’—in popular renditions and vulgarizations—had become synonymous with the Milesian doctrine as a whole (Burnet, 1930:79). But the point needs little emphasis: the generalized idea that all processes of nature can be accounted for in terms of simple elemental causes and a quantitative explanatory mechanism was seen to spell the end of all teleological accounts of reality. A phusis governed by Gods could be replaced by a ‘nature’ ruled by causal regularities (nomoi) and underlying physical mechanisms. As we shall see in Volume 4, this single theme was to become the ideological crucible for a range of complex intellectual and cultural conflicts in the last decades of the fifth century. 5 THE SELF-DECONSTRUCTION OF ANAXIMENES’ TEXT Let us return to Anaximenes’ text. We have suggested that his attempt to create a single causal mechanism articulated in a unitary ‘language of things’ was subverted by the text’s unconscious use of teleological figures drawn from a much older theological idiom. 5.1 The divinity of infinite air Aristophanes wrote the Clouds for an audience that was well aware of the clash of religious and naturalistic discourse. In fact Aristophanes’ parody was most probably constructed on the basis of secondary texts 181

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representing the ideas of Diogenes of Apollonia. Diogenes (fl. 440–430 BC) interpreted Anaximenes’ book according to the spirit of its presuppositions; and behind the causal lexicon he heard an older teleological language. Diogenes thus saw no contradiction in accepting the divinity of Air (‘Air is God’). Air is not merely a source element, but, as a god, it is eternal and immortal, governing the whole Cosmos. This is also why Air can be said to hold the body and all other substances in its embrace. Air is ‘everlasting and immortal’, manifold in form, and ‘all things live, see and hear by the same thing (air), and all have the rest of intelligence also from the same.’9 The divine arche embraces all things, men and gods. In the idiom of Fragment 4: ‘Man and all the other animals live on air by breathing it, and this is their soul [or life-principle] and their understanding (noesis)…while they die and their understanding fails, when it is taken from them.’ This should also be compared to the legacy of Anaximenes as this is presented by Diogenes Laertius, Simplicius, Hippolytus, and, much later, by Cicero.10 The textual fusion of causal and teleological imagery illustrates how mythic symbolism and philosophical metaphor interact to create an emergent understanding that is more thought-provoking than the mere collocation of parts. Anaximander appeared to have abandoned all material imagery, only to have Anaximenes return the infinite to an even more elemental figure (Heraclitus may have taken a similar stand, and the semantic affinity between Aither, Pneuma, and Fire is well documented). Air presented itself as a perfect icon of genesis with its phenomenological connotations of omnipresence yet invisibility, omnispatiality—air ‘fills’ the plenum of Being-elementality (prior to all division into inner and outer, internal and external regions) as well as its Archaic affinity with the ancient metaphors of ‘breath’ for soul (psyche) and life in general. If the kosmos is a living and mobile Whole, what better image for this than life itself? Most literally, air is the measure and source of all things, while it cannot itself be measured: the human psyche is the gift of air, and lack of air, as Diogenes reports, invariably spells death. Air, in other words, connects the arche with the divine horizon and with the new infinite universe.11 The polysemic word aither presented itself as a perfect symbol of unity and mediation: Since the heavenly bodies (ouranioi) dwell in the aither another possibility was that the soul might be absorbed into the stars… This belief was incorporated into later Pythagoreanism, but with the reservation of aither to the supralunary world; it was the aer between the moon and the earth that was filled with daimones and heroes. (Peters, 1967:4)

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5.2 The world soul It is well known that the earliest imagery for the soul—as the mobile source of life—was drawn from ordinary words for ‘breath’ and ‘wind’. Thus the ancient Hebraic expression for both ‘soul’ and ‘life’ (nephesh) derives from the word for breath (neshama). The psyche is an invisible Vapour’ which leaves the body at the point of death—a theme that is common to Homeric epic and many of the mythologies of ancient cultures. As we have seen in our investigation of reflexivity in Homer in Volume 2, psyche and thumos are closely interrelated expressions. In both the Judaic and Archaic Greek contexts, the nexus of life, soul, and ‘spirited’ experience is symbolized by the ‘heart’.12 Air (as Life or the ‘life principle’) was one of the four key Elements in the earliest account of the dynamic oppositions underlying and unifying all natural processes. And in this form it would have one of the longest careers of any ancient theory, continuing down to the modern period. We all know the dying words of Cleopatra, without associating these with the Milesians: ‘Husband, I come… I am Fire, and Air; my other Elements I give to baser Life’.13 No less a figure than the founder of modern philosophy, René Descartes, two thousand years later, still understood ‘physics’ within the framework of this system: Je concoy le premier, qu’on peut nommer ‘Element du Feu, comme une liqueur la plus subtile et la plus penetrante qui soit au Monde [I conceive of the first, which one may call the Element of Fire, as the most subtle and penetrating fluid there is in the world].14 And perhaps one last modern instance which links Anaximenes’ theory of condensation and rarefaction with the Heraclitean kosmos of Fire: The innumerable suns and solar systems of our cosmic island, bounded by the outermost stellar rings of the Milky Way, developed by contracting and cooling from swirling, glowing masses of vapour, the laws of motion of which will perhaps be disclosed after the observation of some centuries have given us an insight into the proper motion of the stars… How a solar system develops from a separate nebular mass has been shown in detail by Laplace in a manner still unsurpassed; subsequent science has more and more confirmed him.15 One further step and we find ourselves in the field of modern cosmology, which is to say, we are returned to the speculative insights of the Milesian thinkers. Consider the following description of the fire birth and fire death of an expanding and contracting universe, in essence a reformulation of Anaximenes’ central explanatory principle, reworked within a general relativity framework: if the recession of the galaxies ultimately ceases and they begin to move back towards each other they will move ever closer together to play in 183

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reverse the actions begun at the beginning. As the galaxies approach they will co-mingle and lose their identity, as will their constituent stars, their constituent atoms, the constituents of these atoms, and so on. The scenario at the end of the world is that of the beginning reversed… the laws of science are once again strained to breaking point to explain the further lines of the great drama of the universe.16 5.3 Anaximenes’ iconic discourse From the evidence of the ancient sources, Anaximenes does not appear to have identified the cosmos with the World-Soul. This remained one of the original contributions of Plato. Rather, he draws out a shared ground between microcosm and macrocosm, and labels this ground aer or ‘pneuma’. We have seen that Diogenes of Apollonia grasped the central point in claiming that all things live, see, and hear by Air; and that air is the medium of intelligence and reflexivity. If we can read between the lines of Theophrastus’ account the same general picture emerges: [Anaximenes] said that the first principle was limitless Air (aer), from which arises what comes into being, what has become, and what will be, and gods and things divine; but other things arise from its offspring. The form of the air is as follows: when it is most uniform it is invisible; but it is made manifest by cold and heat and moisture and motion. It moves continually: for it would not change as much as it does if it were not in motion. As it thickens or rarefies it appears as different. For when it spreads out into rarer form it becomes fire; winds on the other hand are air as it thickens; from Air cloud is produced by compression; and water by still more compression; when further thickened it becomes earth and in its thickest form stones.17 Yet the text is not physical science in its modern sense. Anaximenes’ discourse is not an exercise in protophysics. Like his fellow Milesians his project is one of formulating the nature of the Whole. And the Ionians accomplish this task by borrowing symbols to create adequate expressions of the Whole: Thales’ god-plenum, Anaximander’s divine, all-steering Apeiron, Heraclitus’ universal Logos, Empedocles’ dialectic of Love (Philotes) and Hate (Neikos). They share the attempt to articulate the unity or firstness which provides the ground of all manifestation (beneath the manifold differentiation of beings all things are One). Their ‘topic’ is ontologically prior to the regional problems of science. Furthermore, the attempt to ‘think the nature of Being’ discloses the question of the element of thinking, in the sense that something like psyche or selfconsciousness is inextricably linked to such thinking. In Anaximenes’ cosmology, the soul is gathered together as part of phusis, so that such thinking must reflexively address the soul’s involvement with process and becoming. Heraclitus makes this idea explicit and, we might 184

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suggest, based his whole philosophical project upon its consequences: the thinking of Becoming is a radically reflexive project in the sense that only a soul that is open to the Logos can ‘attend’ to the ground of all ‘coming-to-be’ and ‘passing-away’. Only a reflexive being can relate to the horizon of Being itself. Rather than linking Anaximenes’ text to the tradition of physical inquiry, we may also see it as responding to a different problematic: how to respond thoughtfully to the reflexivity of human life within the encompassing horizon of the cosmos—how to refer to ‘that which never sets’ (Heraclitus, B 16), the hidden harmony binding the soul to the cosmos (B 54)? 6 A REFLEXIVE PNEUMATOLOGY? Anaximenes’ project might be reconstructed as follows. Educated within the discourses of Homeric epic, myth, and Orphic cosmogony, Anaximenes was fully conversant with the traditional account of the fourfold elements of all things: Gaia, the dark, damp ground of human action and community; Water (Okeanos) as the fecund source of life, a gift of the Gods; Fire, the moving thumos of all things flowing from the Sun; and Air, symbol of elemental life, the principle of eternal transformation, the living pneuma of the soul and, in the purer form of aither, of the heavens. Faced with these stories Anaximenes posed a simple question: how can the differentiation and interplay of these elements be reconciled with the unity of the cosmos? And how is the ‘unityin-difference’ that is human existence to be understood within a general account of the Whole? For it is human speech that ultimately celebrates experience, names the gods and recollects the birth of the world. One obvious solution presented itself: that which ‘animates’ the psyche also informs the whole of Being; whatever makes a soul into an active, speaking, reasoning soul (an intelligent psyche) also organizes the world as an intelligible process. Taken one step further this produces the following ‘solution’: the elements are but displacements of a more universal Element binding together psyche and kosmos; and this ‘super element’ is divine Air. Air is then posited as the divine medium underlying all other elemental oppositions. Pneuma (like the prana in the Upanishads) becomes the universal medium of a speaking, seeing, hearing psyche just as it is the medium of a reflexive universe. The soul’s reflexivity and the logos of the cosmos are permutations of the same arche. And what better icon for the mutual imbrication of human and cosmological reflexivity than ‘aetherial’ Air? What makes human speech and reason possible is also the ground of Nature. While the world is things is materialized Air, the realm of human reality is spiritualized Air. By virtue of its unique transformative potential and ‘presence’ in all things, Air was readily associated with the presence of divinity. The figure of Aether—‘fiery’, mobile, infinite, vital, translucent blue ‘air’—becomes a symbol of natural supernaturalism. This is the point of convergence with Thales’ earlier idea that all things are 185

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pervaded and held together by psyche and Heraclitus’ later theory of the ‘common’ Logos. It is also the nexus from which later Greek thought connects intellect (noesis) and pneuma. Psyche as the principle of animation is a breathlike spirit (cf. Plato, Phaedo 69E–70A). And in this general pneumatology there can be many different types of psych ai just as there are many different forms of pneuma or ‘animation’. Diogenes of Apollonia prefigures Aristotle’s later doctrine of the soul as the form of the body and the taxonomy of vegetative, sensitive, and intellectual ‘animation’ theorized in De Anima when he suggests that Air may be warmer or cooler, drier or damper. It is more stationary and more mobile and varies in many other ways. Air occurs in an infinity of states of different scent and colour. The soul of all animals is the same thing, that is, air which is warmer than the air which surrounds us but much cooler than the air which is nearer the sun. No animal has the same warmth as any other, and no man the same as any other, but the difference is not great, no greater than is compatible with the similarity they display. (Fr. 5) Or as Anaximenes says more precisely: everything is produced from the condensation or rarefaction of Air. Hegel quite naturally thought that the ‘pneumatic’ essence of Anaximenes’ ontology represented a distinct advance over Thales’ and Anaximander’s cosmologies and has very positive things to say about Anaximenes’ role in prefiguring ‘the philosophy of consciousness’ first explicitly elaborated in the Nous-concept of Anaxagoras. The central passage on Anaximenes in his History of Philosophy (1.190) reads: Anaximenes shows very clearly the nature of essence in the soul, and he thus points out what may be called the transition of natural philosophy into the philosophy of consciousness, or the surrender of the objective form of principle. The nature of this principle has hitherto been determined in a manner which is foreign and negative to consciousness; both its reality, water or air, and the infinite are a ‘beyond’ to consciousness. But soul is the universal medium; it is a collection of conceptions which pass away and come forth, while the unity and continuity never cease. It is active as well as passive, from its unity severing asunder the conceptions and sublating them, and it is present to itself in its infinitude, so that negative signification and positive come into unison. Speaking more precisely, this idea of the nature of the origin of things is that of Anaxagoras, the pupil of Anaximenes. But if Anaximenes’ ambivalent text reaches out to the Philosophy of Mind in Anaxagoras’ Nous cosmology, its most immediate impact would be upon the thought of Heraclitus, particularly on the theme of the soul as central to inquiry and self-understanding. The Anaximinean theory of the psyche also 186

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provides an important textual link with Heraclitus’ philosophy of the Logos. Like the processual transformations of Air, the Heraclitean Cosmos is an ordered process of exchanges governed by an intelligible law. Anaximenes’ doctrine of the pneuma is also evident in Heraclitus’ thoughts about the ‘dry’ and ‘moist’ psyche; this ‘logos’ which we breathe with the air and whereby we gain our faculty for a thinking that is adequate to it, is subtler than air, it is pure fire…through breathing, through the breath, vehicle of the Logos, the microcosm is joined to the macrocosm; the logos in us and the Logos in the universe are one and the same. According to the reading proposed by Walter Wili,18 whose account I have been citing, Heraclitus’ Logos ‘could not have been conceived without the thinking of Anaximenes’. The profound impact of Anaximenes upon Heraclitus Logos concept is also supported in an important paper by Gregory Vlastos, ‘On Heraclitus’,19 where he concludes that the main historical influences on Heraclitus’ thought were the great Milesians, Anaximander and Anaximenes, and…our best chance to understand the problems which confronted him and the meaning of his own answers to them is to discover as best we can the links which connect his thought with theirs. Anaximenes thus becomes an important figure not only in the history of protophysics, but in the early history of spirit, an important innovator in developing ideas concerning reflexivity and self-reflexivity. According to Wili this tradition has only four important landmarks prior to the decisive work of Plato: the conception of spirit as aer and pneuma in Anaximenes, Hippocrates and the Pythagorean medical tradition; the Logos concept in Heraclitus; the ‘spirit-number’ in Pythagorean metaphysics; and the transcendent Nous of Anaxagoras. The reconstruction we have offered, and our sense of the internal conflict of both teleological and causal figures, need not, of course, detract from Anaximenes’ role as the founding father of a quantitative protophysics, searching for the physical mechanism underlying qualitative and quantitative change.20 Rather we wish to complement this traditional interpretation by relocating his text in terms of an emerging tradition of ancient reflexivity. To bring these observations together, we can summarize this reading of Anaximenes’ philosophy as follows. First, his problematic was logically prior to that of physics or natural philosophy narrowly understood in Aristotelian categories; his question-frame focused upon the reflexive participation of psyche and kosmos, symbolized by the elemental icon ‘Air’; second, like his contemporaries Anaximander and Thales, he attempted to specify the nature of what underlies all things, the unitary arche embracing the cosmos and making it a world-order; third, the unity of Being did not prevent him from speculating about a natural mechanism 187

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of differentiation which might be used to explain the manifold forms of existence; fourth, all beings are differentiated in an unending process of transformation which may be thought of as an ‘opposition’ of rarefaction and condensation; fifth, the world we experience is one of change and ‘becoming’ rather than a closed or static totality—and many apparently different and fixed modalities of being are, upon further analysis, reducible to more elementary processes (this adumbrates important ideas which are later revived in the writings of Anaxagoras, the Atomists, and Aristotle); finally, Anaximenes’ account is fully compatible with the idea of a Logos that is both a process of becoming and an intelligible order hidden in appearances. Whatever the subsequent fifth-century reception and interpretation of his thought we cannot agree that Anaximenes was a pallid reflection of Anaximander.21 From the reflexive perspective Anaximenes broke new ground in placing the psyche at the centre of the philosophical agenda. He was matched in this project by the two greatest Presocratic thinkers, Pythagoras and Heraclitus. It is within the parameters of this emerging tradition of reflexivity that we can best understand the emergence of the Pythagorean form of life and Heraclitean ideas on self-reflexion.

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But, if Homer never did any public service, was he privately a guide or teacher of any? Had he in his lifetime friends who loved to associate with him, and who handed down to posterity an Homeric way of life, such as was established by Pythagoras who was particularly loved for this reason and whose successors are to this day conspicuous among others by what they term the Pythagorean form of life? (Plato, Republic 600A–B)1 [T]hey supposed the elements of numbers to be the elements of all things, and the whole heaven to be a musical scale and a number. (Aristotle, Metaphysics 986a3) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Introduction: the Pythagorean form of life The ontotheology of Number: all is Number Pythagorean videology The Pythagorean soul and metempsychosis Philosophia and the three lives The videological form of life Conclusion: the elements of Classical videological culture 1 INTRODUCTION: THE PYTHAGOREAN FORM OF LIFE

According to tradition Pythagoras the son of Mnesarchus was born around 570 BC on the island of Samos in Ionia. He came from a wealthy family, travelled extensively in the Near East and Egypt and as a young man became involved in the factional struggles which then divided Samian political life.2 He is known to have left Samos for Croton in southern Italy sometime after 538 BC along with other emigrants fleeing from the dictatorship of Polycrates; here he and his followers founded a religious community based on his own teachings (the core of the so-called Pythagorean Brotherhood or Pythagorean Order). From Croton the Order tried to disseminate an ideology of ethical purification throughout the city-states of Magna Graecia. In sociological terms 189

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we can view the Pythagorean Order as both a religious sect and a political experiment to transform the institutions of the city-state (Pythagoras advanced the idea of a state governed by philosopher-kings nearly two centuries before Plato’s Republic). However the Pythagorean attempt to create a Utopian order by fusing philosophy, religion, and politics in a Guardian élite was shortlived (lasting perhaps only decades from around 530 to 490 BC in its original form). The political experiment was terminated in a series of violent attacks on the Italian Community and Pythagoras was forced to abandon Croton for Locri and Tarentum, finally to die at Metapontum, near Tarentum, with his political ambitions in ruins (DL 8.2).3 Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans There are no extant writings of Pythagoras even though the Order survived in one form or another for more than two centuries after the founder’s death (Diogenes, probably recycling information from Heraclides of Pontus, lists three books by Pythagoras: On Education, On Statesmanship, and On Nature (DL 8.6)). The arcane doctrines of the Brotherhood were taught and, we may presume, transmitted by word of mouth. Consequently what can be known of the internal workings of the Order derives from secondary sources, each providing evidence of varying degrees of trustworthiness: the medical theories of Alcmaeon, the second-hand Pythagoreanism of Archytas, Philolaus, and Lysis, scattered references in Herodotus (2.81, 2.123, 4.95–6), later philosophical commentators like Plato (Rep. 530D, 600 A-B), Aristotle (Met. 989b29–30, 986a29; De Caelo 13.293a20), Theophrastus, Simplicius, and finally, the Neopythagorean writings of Porphyry, Plotinus, and Iamblichus. Iamblichus, an influential philosopher of the fourth century AD, wrote a Vita Pythagorica and a history, De Communi Mathematica Scientia which exerted a considerable influence on the course of later Neoplatonism. Hellenistic Neopythagoreans also freely invented legends to legitimate their own distinctive metaphysics (as illustrated, for example, in Porphyry’s hagiographical Life of Pythagoras 7, 19). The practice of separating the teachings of Pythagoras from the politics of the Pythagorean Order was already a commonplace in the late fifth century. Aristotle invariably refers to ‘the socalled Pythagoreans’ (Physics 203a1, 204a33, 213b22; Met. 985b23; De Caelo 268a10, 284b6, 285a10), a cautionary habit he may have acquired during his time in the Academy (see Plato, Cratylus 400; Gorgias 493; Rep. 7.530D); he is followed in this locutionary reticence by the first historian of Greek mathematics, Eudemus (late fourth century BC)—one of his most important students and the first codifier of plane geometry. However speculative and mediated, these Classical sources support the use of the expression, ‘the Pythagorean form of life’. As a focus for a congery of mathematical, philosophical, culinary, ethical, religious, and social practices, Pythagoreanism was one of the most important ideological currents in shaping 190

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Greek intellectual culture. Its influence reaches deep into the Hellenistic period and persists in Christian Neoplatonism and the dualist thought of the Church Fathers (for example, in their praise of the Pythagorean rules on sexual restraint, the strict disciplining of women, and the regulation of the body, cf. Detienne, 1977:123–31). Erotic attachments are tacitly equated with the loss of psyche and self-control (Diodorus Siculus 10.9.3–4). The early Pythagorean idea of a religious transformation of everyday life might even be said to have been one of the most formative intellectual influences on the religious and political life of the western colonies. Pythagorean ideas attracted some of the great minds of the late fifth and fourth century. Their impact upon the thought of Plato and the Academicians is well known. Aristotle, for example, wrote a lengthy treatise on the Pythagorean way of life, a work which is unfortunately lost but carried the title On the Pythagoreans (Peri tes Puthagorikon doxes; he refers to his own work at Metaphysics 986a and the text is cited by his greatest commentator, Alexander of Aphrodisias in his On Aristotle, Metaphysics I at 38.8–41 and 75.16; Diogenes quotes from the same work at 8.34; cf. also 8.36 and 8.43). In fact by Aristotle’s day Pythagoras was viewed as a semi-legendary figure (Walter Burkert (1972) and F.M.Cornford (1965), following the lead of Rohde, called him a Greek shaman; Burnet speaks of Pythagoras as a ‘wonder-worker’ (1930:87)). Pythagoras was ‘regarded as a prophet of the mantic Apollo and the hierophant of a sacred revelation’ (Cornford, 1965:111). Appropriately, the Hellenistic Neopythagoreans referred to the founder of the sect as ‘the divine Pythagoras’ (Iamblichus, v. Pythag., 1.1.10; cf. Plato, Timaeus 27C). The original Pythagorean movement had its origins in a very specific historical conjuncture of economic and political conflicts, and Plato’s later idea of a city governed by philosopher-kings may well have been inspired by the Pythagorean struggle for power in Croton. The sect appears to have been organized on quasi-communist principles, sharing all property as a common resource. And Pythagoras is often cited as the source of the maxim: ‘Friends have all things in common’ (cf. Diodorus Siculus 10.3.5). Novitiates underwent three years of careful instruction by initiates of the community, followed by five years of complete silence and a further course of rigorous purification rites, before being fully accepted into the Order. Vows of silence, poverty, a strict dietary regime, and lifelong corporeal regulation seem to have been standard requisites of the earlier communities (DL 8.10; Porphyry, Vita Pythagorae 19; Iamblichus, v. Pythag., 72–4, 110; Isocrates, Busiris 28). The overriding aim was to create a close-knit community founded on mutual friendship and self-discipline (‘The Pythagoreans laid the greatest store upon constancy toward one’s friends, believing as they did that the loyalty of friends is the greatest good to be found in life’, Diodorus Siculus 10.8.1). Iamblichus summarizes the rules of the Order to the following precepts: ‘These things are to be avoided by every means, eradicated by fire or iron or any other means: disease from the body, ignorance from the soul, luxury from the belly, 191

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faction from the city, division from the household, excess from everything’ (v. Pythag.,34). The Order, then, formed one of the first ‘philosophical schools’, illustrating our ideal-typical description of the fusion of political, religions and intellectual values in the earliest institutions of reflection. The Pythagoreans not only introduced some of the basic ideas and thematic concerns of early Greek thought, but more importantly laid the foundations for the institutional form of philosophia, creating a model for future reflexive communities. As a revolutionary tradition—Burnet speaks of the Rule of the Saints in the cities of southern Italy (in Livingstone, ed., 1921:66)—it may even be described as one of first self-conscious political experiments in the ancient world, centred on a living canonical system, definite rules of oral transmission, an elaborate apparatus of ‘initiation’, and a clear conception of ethical and political purpose. For these reasons it is difficult to separate its educational, religious, and political dimensions. More significantly for the evolution of Classical philosophy, each of these features would be later incorporated in the pedagogic organization of the Platonic Academy (Burkert, 1972:74–5; Ferguson, 1975:40–9). By the end of the century the Pythagorean sects had become significant actors in the political landscape of Magna Graecia; we hear of recurrent attacks and purges—the community at Croton, for example, was destroyed in violent circumstances in 454 BC. In this context, Emile Bréhier observes: Religious organisation, Ionian cosmology, physical mathematics—these three aspects should be completed by adding a fourth, the political activity of the order. We are completely ignorant of the conditions under which the order seized power at Crotona and what the political tendencies of the Pythagoreans were. Only the fact is certain; what is equally certain is that one of the noblest and richest men of the city, Cylon by name, led a successful revolt against the new masters. The house where the principal Pythagoreans of Crotona were assembled was surrounded and set on fire; only two were able to escape, Archippus and Lysis, afterward the teacher of Epaminondas at Thebes. It was doubtless after this catastrophe, which took place toward the middle of the fifth century, that the Pythagoreans emigrated to continental Greece where we will find them later.4 Pythagorean politics In historical terms the Pythagorean movement was a product of the rapid social changes marking the turn of the sixth century; the original communities may have recruited from marginal, disenfranchized groups created by the stasis between aristocracy and oligarchical factions. They were probably supported by individuals who were neither members of the older aristocratic circles nor attached to the new middle strata of commercial and mercantile 192

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groups. Pythagoreanism during this period articulated the beliefs of an intelligent, if defensive and perhaps reactionary, stratum of the upper middle class that had lost land, property, and political influence in the wave of enforced immigration. The ideology of the Pythagorean tradition thus remained deeply conservative, phallocentric, and hierarchical. The élitism of Pythagorean politics was in harmony with its basic doctrine, which required all initiates to ‘transcend’ everyday life and ordinary social behaviour by means of a long period of spiritual exercise and intellectual training. One of its particular targets was the supposed excessive sensuality of the female body and ‘feminine desire’ in general (cf. Detienne, 1977: ch. 6). The body politic itself was to be purified through a strenuous programme of physical training, mental hygiene, and strict behavioural regulation. Pythagorean ideology stipulated that only those who were purified could receive the esoteric knowledge and enter the ranks of the philosophoi, and, by implication, only a privileged few could assume the governance of states. Clearly this was not a philosophy for the demos. In its obsession with order and discipline it ran counter to the popular forms of Greek everyday culture. Every carnivalesque expression of affectivity, indiscipline, and eroticism fell foul of the Pythagorean censors. Diogenes Laertius speaks of the Pythagorean community governing at Croton in the spirit of a ‘true aristocracy’ (DL 8.3; compare Iamblichus, v. Pytbag., 45–6). The aristocratic ethos of the Pythagoreans may also explain the peculiar prohibition against eating beansbeans being used for voting purposes by both the oligarchic and democratic political systems (cf. DL 8.34, Iamblichus, v. Pythag., 60 and Hippolytus, Ref. 6.27: “Do not eat beans”—Do not accept office in the government. For they used beans for the elections to offices in those days’). Given these decisive contexts we can understand why the Pythagoreans chose the word kosmos as their key symbol and thematic concern (see Chapter 1 on the ‘law and order’ connotations of the term). We know that Croton had been locked in a long-lasting military struggle with neighbouring Italian cities such as Locri, Rhegion, Hipponium, and Medma. As in many other social struggles in antiquity, conflicts with neighbouring states were also replicated by internal political violence. Croton seems to have been riddled with factionalism at the time the Pythagoreans were pursuing their Utopian vision for the city-states of Italy (c. 540–530 BC). Ferguson has suggested that the fact that Pythagoras left Samos because of Polycrates suggests that his sympathies lay to the right…the parallels between the class-structure of Plato’s Republic and Hindu thought and practice are too close to be accidental… The Pythagorean doctrine of harmony may well lead to a system with a place for each and each to keep in his place. The Pythagoreans indeed…appear to us not unlike the Brahmin priest-rulers. Certainly by the disturbances of which Polybius speaks the 193

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Pythagoreans appear as reactionaries… We may then suppose that the Pythagoreans belonged to the Upper Middle Class, that in politics they held to an organic structure of society with a ruling class, an executive, a working class and slaves, corresponding to the Indian Brahmanas, Kshattryas, Vaishyas and Sudras, and that they applied these principles to the society around them, they themselves appearing as the ruling class, though the inner fraternity no doubt acted as eminences grises rather than taking office themselves.5 Pythagorean philosophy with its stratified view of social order was articulated in a period of bitter social and political conflict. The nub of this conflict—in Sicily and the southern Italian cities of Locri and Rhegium—determined the form of Athenian-Sicilian politics well into the fifth century (the disastrous Sicilian expedition of the Athenians toward the end of the Peloponnesian War marks a tragic terminus to these political and military struggles). Later Pythagoreans In the first decades of the fifth century the Pythagorean communities were forced to migrate from the western fringes of the Greek world to enter the mainstream of Greek culture. Polybius in his Histories describes the citystates of this part of Greece as filled with bloodshed, revolution, and civil strife of every kind (Histories 2.39.1–3). And we know that the Italian and Sicilian cities abandoned by the Pythagoreans became the preserve of autocratic tyrants. One of the most important Pythagorean schools was established in Thebes, from where Pythagorean doctrines were spread to the literate culture of other city-states, eventually reaching Athens in the latter quarter of the fifth century. Through this accident of history something like a composite ideology of Milesian cosmology, speculative mathematics, and élite ideology became a diffuse vocabulary among members of the landed middleclass strata of the commercial city-states. One of the central elements in this terminological magma was the new word for inquiry itself, ‘philosophy’, the love of wisdom, lamblichus observes that Pythagoras was the first to describe himself as a lover of wisdom (philosophos) not a sage (sophos) (v. Pythag. 44–5, 57–8). Thebes thus played a major part in disseminating the new concept of ‘philosophy’.6 It is another irony that Plato would later identify his own political mission as one of taking the doctrine of philosophical governance back to the autocratic city-states of Sicily. It is hard to exaggerate the impact of the intellectual and ideological programme of the Pythagoreans upon the linguistic and cultural imagination of contemporaries like Empedocles, Xenophanes, and Heraclitus (cf. DK 21 B 7; 22 B 40, 81, 126; 31 B 129). Parmenides’ ontology is frequently interpreted as a sublimation of the ‘spherical’ cosmology of the Pythagoreans—as we shall see in Chapter 7, Parmenides conceptualized Being or the One as a perfect 194

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Sphere. Demystified and pluralized, the same general conception leads directly to the atomic ‘spheres’ of Leucippus and Democritus. The Pythagorean pursuit of istoria also left a profound impression on Plato’s ‘Dorian’ conception of the unity of philosophical theoria and political praxis, and was a living issue when Aristotle turned his mind to scientific and philosophical topics. But the men who were locally decisive in disseminating the discursive practices of the Order were undoubtedly Echphantus, Alcmaeon, Archytas, and Philolaus. Ecphantus Ecphantus is often regarded as the founder of the Pythagorean school of Syracuse in the fifth century. Histories of philosophy present him as an early cosmologist and astronomical theorist. He helped to popularize an ontology based on ‘number monads’ (Aëtius 1.3.19). Like Philolaus—the Copernicus of the ancient world—he accepted the sphericity of the world and the rotation of the earth about its axis. It is not improbable that Ecphantus’ intellectual efforts were elaborated around a much more explicit theory of the kosmos as a self-regulating system. In his speculative metaphysics, for example, ‘monads’ are animated by a dynamic psyche or nous (analogous to the Anaxagorean Nous) which probably had physical and cosmic functions. The imaginative power of Ecphantus’ vision of the rotating cosmos can only be matched by the great scientists of Alexandria three centuries later (in particular Eratosthenes and Hipparchus). Ecphantus may even have abandoned the speculative constructs of the ‘central fire’ and ‘counter-earth’ in favour of the ‘nous hypothesis’ (cf. Heiberg, 1922:13; Windelband, 1956:103–4). Alcmaeon Alcmaeon is said to have been a contemporary of Pythagoras (DL 8.83); a medical writer (iatros) and natural scientist, his works are cited by Aristotle (Met. 986a30–4; De Caelo, 405a29-b1) and Theophrastus (On the Senses 25–6). He was one of the most prominent disciples and popularizers of Pythagorean doctrines in the brotherhood of Croton (DL 8.83). As a physicianphilosopher he made extensive inquiries into biological and physiological problems-concentrating particularly upon topics in embryology-and acted as a mediator between Pythagorean philosophy and Hippocratic medicine (in Alcmaeon’s cosmology, duality or the conflict of opposites is a law of nature (DL 8.83= DK 24 Al who reports his maxim: ‘Most human things go in pairs’; also Aristotle, Met, 1.5.986a27–31): health is a ‘harmony’ or ‘mean’ of hot and cold, wet and dry, bitter and sweet, etc.; the ‘etc.’ is very important in that Alcmaeon extended the Pythagorean table of ten opposites indefinitely: there are numberless oppositions which govern and structure the phenomenal world; disease is an imbalance of Limit (or Limit/Same) and Unlimited (or Unlimited/Other) in the body and soul: ‘men die for this reason, that they 195

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cannot join the beginning to the end’ Aristotle, Problems 17.3. 916a33; Theophrastus, On The Senses 25). He was also one of the first physicians to claim that the brain (enkephalos) is the executive sensorium and source of the soul’s sensations, perception, and intellectual thought (specifying the network of nerves as the ‘passages’ (poroi) of vital movement—a theory accepted by Plato, but rejected by Aristotle (see Theophrastus, On the Senses 25–6; cf. Phaedo 96B)). Armed by this protodualistic world-view, Alcmaeon advocated diagnostic procedures designed to restore the delicate balance of mind and body, achieving the ‘mean’ or proportionate blend of the opposing qualities of dry, wet, cold, hot, etc. By viewing health as isonomia (‘equality’ of the opposites) he may have been one of the first holists in Greek medical history—explicitly theorizing illness as a disharmony of opposing forces (DK B 4; cf. Aëtius 5.30.1; DL 8.83). Aristotle accepted Alcmaeon’s theory of polar dualities as a forerunner of his own theory of opposites: from both these authorities [Pythagoreans and Alcmaeon] we can gather this much, that the contraries are first principles of things; and from the former, how many and what the contraries are. How these can be referred to our list of causes is not definitely expressed by them, but they appear to reckon their elements as material; for they say that these are the original constituents of which Being is fashioned and composed. (Met. 986b1–9; see KRS: 338–9) Archytas Archytas was a leading figure in the Pythagorean school at Tarentum (fourth century) and, if we accept Diogenes’ testimony, a leading statesman of Tarentum (8.79–83). He also carried out specialized work in mathematical theory, including harmonics, mechanics, and the theory of scales. Archytas was the first to bring mechanics to a system by applying mathematical principles; the first to employ mechanical motion in a geometrical construction, when he tried, by means of a section of a half-cylinder, to find two mean proportionals in order to duplicate the cube. (DL 8.83) It is also significant that Archytas is also the source for the Classical division of mathematics into the four departments of arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy (Fr. 1)—a classification which later became known as the quadri Philolaus Philolaus was a second-generation Pythagorean, born around 470–450 BC (an older contemporary of Socrates and Democritus). He is usually referred 196

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to as ‘Philolaus of Croton’, but may have lived and worked in the school of Tarentum. Many Classical references to ‘the Pythagoreans’ may have originally referred to the school of Philolaus. A contemporary of Socrates, he made contributions to mathematical and astronomical theory. Philolaus is credited with a number of important discoveries: that the sun was the ‘central fire’ (hestia—‘hearth’) or hub of a rotating universe; that the celestial bodies were stars revolving in fixed, concentric spheres; and that the ‘orbits’ of these stars are circular. Numerous other mathematical discoveries were attributed to him in antiquity. He was the first to declare that the earth moves in a circle [around a central fire] … According to Demetrius… Philolaus was the first to publish the Pythagorean treatises, to which he gave the title On Nature, beginning as follows: ‘Nature in the ordered universe was composed of unlimited and limiting elements, and so was the whole universe (kosmos) and all that is therein’. (DL 8.85) These important Pythagorean contributions to cosmology, medicine, mathematics, and natural philosophy—especially Pythagorean mathematization, ‘heliocentrism’ (in the form of Philolaus’ theory of the Earth circulating around a central fire), the distinction between the sublunary and the superlunary or celestial realms (forerunner of the influential distinction in later astronomy between ‘terrestrial’ and ‘celestial’ mechanics, and the prototype of the quadrivium)—were all well-known doctrines during the later fifth and early fourth centuries. Aristotle, for example, treats heliocentrism and the associated doctrine of the ‘counter-earth’ (antichthon) as an idiosyncracy of the Italian school in his own work on astronomy: Most people—all, in fact, who regard the whole earth as finite—say it lies at the centre. But the Italian philosophers known as Pythagoreans take the contrary view. At the centre, they say, is fire, and the earth is one of the stars, creating night and day by its circular motion about the centre. They further construct another earth in opposition to ours to which they give the name counter-earth.8 2 THE ONTOTHEOLOGY OF NUMBER: ALL IS NUMBER Pythagoras declared that the ungenerated principle of all things was the monad (monada), but the dyad was generated and all the other numbers. And the father of the dyad was the monad, and the mother of all things that are generated was the dyad, generated mother of generated things. And Zaratas (Zoroaster, the teacher of Pythagoras, called the one father and the two mother. For the dyad was born from the monad according to Pythagoras and the monad is male and primary and the 197

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dyad female. And besides the dyad there is the triad and the numbers in sequence up to ten. (Hippolytus, Refutations 6.22)

What do we know about the language and thought processes of the Pythagorean community other than its obsession for arcane symbolism, ritual, and secrecy? Given the murky character of the available evidence can we reasonably reconstruct the linguistic and ideological innovations following the Pythagorean revolution in Greek culture? We can agree that the quest for order and pattern in early Greek culture is an undisputed fact. And further, that the Pythagorean communities of theorists (syssitie) built upon the mathematical and speculative lore of vernacular traditions which date back to prehistoric times. But what was unique about the Order was its explicit linking of the quest for a logos of the Whole with the mapping functions of numbers and numerical relations. Perhaps the Pythagoreans were the first philosophers to view nature as a kind of language -the language of number—and in the wake of this insight the first to give the term ‘philosophia’ its sense as a way of life devoted to the investigation of the hidden mathematical language of Being. Most commentators observe that the word philosophia was first coined by the Pythagoreans to articulate this discovery of mathematical intelligibility (DL 1.12; cf. Herodotus 1.30; Thucydides 2.40; Cicero, Tusculan Disputes 5.3.8–9; Iamblichus, v. Pythag. 57). ‘Pythagoras called the principles he taught philosophia or love of wisdom, but not sophia or wisdom’ (Diodorus Siculus 10.10.1). Initially the word philosophia designated the secret gnosis of the Order, a unique arcanum coded in an exclusive and private language. But with the spread of the Order in the fifth century the ‘Philosophy of Number’ was popularized as a watchword for the contemplative way of life itself.9 We may be reasonably confident that one fundamental intellectual doctrine can be ascribed to the Pythagoreans: the discovery—in the formulation of Philolaus of Tarentum—that everything that can be known has a Number, and that it is impossible to grasp anything with the mind or recognize it without Number.10 The logos of Being, in other words, is fundamentally numerical. But implicit in this doctrine is a much more strategic division of the world into what is material and perceptible and what is non-material and imperceptible. With this division of material and non-material substances came the prioritizing of the invisible over the visible order of things— forerunner of the seminal distinctions between the abstract and the concrete, the analytic and the empirical. Pythagorean speculation, in short, envisioned the Kosmos as a vast—if invisible—numerical configuration, a harmonious universe of ideal mathematical structures underlying the visible world. Everything that existed— including the soul and social life—was literally governed by divine numbers and numerical ratios separate from matter and physical objects. Numbers 198

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(arithmoi; arithmos, number), as the purest instance of non-material ‘being’ are denizens of an eternal, invisible realm of ideal relations. Moreover, this intangible order is deemed to be the authentic region of speculative inquiry. As ‘the highest form of music’, philosophy ‘is both the discovery of mathematical truth and the way of life which brings the soul into tune with the beauty and goodness implied in the term “cosmos”’ (Cornford, 1965:112). In other words the early Pythagorean sects sought and found structure throughout the visible and invisible cosmos: in a literal sense, the cosmos itself was Logos incarnate. Pythagorean mathematics According to Aristotle’s testimony, the Pythagoreans were the first thinkers to apply themselves systematically to the study of mathematics and to develop the basic elements of the science; from this study, they generalized their discoveries, believing that the principles of mathematics were the corporeal principles of the world-order. Aristotle is quite emphatic that the Pythagoreans spoke literally when they identified things as numbers (Met. 985b25ff.): Whatever analogues to the processes and parts of the heavens and to the whole order of the universe they could exhibit in numbers and proportions, these they collected and correlated; and if there was any deficiency anywhere, they made haste to supply it, in order to make their system a connected whole. (Met. 986a) ‘…ton d’ arithmos ek tou enos, arithmous de, kathaper eiretai, ton holon ouranon’ (986a20): Number is singled out as the originary Ground or arche of all things: All is Number, and as the Ground of all Grounds is eternal and unchanged, so the originating power of Number must participate in (if not be identical with) the divine process (being divinely ordered by the One, the world of appearances is wholly intelligible, and ‘intelligibility’ here means ‘capable’ of being reduced to mathematical patterns, or the rational procedures of mathesis—particularly geometry and number theory).11 Number (music) as the language of the cosmos The very existence of the kosmos is evidence of the reality of an eternal, harmonic order—exemplified by the existence of harmonic laws and ratios of musical scales. By identifying the cosmos with mathematical relations (ta mathematika) the Pythagoreans viewed the underlying structure of the universe as an ideal, incorporeal realm of pure forms and harmonic laws. Discounting commonsense experience they posited the idea of a spherical earth and a circular form of motion for the orbiting planets. As the decad was the sacred image of the cosmos, they argued that the planets must also be ten in number—and finding 199

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only nine, introduced an invisible tenth to complete the series—the so-called antichthon or ‘counter-earth’ (cf. Alexander, Met. 40). The idea of ‘the music of the Spheres’ was thus a logical corollary of the cognitive ethic which saw all appearances as the trace of an underlying harmonic system. Indeed, according to Philolaus’ testimony, ‘harmony’ may have been the manner in which the Pythagoreans understood the word ‘kosmos’—the world as a beautiful order essentially means a divinely patterned domain of resonant relations (qua order-producing harmonic ratios). Philolaus took his own argument to heart and argued speculatively that such a kosmos could never accept the ‘demeaning’ idea of the Sun as a planetary ‘object’ rotating around a fixed earth. The aesthetics of symmetry and religious reverence for order required that this noblest of bodies should be placed in the centre of the universe and the earth made to revolve around this fiery ‘hearth’. The Pythagoreans thus advocated heliocentrism by ignoring the evidence of the senses and pursuing the logocentric ideal of intelligible order. Alexander, in his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics 7, writes: For the bodies moving around the centre have the intervals [separating them] in a [mathematical] proportion, and some of them move more rapidly, others more slowly, and in their motion they produce a sound—the slower bodies a deep note, the faster bodies a high note. Because these notes are in proportion to the intervals separating the bodies, they make the sound resulting from them harmonious; and since [the Pythagoreans] said that number is the principle of this harmony, they naturally made number the principle both of the heavens and of the universe. (Met. 39.25–40.5) To explain the nature of things now meant uncovering the universal structure of mathematical harmonies hidden within the world process.12 One of the metaphysical axioms of early Greek science was fixed: everything that exists has an underlying Form or Structure defined by mathematical relations. This principle is equally valid for the resonant harmonies of stringed instruments, the pulse of the blood or heart, and the rotation of the heavenly bodies and the whole universe. Indeed every phenomenal order obeys its own distinct, rationally ordered ‘ratio’. The cosmos was literally an incarnation of numerical patterns. All things have a number; without this nothing could possibly be known or thought (cf. B 11). Without logos nothing could exist. The quadrivium as a Pythagorean curriculum We have observed that the quadrivium—later expanded by the addition of the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric—became the prototype of all late Graeco-Latin and medieval education and has been justly described as the oldest continuous curricular institution. And numerical harmony provided 200

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the common theme of the mathematical quadrivium of music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. Where geometry and ‘geometrical’ arithmetic studied the harmonies of ordered space, astronomy investigated the mathematical ratio embodied in the universe. Music—particularly the study of harmonic forms-was now construed as the mathematics of time. But during the sixth century the expression ‘music’ was a collective term for every sphere of ‘civilized experience’. The patron of the Orphic sects had been the god of Music, Orpheus (along with the legendary singer, Musaeus). The Orphics also believed that musical harmony pervaded the psyche. Since harmony ruled the Whole, it served as a ready source of metaphors for psychological, ethical, and social order: part and whole must be ‘tuned’ to resonate in unison; the immoderate soul (Heraclitus’ ‘barbarion souls’) must be tamed by musical therapy; the social order should eliminate all harsh or strident elements; dissonance is the product of unlimited demands and unordered desires; the cosmos itself is a vast musical structure. In this way, Orphism and Pythagoreanism came to view music as a powerful force of transcendence by which the psyche could escape from the material tomb of a fallen world and ascend to the divine One. Number—being the invisible key to harmony— thus held the key to salvation. Iamblichus reports: He thought that the training of people begins with the senses, when we see beautiful shapes and forms and hear beautiful rhythms and melodies. So the first stage of his system of education was music: songs and rhythms from which came healing of human temperaments and passions. The original harmony of the soul’s powers was restored, and Pythagoras devised remission, and complete recovery, from diseases affecting both body and soul. (v. Pythag. 64) The musical cosmos of numbers What, then, is meant by ‘Number’ (arithmos) in these extended contexts? It appears that the early Pythagoreans adopted a literal attitude toward their numerical ontology. Arithmoi were ascribed with many of the qualities of phusis. As an arche. Number is cosmogonic: all things are generated from Numbers, and in particular from the archetypal Monad or ‘the One’. The idea seems to have been understood in four related ways: (i)

as a cosmogonic thesis (mathematical harmonies function as a creative matrix); (ii) as an epistemological principle (only the mathematical is knowable); (iii) as an ontological truth (the really real, beneath the realm of appearances, is a world of mathematical relations); and (iv) as a religious insight into the nature of things. 201

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Commensurately the concept of Number as an arche has at least four different interpretations: (i)

That all things correspond to or can be represented by numbers (following the Greek procedure of deriving geometrical constructions from spatially represented numbers, in diagrams of number-points). (ii) That all things have their source in numbers (this intepretation is formulated by Diogenes Laertius on the authority of Alexander’s Successions of Philosophers (8.24–5): ‘the principle of all things is the monad; arising from the monad, the undetermined dyad acts as matter to the monad which is cause; from the monad and the undetermined dyad arises numbers; from numbers points; from these, lines out of which arise plane figures which produce in turn solid figures; from these, material bodies whose constituents are four—fire, water, earth, air. These elements interchange and turn into one another…out of them arises a world which is animate, intelligent, spherical and has the earth as its center, a spherical body inhabited round about’; this provided the target of Aristotle’s criticism when he argued that the Pythagoreans ‘construct the whole heaven out of numbers. Not, however, out of numbers considered as abstract units; for they suppose the units to have magnitude. But how the first “one” was constructed so as to have magnitude (to proton hen… echon megethos), they seem to be unable to say’ (Met. 13.6.1080b18). (iii) That all things have a logos or intelligible order in numbers (beneath the mutable appearance of things lies a system of numbers and numerical relations which concrete objects embody or ‘imitate’); this interpretation prefigures the Platonic concept of a realm of pure Forms in which concrete entities ‘participate’ (in Pythagorean metaphysics this world is identified as the realm of mathematical Forms: Unity, Dyad, Triangularity, the Fourfold (the pyramidal base number), and so on); the most sustained exercise in such world construction is found in the Timaeus where the Demiurge or world creator constructs the architecture of things, objects, and the planetary system on the basis of abstract geometrical relationships (tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, icosahedron, and the dodecahedron). (iv) Finally, that all things are numbers (arithmoi are literally substances or ‘bodies’ (soma) with particular attributes—physical extension, determinate attributes, and so on). In his history of early number theory Aristotle observed that the Pythagoreans posited number as both substances (ousiae)—as tangible, materialized entities—and as the primary principle or arche of Nature (Met. 986a15, 1080a10-15, 1080b16). Pythagorean ontocosmology does not ‘abstract from’ matter (hyle) to create the concept of numerical magnitude, but, in effect, ‘somatizes’ arithmoi. The units of arithmetic are granted spatial magnitude (Met. 1080b16) and, if we follow Aristotle’s report, ontological power. Because 202

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numbers actually ‘originate’ and enter into the physical fabric of things, the Pythagoreans hypostatized them, taking arithmoi as ‘thing-like’ entities (Met. 1083b8, 1090a20–5). Numbers were endowed with causal powers, generating further objects and relations. In Aristotle’s judgement, the Pythagorean category mistake was evidence of a failure or incapacity to understand the logic of conceptual abstraction: For it is not true to speak of indivisible spatial magnitudes; and however much there might be magnitudes of this sort, units at least have not magnitude; and how can a magnitude be composed of indivisibles? But arithmetical number, at least, consists of units, while these thinkers identify number with real things; at any rate they apply their propositions to bodies as if they consisted of those numbers. (Met. 1083b5–20) From this error the Pythagoreans committed the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, a misrecognition which made number-atomism inevitable: The Pythagoreans believe in one kind of number—the mathematical; only they maintain that it is not separate, but that sensible substances are composed of it. For they construct the whole universe of numbers, but not of numbers consisting of abstract units; they suppose the units to be extended—but as for how the first extended unit was formed they appear to be at a loss. (Met. 1080b6–21; cf. 1080b30–4) In the concise formulation of Harold Cherniss, Pythagorean philosophy postulated ‘a materialization of number’ rather than ‘a mathematization of nature’.13 To the inevitable question: ‘But what is the origin or cause of number?’ the Pythagoreans had only one logical response: numbers are their own causes and ‘the same thing becomes for them both cause and effect’ (Alexander, Met., 74. 1–9). It appears that this doctrine of self-causation allied with the ‘materialization of number’ had been differentiated to a high degree in the Pythagorean schools, particularly in relation to the numerical ratios (logoi) governing the heavens. Alexander reports that in the treatise on the Pythagoreans (now lost), Aristotle deconstructed the reasoning behind this theory: ‘In the second book of his treatise on the doctrine of the Pythagoreans, Aristotle mentions the arrangement of the numbers in the heavens which the Pythagoreans devised’, Met. 75.15). The same idea is repeated by Iamblichus: It seemed as if he [Pythagoras] alone could hear and understand the universal harmony and music of the spheres and of the stars which move within them, uttering a song more complete and satisfying than any human melody, composed of subtly varied sounds of motion and speeds and sizes and positions, organised in a logical and harmonious 203

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relation to each other, and achieving a melodious circuit of subtle and exceptional beauty. (v. Pytbag. 65) Aristotle’s extensive criticism of number metaphysics follows substantially the same strategy as his critique of the Platonic hypostatization of Forms: both conceptions lead to a bifurcated universe of Matter on the one side and transcendent Forms on the other. The consequence is to generate the ThirdMan’ aporia (tritos anthropos) which multiplies ideal objects without limit: for every class term there is a Form (or formal term), and for every formal term a further Form, and so on ad infinitum. He invokes the precedent of Socratic dialectic to counter this fallacy: Socrates, he claims, searched out the universal (kathalou) and the essential, but did not make the mistake of ontologically separating the eidos from concrete whatness (tode ti). It was Plato (or Platonists’ like Xenocrates, Eudoxus, and Speusippus) who took this fateful step, leading to a false image of a pure realm of universality set against the regularities of material experience. This grammatical error created a transcendent ontology of causal, mathematical Ideas. With this move— prepared by the Pythagorean cosmology of substantial Numbers—we are led to posit a world of mathematical Objects and pure Forms, subsisting—if not ‘existing’—in a sphere beyond the everyday world of perceptual things. Pythagorean-Platonic theorizing, in other words, made Ideas causes. It is important to note that the criticism of Pythagorean number metaphysics and Platonic hypostatization led Aristotle to develop his own theory of the concrete universal, where eidos (morphe) is embodied in the order of concrete substances (nature as ousiae), a theory of matter and form which leads to a view of mathematization as an intellectual operation carried out upon the concrete, pregiven patterns of perceptual experience: the mathematics abstracts forms from physical substances. This perspective undoubtedly informed his now-lost work on the theory of Forms—Peri ideon (On the Ideas) (cited by Alexander, Met. 79.4–83.30; 85.11; 97.27–98.4). The One or monad Certain numbers held a mystical fascination for the Pythagoreans. The first of these was, naturally, the number of numbers, the One or Monad which generates the natural number series. The One is the very utterance of the Universe itself, the root chord of its universal melody (Iamblichus, v. Pythag. 66). After this came the Dyad and then the perfect number ten (the Decad or triangular tetractys (Tetractys—‘fourness’—of the Decad/Dekad), a pyramid of ten point-like numbers represented as a four-tiered equilateral triangle); see Figure 2.14 Mystical significance was also invested in the star-shaped pentagram, the table of opposite principles, and the disturbing ‘discovery’ of incommensurable 204

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numbers (the existence of quantities not expressible in terms of whole numbers: ‘it must seem to everyone matter for wonder that there should exist a thing which is not measurable by the smallest possible number’, Aristotle, An. post., 71a1–4; cf. Plato, Theaetetus 147Dff.; cf. Von Fritz 1970).

Figure 2

From these essentially magical representations the Pythagoreans began to explore the geometrical properties of planar figures, the triangle—and the right-angled 3, 4, 5 triangle in particular (the origin of the ‘Theorem of Pythagoras’ beloved of every student of mathematics: ‘We are told by Apollodorus the calculator that he offered a sacrifice of oxen on finding that in a right-angled triangle the square on the hypoteneuse is equal to the squares on the sides containing the right angle’ (DL 8.12)). Numbers were projected as geometrical figures in a planar field. The next step in this numbers game was to represent the spatiotemporal world of physical objects in numerical form. We move from two-dimensional to three-dimensional geometrical analogies. The number one thus represented the point, two the line, three the triangle, and four the pyramid. The sum of these formed the sacred number ten. Because of its ‘perfection’ the number ten was thought to have profound existential and ontological functions. In cosmological terms—a cosmology which decisively influenced Plato’s Timaeus—number patterns formed the building-blocks of matter and three-dimensional solids: The generation of the number-series is to the Pythagoreans, in other words, both the generation of the objects of geometry and also cosmogony. Since things equal numbers, the first unit, in generating the number series, is generating also the physical universe. (KR: 256) From this perspective ‘the monad’ or ‘One’ was readily identified with the divine origin of reality. Here, however, it is not so much a question of Pythagorean mathematics translating number theories into geometrical notations; rather, numbers were in their nature geometrical and even corporeal substances. Traces of this influential doctrine can be found in the later Books 205

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of the Metaphysics—in their most concentrated form in Metaphysics 13.6–9. The commentator Hippolytus also confirms the same corporeal ontology: ‘The tetraktys is the principle of natural and solid bodies, as the monad is of intelligible things’ (esti de e tetraktes ton phusikon kai stereon somaton arche, os e monas ton noeton) (Ref. 6.23.4). Aristotle’s negative comments on the mystical apriorism of Pythagorean mathematics and its Platonic revisions in an ontocosmology of the One and the Indefinite Dyad (the Idea-Number or Idea-as-Number theory) retains its validity: the astronomy of the Order was so ideologically committed to a belief in ‘perfect numbers’ that they projected harmonious numbers into every phenomenal domain, and if the phenomena contradicted the theory they denied reality to preserve the theory: ‘as the number 10 is thought to be perfect and to comprise the whole nature of number, they say that the bodies which move through the heavens are ten, but as the visible bodies are only nine, to meet this they invent a tenth—the “counter-earth”’ (Met. 986a5–12, 987b; cf. and T.L.Heath, Mathematics in Aristotle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949): 258–9; see in general Met. 13.6–7). Similar considerations hold for the famous Pythagorean Table of Opposites (sustoichia). As we have seen, the Order regarded the Dyad or binary number ‘two’ as an auratic structure. Digitality and dualistic ‘oppositions’ were identified throughout the physical and social world, an ‘insight’ which would permanently structure the organization of metaphysical concepts (Aristotle’s own metaphysics of Form and Matter being a noticeable variant of the pairing of One and Two to create the Dyad, and our own reliance upon digital technology and computational logics being essentially a creative extension of the structural possibilities of the Dyad).15 The Table of Opposites: Limit and Unlimited (Same and Other) The Pythagoreans were the great dualists of the ancient world. They posited two worlds, one purely intelligible (noetic), governed by the monad or One as its arche and the other the sensible world (aisthetos) of corporeal or ‘concretized’ numbers. The Table of Opposites was constructed by hierarchizing the component elements of Numbers: (i)

(ii)

Pride of place was given to ‘the One’ or the Monad as the Monad is potentially all numbers (the ‘root’ element of all odd and even numbers, the number series, square numbers, etc.). By bifurcation the One generates its opposite, the ‘indeterminate’ Dyad, creating the elemental polarity of Same and Other from which proceeds the binary opposition of Limited and Unlimited or Even and Odd Principles based on the ultimate dualist paradigm of contraries: Peras and

206

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Apeiron, Limit and Unlimited, Same and Other as tropes of the Dionysian opposite of Order and Chaos: Limit Unlimited Male Female Even Odd One/Unity Plurality Right Left Rest Motion Straight Curved Light Darkness Good Evil Square Oblong (iii) The mathematical manifold of objects and relations are created as spatial-material configurations of these elemental oppositions as the constituent elements of numbers (at root, all derived from the elements called ‘the Limited’ and ‘the Unlimited’).16 (iv) Finally, the cosmos is divided into an intelligible and sensible world. In Hippolytus’ later gloss: ‘we have our reason from the intelligible world, so that we can observe the substance of the intelligible and incorporeal and divine things with our reason. But we have five senses…smell, sight, hearing, taste and touch, by which we come to knowledge of the sensible things… Nothing…of the intelligible things can become known to us through perception’ (Ref. 6.24). A well-known instance of these principles is the ‘gnomic’ generation of ‘squares’ or ‘square numbers’:

Figure 3 207

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Here our main source is Aristotle’s summary presentation of Pythagorean mathematics: The so-called Pythagoreans, who were the first to take up mathematics, not only advanced this study, but also having been brought up in it they thought that its principles were the principles of all things. And since of these principles numbers are by nature the first, and in numbers they seemed to see many resemblances to the things that exist and come into being—more than in fire and earth and water…since again they saw that the modifications and the ratios of the musical scales were expressible in numbers—since, then, all other things seemed in their whole nature modelled on numbers, and numbers seemed to be the first things in the whole of nature, they supposed the elements of numbers to be the elements of all things and the whole heaven to be a musical scale and a number. (Aristotle, Met. 985b23ff.) Aristotle’s reconstruction clearly has its limits. It is vague about time and place; it is unspecific about the membership of ‘the so-called Pythagoreans’ (a special difficulty since we have seen that there was considerable doctrinal difference between different branches of the Pythagorean movement); the theory of Number is separated from its sociocultural context in the ethical and religious teachings of the Order; and no attempt is made to reconstitute the original questions to which these doctrines were responses. Yet his brief summary contains important evidence concerning the reception of Pythagorean mathematics during the middle decades of the fourth century and, once more, displays the way in which Aristotle projected his own problematic upon the questions of earlier philosophical theories. Several important themes might be noted: (i)

the Pythagorean school is recognized as the first ‘specialist’ tradition of mathematical speculation and numerological research, most probably mapping discrete ‘element-numbers’ into geometrical and musicological patterns; by implication, the exoteric and esoteric curriculum of the School was dominated by the idea of representing all phenomena in numerical terms: the Pythagoreans appear as the first great ‘model builders’ of the European tradition; (ii) a difference is drawn between Number(s) and the ‘elements’ of Number(s): the fundamental elements of Number being the opposed terms of the Limit and Unlimited; (iii) under ‘Number’ is included relations or, to be more precise, the mathematical relation Aristotle understood as ‘ratio’ (for example, the discovery of the harmonic proportion of the musical scale as a cosmogonic structure); 208

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(iv) ‘Number’ has an ontological or cosmological significance—being the arche and invisible moving ‘principle’ of the heavens; and thus, (v) ‘Number’ appears as a divinely authorized source of the universe.17 3 PYTHAGOREAN VIDEOLOGY The genealogy of the geometrical and the algebraic imagination Proclus Diadochus was one of the first commentators to emphasize the constitutive role of the geometrical imagination in Pythagorean mathematics. It was the Pythagorean fascination for geometrical representation and visual totality, according to Proclus, that set Greek mathematics on the path toward strict deductivism and the search for systematic apodictic proofs of its theorems. Without Pythagoras, no Euclid: Pythagoras changed the study of geometry, giving it the form of a liberal discipline, seeking its first principles in ultimate ideas, and investigating its theorems abstractly and in a purely intellectual way. It was he who discovered the subject of proportions and the construction of the cosmic figures (regular polyhedra).18 In claiming that number or discontinuous quantities rather than unmediated matter or some primary element was the root of all things, Pythagoras may be said to have discovered the generative role of symbolic forms, interpreting the world-order as a symbolic kosmos. Numerological relations and, more generally, mathematical ratios and formulae are intuitively grasped as a profoundly important ‘mental technology’. The Pythagoreans had stumbled upon a decisive technique of reflection, a new cultural technology. Again we must emphasize the visual element of this revolutionary change of paradigms: Pythagorean mathematics is founded on a geometrical vision of the universe, seeing the kosmos as a mathematically ordered totality of elements and their structured relations—forerunner of the Platonic Form theory and all subsequent ‘structuralist’ paradigms. The fundamental claim is that purely visual patterns hold the key to the physical organization of the whole cosmos. With Cornford we tend to agree that this was one of the great—if not the greatest-discoveries of antiquity: ‘The key to intelligible order lies in the notion of limited quantity defining unlimited quality… This was a theoretical discovery comparable to the greatest of all man’s practical inventions, the alphabet’.19 Visual geometry—the mathematics of spatial form—with its proportional ratios provided a perfect allegory for Pythagorean politics. The association with the alphabet is not fortuitous. Just as there is a graphic syntax of words and speech, so there is a ‘grammar’ of corporeal objects and social life; the whole world-order follows simple rules, and the discovery of its syntax places an immense power into the hands of the theorist. Even the traditional contrast 209

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between aristocracy and democracy could be coded in the difference between geometry and arithmetic: For arithmetic, by its employment of number, distributes things equally, geometry, by the employment of proportion, distributes things according to merit. Geometry is therefore not a source of confusion in the State, but has in it a notable principle of distinction between good men and bad, who are awarded portions not by weight or lot, but by the differences between vice and virtue. This, the geometrical, is the system of proportion which God applies to affairs.20 Numbers are the ‘point-masses’ of geometrical structures; they are the calculi from which we calculate proportions. It may even be that the first form of ‘Atomism’—or at least, the first ‘atomizing’ attitude toward experience—was introduced by Pythagorean Number metaphysics. We have already seen this at work in the numerology that defines material objects and their stereometric form as products of generative numbers. We know that the Pythagoreans constructed geometrical models of Earth, Fire, Air, and Water (linking the tetrahedron to fire, the cube to earth, the octahedron to air, the icosahedron to water, and the dodacahedron to the aether) which would fuel later astronomical and even astrological speculation from the Neopythagorean renaissance down to the time of the Scientific Revolution in the sixteenth century—Kepler’s Pythagorean speculations being a case in point). The numerological interests of the Pythagoreans combined with their ideological valorization of pure geometry produced a powerful mathematical discourse, but one that ultimately obstructed the development of mathematical theory. A vast field of mathematical speculation—designated by the Arabic term ‘algebra’—remained essentially closed to Greek mathematics. Here it seems that both ‘internal’ and ‘external’ cultural contexts contributed to the geometricizing of the Greek mathematical imagination (with notable ‘algebraic’ exceptions in the work of Archimedes, Hipparchus, Pappus, and Diophantus) and suggest a sociological explanation as to why, for example, abstract number theory and the theory of algebraic relations and functions were never combined (at best something like a ‘geometrical algebra’ was adumbrated, whose late fruit is best represented by the explicit proof procedures in Euclid’s Elements). The cultural effects of this over-valorization of digital-spatial models and devaluation of analogue-temporal metrics (algebra) helped to consolidate a deep-rooted image of the world as a visible, tangible, spatially-extended manifold. In short the mathematics of space obstructed the development of a mathematics of time; instead of dynamic, functional equations (which are essentially the product of algebraic operations) the Greeks elaborated a mathematical language of static, geometrical Forms. The absence of such an ‘obvious’ linkage, given the extensive and early development of mathematics in the fifth century is itself a topic of some logological significance.21 Another obstacle to the spread of mathematical speculation was the tendency 210

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of Pythagorean mathesis to ignore some of the more basic norms of replication; in particular it expressly proscribed the ‘norm of communism’ (to borrow Robert K.Merton’s felicitious expression)—the esoteric truths of Pythagoreanism were not to be shared beyond the inner forum of the Pythagorean Brotherhood upon pain of expulsion and, some suggest, the forfeit of life itself.22 The related proscription against ‘irrational’ or ‘incommensurable’ metrics may also have prevented more speculative minds from working upon the concept of the continuum or the mathematics of infinite ‘numbers’. Here there were definite cultural constraints which shaped the form of early Greek mathematics, turning it away from algebraic structures and more ‘dynamic’ models of change and process. The dominant mode of representation—manifest in the visual notations of the Pythagoreans but rooted in the spatializing properties of Greek grammar— channelled the mathematical imagination in a particular ideological direction. Over many generations such ‘epistemological obstacles’—to borrow Gaston Bachelard’s expression—led the mathematicians of the fifth and fourth centuries to downgrade systematically the symbolic procedures to be found, for instance, in Babylonian mathematics and astronomy. We hear next to nothing—after the time of Thales—of any attempt to adopt or use Babylonian ideas concerning the algebraizing of geometrical figures or astronomical relationships. Even some of the greatest Alexandrian experimentalists such as Archimedes persist in prioritizing the abstract study of geometrical problems over and above ‘practical mathematics’ and ‘mechanics’: Archimedes did not regard his military inventions as an achievement of any importance, but merely as a byproduct, which he occasionally pursued for his own amusement, of his serious work, namely the study of geometry. He had done this in the past because Hiero, the former ruler of Syracuse, had often pressed and finally persuaded him to divert his studies from the pursuit of abstract principles to the solution of practical problems, and to make his theories more intelligible to the majority of mankind by applying them through the medium of the senses to the needs of everyday life. (Plutarch, Life ofMarcellus 14ff.) This cultural blindness, when combined with the disinterest in practical application and experimental validation, is one of the most striking characteristics of the history of early Greek mathematization. To cite Plutarch once more, the tradition of mechanics from Archytas and Eudoxos to Archimedes produced remarkable automata and mechanisms of ‘great ingenuity’, but these were viewed as devices for illustrating geometrical theorems—‘to support by means of mechanical demonstration easily grasped by the senses propositions which are too intricate for proof by word or diagram’ (Plutarch, Life of Marcellus, 14ff.). Practical application, mechanical ‘embodiment’, and the experimental application of mathematics and science 211

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were culturally proscribed. Whether the story is apocryphal or not, the ethos displayed in the following text undoubtedly held sway for many centuries after the demise of Classical mathematics: Plato was indignant at these developments, and attacked both men [Archytas and Eudoxos] for having corrupted and destroyed the ideal purity of geometry. He complained that they had caused her to forsake the realm of disembodied and abstract thought for that of material objects, and to employ instruments which required much base and manual labour. For this reason mechanics came to be separated from geometry, and as the subject was for a long time disregarded by philosophers, it took its place among the military arts. (Plutarch, Life of Marcellus, 14ff.) Here we touch upon one of the major themes in any logological investigation: the constitutive role of normative symbolic representations within social activities and practices and how these ‘attitudes’ and ‘discourses’ are channelled and institutionalized within a given society or historical period (‘mechanics… took its place among the military arts’). Two contrasting paradigms can be found in Indian and Arabic mathematics. Neither tradition was fixated upon geometrical models or spatial demonstrations. In fact, the Koran specifically proscribed spatial depictions of the most holy objects of the Islamic faith—an attitude which may have encouraged purely symbolic and numerical notations. The tendency toward algebraic reasoning (and its correlative ‘techniques of reflection’) is a noticeable feature of Islamic mathematics from the very beginning, in the late eighth and ninth-century writings of al-Khwarizmi and abu Kamil (Fauvel and Gray, eds, 1987:223). The cultural preference for algebraic ‘objects’ and algebraic reasoning is perfectly homologous with the ritual prescriptions of the early Islamic church with its emphatic principle that God (abstract numbers, square roots, etc.) has no spatial existence and all visual representation of the One God produces error. It may also follow from some of the basic semantic structures of ancient Arabic which seem to engender more analytic, reflexive, and ‘algebraicizing’ operations. Like other Semitic languages, Arabic uses basic units or ‘atoms’ of meaning and generates sentences through inflectional elements rather than through syntactical place or connectives. These structural features encourage paratactical constructions that are especially subject to contextual disambiguation and interpretation, a syntactical feature which places a premium on meaning as it emerges through self-reflection. It has been argued that these deep grammatical operations facilitate a basic ‘interiorization’ of thought—or what we here call reflexive capacities: Because of these structural properties, Arabic favours the expression of analytic, atomistic, occasionalist and apophthegmatic thought. A recent technical study on the ‘semantic involution of concepts’ has shown how 212

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much Semitic languages tend towards shortened and abstract formulations—how they ‘algebraize’, while Aryan languages ‘geometrize’. In fact, just as thought may be projected into space (as in Pythagorean figured numbers), so it can be turned back on itself at appropriate times to construct its object (compare the time-scheme of Kant). The suggestion is that these logological deep rules prefigured definite structures of mathematical and physical thought: In arithmetic, numbers became personalized; they ceased to be ‘natures’ and became active beings capable of acting in concern with others. By extending to mathematics the occasional atomism of the first Islamic scholastics, the Arabs ceased to confine numbers within the closed and static spatial continuum of the Greeks, and projected them instead into unlimited time where they became so many discontinuous instants of intensity…they invariably tended to look upon certain numbers as particularly ‘helpful’ to experimental research…they were more concerned with ordinals than with cardinals; unlike the Greeks, they had no aversion to odd or irrational numbers… The twenty-eight letters of the Arabic alphabet not only represent all the numerals but also the twentyeight classes of ideas of Arab philosophers… In this way, Arabic science managed to produce abstract ‘arguments’ based on alphabetical numbers—every word can ‘release’ a number of objects designated by letters adding up to the same total. (Arnaldez and Massignon, inTaton, ed., 1963:385–421, esp. 402–5) Mathematical representation From this comparison we can infer that Pythagorean speculation was shaped by its adversarial relationships within a specific field of discourse. Two adversaries in particular might be noted: the language of common sense (doxa) and naive materialism. Both common sense and everyday materialism share an unquestioned belief in the paradigmatic status of the corporeal entity, the physical thing. Pythagorean mathesis, however, questioned this ‘natural’ starting point and in the face of common sense proposed a very different notion of what is ontologically and cognitively ‘first’. Aristotle reminds us of this controversial history in Book Zeta (VII) of the Metaphysics, where he describes the latter position as arguing for the primacy of the ‘limits’ of body: surface (plane), line, point, and unit (monas); these apparently abstract predicates are, according to the Pythagorean inversion of everyday belief, more ‘substantial’ than corporeal substances (Met. 1028b16). Aristotle related this formalism to Platonic ontology which posited Forms and ‘mathematika’ as the founding structure of the whole material universe. And subsequent 213

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doxographers followed the Aristotelian precedent: ‘From Pythagorean mathematika to Platonic Forms’ In fact in the Hellenistic period, Platonism was frequently conflated with Pythagorean speculation producing the hybrid, ‘Neopythagorean metaphysics’. The seventh book of the Metaphysics provided chapter and verse to legitimate this philosophical coupling, creating one of the central strands of Western VideologicaP thought: the ‘two-world’ metaphysics of popular Neoplatonism. As I will show in detail in a later volume, Aristotle salvaged what he could from Pythagorean speculation. In the main he appropriated the doctrine of elemental oppositions between Limit (peras) and Unlimited (apeiron) which, in his hands, becomes a thinly veiled opposition between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ principles; he would eventually assimilate this polarity to his own schema of Form and Matter—hylomorphism being an obvious family relative of the binary logic of Limit and Unlimited. Unfortunately, however, Aristotle failed to understand the revolutionary significance of the idea of mathematization implicit in Pythagorean cosmology; and his oversight led him to reject the speculative idea of a universal mathematical language of physical description. His own intellectual orientation was more concerned with the description and explanation of the growth and transformation of organisms than with the abstract world of mathematical physics. 4 THE PYTHAGOREAN SOUL AND METEMPSYCHOSIS Where the Milesian philosophers approached the soul and reflexivity more generally by reflecting upon the processes of Nature (understood as phusis), Pythagoras seems to have reversed this procedure, and interpreted the nature of Being by studying the psyche. Where Ionian metaphysics led inexorably back to the question of the kosmos, the ideology of the Pythagorean Order converges in a mystical ‘psychology’ or ‘logos on the psyche’. 4.1 Pythagorean psychology 4.1.1 The morphology of the psychic structure Diogenes attributes a number of important developments to the Pythagoreans, making Pythagoras the founding father of psychology in its original etymological sense: first, the division of the psyche into three functional parts: intellect or intelligence (nous), reason (phrena), and passion (thumos). First, what was once almost synonymous with the soul (as in the Homeric usage of thumos) now becomes one component of the general psychic structure; second, while phrena and thumos are capacities shared by the animal kingdom, reason is man’s singular differentiating capacity; third, the locus of the psyche extends from the heart (kardia) to the brain (enkephalos); fourth, the thumos-part has its seat in the heart, while reason and intelligence are localized in the brain; 214

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fifth, nous represents the ‘immortal’ element of the soul; sixth, the senses are ‘distillations’ of reason and intelligence; seventh, the psyche is nourished by the blood (the veins, arteries, and sinews being ‘bonds of the psyche’); eighth, the psyche survives the body at death (ushered into Hades by Hermes, the escorter or keeper of the gate); ninth, the air is full of souls, termed daemones who transmit dreams and premonitions of the future to men (but also to animals); tenth, the ultimate aim of human life is to turn the soul toward good (the aim of life is the creation of a ‘good psyche’) (DL 8.30–2). The understanding that philosophy was an important instrument or technique of self-inquiry—a tool for inquiring into the ‘nature’ or ‘structure’ of the human soul (anthropos psyche) may have been one of the more original innovations of the Pythagorean tradition. For Pythagoras the immortal psyche is the clue to human existence; it represents the faint spark of divinity in the material ‘flesh’ of the mundane world. Only Heraclitus, amongst the Presocratic thinkers, pays more attention to the phenomenon of the psyche. We might even suggest that the Number ontology and ascetic rules of the Order were consequences of Pythagorean psychology. We know, for instance, that the psyche was granted a special number (as were Reason and Justice) to recognize its fundamental role in the conduct of life. This is the hypothesis we will pursue in the rest of this chapter. 4.1.2 Psyche as an immaterial and immortal soul The general psychology of the Pythagoreans posits the psyche as an intangible structuring, controlling, self-monitoring agency: ‘Soul is distinct from life; it is immortal, since that from which it is detached is immortal’ (DL 8.28). The central idea of the reflexive structuration of the soul emerges most clearly in these speculations. From Diogenes’ account we may infer that the ‘self or ‘mind’ has been demarcated as a phenomenon for inquiry in its own right. The ‘soul’ is now articulated into a complex of ‘faculties’. ‘The most momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or to evil. Blest are the men who acquire a good soul’ (DL: 8.32). The good soul is mapped in terms of the cosmic theory of harmonious balances and tensions: ‘Virtue is harmony, and so are health and all good and God himself; this is why they say that all things are constructed according to the laws of harmony. The love of friends is just concord and equality’ (DL 8.33). Pythagorean psychology gave rise to a singularly important distinction (which in the late fifth century and fourth century sedimented into an ontological division) between psyche and soma or ‘soul’ and ‘body’ as we would now say. Where the body is subject to change and dissolution, the soul is an immortal element. As Hussey rightly observes, if ‘any formula could ever sum up the intellectual development of a period of years, then the years from around 530 to around 430, in Greece, might be brought under the formula “the detachment of the soul from the body”’.23 Originally, however, the Pythagorean distinction was more closely related 215

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to a difference drawn between ‘form-creating’ and ‘form-destroying’ powers: the psyche was foregrounded as a thematic object precisely because of its putative form-generating capacities; its superior powers control and organize its form-destroying propensities (the sensation, appetite, and the passions); yet even these components qua elements of the soul are not without their own formal organization and function. The Pythagorean psyche is not so much a personal self, as a site of struggle, internal contestation, and differentiation waged between functions that are essentially pulling in different directions (and in this respect the Pythagorean rhetoric of reflexivity is still indebted to the Homeric phenomenology of thumos as a complex force in human life and social relationships). Where the ordering powers of nous fail there we invariably find pathology; where the components go their own ways or overdetermine the higher powers of reason, we have the beginnings of ‘dis-harmony’ and with it ‘dis-ease’. It is thus understandable that the Pythagoreans approached issues of health and illness in the language of Opposites and Harmony. In Diogenes’ report, health is basically the fulfilment of form-creating energies, while disease appears with the dissolution of natural pattern. This original ‘cosmic’ psychology may also have inspired physicians within the Pythagorean order to speculate on the linkages between health, disease, and numerical configurations (a fascination which continued down to Augustine’s De Musica and beyond). 4.1.3 Metempsychosis Metempsychosis, or the belief in the transmigration of souls, is another distinctive teaching of the Pythagoreans. Once more we follow Diogenes Laertius who claimed that Pythagoras ‘was the first to declare that the soul, bound now in this creature, now in that, thus goes on a round ordained of necessity (psyche kuklos anankes)’ (DL 8.14). The cycle of necessity maps a path through different incarnations until the soul is reunited with the divine (to theion). Evidence of Pythagoras’ acceptance of transmigration and the doctrine of immortality is provided by one of Xenophanes’ elegiac poems, allegedly the oldest testimony on the doctrine of metempsychosis in the Greek world: And once when he passed a puppy that was being whipped they say he took pity on it and made this remark: ‘Stop, do not beat it; for it is the soul of a dear friend—I recognized it when I heard the voice’.24 The doctrine appears to have been derived from a well-developed mythology of the mobile soul, which may have included the following elements: (i) (ii)

that the psyche—as the source of mobility and change—is the divine element or trace of the immortal One in human beings; like its source, the soul is both immortal and a unity; 216

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(iii) however, the soul is modified by its embodiment, and even ‘tested’ through different incarnations; (iv) (iii) implies cycles of reincarnation or, at least, stages of bodily transformation, both in animal and non-animal forms (at 2.123 Herodotus speaks of a cycle involving 3,000 years: ‘the Egyptians are the first to have maintained the doctrine that the soul of man is immortal, and that, when the body perishes, it enters into another animal that is being born at the time, and when it has been the complete round of the creatures of the dry land and of the sea and of the air it enters again into the body of a man at birth; and its cycle is completed in 3,000 years. There are some Greeks who had adopted this doctrine, some in former times, and some in later, as if it were their own invention; their names I know but refrain from writing down’); (v) reminiscence (anamnesis)—the soul’s knowledge of earlier forms of embodiment—is the medium which allows the present psyche to train and purify itself, in anticipation of an eternal life; (vi) reminiscence presupposes the ‘eternal return’ of all events and experiences; (vii) all life is ‘ensouled’ and should be respected (the ‘kinship of all living things’ made vegetarianism a fundamental dietary rule for the Pythagorean communities): ‘He sacrificed to the gods frankincense, millet, cakes, honeycomb, myrrh and the other fragrances’ (Iamblichus, v. Pythag. 150);25 (viii) transmigration into the body of an animal or ‘lower’ form of life is a punishment for a previous form of life. The immortality of the soul, attested by its reincarnation and transmigration across many forms of life and species, appears to have been a very important doctrinal component of Pythagorean religion. Members of the Order were, for example, pledged to a rigorous ascetic lifestyle, refraining from eating flesh or killing other creatures. He ‘taught his disciples to abstain from all living things and from certain foods which hinder the pure and keen operation of reason’ (Iamblichus, v. Pythag. 68). Metempsychosis may be regarded as a ‘logical’ consequence of the thesis of immortality in reconciling (i) the intangible and invisible soul (psyche); (ii) its transcendent nature as eternal; (iii) its link to the divine One; and (iv) the deeprooted dualism inherent in the doctrine of the soul and the body as an attunement of the corporeal and the incorporeal. As a coherent doctrine, transmigration presupposes the radical incompatibility of psyche and embodiment: the soul is not made from the same material as the body—it animates the body, but cannot be considered to be coextensive with the body; if this were the case, the soul would die with the death of the material body. The confluence of spiritual beliefs also explains the affinity between Pythagorean ideas on eternal recurrence and Orphic religion; both converge as an intellectualized salvation religion based on speculative 217

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mythology and purification rituals. The crucial ingredient during the sixth century is the thesis that philosophia is a kind of existential therapy—a rigorous training (askesis) of the body and soul—securing the soul’s health in this world and preparing its passage into another form of life after death. Philosophy was a cathartic regime designed to prepare the individual for the passage of the psyche from the body on its course of reincarnations (see Xenophanes, DK 21 B7; Plato, Phaedo 64E, 67CD, Rep. 521C; Iamblichus, v. Pythag. 68, 69). 4.1.4 Anamnesis John Burnet derived the Platonic doctrine of reminiscence (anamnesis) directly from the Pythagorean idea of rebirth. In Plato’s Meno and Phaedo, the objects of the senses remind us of things we knew when the soul was out of the body and could perceive reality directly. We have never seen equal sticks or stones, but we know what equality is, and it is just by comparing the things of sense with the realities of which they remind us that we judge them to be imperfect. Burnet concludes: I see no difficulty in referring this doctrine in its mathematical application to Pythagoras himself. It must have struck him that the realities he was dealing with were not perceived by the senses, and the doctrine of Reminiscence follows easily from that of Rebirth.26 4.1.5 Pythagorean medicine: the soul in the kosmos, the kosmos in the soul Two Pythagorean ideas in particular encouraged a renewed interest in the workings of the human body as a microcosm of the divine cosmos. First, the general theory of a homologous universe governed by Reason; this entailed that the structure and movement of the world-order should be evidenced in both the microcosmic and macrocosmic world, and that by exploring the universe, the soul could deepen its understanding of its own place in the cosmos. Second, the psyche was functionally similar to the ‘soul’ of the universe; it ‘governed’ the body as God steered the world-order. By implication only the pure soul, the soul subject to a lifelong regime of katharsis, could gain access to the soul of the world. Ironically, this speculative theory of the interconnected microcosm/macrocosm may have encouraged a more objective approach to the body, as an organization continuous with the material structure of the world: It is natural to connect this with the Pythagorean concept of the soul, as something totally alien to the body, and having no necessary connection 218

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with it. If what was of value in man was not human at all, but an exiled divinity, this would facilitate and justify the detached inspection of the facts of human physiology, as just another part of cosmology.27 This paradoxical materialization of the human body (correlative with the spiritualization of reason and the soul) may have prompted the development of medical research, physiology, and anatomy as warrantable practices; we know, for example, that the physician-philosopher Philolaus dissected animals and may have carried out autopsies in order to explore the connection between the brain and the pathways of the nervous system; it is not beyond belief that the ‘oscillating’ nature of the blood supply, the role of the heart as pump, and the coordinating role of the brain were part of his medical outlook: the human body becomes as never before an object of study. In a parallel way, in the visual arts, the human body and other things are rendered with a naturalness never before achieved, and this is done by a consciousness of the importance of structure in the form of proportions.28 Pythagorean medicine thus adapted the cosmology of harmonic relations to the tasks of practical therapy: Man does not live in harmony with Nature and reason, and that is why the world is so full of hatred and selfishness. He must learn as an individual to create cosmos, to live cosmos in the State and the world of States. He must seek new life for individuals and States through the idea of God and Nature. A new aristocracy must be created of the rational and god-inspired as an instrument of universal re-birth. In the Clubs, the Pythagorean Brotherhoods of life and education, it was to be selected, trained, and prepared for sovereignty. The aristocratic ideal of beauty and goodness, of perfect discipline and temperance together with good birth and bodily training, had already been deepened and developed in the maxims of the Sages; they called for self-knowledge, self-control, and measure in all things. In the notion of harmony Pythagoras could sum it all up and anchor it deep down in the foundations of the world. For self-knowledge is only a part of the divine and natural perception that reason and order are the essence of the universe; self-control is only part of the transformation of the ego into a temple of reason and order; measure is beautiful and wholesome because it is divine, immoderation ugly and disastrous because it is contrary to Nature and God. The harmony of the body is health, that of the soul is virtue, energy, ability. Thus the old aristocratic ideal was renewed and spiritualized. But at the same time it ceased to be the ideal of a hereditary caste. Everybody was to follow the ideal, though not everybody could reach perfection and the vocation of a ruler. The education of the Brotherhoods applied to everyone and led them as far as they were able to go.29 219

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5 PHILOSOPHIA AND THE THREE LIVES Sosicrates in his Successions of Philosophers says that, when Leon the tyrant of Phlius asked him who he was, he said, ‘A philosopher’ (philosophos), and that he compared life to the Great Games, where some went to compete for the prize and others went with wares to sell, but the best as spectators. (DL 8.8) The bios theoretikos As we have suggested, Pythagoras stabilized the meaning of the word philosophia and its conjugates as terms indicating a distinctive theoretical and ethical way of life. Philosophy was not an end in itself, but a means to liberate the immortal psyche within each individual. In the context of a mystical religion informed by Orphic motifs, philo-sophia served to demarcate the life of pure inquiry as an autonomous form of existence subject to its own rigorous criteria and principles. Although Pythagoreanism eventually degenerated into an eclectic system of arcane cosmogony and number mysticism, the idea of philosophical theoria would be taken up and developed in the Platonic Academy and Aristotelian Lyceum as the sovereign end of speculative reflexivity. Theoria and Sophia Pythagoras is said to have been the first person to call himself a philosopher. (Iamblichus, v. Pythag. 57) The way of life of the philosophos is described in the well-known parable of the three lives. Three categories of interest differentiate those who frequent the Greek Games: first, those who come to buy and sell; second, those who wish to participate and compete; and finally, those who attend to look and spectate. If life can be imagined as a festival then there are three possible roles for human beings—the life of active participants, tradesmen, and spectators (theatai). In its purity and freedom from all extrinsic interests, the bios theoretikos is the highest form of the purely disinterested life of spectating. Hence the ‘lover of wisdom’ is absorbed in one fundamental interest, in seeing the nature of the whole, in returning to the one absolute realm of Being. His quest for the truth (aletheia) is thereby the highest form of human life. If the desire to know is a universal aspect of the human condition, the word ‘philosophy’ reminds human beings of the difference between finite cognition and divine wisdom: mortals are destined only to be lovers of truth, but only the God is wise. In this way, a life lived toward the possibility of sophia is, by definition, a philosophical life. This is the setting in which Plato invokes the 220

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Pythagorean form of life in the Republic (530D, 600A-B) and later in the Timaeus, reminds his audience of the risk of those who would grasp ‘the Whole truth’, forgetting the radical difference between mortal and divine, for only God has the knowledge and power to combine things into one and again resolve the one into the many; but this is beyond the intellect of any individual (Timaeus 68D). Because sophia is restricted to the God alone, philosophia is the ‘modest and befitting title’ of seekers after truth (Phaedrus 278D). As we have seen, the eros of inquiry is exemplified by the pursuit of mathematical knowledge. Pure mathematics—the ‘longing for knowledge’ (epizetoumena episteme) as Aristotle says—represented the paradigm case of disinterested theory—the word theoria, from theorem, having the sense of contemplative looking totally separated from ulterior interests or motivation. Plato generalized the Pythagorean insight into the immanent intentionality of cognition by grounding the eros of pure theorizing in the desire of the Good: Having no place among the gods in heaven…[human beings] ought to fly away from earth to heaven as quickly as we can; and to fly away means to become like God, as far as this is possible; and to become like him, means to become holy, just and wise…the truth is that God is never in any way unrighteous—he is perfect righteousness; and he of us who is the most righteous is of all things most like him. Herein is seen the true knowledge of a man, and also his nothingness and want of manhood. For to know this is true wisdom and virtue, and ignorance of this is manifest folly and vice.30 When Aristotle wrote the Nicomachean Ethics this view of theoria as the mimesis of God, as ‘a putting on the immortal’ had become a cliché: We ought not to obey those who tell us that a man should think a man’s thoughts, and a mortal the thoughts of a mortal. On the contrary, we should endeavour as far as possible to become immortal [‘to put on the immortal’] and to do all that we can to love, in accordance with what is highest in us. Sophia can only be achieved through a life of inquiry, most concretely adumbrated in the striving for self-knowledge. Knowledge is a concrete way of ‘following God’. From Pythagoras to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, philosophy defines itself as the love of self-reflexivity, the pursuit of the Whole through a living experience of reflexive theorizing. Plato’s doctrine of anamnesis belongs in this tradition—as the soul gains knowledge of itself by escaping from material involvements, purifying and recollecting itself in relation to the One. This is why an unreflexive life is a life unworthy of human existence.31 6 THE VIDEOLOGICAL FORM OF LIFE We can draw these remarks together by asking a question with three related 221

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aspects: what were the historical importance, logological characteristics, and cultural impact of the Pythagorean vision of the cosmos? 6.1 The mathematical projection of the world As we have seen, the Pythagorean world-view is expressed most emphatically in its definition of the theoretical life as the pursuit of mathematical order: 6.1.1 Pythagorean arithmetic and geometry moved away from the older practice of mathematics as a practical art (techne) to develop the concept of a ‘pure’ or abstract mathematics; closely allied with this was the distinction between ‘applied mathematics’ (the ‘physical mathematics’ which Aristotle identified as geometry, optics, and harmonics) and the ‘pure mathematics’ of abstract numbers and logical relations. 6.1.2 Mathematical logos (relation, proportion, ratio) was projected as a model applicable to all spheres of being, activities, and social practices; in this way mathematical patterns and ‘harmonies’ might be sought in the structure of the physical cosmos (with its cycles, periodicities, and rhythms), in music (the science of harmonics), in applied crafts (architecture, building, metallurgy, pottery, and so on), in military strategy, in the metric forms of poetry, visual and plastic arts and, last but not least, in the social cosmos of ethical and political order; the underlying idea of inquiry as an archaeology of hidden structures—a logos of eide in every department of existence would eventually become the paradigm of the bios theoretikos (as the older sense of philosophy as an inquiry into the phusis of the kosmos was transmuted into the mathesis of Form or essence). 6.1.3 Pythagorean mathesis created the grammar of formal mathematics (defining the basic lexicon for all subsequent mathematics: apodeixis, logos, arche, eidos, problems, lemmas, aporia, ratio, syllogism, odd, even, incommensurable or ‘irrational’ numbers, demonstration, etc.); as a specialized term, the word ‘mathematics’ is a product of Pythagorean theorizing (mathesis originally designated any ‘disipline’ or body of knowledge); as Burnet noted, ‘all mathematical terms are purely Greek in their origin’ (1930:21). 6.1.4 In addition to elaborating the grammar of later mathematics, the following specific contributions have been credited to this tradition: 6.1.4.1 the construction of a general theory of numbers (the definition of ‘number’ as a point-unit), the classificiation of various types of number (odd, even, prime, composite, etc.), and their subdivisions (odd-even, even-timeseven, etc.); 222

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6.1.4.2 the visualization of ‘geometrical numbers’ (triangular, square, oblong, polygonal numbers corresponding to planes, cubes, pyramidal, etc. figures); 6.1.4.3 discoveries in geometrical arithmetic (the exploration of the continuum and tentative introduction of the method of approximation—leading to ideas concerning the mathematical infinite); 6.1.4.4 the demonstration that the sum of the angles of any triangle is equal to two right angles; 6.1.4.5 the demonstration of ‘the Pythagorean theorem’ (Proclus, Commentary, 426.1–9); 6.1.4.6 investigations of the theory of proportions (limited to commensurable magnitudes; Proclus speaks of Pythagoras as the discoverer of the doctrine of proportionals and the structure of the cosmic figures); 6.1.4.7. the exploration of deductive demonstration in geometry (opening up the field of ‘material axiomatics’ and formalization in terms of a finite number of axioms, definitions and transformation rules—thus providing the impetus for a development that culminated in the algorithmic system of Euclid’s Elements); 6.1.4.8 the discovery of the existence of incommensurable segments by Hippasus of Metapontum (Von Fritz, 1970), in particular the diagonal of a square in relation to its side (perhaps even formal ‘proofs’ of the ‘irrationality’ of the square root of two, five, and so on—proofs which were formalized by Plato’s teacher, Theodorus of Cyrene); 6.1.4.9 experimental explorations of the harmonic properties and periodicities of vibrating strings.32

6.2 The logological structure of Pythagorean discourse: the cosmos envisioned Pythagorean mathesis can best be summarized as a commitment to see reason or logos working in a homologous configuration of ‘life-spheres’. The implications of this orientation can be analyzed under the following headings. 6.2.1 Videological geometry 6.2.1.1 Mathematics is primarily number theory; numbers are grasped ‘substantially’ as point-elements and mathematization is based on visualizable 223

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quantities and relations (mathematical logos is represented in videological relations); the orientation encouraged the abstraction of ‘pure’ forms from their material embodiments (for example, we find the beginnings of definition of such abstract objects as quantity, ratio, point, line, surface, angle and body); these eventually formed the ‘self-evident’ axioms of later mathematical theorizing.’ 6.2.1.2 Numbers were literally seen as rationally distributed patterns; this is best exemplified in the numerical structures of plane geometry and the phenomenological properties of solid geometry. 6.2.1.3 Such investigations supported the idea that the cosmos of numerical logoi formed the true nature of natural things: the visible universe was constituted from numbers. 6.2.1.4 Videological mathesis made three-dimensional forms the most ‘natural’ exemplars of mathematical laws—a position which tended to exclude more abstract and ‘disembodied’ objects from mathematical theory; as a result of these presuppositions subsequent Greek mathematics was predominantly finitist (‘If I were to sit at the extreme limit of the universe, could I or could I not stretch out my hand? If I could, it means that beyond this limit there is yet more space’, Archytus, according to Simplicius, 467.26). 6.2.1.5 As a medium of the divine Logos, videological mathematics must be apodictic (apodeixis); this encouraged the movement toward deductive proofs and axiomatization, culminating in Euclid’s formalization of geometry and the construction of the concept of ‘proof within a system’. 6.2.2 Visual ontology 6.2.2.1 Mathematical ratios and harmonies are evidence of the underlying lawfulness of Being (reinforcing the belief in the ultimate intelligibility of the cosmos as an ordered totality). 6.2.2.2 Phusis or ‘nature’ became the physical manifestation of this ‘beautiful order’, exemplified in the harmonic relations of objects and the cosmic harmonies of planetary motion. 6.2.2.3 All other modes of existence can be understood as analogies of cosmic order; hence, there must be an ‘order’ or ‘logic’ to every systematic sphere of existence. 6.2.2.4 As a ‘perfect’ object, the circle (and circular motion) most closely approximates rational order; this was one of the primary reasons why 224

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Pythagorean physics postulated a Central Fire around which the planets revolved; it also predisposed the Pythagoreans to a heliocentric view of the world. 6.2.3 Cosmology 6.2.3.1 The thesis that ‘All is Number’ was taken to mean that the whole kosmos had been generated from the arche of Number and could only be comprehended by mathematical reason. 6.2.3.2 Mathematics becomes the paradigm for a truly rational cosmology. 6.2.3.3 The visible kosmos is a stratification of isomorphic patterns, a ‘levelled’ reality of different modes of being patterned from similar laws (e.g. of harmonic oscillation). 6.2.3.4 This licensed the idea that knowledge of the Whole could be grasped in a single system of mathematical reason. 6.2.3.5 Physical nature and the psyche form two interrelated domains of the world system; the soul obeys harmonic laws and is ‘tuned’ to the beautiful order of the cosmos. 6.2.4 Ethics 6.2.4.1 The ‘resonance’ between psyche and kosmos suggests the existence of a transcendental norm as the telos of pure knowledge; such knowledge would form a transcendental basis for psychological and social reforms (individual and society must be brought into harmony with the cosmic Logos); hence the correction of untoward behaviour was called ‘tuning’ (Iamblichus, v. Pythag. 197). 6.2.4.2 The ‘cosmic resonance’ runs through every order of being; the psyche’s ‘ascent’ (or ‘descent’) toward ‘true Being’ is woven into the doctrine of metempsychosis (thepsyche that is abandoned in the void of matter or prehuman existence can ascend to forms of existence closer to the divine One). 6.2.4.3 Mathematics is the bridge between ethics and religion: the soul’s ascent toward the One is a long process of psychological regulation marked by initiation and purification ceremonies; this is controlled by a spiritual élite, possessors of absolute knowledge. 6.2.4.4 Finally, only the cognoscenti who have successfully graduated from the mathematics of finite objects, through physical harmonics, astronomy, 225

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and cosmology to an ultimate vision of the One, should be allowed to organize the City, control the education of the young, and supervise their moral, intellectual, and social welfare; Pythagorean ethics culminates in a form of ethical élitism (an ideology that attracted Plato—especially the idea of building ‘the good society’ in the light of the unity of kosmos and ethos). 6.2.5 Politics 6.2.5.1 As with ethics, political order is envisioned as a hierarchy of ‘natural ranks’ and ‘just proportions’: the ‘origin of justice…is community feeling and fairness’ (Iamblichus, v. Pythag. 167). 6.2.5.2 There is a rigid separation between the Many and the One, coded in the opposition between the pure science of philosophic (mathesis) and the ‘impure’ worlds of doxa, sensory awateness, and craft knowledge. 6.2.5.3 Hierarchy becomes the principle of social ‘harmony’. 6.2.5.4 The ‘just order’ requires a radical separation of ‘manual’ and ‘mental’ labour. 6.2.5.5 A videological interpretation of the ‘just City’: an order manifold governed by an ‘all-seeing’ élite, ideally selected from the traditional ruling aristocracy of the ancient Greek world. 6.2.5.6 A spatial conception of social order-the City as a panoptical harmony of integrated orders (exemplified most fully in the Ideal City of Plato’s Republic and Laws). 6.2.5.7 Political practice is totally subservient to theoretical mathesis (and its aristocratic agents).33 6.3 The videological form of life: Pythagoreanism as a ‘civilizing power’ Pythagoras was the author of the first fully scientific view of the universe, and applied it with a view to the re-birth of Greek civilization. It embraced a doctrine of God and Nature, of statecraft and ethics, and a practical educational theory in the service of all. The doctrine exercised immense influence, theoretically by providing the fundamental notions of mathematics and music, and practically by making ‘beautiful order’, that is the harmonious training of mind and body, the supreme concepts governing the new civic chivalrous education, 226

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especially in Athens, with Homer as text-book. Pythagoras, as the author of this ideal of Greek humanity, was as important as Homer. Even Herodotus placed him and Solon side by side as sophistes, sages of practical life.34 6.3.1 Pythagoreanism in the field of cultural production A number of important cultural discourses were made possible by the activities of the Pythagorean Order. In general terms the spread of Pythagorean ideology provided a language in which philosophy and mathematics could be integrated and defined as a collective project and common body of knowledge. Its relentless formalism stimulated the development of abstract, deductive reasoning (inaugurating a series of research programmes which culminated in the theory of deductive demonstration in the Aristotelian Organon and Hellenistic mathematics), and a tradition of geometrical formalization best represented in its final form by the Elements of Euclid. Together these practices shifted late fifth-century philosophy in the direction of logical and axiomatic analysis; from here it was a short step to define pure science (episteme) by analogy with the model of mathematical explanation and demonstration (apodeixis in Aristotle, An. post. 1.71b–72a)). Within the discipline of mathematics, Pythagoreanism intervened as a source of speculative problems: the paradoxes of numerical definition, proportionality, incommensurable numbers, the difficulties of geometrical proof, the method of approximation or ‘exhaustion’ (from Eudoxus to Archimedes), the problem of solving the mathematical representation of threedimensional bodies, and so on. Many of these problems formed the starting point for the great mathematical discoveries of the Hellenistic period: curvilinear relations applied to the theory of optics (Euclid’s Optics being the first known work on the topic); work on reflection and refraction by Euclid and Ptolemy; trigonometric relationships devised for use in astronomical calculations by Aristarchus of Samos and Hipparchus; the intensive study of conic sections by Apollonius of Perga (‘including the use of the parabola to describe the path of projectiles of Greek artillery and the hyperbole of the shadow case on sun dials’); the procedure of integration based on the comparative study of static moments of two objects (Archimedes); the discovery of acceptable approximations for pi and the other irrational numbers necessary for the solution of such practical problems as map-making and the hydraulic wheel; creative work in geometrical algebra, culminating in the work of Diophantus. In sum: the growing corpus of geometrical mathematics provided the basic framework for Classical astronomy, statics, and dynamics. It was precisely these discoveries—lost for more than a thousand years—that would play such an important part in the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As Simone Weil once observed, the whole of Classical physical science is contained in the mathematics of Eudoxus and 227

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Archimedes, and behind these, the Pythagorean and Platonic tradition—‘the core of Greek civilization’.35 6.3.2 The digitalization of nature The ideology of metaphysical dualism gained tremendous prestige in the wake of Pythagorean videology—especially in its more generalized form systematized by Plato, Aristotle, and Hellenistic mathematics. For this tradition the only access to ‘true reality’ could be secured by abandoning sensory experience and doxa and following the path of abstract mathesis, the bios theoretikos. As pure axiomatic rationality with its self-evident premises and chains of deductive reasoning gained prestige the project of mathematizing nature could be imagined: with nothing more than basic axioms and elementary deductive logic it seemed possible to reconstruct the workings of nature (this is the Pythagorean dream flowing through Hippocrates of Chios (c. 430 BC), Aristarchus and Ptolemy to Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and into contemporary science). The everyday ‘truths’ of the life-world were rejected in deference to the contemplative mathesis of pure reason. In its original form, however, Pythagorean mathematics remained unproductive within the sphere of mathematical theory. It is more accurate to see its historical influence as part of a larger shift in sensibility—one part of a spreading videological culture. Like Baconian experimentalism or the Cartesian mathematics of the vortex in the early modern period, Pythagorean mathesis was more of an exhortation to knowledge than a realizable programme of research. Its role was to make the first move in the digitalization of experience, while remaining encased in its own analogue framework (its number ontology and the geometrical prejudices). Hellenistic mathematics would only make progress by abandoning number hypostatization for more abstract questionframes. But the seminal idea of digitalization with its fundamental metaphor of the cosmos as a text written in numerical characters was a significant achievement of the Pythagorean Order. Contemporary physics and mathematical cosmology still stand within the same panoptical field.36 6.3.3 Optics and the grammar of reflection Pythagorean geometry also inspired the development of the earliest forms of optical theorizing. Proclus Diadochus describes the videological orientation of this branch of applied mathematics. He observes that ‘the science of optics makes use of lines as visual rays’ and also ‘of the angles formed by these lines’—in other words, it geometrizes the visual experience along the lines of Pythagorean solid geometry (for example, the Pythagorean paradigm of linear, plane, and solid numbers). There are three main divisions of the science:

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(i)

the study of optics proper and explanations for illusions in the perception of objects at a distance (the famous Square Tower that appears Circular); (ii) catoptics, dealing with every kind of reflection of light, incorporating the theory of images (eidola); and (iii) scenography (literally ‘scene-painting’), explaining how obj ects at various distances and of various heights may be represented in drawings so that they will not appear to be out of proportion or distorted (the applied branch of pure optics).37 But in terms of the evolution of an essentially visual definition of experience, the important place of optics provides further evidence for the spread of videological logics from the sciences into other spheres of experience. Ancient optics, in fact, became one of the key linguistic sources for the rhetorics of reflection and self-reflection which would play such an important part in later European thought. 7 CONCLUSION: THE ELEMENTS OF CLASSICAL VIDEOLOGICAL CULTURE We can summarize the conclusions of this chapter by returning to the wider social and cultural contexts of the Pythagorean revolution. What social practices and institutional innovations might lead a society to think of the world in purely mathematical terms? What social paradigms might explain the spread of Pythagorean mathesis and its metaphysical presuppositions ? What ‘mental technologies’ enabled individuals and communities to interpret experience in the rhetorical figures of this new language-game? We can isolate five strands from the historical constellation as plausible institutional contexts which might enter into an explanation of the reception and assimilation of Pythagorean thought during the latter part of the fifth century: (i)

the impact of metaphysical dualism popularized in Orphism and nonGreek religions; (ii) the role of videological aesthetics; (iii) the background texts of Homeric epic and associated material culture; (iv) the culture of mousike; (v) the role of the Greek alphabet and money-form in the democratic polis. 7.1 Metaphysical dualism in Orphism and non-Greek religion The sudden appearance and rapid dissemination of Orphism, ‘mystery cults’, and other Dionysian salvation religions is one of the striking features of sixthcentury Greece (see Volume 2, Chapter 6). On the surface these Dionysian manifestations in what was otherwise assumed to be an Apollonian culture seem inexplicable. But we know that the idealized image of aristocratic religion and culture was a later ideological self-interpretation. We also know that the 229

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‘axial’ age in Greece was an epoch of major social and political turmoil, a world torn with social divisions and class struggle. Many of the traditional belief systems were rejected in favour of new political and religious ‘gods’. Orphism was a direct reflection of these changes, fulfilling a more generalized need for change and spiritual transcendence. This explains why its doctrines invariably took a stark, dualistic form. The initiate is asked to choose between the world of evil, fallen matter and the transcendent realm of the good. To simplify a very complex set of problems, Pythagoreanism was Orphism sublimated into a form more acceptable to a cultured élite. Salvational transcendence, reincarnation (metempsychosis), the harmony between psyche and kosmos, number mysticism, the dualist opposition between the good ‘peras’ and the evil ‘apeiron’, and so on, became thinly veiled rationalizations of older religious visions (albeit heavily influenced by Egyptian, Phoenician, Persian, Babylonian, and other Middle Eastern mythologies). The end product of this bricollage was a generalized Pythagorean sensibility which spread through the Greek-speaking world of the fifth century. In its most articulate versions, cosmological dualism and hypostatized mathematics contrasted sharply with the traditional mythologies and the monistic cosmology of the Milesians. The very vagueness of the ideology allowed it to function both as popular ‘wisdom’ and as a rationalized world-view of neoconservative groups. In this way it successfully competed with alternative discourses to become the basic paradigm for late fifth-century and fourth-century Greek ideology— its most illustrious exponents being Parmenides and Plato. Parmenides’ principle of the unity of Being ironically served to confirm the hold of dualism which it set out to oppose. The same dialectic of Being (Form) and Nonbeing (Matter, Privation, etc.) forms the leitmotif of the Platonic Dialogues. As sublimated Orphism, it extended to every subsequent discourse in which ‘matter’ is contrasted with ‘form’.38 7.2 Videological aesthetics In Chapter 1 we explored the general claim that Archaic Greek culture had poetically troped the universe in the figures of ‘beauty’ or visual harmony and perfection. In this chapter we have seen that Pythagorean mathesis built its elaborate doctrinal superstructure, reflective practices, and institutional authority on the basis of an analogous interpretation of Being. Greek mathesis and episteme adhered to geometrical and spectatorial ideals. Its visual equivalent is the rise of sculptural realism in the three-dimensional representation of the human body. The great achievements of Greek sculpture embodied practical ‘solutions’ to many of the abstract problems of geometrical analysis thematized by the Pythagorean Order. Although this is a dialectical relationship, early geometry may have abstracted these tangible solutions and projected them upon ‘any-object-whatsoever’ to construct the maximum generality of the proposition: All is Number. If 230

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there is a nascent mathesis in physical objects, if points, lines, and threedimensional shapes are subject to arithmetical representation and formalization, does this not suggest that the true essence of all things lies in the realm of ta mathematika? Problems of causal priority and ascription are probably irresolvable. It is possible that both Pythagorean mathesis and Classical Greek statuary techniques were both parts of a larger constellation of values and cultural vectors, both incarnations and regional codifications of an antecedent discourse formation—which we have called the videological ethos. This same value complex is also the natural site of Greek epic narrative and tragic drama. 7.3 Homeric epic and material culture As we have analyzed the videological foundations of Homeric epic extensively in Volume 2 I will simply summarize some of the main conclusions at this point. The prototype of all videological discourse is the narrative language of the epic, the ‘tribal encyclopaedia’ with its fundamental foregrounding of visual paradigms, concrete forms of praxis, realistic detail, and dramatic plot devices in the ‘three-dimensional’ depiction of actors, character, place, and action. Epic assumed something like a ‘cinematographic’ perspective toward the spatio temporal world of heroes and gods. The dramatic visualization of events and objects encouraged similar projects in other aesthetic media-particularly in sculpture and visual representation. The ‘material culture’ of the Greeks—its city plans, free-standing statues, bas reliefs, temples, buildings, pottery, jewellery, coinage, dress, and other everyday equipment were also transformed under the generalized impress of the new ‘aesthetics’. The very idea of ‘aesthetics’ in its modern sense is rooted in the Greek poetry of the visible world. But we should also observe that the videological imagination evidenced by Homeric epic was also supplemented by the earliest systematic bodies of knowledge in medicine, physiology and anatomy, history, and cosmology. All of these practices emphasize orderly presentation, symmetrical arrangement, accurate description, and the values of symmetry and harmonious form (to such an extent that the word ‘classical’ in sculpture and architecture primarily means Greek—and derivatively, Roman—techniques of composition and construction).39 7.4 Music (Mousike) The Pythagorean Order was the first philosophical movement to construct a science called ‘harmonics’. And as the Pythagoreans made so much of harmonic relations, it was natural that ‘musical education’ would play a considerable part in suggesting harmonic paradigms for other domains of culture—or ‘mousike’. But what does the term mousike mean in the sixth century? Foreshortening a lengthy analysis of the key texts we can summarize by saying that the word ‘mousike’ included dance, recitation, the works of Homer and 231

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Hesiod, lyric poetry, and so on. ‘Music’ had a meaning that is close to what eighteenth-century Germans intended when they spoke of Bildung, the cultivation of the arts and, more especially, the cultivation of the self. Thus Aristotle speaks of the ‘anthropon mousikon’—literally ‘the musical man’—in the sense in which we would refer to the ‘civilized’ or ‘cultivated individual’ (Physics 189b30–5). Here ‘becoming civilized’ is synonymous with becoming ‘musical’ (189b35,190a). This may have been derived from the fact that in the earliest choral odes and epic recitals the muthos was always accompanied by the harmonic melody, metrical rhythm, and dance of the performers. Thus ‘mousike’—the crafts presided over by the Muses—was thought to be a powerful force in defining the individual and community. The choruses of tragedy, like the religious hymns, were in practice slow choral dances whose circling was marked by a subtle alternation of forward and back, a ripple and halting in the stance which brought out the free ‘numbers’ of the song. The rhythm was not superposed, as is the metronome ‘beat’ of modern song; the word and the act were as one body. To circle in the dance meant to experience in one’s being the timelessness of first and last things, as expressed in the steady logos of the words. It all became, as it were, the substrate of speech, a realization of the ‘divine’ in immediate reality. (DeSantillana, 1961:85–6) Mousike was not understood as an autonomous ‘sphere’ of aesthetic experience, but rather as a training common to a range of self-forming practices ‘tied to the poetic and ethical side of man’s being: something which affects and transforms the soul’. This is the organic link between Pythagorean harmonics and the practices of ancient mousike: music consists of numerical relations in its rhythmic as well as its harmonic element…the whole nature of the world, both as microcosm and macrocosm, may certainly be expressed by mere numerical relations and thus to a certain extent be reduced thereto. In this sense, Pythagoras had been right in placing the true nature of things in numbers. But what are numbers? Relations of succession whose possibility rests on time. Purified of all concrete and physical features mathematics could serve not only as the basis for the psyche’s education but also as a charter for regathering the psyche and the kosmos into the One, a method for unifying the divided parts of the individual and the City—‘unifying their breathing, their heart beats and their state of courage’.40 7.5 The Greek alphabet and money-form Finally we come to the two most concrete exemplars of the constellation of 232

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harmonia, kosmos, and logos—the ‘beautiful order’ of the Greek alphabet and the abstract money-form. The invention of alphabetic script along with the generalized use of money as an abstract form of wealth have often been proposed as two models for the mathematical imagination. To take the moneyform first. The suggestion is that a basic condition of mathematization is the abstract idea of formal equivalence in which different orders of phenomena are approached as ‘translatable’ into the same abstract pattern of numbers. Coined money used as a generalized medium of exchange is itself a working model of the isomorphic reduction of all things (qua commodities) to a quantitative metric. Coinage is the most concrete embodiment of numbers (prices being ratios of numbers). It should be noted that Pythagoras’ home city—Samos, in Ionia—in the sixth century was a highly developed commercial and trading centre. Perhaps the idea that All is Number was the next step of abstraction from the omnipresent exchange ratios governing the Samian economy in the sixth century (All is Money). A parallel can be drawn with alphabetic script. Pythagorean arithmetic functioned as an abstract schema and generative base plan of elements from which the whole cosmos could be produced (Aristotle, Met. I.8.989b29ff.). Numbers were point-like substances (ousiae), the elements (stoicheia) from which larger wholes were composed. Different orders of existence ‘imitated’ or ‘participated’ in the abstract relations and harmonies of these elements. The kosmos was then projected along the lines of a stratified hologram (holos, whole; grammatos, a letter, that which is written (graphein)). This is strikingly similar to the new universe of writing. Here too the Whole is deconstructed into its elementary elements and combinatorial rules; from these simple relations whole sentences and texts can be constructed following strict combinatorial laws. Phonetic alphabetization, then, presupposed the deconstruction of language to its graphic elements into which the totality of speech could be mapped, embodied, and, where necessary, ‘generated’. Models of the physical universe—especially numerical paradigms—were derived by analogy with graphic symbolisms: phusis operated like an alphabetic system of basic elements and laws (the world of phusis became a vast holograph written in numerical laws).41 We come, finally, to the idea of Nature as a Text, a book to be read and interpreted. Just as the text of social life had been reduced to money and exchange relations, so the Book of Nature could be deciphered and read through the language of mathematics. Ultimately the cosmos only exists as the incarnation of Forms.

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6 HERACLITUS, LOGOLOGIST: THE REFLEXIVE COSMOS OF HERACLITUS I inquired into myself. (Heraclitus, Fragment 101) phusis kruptesthai philei (nature loves to hide). (Heraclitus, DK B 123, Themistius, Orations 5.69b) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Introduction Critical reflexivity: thinking as polemos Peri Phusis Logological configurations The Logos teaching Interpretations of the Logos-concept in Heraclitus Language-play in Heraclitus’ text The reflexive psyche in Heraclitus Logos and Kosmos Process philosophy 1 INTRODUCTION

We know very little of the life of Heraclitus, and what can be gleaned from the ancient commentators and testimonia is at best speculative. A biographical inventory would include the following scraps of information. Heraclitus was a citizen of the prosperous Ionian city-state of Ephesus. He was the son of Bloson (or Herakon) of Ephesus, a family that was linked to the ruling aristocracy or even to the royal lineage of Ephesus—he is credited with having voluntarily surrendered the nominal office of priestly kingship (archon Basileus) in favour of his brother. Ionia had been under Persian hegemony from 546 BC and Heraclitus lived to see the revolt of 500/499 which eventually brought Ionian civilization to an abrupt end in 494 with the sacking of Miletus. Traces of the catastrophe are most certainly inscribed in the cryptic texts of the surviving fragments of his work On Nature, especially in the condemnation of his fellow Ephesians for banishing Hermodorus, the lawgiver (DK B 121), his bitter attack on the Ephesians, and his diatribes against the ‘democratic’ 234

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constitution. Heraclitus prefers to observe the games of children rather than participate in the intrigues of Ephesian politics. The baselessness, corruption, and nihilistic ‘fluidity’ of political life during this period undoubtedly confirmed his vision of interminable change governing every sphere of reality, and may explain the oracular, disdainful, and misanthropic tone of the surviving fragments: ‘the world-process always was and is and ever shall be an everliving fire, kindling in measures and extinguished in measures’ (DK B 30). He would have been aware of the theories of the Ionian cosmologists and natural philosophers, particularly the respective works On Nature by Anaximander and Anaximenes. His own treatise contains many direct and indirect intertextual references to the language and thought of Thales, Anaximenes, Anaximander, Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Hecataeus, and others. We can reasonably assume that literate members of the Ephesian intelligentsia were aware of the writings of the philosophers of phusis or at least had access to reports about their activities. Heraclitus may even have been prompted to cast his own thoughts in an arcane and metaphorical logos as a direct response to the prosaic theories of Thales and Anaximenes. Whatever the literary linkages, the extant fragments represent the first philosophical text to be constructed as a self-con-scious intervention in a critical intellectual tradition. He may have been at his most productive around 500 BC. Scholars date Heraclitus’ work to the period of the sixty-ninth Olympiad (504–501 BC, although Zeller has argued for a later date, after 478 BC, supported in this by Windelband.1) This would give a rough date for his life from around 540/ 530 BC to around 480/470 BC. The surviving fragments—consisting of around 125 short aphoristic sayings—are written in the Ionian dialect and are recorded in prose rather than verse (unlike Xenophanes and Parmenides who both ‘theorized’ in the accepted poetic forms of their respective traditions). It was Diogenes Laertius’ opinion that the original work ‘On Nature’ (Peri Phusis) had a three-part structure—one part devoted to the cosmos (kosmos), another to politics (politikos), and the third to theology (theologikos) (DL 9.5–6). Caught up in the general catastrophe of the Ionian city-states during this period, Heraclitus may also have viewed his own philosophical efforts as a contribution to the ethical and political reformation of the City. A political reading of the fragments is prompted by what we know of the social context and recurrent themes of the surviving texts. Like the Judaic prophets, Amos, Hosea (c. 740–735 BC), Isaiah (c. 738–700 BC)., and Deutero-Isaiah (sixth century) he appears to have set his whole being against the dominant culture and ideological tendencies of his age. Where the Judaic prophets reveal the impassive Will of Yahweh working its ways through time, Heraclitus speaks of the cosmic justice of the Logos governing the whole world process: ‘To God all things are beautiful and good and just’ (to men theo kala panta kai dikaia) In sociological terms, Heraclitus lived through a critical turning point in the late Archaic period. His thought marked the end of the epoch of Ionian 235

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civilization but also prefigured the new humanist culture of the fifth-century Greek polis. The great shift of world power during the years from the end of the sixth century to the first three decades of the fifth was concentrated in the decisive military confrontation between the Greek world and the last expansive thrust of the ailing Persian Empire. Aristocratic observers like Heraclitus and Herodotus viewed the age as a truly ‘axial’ period, an epoch when ‘all that is solid melts into air’. Unlike his Ionian predecessors he chose not to construct a ‘Philosophy of Nature’ or propose an alternative body of cosmological and cosmogonical theory. Instead his thought dwells on the ‘strife of Becoming’. Yet Heraclitus still shared the preoccupations of the Archaic world-view. His book Peri Phusis did not lead to a historical God but to a cyclical theory of cosmic transformation. His Logos is not salutary in the manner of the axial religious reformers during the same period or ‘anthropomorphic’ in the style of the Judaic prophets. And perhaps in this respect Heraclitus was influenced by Xenophanes’ precedent. As we will see in Chapter 7 Xenophanes condemned the dominant beliefs of his age, creating a critical space for what, in the conventions of the day, was transgressive thinking. The Xenophanean style of critique was perfected by Heraclitus (DL 9.6). Even a cursory reading of Peri Phusis raises the question of style: with Xenophanes’ precedent before him, Heraclitus shaped a language of adversarial critique, extending the Greek competitive spirit—the culture of the agon—to the sphere of philosophical inquiry.2 2 CRITICAL REFLEXIVITY: THINKING AS POLEMOS We can begin our interpretation of Heraclitus’ thought by recalling the spirit of antagonism which pervades the extant fragments. Unlike the Freudian primal scene, however, the rivalry here is directed not toward the patriarch, but to the patriarchal source of Greek culture—Homeric discourse and its dissemination in the rituals and poetry of everyday knowledge. Heraclitean critique prefigures the Platonic attempt to articulate a path out of the dense Homeric tradition by unravelling Homeric paiedia with the stylus of the graphic sign. Let us first turn to the adversarial codes brought into play by Heraclitus’ text by asking: how and why did Heraclitus reject the dominant discourses of his age? Against the Many Heraclitus adopts an unrelentingly critical attitude toward the opinions and thought of the unreflective Many. The unknowing and unthoughtful mass of human beings, the hoi polloi, is the text’s most frequent target. Beginning with his fellow Ephesians, Heraclitus recommends a simple, if perhaps rather drastic, remedy for their thoughtlessness: 236

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The Ephesians deserve to be hanged, every adult man; and abandon their city to the young. For they exiled Hermodorus, the best man among them, saying: ‘Let no one of us be best; if there is such a man, let him go elsewhere and live among others. (B 121; Strabo 14.25) Hermodorus had served Ephesus as a benign ‘tyrant’, reconciling aristocratic and popular factions; he was well known in antiquity as a figure of upstanding virtue. Heraclitus’ text implies that his downfall came as the result of a popular uprising against his rule. At B 104 the target of Heraclitus’ polemic has widened: ‘What intelligence do they possess? They believe the people’s poets, and use as their teacher the populace, not knowing that the majority are evil and the good are few.’ Finally, mankind as a whole is judged, found wanting, and dismissed as a collectivity of dissimulators: ‘Dogs bark at those whom they do not recognise’ (B 97; cf. B 33); ‘The best choose one thing in place of all else: everlasting glory among mortals; but the majority are glutted like cattle’ (B 29). The hoi polloi are sleep-walkers, seeing without noticing, hearing without comprehending the Logos that pervades all things. The Many ‘do not know how to listen [to the invisible Logos] or how to speak [the truth]’ (B 19, Clement, Stromateis 2.24.5; cf. B 87, 104). Tragically, the ‘Many’ are trapped in their own immediate concerns and illusory interests; greedy and ‘glutted’ like beasts (104) they are wholly ‘absorbed’ in the world of appearances, oblivious to the ‘underlying order’ of that which guides and articulates all things (B 17,19): ‘Asses prefer garbage to gold’ (B 9); they live lives unheeding and unresponsive to the truth which informs existing things. Living in igorance of the Logos they attend only to the surface manifestation of things (ta panta), unaware of the process of manifestation itself. Being ‘invisible’ and ‘intangible’, the Logos is both first in order of being and first to be occluded by the quotidian interests of day-today life. Heraclitus is perhaps the first Western thinker to approach ‘everydayness’ through the experience of dissimulation and occlusion. He exhorts his auditors to change their lives, to turn away from popular religion, political demagogues, cultic rites and the worship of Dionysius (B 5, B 14 and B 15) and return to the originative Logos as an ‘ethical’ ideal (to ‘listen to the Logos’ here means something like placing the psyche back in touch— or in ‘tune’—with the ethos that governs all things). Fragment 14 inventories the following icons of irrationality: ‘night-wandering wizards’, Bacchants (celebrants of Bacchus or Dionysus), Lenaeans (Maenads), initiates; these he threatens with fire and destruction, because of the profane nature of the Mysteries and Orphic rites (Clement, Protrepticus 22.2). And B 15: ‘Hades and Dionysus, for whom they rave and celebrate the festival of the Lenaea, are (one and) the same’ (Clement, Protrepticus 34.5). Heraclitus thus diagnoses an inherent forgetfulness in the lives of men: the 237

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innumerable seductions of everyday experience leads mortals away from the one sustaining ground, the comprehensive and pretheoretical horizon he refers to with the polysemic word ‘Logos’. The question of Logos and ethos, then, are one and the same in Heraclitus’ thought (cf. his claims that the ordinary beliefs, moral opinions, ideas, and conjectures of humanity are but children’s toys (B 70) compared with God, the wisest of men seems like an ape in wisdom, beauty, and everything else (B 83); and that which is wise is set apart from all things (B 108)).3 Against the philosophers Heraclitus’ philosophical precursors and contemporaries fare no better. Like ordinary mortals, the self-proclaimed ‘philosophers’ possess a dissembling wisdom; in their polymathy they live out their lives unattentive to the Logos; they also actively hide from the truth, occluding the paradoxical flow of reality behind one-sided intuitions and fallacious stories of a stable order of Being or self-identical cosmos. Pythagoras is prominent among the ‘polymaths’ targeted as the original ‘chief of wranglers’, someone whose wide learning has not brought wisdom (B 81, 40; cf. 108, 129): ‘The learning of many things does not teach understanding; if it did, it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, and again Xenophanes and Hecataeus’ (B 40; DL 9.1); ‘Pythagoras, son of Mnesarchus, practised inquiry ((h)istoria) more than any other man, and selecting from these writings he constructed a wisdom for himself—much learning (polymathia), artful knavery’ (B 129; DL 8.6; cf. Iamblichus, v. Pythag. 89). The implication is that mathematics and ‘natural philosophy’ are not to be equated with the science of Wisdom. Wisdom (phronesis, sophia) and learning (manthano) must be rigorously distinguished. The pursuit of inquiry as an end in itself will not necessarily lead the inquirer to wisdom. Hesiod’s compilation of stories about the gods, for example, is merely a thoughtless patchwork of mythical information. It cannot, of itself, bring knowledge of reality or change the soul (psyche) of the investigator. Fragment B 129 is only intelligible if we assume that Heraclitus made a principled distinction between the right-thinking ‘wisdom’ (sophia) pursued by authentic philosophoi and what passed for ‘philosophy’ in the existing Pythagorean communities of the Greek world; the heady mix of arcane mathematics (mystical number theory) and purification rituals may also have led Heraclitus to associate the Pythagorean way of life with the myths and rites he condemns elsewhere (e.g. in B 14 and B 15). Philosophia in its reigning forms was simply another way of being absent while appearing to be present (B 34), being self-deluded while pretending to know the truth of things. Poets like Hesiod and Archilochus and ‘wise men’ like Pythagoras and Xenophanes still lack the critical ingredient of philosophical reflexivity—which Heraclitus calls noos (nous). They are sleep-walkers locked into their own private wisdom or ‘artful 238

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knavery’ (Heraclitus’ word is kakotechnie, a neologism composed of the two Greek terms ‘kakon’ (bad, evil) and techne (craft, skill, technique)). Why Pythagoras should be faulted for kakotechnie is unclear and open to interpretation—although we might conjecture that it is an indirect reference to the arcane rites, initiation ceremonies, and esoteric ‘equipment’ used in the Pythagorean communities of southern Italy. Of his fellow Milesians, only Thales escapes his accusation of philosophical charlatanry and pseudo-wisdom (B 40, B 42, B 56, B 57, B 81). In Chapter 2 we have seen that Thales was credited in antiquity with a relatively wellarticulated account of Nous as the animating source of all things. Yet even though Heraclitus does not reject Thalean reflexivity out of hand, we learn hardly anything about the substance of Thales’ cosmological theorizing from the existing fragments—merely that he was the first astronomer (B 38).4 But Homer and Hesiod—representing the tradition of mythopoiesis and philosophical poetry respectively—do not escape Heraclitus’ censure. Hesiod claims to know many things, to be ‘a teacher of very many’ (didaskalospleiston, touton epistantai pleista eidenai), and yet ‘he did not understand Day and Night: for they are one’ (B 57) and divine (B 67). The poet-philosopher, Xenophanes and the historian-geographer Hecataeus are rejected as dilettantes: ‘The learning of many things does not teach understanding—if it did it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, and again, Xenophanes and Hecataeus’ (polumathie noos ou didaskeiHesiodosgaran edidache kai Puthagares autis te Zenophanea te kai Hekaitaios) (B 40). Against Homer Heraclitus’ antipathy toward Homeric tradition is as intransigent and radical as Xenophanes’ critique of Homeric anthropomorphism. Here we have one of the earliest textual origins of the muthos-logos contrast. Homer should be thrown out of the games and given a beating—along with Archilochus, the most influential lyric poet of the day (B 42, DL 9.1; cf. B 40, 56). Even the ‘wisest of the Greeks’ (‘ton Hellenon sophoteros panton’, B 56) failed to comprehend the Logos. Against popular religion and mythology One of Heraclitus’ primary targets was the rituals of popular religion involving blood sacrifices and cathartic ceremonies: They vainly purify themselves with blood when they are defiled: as though one were to step in the mud and try to wash it off with mud. Any man who saw him doing that would think we was mad. And they pray to these statues as though one were to gossip to the houses, not knowing who the gods and who the heroes are. (B5) 239

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The popular worship of Dionysus seems to have been particularly offensive to Heraclitus’ austere sense of divinity (B 14, 15). Although we have little concrete evidence in the fragments themselves, we can safely assume that Heraclitus’ idea of reflexive inquiry and the criticism of his predecessors and contemporaries helped to inaugurate the critical distinction between the claims of muthos (and mimetic discourse in general) and the more rigorous art (techne) of theorizing—a division which Plato and Aristotle would later explicitly construe as the struggle between poetry and philosophy (or as later interpreters hypostatized this, the conflict between Mythos and Logos). We should also note that although Heraclitus was manifestly influenced by Xenophanes’ critique of individual poets,5 Heraclitus is the first to engage in something like a metacritique of poetry (poetic narrative qua mimesis, and more broadly ‘religious’ genealogies) as both a discourse (muthos) and a form of life—and he extends his metacritique to include the ‘apparent wisdom’ of Xenophanes as both vain and empty. Not surprisingly the text rejects the language of Archilochus (for ‘Archilochus’ we should read: the mid-seventhcentury innovations in lyric expression) as anathema to the higher ideal of divine sophia and sophrosune; the self-centred, self-positing cynicism of Archilochus’ verse is as far away from the austerity demanded by thinking and the rational claims of the ‘common Logos’ to which it is ultimately responsible as any intellectual practice could be. By following the ‘paths’ of epic and lyric poetry (Heraclitus’ first-order critique) and mimetic discourse per se (the secondorder, metacritique of representation) there is absolutely no possibility of advancing toward a knowledge of the divine Logos: the kosmos is not made by the gods but has been eternally ruled by a wisdom ‘which is unwilling and willing to be called by the name Zeus’ (Hen to soph on mounon legesthai ouk etbelei kai ethelei Zenos onoma) (Fr. 32). As a foundation for thought and praxis, mimesis can only sustain cosmogonic verse (Hesiod), natural philosophy (Thales), speculative astrology (Pythagoras), poetic theology (Xenophanes), or empirical narrative (Hecataeus) but cannot ground the reflexive calling of authentic philosophy which pursues wisdom (sophia). Philosophy is figured as the desire for ‘wisdom’ rather than the acquisition of knowledge about objects, nature, or the cosmos. Grasping the Absolute—if this was humanly possible—would still not advance the human species one step along the path of wisdom. To regain the right road we have to think in a radically different manner. And Heraclitus set himself the task of introducing this fundamental revolution in thinking. Heraclitus’ iconic Logos as paradox and reflexivity If phusis loves to hide and has evaded the thinking of the majority of men as it does the most notable thinkers and poets of the past, what kind of language could reveal the truth? If all previous reflection—including the theorizing of the Milesian cosmologists—has failed to embody the truth that ‘Being’ does 240

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not name an object, thing, or unity, but the transience of manifestation itself, what kind of speech could bring the ‘essence of manifestation as universal change’ into the orbit of thought and language? How can the soul acquire sophia? Heraclitus responds to these questions by articulating the experience of the Logos in the form of paradox. If reality is process and becoming, the recognition of the essence of manifestation we know as ‘thought’ or ‘reflexive thinking’ must also appear as a moment of the same process. Any intelligible speech (logos) which desires to express the Logos as unity-in-difference must in principle exemplify the inescapable principle of transformation in its own organization. Each speaker must respect the truth of the cosmic process by showing the self-reflexive involvement of discourse itself in the Whole. Heraclitus may have been called ‘the Obscure’ or ‘Riddling’ philosopher 6 for principled reasons—in that he was impelled to speak and write in paradoxical, antithetical figures, to experiment with idioms of dialectical play designed concretely to evoke a truth which he felt to be intrinsically strange and elusive. The many obstacles to self-knowledge make the articulation and communication of sophia deeply problematic and inherently difficult: how to provide a reasoned logos of that which transcends and evades all stability and formal presence—the Logos of Being as ‘becoming’, and ‘manifestation’ as absolute flux? 3 PERI PHUSIS A not insignificant feature of the traditional stories about Heraclitus’ life and thought is the prominence they give to his unshakeable faith in his own self, an attitude of self-importance interpreters describe as intellectual vanity and arrogance. He appears to have been the first Greek philosopher to have pursued the ideal of self-knowledge through systematic self-reflection. He opposes the truth of his own ‘wisdom’ to the falsity of every other tradition; he possesses a knowledge so rare and important that it must be housed in the temple of the goddess Artemis. His arrogance also has an elective affinity with the singular egoism of other Heraclitean pronouncements; for example, his claim that he acquired his wisdom solely by returning to himself, by ‘inquiring into himself (B 101) and by abandoning the vain pretensions to knowledge of his predecessors and contemporaries. This ‘turn to the self’— constitutive of every self-reflexive philosophy—may have been part of a systematic critique of the universal pretensions at work in Milesian natural philosophy. He displays the freedom of the Greek tragedians in manipulating the linguistic resources of the Greek language to forge a suitable medium for the truth. In these respects the texts of Heraclitus exemplify that unique selfcertainty and aggressive rhetoric of selfhood which we find at the very beginning of Greek theorizing. Sophia requires a new form of discourse— perhaps a new conception of philosophy—to express the truth of reality as interminable Becoming.7 Like the phusikoi he criticized, he also wrote a book 241

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with the title Peri Phusis. We can begin our analysis by turning to Fragments 1 and 2 of the surviving text. The divine Logos in Fragment 1 The first sentences of Peri Phusis read: Of the Logos which holds forever men prove uncomprehending, both before hearing it and when once they have heard it. For although all things come about in accordance with this Logos, men are like people with no experience, even as they attempt such words and deeds as I now relate, distinguishing each thing according to its nature and explaining how it is. Other men fail to notice what they do when they are awake as they forget what they do when asleep.8 The common Logos in Fragment 2 Grammatically and semantically, Fragment 2 appears to be a ‘conclusion’ to—or at least to be deductively connected to—the sequence of opening lines forming the beginning of Heraclitus’ text (Fr. 1, DK 22 B 1). It begins with the linking expression, ‘therefore’ (or ‘For that reason’): Therefore it is necessary to follow (dio dei epesthai to) what is common [xynos—‘common’, ‘shared’, ‘universal’—as in ‘held in common’]. But although the Logos is common, most men live as though they had an understanding [phronesis—‘understanding’, ‘intelligence’, ‘thought’] of their own.9 We can begin our exegesis of the first two fragments of Heraclitus’ text by explicating a knot of interrelated themes announced by the word Logos. As a further logos on Logos we are acutely conscious of the self-reflexive character of this analysis. What are the fundamental motifs of this logological texture? First, that the Logos of which the text speaks should not be uniquely identified with the self-referential act of Heraclitus’ speech or the sedimented text which traces that speech for an audience or readers, even though this is a necessary vehicle for its theoretical articulation and ‘presence’. The Logos named in the text ‘always exists’ (aiai, ‘always’). It is said to exist externally like the God (to theios)—in its absolute self-collectedness, it ‘holds forever’. Second all things are disclosed, made manifest, and ordered in accordance with the Logos (including the ‘event’ of evoking and commemorating the Logos). Here the ‘all’ (as in the expression ‘governing all through all’ which occurs in B 41) refers not merely to the actions and thoughts of human beings, but to the totality of nature and the universe as a kosmos governed by the intelligible operation of Logos. Like his Ionian predecessors, Heraclitus did not write a 242

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book on ‘anthropology’ or ‘epistemology’, but a work on the kosmos or worldprocess (Periphusis). Third, we cannot but follow—whether conscious of this or not—that which is ‘common’, the universal (xunos/xynos) yet invisible Logos (B 2, 80, 114). As the unacknowledged ‘action’ of the Logos collects and gathers all things into an intelligible order, so that which is ‘common’ brings things together and forms them into a configuration (the logological term, configuration aptly evokes both the process and the product indicated by Heraclitus’ word xunienai, ‘to combine together’). Fourth, while Logos pervades, orders, and governs (‘steers’ in B 41 and B 64) the universe, human beings fail to recognize and, consequently, to acknowledge the true ground and intelligible source of Reality and hence the Truth—lacking understanding (axunetos, axunetoi—‘uncomprehending’) of the Logos leads individuals to live apart from the ‘work’ of the Whole, living ‘mindlessly’ or ‘unheedingly’ (xun nooi =‘without mind’, hence axunetoi, not-understanding or more actively, misunderstanding). Mortals live a life absorbed within the circle of their own thoughts, as though they had an understanding or private wisdom of their own (cf. B 51). Individuals separate themselves off from the profound source of all intelligibility; they lose their ‘deep’ connection with the ground of their own psyche (cf. B 45). But human beings can only exist as zoon logikon—quite literally, as ‘logical beings’— by virtue of the universal Logos. The final thread of our knot weaves us into and out of Heraclitus’ intertextual space: the text claims that ‘misrecognition’ is an archetypal feature of human experience and, therefore, it is almost impossible to remedy, even after explicit instruction (‘men prove to be uncomprehending, both before hearing it and when once they have heard it’;10) the heeding/unheeding figure determines the horizon of human existence in the sense that human beings cannot wilfully put their minds to the tasks of understanding the Logos, and this chronic incapacity to unite mindfulness with the Logos is most tragically displayed as a failure to realize the deep-rooted affinity between mind and soul (psyche) and the intelligible workings of the universal Logos (the root stem ‘xun’ having the sense of ‘together with’ or ‘pattern’). Heraclitus‘ own writing is designed to bring the minds of his listeners into a deeper correspondence with the ‘undying’ order of things, to move his readers to an understanding of part and whole, self and world process. It strives to articulate the nature of things and say how these in are in reality (hokos echei). But it appears that no amount of information or exegesis concerning the holistic and reflexive structure of the world-order can help those who fail to open their souls to the Logos. The theme is explicit in B 50: ‘Heeding not me but the Logos it is wise to agree that the one is all.’ We need to explore the metaphorical space opened by these initial reflections in more depth. Let us return to the beginning and explicate the semantic texture of the sign ‘Logos’.

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4 LOGOLOGICAL CONFIGURATIONS The title of this chapter applies the term ‘logologist’ to Heraclitus to emphasize the fact that the extant fragments involve systematic reflection upon the metaphoric processes and possibilities of language. Whatever doctrines and metaphysical positions have been attributed to Heraclitus, it is evident from even a cursory reading of the extant texts that Heraclitus was a lover of language and crafted his paratactic ‘statements’ with great care and skill to break up the superficial coherence of previous modes of speech (Robinson, 1987:124). He searched for a clue to the Logos of the cosmos by listening to the reflexive rhythms and configurations of discourse. For these purposes the riddle-like logic of the aphorism was indispensable to his deconstruction of the major genres of traditional ‘wisdom’. What is involved in this ‘logos concerning Logos’ ? The eternal Logos From the first line of Heraclitus’ book we learn that the Logos is timeless: the Logos has held forever; it gathers everything that comes to be and passes away—like the flow of the River of B 12 or the universal law in B 33. While it is the destiny of all things to establish themselves temporarily ‘in being’ before flowing away like the streaming river into which we cannot step twice, the Logos exists eternally. Part of the paradoxical nature of Heraclitus’ discourse is that he celebrates the ‘finitude’ of beings, their subjection to the eroding work of Time, in order to portray ‘that’ which lies beyond Time. All temporal predicates (even ‘timelessness’) are, of course, inadequate signs to express the Logos as ‘that’ which lies beyond all temporal signification—‘the wise (one) which is not and is willing to be called by the name Zeus’ (Fr. 32). Like Anaximander’s arche and Parmenides’ absolute Being, Logos is uncreated, having neither beginning nor end (as we noted above, we can only say the Logos was, is, and will be in an iconic gesture); what we try to name by the word ‘Logos’ is intrinsically nameless, the intangible ground, underlying unity, and matrix of things that grow, change, and disappear—the ‘essence of manifestation’ which pervades and governs all things.11 The universal Logos From the text of DK B 2 we know that the Logos is not a private possession or singular phenomenon. It is ‘common’ to all. The term xynus occurs again at B 80: ‘We must know that war is common [universal] and justice (dike) is strife and that all things come to be through strife and necessity’.12 Similarly at B 103: ‘For the circle, beginning and end are common.’ And, finally, at B 114: Those who speak with insight must base themselves firmly on that which is common to all, as a city on the law (nomos)—and even more strongly. 244

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For all human laws are nourished by one, which is divine. For it governs as far as it will, and is sufficient for all, and is still left over.’ The unitary Logos: hen panta einai The totality of things is not merely ordered and governed by the Logos; all things are ‘one’ within the universal or ‘common’ Logos. The psyche itself is ‘whole’ only by virtue of the logos within us. This sense of ‘being gathered’ into a unitary Whole is expressed in Fragment 50 as an exhortation: ‘It is wise to listen, not to me, but to the Logos, and to agree (homologein) that all things are One (henpanta einai)’ (DK B 50).13 The terms and structure of the concluding phrase of B 50 are disarmingly polysemic and, as such, subject to numerous interpretations. We cannot even console ourselves that ‘the One’ or ‘the One thing’ has a unitary sense. Heraclitus writes, ‘hen panta einai’, which an immediate translation renders, ‘all things are one’; and, knowing something of the background of Greek philosophical thought, we are tempted to read this as a variant of Parmenides’ or Melissus’ intuition: all things are One (thing, Being)—the Finite or Infinite One. We might also gloss the text as an affirmation that all things are, qua things, a unity (prefiguring a central tenet of the Democritean school). Or we could interpret the fragment as an expression of the central idea of Peri Phusis which instructs the reader not to listen merely to the text but, more importantly, to the Logos and to recognize that all things are One. Here ‘unity’ indexes the rule or hegemony of the gathering matrix of the Logos: all things are collected together within the matrix of ‘that’ which precedes all existence. This provides a good example of the presence of double articulation in Heraclitus’ text, a semantic structure combining the unity of things as existence under the gathering protection of the Logos and the unity of the Logos itself which transcends whatever it collects into the Whole, as befits a divine ordering (B 114). The unity of all things is interpreted as being the ‘work’ of the ‘one’ eternal Logos.14 Logos as measure In its work of ‘double articulation’ Logos can be said to provide the ‘measure’ of the universe and its order of creation and destruction; the Pythagorean term metron configures the structure of Fragment 94: ‘The sun god will not overstep his measures (metrai), otherwise the Erinyes [Furies], the ministers of Justice, will find him out.’ The Erinyes—as guardians of just measure whose functions predate even the Homeric epics—preserve the world-order and punish transgression; in Sophoclean tragedy they are also regarded as ‘allseeing’ protectors of the measures of things: Maidens immortal, with immortal eyes beholding all the many woes of 245

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man, swift-footed hounds of vengeance, mark ye well how by the Atridae I am all undone. Swoop on them, Furies, blight and blast them both in utter ruin, as they see me now. (Ajax 837ff.) And perhaps B 31b is also drawn from a larger text where the word ‘measure(s)’ was used to depict the dynamic, configurated ‘proportion’ of the Elements—Water (Sea) and Earth; Logos can be transliterated as Measure (that which both measures all things and is a measure of Self—only the Divine contains the measure of itself, and is consequently, for mortals, immeasurable and consequently, incommensurable). Of course, the theme of the ‘just Measure’ dates back to the early Archaic period and can be found in Homer and Hesiod. The latter’s Works and Days might even be regarded as a celebration of ‘the measure’ in all things: ‘Observe due measure: proportion is best in all things’ (Works 694–5). The whole universe of gods and nature is governed by chreon and metra, by necessary order and measure. It is in this sense that Measure is the indispensable term for describing the cyclical course of the cosmic fire in B 30. Significantly ‘measure’ appears in its plural form— metrai: the cosmos is an ‘eternal fire, being kindled in measures, and being put out in measures’. What ‘measures’ the cosmic order is not human knowledge—man is certainly not the measure—but metrai appropriate to the Whole itself, a ‘divine’ standard—modelled in several fragments on the supreme God, Zeus—measuring out the creation and destruction of worlds, which Heraclitus calls the everliving Logos.15 The divine Logos Fragment 41 contains an identifiable trace reference to Xenophanes’ theology, visible even in its damaged state: ‘The wise [or ‘Wisdom’] is one thing, to understand the intelligent will which steers all things through all things.’ Direct attribution, however, is difficult to establish and it may well be that similar locutions were available in everyday Ionic Greek. Elsewhere, however, the text appears playfully to subvert the Xenophanic position; B 32 obstructs our hasty interpretation of ‘the divine’ or to theion as the ‘One God, greater than all’ by using a phrase which combines two dissonant voices in the same line: ‘One thing, that which alone is wise, is willing and unwilling to be called by the name Zeus.’ There is no evidence to think that Xenophanes’ ideas on God were expressed in this ambivalent way. It also makes a considerable difference to our undestanding of this enigmatic remark if we bear in mind the polysemy of ‘Zeus’ as ‘God’ and ‘Life’ in Heraclitus’ text. Consider the proposition with the latter meaning to the fore: ‘One thing, that which alone is wise [the only wise thing], is willing and unwilling to be called by the name of Life.’ Other texts (Frs 64 and 67 for example) also encourage incompatible readings—or at least, a friction of interpretations. Is the ‘thunderbolt’ in this 246

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text Zeus (the high god that is both willing and unwilling to be called by the name Zeus—‘Zeus’ thunderbolt’ being a standard Homeric epithet) or perhaps nature’s force—along the lines of Anaximander’s physics or Xenophanes’ Rainbow (B 32)? Or even as we have suggested a generic icon for ‘Life’ or ‘the Living’: ‘Thunderbolt steers the totality of things’ (Hippolytus, Ref. 9.10.7; cf. Clement, Stromateis 5.115.1). Finally, B 108 could complete a hypothetical metacritique of Xenophanes’ critique of earlier ‘god discourse’: ‘Of all those whose logoi I have listened to, none arrives at the realization that that which is wise is set apart from all things.’ The enigmatic sentence also anticipates the idea of Nous we find in Anaxagoras’ thought (see Chapter 8 below). By ascribing ‘wisdom’ (sophia) to that which ‘steers’ all things (B 41, 64, and perhaps 78), given what we know of the interpretive expectations and religious beliefs of an early fifth-century audience, the text would immediately suggest the high god, Zeus, ‘Lord of Olympus’. We know, for example, that the sixth-century cosmologist Pherecydes of Syros had already portrayed Zeus as creating the cosmos through opposites, bestowing harmony, likeness, and unity upon a formless universe (cf. Aristotle, Met. 1071b25ff, 1091bff, 1091b8–10). Even closer to the critical spirit of Heraclitus, we find Xenophanes—a near contemporary of Pherecydes—appealing to the one god who ‘without toil sets everything in motion, by the thought of his mind’ (and, later, Anaxagoras, from very different premises, ascribing the same exalted function to the Nous which originates and steers the world vortex while remaining separate from ‘all things’). Early in the fifth century the Sicilian writer of comedies, Epicharmus of Syracuse (fl. 485–467), asserted that the Logos steers mankind aright and ever preserves them. Man has no calculation, but there is also the divine logos. But the human logos is sprung from the divine logos, and it brings to each man his means of life, and his maintenance. The divine Logos accompanies all the arts, itself teaching men what they must do for their advantage; for no man has discovered any art, but it is always God.16 And finally, during the Athenian century, the image of Zeus ordering and steering the world-order becomes a fundamental image and metaphor explored by the tragic dramatists: ‘Zeus, king of gods, heaven-who orders all things’.17 Heraclitus’ remedial concern for human thought (phronesis), like Epicharmus’ ‘calculative reason’ (logismos) which copies the divine in steering human affairs, is a signal attempt to reframe the nature of human being and divinity.18 Both orders of existence are intrinsically linked by relations of similarity (iconically) and function (ontological participation), foreshadowing Plato’s later distinction between the original and its images—the divine One (Logos) and its human copies (logos, logismos, mimesis, eikones, etc.). For Heraclitus, the Logos is the matrix which gathers both the human and the divine and apportions their respective destinies. Concern for the way in which 247

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‘the rational’ in human reality ‘participates’ in the divine is yet another variation on the Presocratic theme of the Many and the One—hen panta. 5 THE LOGOS TEACHING Why Logos? Given the centrality of the Logos in Heraclitus’ thought we should analyze the cultural field associated with this word. We have seen that Logos is a densely polysemic sign. In the Greek language of the early fifth century it was already overused, appearing promiscuously in a diverse network of different language-games and contexts. As an abstract verbal noun, logos derives from the verb legein, to gather or collect together; it then seems to have been extended to acts of counting, enumeration, and ‘reckoning’ and, as with the analogous English terms account(ing), metaphorically extended to other social contexts of telling, relating, making pleas, accounting for one’s behaviour, rationalizing one’s conduct, and so on. In its singular form, a logos might simply mean a speech (anything said or written), the act of saying, from legein, ‘to speak’ or ‘to say’, an utterance, story, narrative, or account of something—thoughts expressed in words, sentences, and coherent arguments. In later Greek usage this sense of the term logos forms a polar opposite of the term ergon, ‘deed’ or ‘act’ (in the schematic contrast: logos/ ergon—‘word/deed’), which formed the original paradigm for the logological polarity of theoria and poiesis (which in turn, underwrites the Western ‘theory/ practice’ couplet). To give an account of some moral topic (ho tou dikaiou logos) is one of the basic elenctic moves of Socrates’ dialectical conversations. Liddell and Scott delineate a complex webwork of interrelated meanings;19 among these: the word, or that by which the thought is expressed (cf. Lat. oratio); the voice (Lat. vox); talk, language, a saying, maxim, proverb; an assertion or statement; a resolution; a condition; discourse; conversation; the power to speak; account; report (as in ‘repute’ or ‘worth’, Lat. fama); a narrative opposed to a mere fable (muthos); prose; proposition; statement, position; principle; thought; reason, intellect (Lat. ratio); a reasoned or intelligible account; reckoning; due relation; proportion; analogy; deliberation (‘thoughtful’ words). In Archaic Greek, logos was frequently used metaphorically as the ‘name’ of a family’s, tribe’s, or city’s reputation (hence the Latin fama from which the English expression, fame); the analogy is still given in such English colloquial expressions as ‘a good name’, ‘the word got about, preceded him/her’, etc.). If this frightening polysemy of everyday usage is not sufficient we can proceed to its secondary aesthetic,20 theoretical, and political elaborations. The ‘orderinggathering-counting-accounting’ semantics of colloquial Greek underwrites the transformations the expression undergoes in its more abstract uses. From meaning simply a ‘story’ it could be used for any account or explanation of something. From here it is used for an account of the reason, cause, or principle of something (in Socratic dialectic, Platonic metaphysics, and Aristotelian logic, 248

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eg. Rep. 343E; Topics 101b37, 107a20), for instance, in mathematics. Here, particularly in geometrical discourses, the term is a surrogate for ‘ratio’, ‘proportion’, or ‘rule’—thus the logos of a figure refers to its regular arrangement or proportionate order. Another turn of abstraction takes us to the language of explanation. To ‘give a logos’ of something is the act of uncovering its ‘reason’, underlying structure, or rule-governed configuration. Hence by the early decades of the fifth century, logos would be understood primarily as a reasoned speech or discourse, particularly rationally ordered, reflective, explanatory discourse—a ‘logos with reason(s)’ as Plato would say (‘knowledge…and right reason’ at Phaedo 73E). Analogously [sic], legein could also refer to the special acts of differentiating, gathering, and configurating elements which the Greeks associated with reading texts (the verb for reading being epilegesthai; modern words like legible, intelligible, legislate, etc. have the same Indo-European root as logos/legein). Throughout these changes and extensions of usage, however, the emphasis is upon the Apollonian values of order, intelligibility, clarity, the mensurable and determinable, by contrast with their putative opposites. Logos became the ur-metaphor for orderly, referential, truthful communication—embracing all the determinable activities that define the soul that ‘possesses’ reason or the rational faculty (Aristotle, NE 1102a28). In later intellectual contexts, the words logos and logike (‘logismos’, ‘the logical’ or ‘reasoned’) were used in a very general sense to register the presence of intelligible structure or ‘form’ in some subject matter (silently preparing the ground for the scientific and philosophical quest to uncover the intelligible eidos and morphe of things). As a synonym for the presence of ‘reason’ or ‘rationality’, this is one the central meanings of the term by the fourth century (crystallized and elaborated in the writings and teaching of Aristotle and his school). The later Greek vocabulary for ‘things linguistic’ was essentially developed from the rich semantic matrix of legein/logos which, as we have seen above, has precedents which date back to the Homeric texts. Three related transformations should be noted. First, the ‘logical turn’ given to the Logos by Plato and Aristotle. Here language appears as the framework within which the actuality and potentialities of entities are disclosed; logos as meaningful, intelligent discourse, living speech which can defend its ‘account’ with reason and argument (Phaedrus 276A, 276–7; Phaedo 73E) is made the medium of philosophical inquiry and the boundaries of logos become all but synonymous with the limits of intelligibility itself (motivating Aristotle’s project to delineate the fundamental principles of ‘the logical’ as ontological criteria of rational discourse: transforming Homeric ‘truth-saying’, Heraclitus’ Logos and Plato’s ‘language of Forms’ into apophantic logic in the Prior and Posterior Analytics). This is also the context for all subsequent designations of human existence as foundationally rational (human beings as ‘political, rational animals’, literally animals possessing the capacity to speak and reason). 249

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Second, the aesthetic turn,21 the development of Logos as the basic medium of ‘literary’ expression and criticism. Hellenistic Greek makes ‘lexis’ (a noun derived from legein) the basic term for ‘diction’, ‘style’, and literary analysis; from this point, all subsequent literary appreciation was constrained to detailed explorations of the stylistic idioms of literary art, inquiries which were, however, never completely divorced from the larger questions indexed by the older term Logos.22 Finally, the theological transformation—what in fact was to become the most widespread use of the term Logos (and the idiom in which the term still lives in Christian-Judaic cultures today)—begins with the Greek text of the St John Gospel: en arche en ho logos, ‘In the beginning was the Word (Logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’.23 Once ‘christianized’, the Logos would have a profound effect on the course of Western onto-theological speculation (and with it, textual and hermeneutic study) from the period of the Church Fathers through the Middle Ages and down to the Modern period. As we are accustomed to saying, a cosmopolitan civilization is a culture of the Book, and hence, the Word—making Verbum, Logos, and Reason convertible icons for the spirit of inquiry itself. 6 INTERPRETATIONS OF THE LOGOS-CONCEPT IN HERACLITUS Zeller, Burnet, West, Kahn, and others We have seen that logos can simply mean ‘story’ or ‘account’, as when the Milesian historian, Hecataeus (a figure whose work and writings were known to Heraclitus), begins his Historiai (or Genealogiai) with the words, ‘Hecataeus of Miletus says as follows. I write these things as they seem to me to be true. For the accounts (logoi) of the Greeks are, in my judgement, many and ridiculous’.24 One school of thought holds that there is no ‘Logos-doctrine’ in Heraclitus, that the expression logos—‘human thought’—simply refers to Heraclitus’ own book and discourse, and that interpretations of texts such as B 1 and B 2 as sanctioning a ‘cosmic’ or ‘ontological’ theory of becoming are simply incorrect. Where Heraclitus urges the reader not to listen to the person Heraclitus, but to the Logos, this should be understood as a crude attempt to distinguish the act of speech from what is spoken, directing the reader not to the speaker but to the authority of the argument. Those deaf to the logos or sunk in the prejudices of tradition are not closed off from some arcane cosmic wisdom, but simply refuse to attend to the reason implicit in the pursuit of rational argument and evidence. Thus M.L.West (like Eduard Zeller before him) interprets logos as a term of self-reference: Heraclitus is simply referring his auditors to his own book Peri Phusis and its intellectual content: 250

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Heraclitus uses logos only in the ordinary senses of the word attested in and before the fifth century, and thus the Logos can be banished from our account of his philosophy. And good riddance. It would indeed have been surprising to find an Ionian philosopher explaining the world in terms of a metaphysical entity that no one else had heard of before him and no other philosopher was to use for a good two centuries after him. However much our histories of philosophy may emphasize the individual features of each thinker’s teaching, we must never forget to what an extent they were using and adapting stock conceptions, or how difficult and slow the birth of a new concept is’.25 In a similar vein, Charles Kahn has argued that we should avoid reifying the Logos into a metaphysical entity, thereby conflating Heraclitus’ own ideas with later Stoic notions about the divinity of Reason. Logos cannot refer to a universal or transcendent Reason as this was intellectually unavailable at the time when Heraclitus’ text was composed. There is no ‘logos doctrine’ in the Heraclitean Fragments: I assume that logos means not simply language but rational discussion, calculation, and choice: rationality as expressed in speech, in thought, and in action (All these ideas are connected with the classic use of logos, logizesthai, epilegein, etc., e.g. in Herodotus). This is rationality as a phenomenal property manifested in intellectual behaviour, not Reason as some kind of theoretical entity posited ‘behind the phenomena’ as cause of rational behaviour. The conception of logos as a self-subsistent power or principle is foreign to the usage of Heraclitus, but essential to the Stoic conception of the divine Reason that rules the universe’.26 What can be said in response to this line of interpretation? As well as taking a very positivistic and literalist approach to the Heraclitean corpus (which, of course we accept in its given, fragmentary state), and systematically occluding the text’s rich and playful semantic texture, this type of reading effectively destroys Heraclitus’ thought both as an imaginative experiment in reflexive cosmology and as a creative work of philosophical discourse. We are tempted to respond to Zeller, West, Kahn, and their friends, that to banish the Logos is to destroy the essence of Heraclitus’ thought—and thus to evade the radical problems of reflexivity which it situates for any responsible philosophical interpretation. But this would be to engage in ad hominem criticism. In fact it is relatively easy to show that these exercises of Ockham’s razor fail purely on internal textual grounds. It would severely strain the extant text if the source of incomprehension, ignorance, and ‘immorality’ of human beings was simply ascribed to a failure to ‘listen’ or ‘attend’ to Heraclitus’ own argument, or to interpret Heraclitus’ admonition in B 1 as a call to his listeners to attune themselves to his own speech; we would also have to set aside the collateral textual evidence which speaks of the ‘unsetting’ and ‘eternal’ nature of the 251

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Logos; and, finally, we would also have to ignore the idea of ‘measure’ governing the cosmic process and the fundamental connection the text makes between the soul’s logos and the wider Logos of the cosmos itself. Thus while we should readily accept that Heraclitus was not a Stoic logician, that he did not introduce a new ‘ontological concept’ of a ‘law’ operating behind appearances (Logos as the ‘law of the universe’), and that he certainly did not theorize from the perspective of an explicit ‘philosophy of language’, we do little justice to the richness, polysemy, and thought-provoking character of the extant fragments (and important secondary testimonia), by reducing their significance in this Procrustean fashion. Above all, we ironically risk failing to ‘listen’ to the Logos or ‘ordering-gathering’ of which Heraclitus’ text speaks in adopting this modern empiricist standpoint. We suggest that most of the fragments are unintelligible when read in terms of the ZellerWest-Kahn interpretation. To turn to another aspect of the same problem: how are we to interpret the text of B 2, which advances the idea of the ‘universal’ or ‘common’ Logos (a thesis which reappears in other parts of the text), if Heraclitus is naively referring to his own book? Or consider the text’s explicit instruction not to listen to the concrete argument and signs of the book, but to the Logos which shines through it? One of the earliest responses to this type of reductionism occurs in the sadly neglected work of James Adam. Adam consistently refused to identify Logos with Heraclitus’ own discourse, argument, or text. I will quote his argument in full, given its importance for the perspective developed in this chapter: There is no real opposition between an author and his work: and ‘listen not to me but to my argument’, ‘discourse’, or ‘treatise’, would therefore by a singularly weak and vapid introduction to a book. But the second fragment makes it clear, I think, that although Heraclitus professes to be going to expound the Logos, yet the Logos itself is one thing, and his exposition of it another. He asserts in the first place that the Logos ‘always is’. On the theory that Logos means discourse, this is supposed to mean ‘my discourse is always true’, ‘is true evermore’; but truth is irrespective of time, and it is not like Heraclitus to waste his words. The natural meaning of the phrase is that Logos is eternal, without beginning and without end; and so it was understood by Cleanthes, who echoes the sentiment in his Hymn to Zeus. Consider in the second place the substance of Heraclitus’ reproof to his fellow-men. When they ‘make trial of his words’, they behave as if they had no experience of the Logos by which all things come to pass. The writer clearly implies that his readers have already had an opportunity of learning the Logos by experience, and that is why he blames them for not understanding the Logos before they have heard it from him… It would be absurd to make this a matter of reproach if the Logos is merely the philosopher’s 252

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own discourse; and indeed the whole of the second fragment makes it plan that the Logos reveals itself in other ways as well as through the spoken word. The lesson, Heraclitus seems to say, is present in our daily life and conversation, and he who runs may read it; but men are sunk in spiritual and intellectual slumber… They are unable to interpret their own experience.27 Adam concludes his criticism: The view that Heraclitus, when he mentions the Logos is thinking only of his own discourse, will be found still less applicable to another two passages where the name occurs in what appears to be its technical Heraclitean sense. We read in one fragment that men ‘are at variance with the Logos which is their most constant companion’, and in another, for our purposes perhaps the most important of all, ‘although the Logos is universal ‘most men live as if they had a private intelligence of their own’. It is clear that in the last two passages logos cannot possibly mean the discourse of Heraclitus.28 Adam’s own positive interpretation, which is close to the reading canvassed here, can be condensed into three main theses: • that the Logos is pre-existent and eternal, ordering the universe like the World-God of Xenophanes; • that all things happen in and through the Logos; its hegemony is not confined to the sphere of human activities, but encompasses the universe as a cosmic principle (arche); its authority being ‘common’ or ‘universal’ (xunos); • that the obligation of human beings is to obey or ‘follow’ this universal Logos and place themselves in harmony with the rest of nature. ‘The result of our inquiry’, Adam concludes, is that the Logos of Heraclitus is virtually the divine reason, immanent in nature and in man. Against this view it has sometimes been urged that logos never in early Greek means reason; but surely there is something of a petitio principii in the objection. Might not the introduction of the usage be due to Heraclitus himself? The only way of determining whether he actually so used the word or not, is by such a comparative study of the fragments as I have attempted, and from this it appears that the Heraclitean logos, if not exactly synonymous with ‘reason’, is something whose essential nature is rationality, intelligence, or thought.29 Ernst Cassirer: the concept of Logos and the development of European philosophy The Neokantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer commended a similar interpretation 253

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of the Heraclitean Logos. Cassirer argued that the idea of Logos was the most fundamental concept of Greek thought. Logos is more than an abstract idea or notion; it articulates a cultural field and has been embodied in many of the central practices of European civilization. Heraclitus is thus a crucial figure in this whole development. Along with the other giants of Ionian philosophy, he brings to fulfilment a ‘colossal labour of thought’, precipitated and sedimented in the plurisignificant Logos-concept. For Cassirer, Heraclitus was one of the first thinkers to convey a clear awareness that sensory perception alone cannot yield a solution to the question of human knowledge, and that only through thought in its objective significance can we construct appropriate resolutions of the paradoxes of knowing and reflexivity: Heraclitus abandoned ‘subjective understanding’ and embraced the notion of thinking as a process that is intrinsically ‘universal and divine’. In Cassirer’s terminology: Here a new task was posed for the whole of Western thought, and with it a new direction was imparted, from which henceforth it was impossible ever to deviate. From the time this thought first permeated the school of Greek philosophy, all knowledge of reality was bound, to a certain extent, by this basic concept of ‘logos’—hence by ‘logic’ in the widest sense.30 Heidegger on the unity of Logos and Phusis Like Cassirer, but from a very different perspective, Martin Heidegger also approaches Heraclitus’ thought as the matrix of all subsequent European philosophy. Heidegger returns to the etymological root of legein which has the sense of ‘collecting’ or ‘gathering together’. Logos signifies the primordial principle of gathering rather than everyday Greek usage’s sense of ‘discourse’. If we follow this reading, logos should be approached in its ontological sense as an expression for the ‘unity’ and ‘intrinsic togetherness’ of Being itself: that which is ‘common’ (again the term xynon reoccurs) is what gathers all things as beings or existences within the horizon of Being. Speculatively, Logos and Phusis name the same ‘thing’, the ‘event of Being’. In his well-known reconstruction of Fragment B 50 Heidegger suggests that we should construe Heraclitus’ saying as articulating the presencing of presence itself, the Being of beings in the shelter of ‘the gathering’. The claim is that thinkers such as Heraclitus ‘heeded’ and ‘dwelt’ within the presencing of Being (qua Logos), but that they did not reflectively determine the ‘nature’ of Being. Heidegger then raises the counterfactual question: what would have come to pass had Heraclitus and the subsequent Greek tradition thought the essence of language as Logos, as the laying that gathers? Had this occurred the Greeks would have thought the essence of language from the essence of Being. Instead the conceptualizing of ‘being’ followed concrete visual and auditory paradigms: The essence of being is physis. Appearing is the power that emerges. 254

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Appearing makes manifest. Already we know then that being, appearing, causes to emerge from concealment… Truth as un-concealment is not an appendage to being. Truth is inherent to the essence of being. (Heidegger, 1973a: 102) For Heidegger, the words physis and logos articulate the same process of disclosure Physis consists in the event of unconcealment (which the Greeks also expressed by the word for ‘truth’, aletheia); and logos, in one of its senses, is the articulation of what is offered to view, a grasp of the intelligibility of beings. It is these older meanings of the words physis, logos, and aletheia that have been occluded by the later terminology of ‘physics’, ‘logic’, and ‘truth’. This is why the stress should be placed on the Archaic sense of legein as ‘to gather’. This, Heidegger claims, is the basic meaning of logos, collecting, to collect, to gather (1973a: 125). And the theme of ‘gathering’ represents the ‘inner bond’ between logos and physis (1973a: 126). Physis is also an expression of the emergence of being, a view homologous to the idea of logos as ‘the original collecting collectedness which is in itself permanently dominant’ (1973a: 128). Physical things, entitles, beings can ‘come to be’ only as the Logos is always-already at work. Logos is ‘steady gathering, the intrinsic togetherness of the essent, i.e. being’ (1973a: 130). This is the sense in which being and thinking belong together. Heidegger’s reading foregrounds the central role of human being in the ‘gathering process’; human reality as the site of reflexivity is the ‘place’ where the disclosure of beings comes into view. Being reveals itself only through those who are open to the event of disclosure; and attending to the gatheredness of Being is both the exclusive vocation and the most difficult and interminable task for human beings: There can be true speaking and hearing only if they are directed in advance toward being, the logos. Only where the logos discloses itself does the phonetic sound become a word… Being is not tangible, it cannot be heard with the ears or smelled… Because being is logos, harmonia, aletheia, phusis, phainesthai, it does not show itself as one pleases. In Heidegger’s gloss, European metaphysics begins when the great unity of Logos and Phusis falls apart to create the modern bifurcated world which speaks of being and thinking, object and subject, world and self. The diremption of the Logos makes way for a conception of language in terms of the phone semantike—a phonocentrism dominated by vocalization, the voice and ‘expression’ as the externalization of thought through a system of signs and significations. The modern conception of the exteriorization of ‘thought’ by ‘means of communication’ and the whole apparatus of ‘data and information processing’ presupposes this reduced understanding of the Logos as a condition of its possibility. By thinking within a matrix antedating these metaphysical distinctions, Heraclitus is unconcerned with the question of 255

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reflection as a relation between subject and object, but deeply involved in a thinking which examines human reality as reflexively gathered into the ‘being’ of Phusis, and to the question as to how human beings in the company of other reflexive beings, appear and speak within the world-order. The Greek experience of language as Logos is projected into paradigms of signification modelled on entities: language is represented through an auditory model and understood phonetically and subsequently ‘grammatically’ on the basis of a videological schema derived from alphabetic script. Classical philosophy—represented by the Form-theory of Plato and Aristotle’s ousiology-began the understanding of the Logos as voice and grammar: In a certain broad sense the Greeks looked on language from a visual point of view, that is, starting from the written language. It is in writing that the spoken language comes to stand. Language is, i.e. it stands in the written image of the word, in the written signs, the letters, grammata. Consequently grammar represents language in being. But through the flow of speech language seeps away into the impermanent. Thus, down to our own time, language has been interpreted grammatically… The crucial view of language remains the grammatical view. (1973a: 64) What is occluded is the primordial experience of the Logos articulated by Heraclitus: Once…in the beginning of Western thinking, the essence of language flashed in the light of Being—once, when Heraclitus thought the Logos as the guiding word, so as to think in this word the Being of beings. But the lightning abruptly vanished. No one held onto its streak of light and the nearness of what is illuminated. In the idiom of the later Heidegger, what is forgotten is the experience of language as the ‘house of Being’, the emergence of presence from the darkness of concealment. The forgetting and occlusion of the ‘bond’ between Logos and Phusis is the fateful event that prepares the epochal history of Western metaphysics, and may, without hyperbole, be said to be a result of forgetting the idea behind Heraclitus’ meditation on the Logos.31 7 LANGUAGE-PLAY IN HERACLITUS’ TEXT One of the most striking features of Heraclitus’ text is its self-conscious use of word play and metaphoric inventiveness in manipulating the lexical and grammatical resources of the Greek language. In its range and extent, this aspect of Heraclitus’ authorship distinguishes him from his predecessors and successors. Arguably he was the first ‘author’ explicitly to adopt a reflexive linguistic style, playing on language’s inherent ambiguities as a necessary vehicle for a message which he felt could not be conveyed either by the 256

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traditional hexameter verse used by Xenophanes or Parmenides, or by adopting the naturalistic prose of the Milesian cosmologists. As a reflexive thinker, Heraclitus is in full command of the idea that any account of a radically reflexive universe must itself be articulated in an appropriately literary form: that the ‘logos on the Logos’ should effect a change in the souls of his listeners commensurate with the vision it recounts (if only for the fact that the ‘invisible harmonie/harmonia is better than the visible’, Fr. 54). He therefore structures his writing around an intertextual play of codes to create a matrix in which his own thinking unfolds. We have already met the ‘adversarial code’ as a polemical device for mapping his own logos in relation to those of his predecessors; other verbal devices include the powerful lexemes of ‘truth’ and ‘inquiry’—what might be called the alethic code, the ‘logos code’ (with its insistent thematic: ‘Listen not to me but the Logos’), the paragrammatic code(s) of ambivalent symbols, antitheses, and paradoxes, and the dialectical code (concerned with the elaboration of unitary oppositions). Heraclitus appears to have found his distinctive voice at the point of intersection of these codes. I will suggest that Heraclitus’ aphoristic, reflexive, and not infrequently enigmatic word-play should be seen as a principled expression of the paradoxical phenomena which forms the substance of his thought; his style is ‘homologous’ in both revealing and occluding, in saying and not-saying that which is constitutively both manifest and occluded. In other words, Heraclitus’ own discourse is an icon of the original Logos toward which it aspires to turn men’s souls. We are oriented toward the Heraclitean fragments in the same manner as those who attended the Delphic oracle. His texts resembles the language of the Delphic Sibyl whose manic utterance of things solemn and unadorned is not inspired by her own knowledge, but by the word of the god—reaching with her voice over a thousand years (B 92): ‘The lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks out nor conceals, but shows by signs’ (B 93).32 Paradox in this context is not merely an occasional theme; it is, rather, constitutive of the style of this discourse. The extant fragments are instances of a paralogical writing which refuses to be concretely appropriated, but demands to be read interpretively. To borrow terms introduced by Roland Barthes, it is a ‘writerly’ rather than a ‘readerly’ text. Therefore instead of reducing Heraclitus’ thought to an inventory of themes and propositions we should explore the presuppositions at work within the aphoristic text. Heraclitus’ reflexivity Nowhere in the surviving fragments does Heraclitus turn deliberately to explore the reflexive resources of the Greek language or its multiform linguistic traditions; yet his rhetorical manipulation of language attests to a critical consciousness of the possibilities and limits of traditional speech and literary genres. Heraclitus’ reflexivity does not display itself in a running commentary 257

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on his predecessors (in the manner of an Aristotle, say), but is exemplified in a ‘book’ whose fragments are constructed dialogicallyi. The Logos fragments represent an active intervention within an ongoing series of disputes common to late sixth-and early fifth-century intellectual culture. I will suggest that the fragments we possess can be seen as evidence of a lengthy interrogation of language. In foregrounding the intertextuality of these fragments we can reappraise the polyphonic style as a transgressive idiom befitting the selfreflexive structure of the Logos teaching. In what follows, then, I will read Heraclitus’ text as a work (an ergoni)of self-formation, treating the fragments as a rich site of metaphorical relations and seminal indications (sema).33 In this way I will explore the text in the same spirit as Heraclitus deconstructed the discourses of his own tradition.34 Heraclitus’ style of writing displays the reflexive attitude of the logologist avant la lettre. We have marked the difference between Heraclitus and his Milesian predecessors by saying that the earlier cosmological project aimed to provide a complete account (logos) of the phenomenal universe (phainomena); their ‘phenomenology’ is quite accurately described as phusiology, a materialist ‘account of phusis’ or ‘natural philosophy’. Heraclitus, on the other hand, speculatively identified phusis with Logos, the divine source of intelligibility in both kosmos and psyche, the hidden principles (metrai, measures) of the world’s structure and process. And by contrast with the natural philosophers, this new phenomenology is strictly speaking manifest in a coded constellation of paradoxical images, each designed to instigate reflexivity in its listener, a logos on the Logos ‘which holds forever’. Consequently, where the Milesian thinkers spoke directly of the kosmos, Heraclitus is forced by the demands of his own insight to turn to more verbally mediated, coded, and indirect linguistic strategies.35 Heraclitus was the first thinker to explore the dialectical interplay between linguistic reflexivity and its ‘object’.36 He is the first logologist, and in this respect the father of reflexive inquiry. Thus I take the reflexive style of Heraclitus to be the most decisive clue in understanding his thought. With these preliminary reflections and cautionary guidelines in mind, we can now turn to examine some of the linguistic and logological features of Heraclitus’ semiopraxis. What follows is a contribution to a materialist hermeneutics of Peri Phusis. The metaphorical texture of Peri Phusis Heraclitus’ prose is richly metaphoric or, to use a more accurate term, iconic— in the sense that his images and ‘reminders’ are designed to resemble what they attempt to signify and express (see Chapter 7, Sections 7–8). And given that ‘iconicism’ is a fundamental feature of allegory, we might also say that he discovered the principle of philosophical allegory. Peri Phusis thus appears as an intertextual network of riddle-like icons: the multidimensional imagery of the Logos itself as that which is ‘common’ (Frs 2, 89, 113, 116), as gathering 258

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all things into unity (50), as a hidden source which we should attend to carefully (22, 54, 56, 123), as law (nomos, 33), a path (60, 71), the tension of a strung bow or lyre (51), the unsetting sun of B 16, and, of course, as discourse (1); the cosmic order as Fire (30, 64, 90); Time as a child playing at draughts (52); the universe as a flowing River (12); Reality as an articulation of parts and wholes (10); War as the father (source, patriarch, maker, patron, producer, etc.) of all things (53, 80); the circular unity of beginning and end (103); and so on. These are all ‘indications’ of an enigmatic truth that cannot be conveyed in the terms of everyday discourse. I have suggested above that the word Logos enables the text of Peri Phusis to put into play a network of metaphoric possibilities, forcing its auditors to engage actively in the task of self-reflection and interpretation. We thus come away from reading Heraclitus with questions, not answers. We refer to this as the text’s logological matrix. A cursory acquaintance with this matrix reveals the following allegorical levels: • Logos can refer to the concrete act of Heraclitus’ prophetic utterance, the tissue of speech acts constituting Peri Phusis, which in literary terms can be interpreted as the intervention of a specific individual in a particular time and place, before a particular audience and interpretive community; • Logos may refer to the ‘ideal’, prepositional content of this performative intervention in language, a realm of universality inaugurating the project of logological reflection (interpretation might thus search for the ‘meaning’ of ‘what is spoken’, its semantic content—and something like this possibility lies behind the later Greek concern for language in its apophantic modalities); • Logos refers to what human beings must already understand, the rules, codes, and conventions of language (or language-like conventions) in order to communicate with one another, to understand, and make sense of their experience;37 • Logos indexes the reflexive relation binding the act of ‘accounting’ (logos) and that which gathers and makes speech possible, the ground of intelligibility presupposed by human activities prior to all concept formation and theorizing; • Logos points to the conflictual character of world forces eternally at war with each other, the polemical order which pervades all things (including human community, speech, and the evolution of mind); • Logos is a reminder of the fruitful ‘strife’ which energizes all becoming and which we eliminate only if we wish to eliminate growth, development, and creativity; • Logos displays the sacred origin of both thinking and being in an unnameable unity which governs and measures the life of all things. By playing on these intertextual resonances, the text creates an iconic space, opening up further possibilities of reflection—most immediately in interpreting 259

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kosmos itself as an intelligible, logological process, a text to be deciphered and interpreted. Let us dwell for a while on the resonant textuality of human discourse and the ‘textuality’ of the governing order of the kosmos. Reflective thinking exemplifies the intuition that human speech (logos) and selfhood always already begin from within the matrix of a governing order (Logos), evidenced by the radical dependence of every particular act of speech upon a larger, invisible tradition of language. For this reason, to listen to the Logos (and listening is Heraclitus’ paradigmatic form of human-being-in-language) is not merely to commit oneself to the task of understanding and interpretation but more significantly to respect and preserve one’s indebtedness to this origin; without the continuous relatedness to the Logos, without this recognition, human beings fall deaf to the collective life of language (B 1, 2, 34, 50, 71, 72); relying on their eyes and ears they forget that perception also has its roots in Logos, and that coming to a common understanding requires great effort and conscious work on the part of the self. By teaching his interlocutors to attend to the invisible Logos, Heraclitus shows the way to a deeper and more salutary relationship with language and with the horizon of Being itself. Only human beings can speak, and only human reality can bring itself back into harmony with the origin and hidden order (B 54). The hidden Logos Heraclitus also allegorizes the timeless indeterminancy of origins and origination by means of the iconic figure of the arcane Logos. To understand the Logos is to grasp something that is not obvious, something difficult and intangible—perhaps something calling for a lifelong commitment. This simple image initiates the idea of inquiry as a lengthy hermeneutic process, an existential quest for the ‘hidden order’ of things. Reflexive praxis now appears as a deciphering activity. We learn from Fragment 54 that the hidden (aphanes) harmony is better than the visible or obvious harmony (phaneras). The universe is written like the script of an undeciphered book. And the invisible rules of such a work are by far the most important step on the path toward selfknowledge: Men are deceived as to their knowledge of visible things [phanera= apparent things, appearances], in the same way that Homer was—who was the wisest of the Greeks; for he was deceived by some children killing lice who said: ‘What we saw and caught, we leave behind; but what we did not see nor caught, we take with us’. (B56) The riddle of Fragment B 56 also presupposes a difference between surface or manifest harmony (the order of ordinary phanera) and depth or hidden harmony (the order of the logos ‘behind’ appearances); this immediately 260

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suggests a connection with the ‘hermeneutic’ idea of inquiry mentioned above and, more resonantly, with the image of the unity of opposites in Heraclitus. For common sense, opposites appear to undermine and destroy one anotherthey struggle to eliminate each other from a given semantic field as though enacting a zero-sum game; on closer and more thoughtful inspection, however, they can be seen configurationally, as mutually implicating, coconstituting aspects of reality (Heraclitus’ central icons of creative ‘war’ are Night and Day, Right and Wrong, Speech and Silence). Harmony is woven from the continuous war of binding and opposing; in fact, as Fränkel has observed, the concept of ‘harmony’ in Presocratic thought ‘becomes void if it is applied to things which were already of like kind and in agreement’.38 Logos and Polis If all things human are bound to their Origin in the Logos this applies most profoundly to the social character of human experience. Here Logos and Polis are allegorically fused. The ‘law’ of the cosmos is compared with the laws of the polis.39 For Heraclitus the City (polis) and its founding laws (nomoi) also belong to the natural order of things; the word nomos, however, should not be heard primarily as ‘convention’—a later meaning consolidated by the Sophists. Nomos is a word that would have been used as an expression for immemorial, traditional customs, the ‘right’ way of life, and ‘orderly’ conduct (the text of B 33 speaks of respecting the ‘custom’ (nomos) that people should obey the counsel of one (presumably, ‘the best’ as in B 49: ‘One man is the equivalent of ten thousand, if he is the best’). But nomos (from nomizo) during this period had also come to be used of the autonomous political laws of the community, the fundamental beliefs and legal constitution underwriting social order: ‘The people should fight for the law as they would for their city-wall’ (B 44). Here the nomos is what is held in common, and consequently what holds a City together (B 114), in short, the text of lawfulness. Selfhood, politics, law, and philosophy form elements of a larger constellation of orderly legality. For this reason alone it is ‘law to obey the counsel of one’ (B 33). It follows that as the City and its encircling walls can also be troped as a microcosm of the macrocosm governed by Logos, any fundamental understanding of ‘things political’ (eplsteme politike) depends on a right understanding of the order which gathers human beings together and ties them to the world-order (significantly kosmos, as we have seen in our discussion of early Presocratic thought, also refers to the ‘right order’ of a society or a justly organized state).40 The bow and the lyre The most striking instance of allegorical word-play occurs in the pun at B 48 on the ‘ambivalence’ of the bow. In translation the fragment reads: ‘The bow is called life, but its work is death.’ 261

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This gnomic utterance is constructed on the semantic fact that the Greek expressions for bow and life (bios) are the same, differentiated phonetically by means of a shift of accent (graphically, biOs accented on the final syllable and bIos accented on the first syllable: Bia—acutely accented over the ‘iota’— means force, strife, or violence). In ordinary speech the words are homonyms, yet each carries a very different meaning. It was thus a happy discovery of Heraclitus to be able to juxtapose the evil of violent death with the good of life, to construct the polarity of the bow (an icon of violence, war, and death) and the lyre (an icon of pleasure, life, poetry, paideia). The bow-and-lyre icon is an ideal image for a world structured as a dynamic system of forces. A bow’s death-delivering work is the product of its vital strength and tension of wood and cord. The same semantic field is at work in the lines of B 51: ‘They do not understand how, in differing from itself (diapheromenon heautoi), it agrees with itself: a backward-stretching [palintropos or palintonos] connection [harmonic], like that of the bow and the lyre.’41 The strength of the ‘back-bending’ or ‘back-turning’ bow (the Homeric adjective palintonos, palin-=mutability, transformation, oscillation) derives from the violent tension of the stringing. Similarly with the Lyre, an instrument which can only function through the tensile strength of its stringing (hence its palintropos harmonic). Significantly, the most Greek of all the gods, Apollo, was also the deity of music and archery (Life and Death, Poetry and Destruction), and we also know that the god who speaks through the Sibyl in Fragment B 92 is Apollo, whose shrine was at Delphi. In this complex, intertextual sense, the antithetical icons of the Bow and Lyre presented themselves as perfect figures for Heraclitus’ teaching on the ‘contradictory’ unity of the universe. The ‘tensile’ force of the back-stretched bow secures the structure and ‘dynamic’ of the configuration as a unity (articulated by the term harmonic, harmotto, ‘to cohere together’). Numerous examples of punning and polysemy occur in the extant fragments: • the word-play in B 5 between mianinomenoi and mainesthai, logos and homologein in B 50; • the semantic interplay between aideoia (genitals), aidos (shame), anaidestata (shamelessness) and Aides (Hades) at B 15 (see Kahn 1979; Robinson, 1987:86–7); • the plurisignificant word daimon at B 119; • the word for ‘common’ (xunoi) and its resonance with xun nooi which we have had occasion to mention already (B 113, 114, 116); • the play on Zen/Zenos at B 32 and on dok (‘seem’) at B 28a; • the etymological pun which follows ‘what is common’ with the phrase ‘with understanding’ (xunoi and xun nooi in B 2); • the pun on the word aides (Hades and ‘sightless’) in Fragment 98; 262

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• the phonetic resonance between phtheir (‘louse’) and phtheirein (‘to destroy’) in Fragment 56; • the multiple meanings of sopkrosyne (e.g. in B 116); • the word-play associated with the expression thanatos psuchais in Fragment 36; • the play on two different meanings of the verb ‘aptein’ in B 26, Clement, Stromateis 4.141.2; aptetai can mean ‘set fire to’ or ‘kindle’, but also ‘touch’ or ‘attach’.42 Heraclitus refers to a person kindling a light for himself at night, but also, in sleep (or death) touching or fastening himself to that which is dead (literally, a dead man).43 Not content with verbal word-play, it seems that Heraclitus coined new words to express intrinsically reflexive and oppositional meanings. For example, his habit of conjoining separate words to create a composite expression: poly and mathesis, giving polymathie (B 40, 129); kakon and teckhne, giving kakotechnie, or ‘the art of effecting evil’ (B 129); homo and logos, giving homologein in B 50 (‘Having listened not to me, but to the Logos, it is wise to agree (homologein) that all things are one’). Verbal and semantic polarity in Peri Phusis [Heraclitus claims that] what opposes unifies and that from different tones comes the fairest tune and that all things are produced through strife. (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 8.2.1155b4) The unity of opposites Some of the most cited passages from Heraclitus’ book are texts which express his idea of the ‘unity’ or ‘identity’ of opposites (including B 50, 51, 53, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 67). The fundamental thought here is that order in the cosmos does not arise in spite of tension, conflict, change, and chronic transformation, but rather because of and through conflict. The order of the universe is woven from the warp and woof of difference and can only be fully understood as a relational or configurational field of contraries. The coincidentia oppositorum is, so to speak, the very substance of real things. It is not simply that ‘unity’ (identity) assumes ‘multiplicity’ (difference), but that unity is constituted through difference: ‘opposites unite (the finest harmony stems from things bearing in opposite directions), and that all things come about by strife’ (B 8 ?). The hidden harmonia or ‘attunement’ of the world-order arises from a dialectical tension of apparently mutually opposed principles—like the structure generated by a dynamically balanced equilibrium of opposing forces (‘Things grasped together: things whole, things not whole, being brought together, being separated; (something) consonant, (something) 263

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dissonant. Out of all things (emerges?) one thing, and out of one thing all things’ (B 10)). Or in one of the most memorable, concrete images in the text: ‘Even the barley-drink (kukeon) separates if it is not stirred’ (B 124). Heraclitus’ imagery strongly suggests that he did not simply wish to claim that different, opposing forces, secure in their individual unity and strength, held each other in a system of tensions. Rather, he appears to have in mind something that a later tradition would call a dialectical unity (or dialectical image), where each ‘opposite’ contains its other, where one ‘term’ of a conflict or polarity is reciprocally constituted by the necessary, antagonistic presence of ‘its’ other (an ‘opposite term’ in a binary opposition is only apparently ‘opposite’, in reality it is a ‘moment’ or ‘aspect’ of an underlying unity, without which a phenomenon could not be said to exist).44 The relation involved is not one of literal, physical ‘opposition’, but one of a mediated and reflexive relationship. We could call Heraclitus’ fundamental discovery the paradigm of reflexive mediation:45 ‘War (polemos) is the father of all things and the king over all’ (B 53) (cf. B 24: ‘Gods and men honour those slain in battle’ and B 26: ‘A man in the night kindles a light for himself, his sight being quenched: living, he kindles the dead; awake, he kindles the sleeping’); ‘God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and famine; but he changes like olive oil which, when it is mixed with perfumes, gets its name from the scent of each’ (B 67)46; ‘War is both king of all, father of all, and it shows some as gods, others as men; some it has made slaves, others free’ (B 53); ‘Doctors cut, burn, torture the weak badly in every respect, and beg money though they do not deserve to take a fee from the weak, when they produce the same effects, good things and diseases’ (B 58); ‘One must realize that War is shared and conflict is Justice, and that all things come to pass in accordance with conflict’ (B 80); ‘Disease makes health pleasant and good, hunger satiety, weariness rest’ (B 111). The ‘unity of opposites’ forms a grid of terms, which we can diagram as follows: Position

combining (‘identity with’)

War Day Satiety Winter Mortals Sea/pure The Way Up Writing/straight Physicians/cut Visible Visible/harmony

Opposition Peace (Fr. 67) Night (Fr. 67) Hunger (Fr. 67) Summer (Fr. 67) Immortals (Fr. 62) Sea/polluted (Fr. 61) The Way Down (Fr. 60) Writing/crooked (Fr. 59) Physicians/heal (Fr. 58) Invisible (Fr. 56) Invisible/harmony (Fr. 54)

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But the static nature of this matrix of binary opposites is very misleading when abstracted from the literary context and intellectual objectives of Heraclitus’ text. The play of intertextuality and the parabolic style of writing themselves exemplify the ‘unity of opposites’. Existence is possible only as a process of exchange: ‘The totality of things is an exchange for fire, and fire an exchange for all things, in the way goods (are exchanged) for gold, and gold for goods’ (B 90). We might also compare this with the following fragments: ‘It is not better for human beings to get all they want. It is disease that has made health sweet and good, hunger satiety, weariness, rest’ (B 110, 111); ‘Cold (things) become warm, warm (things) become cold; a moist thing becomes dry, a parched thing becomes moist’ (B 126); or the exchange of ‘dry’ and ‘wet’ souls, life and death in B 36, 76, 77, and 117; Fire as ‘need and satiety’ (B 65); Blood, pure and defiling in B 5 (cf. 51); and the fusion of Hades and Dionysus, symbols of death and creation as ‘one and the same’ process in B 15. The logic of paradox Koan-like paradoxes can be found in the folk-literatures of many different cultures. And a preference for gnomic expression and riddles is, of course, a defining feature of the parable genre and ‘wisdom’ literature more generally. Consider Christ’s parable on life and death, reported by Luke: ‘For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it’ (9:24). And in the St John Gospel: ‘Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit’ (12:24). Even a sophisticated thinker like Hegel could spin out a whole theoretical system from very simple parabolic ‘seeds’, drawing upon and often conflating Greek and Judaic-Christian traditions: ‘the life of mind is not one that shuns death, and keeps clear of destruction; it endures death and in death maintains its being, for it only wins to its truth when it finds itself utterly torn asunder’47. Similar stories litter the pages of theoretical philosophy from Plato down to Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. Consider the creative conflict between the forces of desire expressed in the imagery of wild horses controlled by the sublimating work of Reason, the charioteer in the metaphor Plato uses in the Phaedrus, or the similar mythopoeic conflict of Eros and Thanatos in Freud’s metapsychology (‘When the superego is established considerable amounts of the aggressive instinct are fixated in the interior of the ego and operate there self-destructively. This is one of the dangers to health by which human beings are faced on their path to cultural development. Holding back aggressiveness is in general unhealthy and leads to illness (to mortification)’48); Schopenhauer’s metaphysical conflict between the Will and Thought; Nietzsche’s language, saturated with Heraclitean figures; finally, the role of the ontological difference in Heidegger’s work has definite parabolic overtones.49 But it is Heraclitus who inspired all these philosophical paradoxes. 265

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One of the most enigmatic and paradoxical lines occurs at B 124: ‘The most beautiful order [of the kosmos, or ‘this most beautiful kosmos’] is a dust heap piled up at random.’ How should we interpret this utterance? An initial clue lies in the ‘relativizing’ work of earlier fragments which compare the lot of mortals to that of the gods (B 78, 79, 82, 83), suggesting that even the greatest human achievements, knowledge, or beauty are as nothing compared with divinity: ‘Compared with God the wisest of mankind will appear an ape’ (B 83) or ‘to god all things are beautiful and good and just, but men have supposed some things to be unjust, others just’. Perhaps B 124 attempts something similar with respect to the visible universe: like sweepings blown into a random order, the kosmos has no extrinsic origin or order, but is ruled from within by Fire or ‘the thunderbolt’ (B 64); B 124 may have been linked to another polarity schema (cosmos/ acosmos) to read: the beauty of the ‘fairest kosmos’ has its origins in randomness and disorder (akin to the ‘just strife’ at B 8 and B 80). An equally striking example occurs at B 103: ‘In the circle, beginning and end are common.’ ‘Common’, we know translates xynos, invoking its dual sense of xunon, ‘together with, in common’, and xun nooi, ‘with understanding’; arche is, of course, beginning, origin, principle, and peras, end (in the sense of ‘limit’ or ‘boundary’, but perhaps also in the sense of telos):50 Paratactic, gnomic utterance The genre of the paratactic paradox is one of Heraclitus’ signal contributions to literary technique. Examples appear throughout his work. He regularly juxtaposes the most serious and the most insignificant themes; one well-known example is his comparison of the cosmic process with a child’s game of draughts (pessoi)—the subtextual contrast between aion (eternity) and pais (child): aion pais esti (aion is a child): ‘Everlasting Time [Aion—Eternity, Age] is a child at play, playing draughts. The kingdom is in the hands of a child’ (B 52)—or perhaps ‘Eternity is a child playing draughts; the kingdom is the kingdom of a child’; compare the paradoxical juxtaposition of Justice (Dike) and Strife (Eris) at B 80: ‘War is common [universal], and Justice strife’ (cf. B 23, 94, 102). Another example of the semantic fusion of antithetical meanings is his use of the Erinyes in Fr. 94; the Erinyes are seen as both the assistants of Justice and the sources of Strife and violence (a similar account of the twofold Eris can be found in Hesiod): ‘The sun will not transgress his due measure; otherwise the Erinyes, the ministers of Justice, will find him out’ (B 94). Finally, the cluster of examples beginning with B 59: ‘The path traced by the carding-combs is straight and crooked’ (B 59);51 ‘The path up and down is one and the same’ (B 60); ‘Immortals are mortals, mortals immortals; living their death, dying their life’ (B 62); and ‘The sea is the most pure and most polluted water; for fish it is drinkable and salutary; for men, undrinkable and deathdealing’ (B 61). 266

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Each of these texts performs something like a bracketing, ‘defamiliarizing’ function, turning an audience away from the surface meaning or commonsense reading toward a more arcane or thoughtful understanding. They disturb and subvert the traditional categorization of things—even things which we treat commonsensically as polar opposites. If commonsense polarities can be subjected to deconstruction then all our conceptual models may be revisable. The logic of paradox resonates with one of Heraclitus’ central messages: An unapparent connexion is stronger than an apparent one (B 54). The aim of this bracketing is not to dissolve reality into sceptical claims and counterclaims, but to rethink the nature of the real from the perspective of the underlying, evasive Logos. Heraclitus is not a sceptical thinker in the Hellenistic sense of the term. In fact he teaches a particular vision of the universe: the kosmos is fundamentally reflexive or self-mediating. It is the Logos itself which holds the secret to the dialectical fabric of the Cosmos. 8 THE REFLEXIVE PSYCHE IN HERACLITUS If we could resurrect the form of life displayed in the surviving fragments, what kind of world would it describe? Heraclitus’ world is not reducible to the play of mechanical forces and causes; nor is it the ‘enlightened’ world of the Athenian century or post-Aristotelian scepticism (in that there is no place in this form of life for sophistic discussion, scepticism, urbane dialectic, oratorical virtuosity, or philosophical rhetoric). In their paratactic starkness the fragments evoke Homer’s universe of irreconcilable conflict and implacable necessity: Peri Phusis requires its readers to envisage a self-reflexive world in which the fate of all things are riven with contradiction and polarity, a world without release, either in a salutary past or in the promise of a teleological future. Even Homer’s saving faith in the recollective power of narrative and his self-effacing celebration of the beauty and tragedy of human experience has given way to a transcendent melancholy, surfacing most visibly in the text’s blanket denunciation of humanity’s failure to recognize the secret harmony of things and to confront the ubiquity of war. Heraclitus’ imagination soared to a height from which the entire universe may have appeared to him only a speck upon the eternal ocean of change, just as every particle which it contains is always passing into something else. The world-creating spirit, he says, is but a child at play.52 Yet despite this godlike, dispassionate stance, Heraclitus’ world cannot be described as tragic, even though, in a certain sense, it articulates some of the logological frames, provides the intellectual orientation, and moves in the same sphere as Greek tragedy.53 For Heraclitus there can be no final resolution of conflict and suffering. The ubiquity of conflict is both a fact and a principle of experience, ultimately grounded in the ‘Violence’ which makes any form of existence possible. 267

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Phronesis requires that we simply recognize that war and conflict are consubstantial with existence. The desire to live without contradictions may be a natural feature of human experience, but at base it is a delusion. Heraclitus’ vision thus projects a version of Self that not only accepts the non-tragic presence of irreconcilable contradictions but is strong enough to celebrate dissonance and heterogeneity as the mainspring of life. Psyche, self-reflexive knowledge and the unity of reason In contrast to the epic tradition but in agreement with the Pythagorean Order, Heraclitus places the soul (psyche) and its self-knowledge at the centre of his reflections. While it would be misleading to describe Heraclitus as the founding father of moral or ethical philosophy—in the Socratic sense—it is evident that Heraclitus defined the problem of the psyche and human nature from the larger standpoint of an ethical discourse. The human soul is an essential part of a wider cosmic order—and must be described in its relation to the world process. As we suggested in Chapter 1, Psyche and Kosmos are internally related as microcosm and macrocosm. Both share the characteristics of ‘depth’, ‘infinite’ transcendence, ‘hidden order’ and, of course, a common fate in the cyclical processes of creation and destruction. Both are ‘measured’ by the Logos that flows through all things. Yet the psyche—at least the human ‘soul’—is the ‘place’ where the cosmic process comes to self-consciousness. Psyche is the site of the inquiring soul and, as such, the matrix of knowledge and understanding—both of phronesis which is ‘common’ to all,54and of the rare, civilizing virtues of thinking (noos) and self-control (sophronein).55 In being attentive to the Logos, the soul also displays its own intelligible ordering—psyche possesses its own logos which increases itself (psyches esti logos eauton auxon, B 115), and the sole path to an understanding of the divine Logos is by turning reflexively toward the darker soul within—in keeping with Heraclitus’ gnomic utterance: ethos anthropon daimon (‘A man’s character [but also, ‘disposition’, ‘usage’, ‘place’, ‘dwelling-place’—‘ethos’] is his daimon’, B 119). Mortals must not act in ways that will damage their souls (Fr. 85). Fragment 45 expresses the ‘truth’ of the soul in iconic images of depth and limitlessness: ‘If you travelled every path, you will not find the limits of the soul, so deep is its logos.’ Only persistent inquiry and the will to self-know-ledge can turn an individual back into the ‘depths’ of his psyche; and, as we have already seen, all knowledge must to some sense be the product of vigilant, self-reflexive inquiry (appropriate to a ‘self-increasing logos’). And despite the natural diversions and innate obstacles to phronesis, human reason remains a unifying force. Here we come close to the heart of Heraclitus’ vision condensed in a single lapidary sentence: ‘I searched out myself.’56 This line of thought culminates in the thesis of Fragment 112: ‘To be sophron is the greatest virtue, and wisdom is to speak and act the truth (aletheia), attending to the nature of things (kata physin).’ But how, if 268

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‘everything flows’ can we achieve the stable balance or ‘mean’ required by sophrosune? How is the psyche to gather itself into a whole when faced with the perpetual flux of becoming? Heraclitus’ solution seems to reside in the ‘balance’ that the soul achieves in recognizing the universal Logos and unity of opposites pervading existence. To comprehend the Logos in the everchanging fluctuations of the cosmic fire is to gain self-knowledge and wisdom (3, 45, 101) and in that very act of reflexivity to ‘deepen’ the soul’s awareness of the divine order of the kosmos. There are intimations of this in Aristotle’s gloss on Heraclitus’ doctrine of the soul as a principle of ‘emanation’ (anathumiasis) in Book 1, Chapter 2 of the De Anima. Richard McKeon translates the relevant passage: Heraclitus too says that the first principle—the ‘warm exhalation’ of which, according to him, everything else is composed—is soul; further, that this exhalation is most incorporeal and in ceaseless flux; that what is in movement requires that what knows it should be in movement; and that all that is has its being essentially in movement. (405a25ff.) To be sophron is to grasp the Logos that governs this flux-like emanation of the world-process. In gaining knowledge the mobile psyche of human beings becomes attuned to the psyche of the world process itself. As the text associates sophronein and sophrosyne with the supreme achievement of human existence—the unity of reason realized as selfknowledge—it is important to examine in more detail how these words were used in Heraclitus’ intellectual environment. A clue is contained in the text’s recurrent linking of psyche and logos as ‘depth’ formations; psyche is the natural place of wisdom (sophia) and the matrix of speaking and acting in accordance with phusis: to be sophron is to recognize (and live in accord with) that which ‘measures’ all things; recollection of the Logos allows the psyche to increase its own ‘logos’ by controlling and delimiting the demands of the body and desire. For Heraclitus the soul that dwells on the surface of things and abandons the quest to understand the language of the cosmos is by definition ‘barbaric’. To live by the measure of sophrosyne is to accept the limits of human experience, to follow the demands placed on the self by the Logos itself, or as we might say today, to act by first taking the measure of ourselves. Only by returning to the self and its profound logos can we civilize our ‘barbarous souls’ (B 107). Heraclitus speaks of Justice (Dike) as the embodiment and guardian of this measured relation (logos) (B 94) and truth (28b, Clement, Stromateis 5.9.3), so that actions which recognize and secure justice are living incarnations of sophrosyne (cf. B 80, B 94, and B 102). It appears, then, that the primary sense of the word has not yet become ‘moderation’ or ‘self-control’, but is still close to the older sense of themis. Themis meant something like the right order or behaviour laid down for things, the adequate measure of anything from which ‘right’ action might flow. In the warrior-culture of the Iliad and 269

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the Odyssey, it is themis to welcome strangers, to bury the dead with the appropriate rites and to let an enemy do likewise, to honour and propitiate the gods, to stand one’s ground and face the enemy courageously, and to die fighting if necessary. These are the roles prescribed by the ‘nature of things’. Hence, the ability to measure things rightly and to act in accord with the ‘way things are’ constitutes the essence of justice—measuring and judging by themis restores untoward actions, bringing things back to the prescribed order (kosmos). Justice means measuring one’s own conduct and relationships by the rule of themis—‘paying heed to the nature of things’ (B 112). An essential ingredient of sophronein (as with the earlier paradigm of themis) is ‘knowledgeable conduct’ that recognizes and respects the constitution of things—avoiding hubris (‘insolence’, ‘immoderation’, and ‘Violence’) and excess in all departments of life and following justice wherever possible (Frs 43, 44; DL 9.2); and it is this older sense of the reflexive awareness of limits (which includes the telos of things) which connects the early Greek word, sophrosyne with its Solonic (Solon 3.8) and, later, Platonic meaning as moral self-control and self-regulation. The common thread in the Homeric, Heraclitean, and Classical idea of sophrosyne is a shared understanding of self-reflexivity as a respectful recognition of limits—and, as a corollary, of the dangers awaiting those who overstep those limits and disrupt the ‘good order’ of things. A similar structure of assumptions informs Athena’s speech in Sophocles Ajax: ‘Warned by these sights, Odysseus, see that thou utter no boastful word against the gods, nor swell with pride if haply might of arm exalt thee o’er thy fellows, or vast wealth. A day can prostrate and a day upraise all that is mortal; but the gods approve sobriety (sophrosune) and forwardness abhor’ (Ajax 127–33, trans. F.Storr). By acting with sophronein/ sophrosyne the self both enacts and deepens the ‘just’ order of things, allowing Heraclitus to say that an active psyche enlarges its logos. The art of measuring things in accordance with their intrinsic constitution (phusis) is the decisive trait of the sophron. Here there is a remarkable convergence between Solon, Heraclitus, the tragic poets, and thinkers like Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle. In Plato’s writings, sophrosyne is connected with the inner harmony and self-regulation of the body and soul (Phaedrus 237E–218A; Rep. 430E– 432A, 442C; Charmides 159Aff.). The dialogue Charmides is devoted to the question, ‘What is sophrosyne?’, and while no definite solution is reached, we can clearly recognize the image of sophia as a self-knowledge of limits in the person who knows the measure of and can thus control his own soul: the sophron, and only he, will know himself, and be able to examine what he knows or does not know, and to see what others know and think that they know and do really know, and what they do not know and fancy that they know when they do not. No other person will be able to do this. And this is to be sophron and sophrosyne—for a man to know what he knows and what he does not know. That is your meaning?57 270

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To return to Heraclitus. If the Logos is divine and the human soul possesses its own logos (B 115) or ‘participates’ in the cosmic order governed by Logos, then the quest for self-knowledge cannot be separated from the search for a deeper understanding of the divine which is ‘common’ to all, and, correlatively, applying this unique knowledge to the situations of everyday life. In fact, only the human psyche can inquire and ‘listen’ to the order of Being because it alone is already attuned to the Whole. Enquiry and self-reflection is possible precisely because ‘thought’ (or ‘thinking’) is common to all (B 113). Psyche is, as we might say, reflexively implicated with the logos of the Whole. Human beings are sustained by the Logos just as they are protected by the laws of the city. Heraclitus’ text articulates a strong sense of the unity of reason in the face of multiplicity and dispersion. ‘Psyche possesses a logos which increases itself (Fr. 115). Mankind is touched by the divine order and yet, in failing to listen, risks living far from the origin of being and truth. In Heraclitus’ world, human beings only become fully human in the pursuit of self-inquiry, in glimpsing the truth articulated in the enigmatic words of Fragments 1 and 2. Thus to pursue ‘self-inquiry’ (to follow Heraclitus’ path indicated by the expression ‘I searched out myself) is not to pursue self-reflection in an introspective sense; it is, rather, to respond to the trace of the Logos within the soul, and to understand that the same divine ‘order’ pervades the universe of the self as it does the universe at large. Logos is at work in the microcosm as it is in the macrocosm. The reflexive turn which Heraclitus’ text recommends is less a return to the ‘inner man’ in the style of St Augustine, Descartes, and Husserl, than an invitation to seek out the Logos, the ground of intelligibility, which gathers the psyche as a moment of the cosmic process.58 The ‘logos of the soul’ represents the divine moment which encompasses human beings. In ‘deepening’ its self-knowledge the psyche is concretely realizing the Divine which is the ultimate context of human understanding. This is the reason why ‘you cannot discover the limits of the soul, even if you traveled every path; so deep is its logos’ (Heraclitus, Fr. 45). ‘Faculties of the soul’ Of the psyche’s various ‘daimonic’ powers, Heraclitus particularly foregrounds those relating to theoretical and practical knowledge (which in this context includes empirical knowledge), judgement or principled discernment (phronesis), insight (self-knowledge), knowledge of limits or self-control (sophrosyne), and sophia. In the words of Fragment 116: ‘All people have a claim to self-knowledge (self-comprehension) and sound thinking (sophronein), (John Stobaeus 3.5.6). Some interpreters claim that Heraclitus was the first Greek thinker to have foregrounded psyche (‘soul’) as a cognitive principle as opposed to either a source of emotional impulse or biological ‘force’ (Robinson, 1987:109–10). 271

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For Heraclitus, as for his great Milesian predecessors and illustrious successors, Plato and Aristotle, there is a creative tension between reason and desire; the human soul is ‘deep’ in the sense that a logos relates the demands of both phronesis and eros; desire and logos are bound together like the strung bow in Fragment 51. As mortals are easily deceived by what they ‘hear’, by opinions and traditions they have accepted uncritically, Heraclitus praises empirical knowledge achieved through the eyes (‘Eyes are more accurate witnesses than the ears’, B 101). Empirical knowledge which possesses an accurate measure of itself and its limits is an essential component of wisdom. It would be mistaken, however, to view this as a prefiguring empiricism or as an expression of a videological conception of knowledge of the kind parodied in Plato’s Theaetetus; for Heraclitus, every ‘faculty’ of knowing is always already informed by the Logos and its immanent conflict with other demands of the psyche. The ‘eyes’ are only as intelligent as their informing soul—and the soul belongs to the Logos. Fragment B 107 states emphatically: ‘Poor witnesses for people are eyes and ears if they possess uncomprehending [literally, ‘barbarian’] souls (psychai)’. We are not surprised to discover that this fragment from Heraclitus was assiduously recorded by Sextus Empiricus (Against the Mathematicians 7.126). Perhaps this is the context for the enigmatic fragment recorded by Aëtius (2.21; Dox. Gr. 351): ‘The Sun’s extent is (that) of a human foot’ (DK B 3); that is, to the mind-unaided senses the sun appears to be the size of an ordinary object. But the ‘mind’ or intellect overrides the distorting evidence of the eyes (this reading is also compatible with the saying reported by Diogenes Laertius at 9.7: ‘[Heraclitus says that] thinking is [an instance of the] sacred disease [and that] sight is deceptive’). Yet the ‘objects of sight, hearing and experience’, the perceptible world (phaneron) are not to be disregarded; they are valuable aids in the pursuit of wisdom (cf. DK B 55; Hippolytus, Ref. 9.9.5). The eyes must be able to ‘read’ and interpret the world; they must be in tune with the language of experience (‘barbarian’ was typically used at this time not only for non-Greeks—that is, ‘uncivilized’ nations—but more pointedly, for those who could not understand the Greek language). The implication is that the psyche is the pre-eminent source of insight and understanding. By analogy, senses that are not directed by the Logos cannot be fully human faculties; they belong to an ‘uncivilized’ psyche for there is no question of insight or the ‘sound understanding’ it brings (cf. B 116 which should be read in close conjunction with Frs 55, 101 a and 107).59 Here again, it is to the ‘middle ground’ of Logos that we should look to find the unifying moment between the practical and theoretical sciences. The psyche and the logos (as the ‘faculty’ of knowledge and wisdom) are related by an elective affinity—the psyche has become the ‘thinking soul’ that would have such a powerful impact upon all later philosophical reflection. Underlying the differentiation of the soul’s ‘powers’—for these are all 272

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construed as ‘capacities’ in Heraclitus’ Greek—psyche is unified by one supreme ‘faculty’, that of ‘being wise’ or—in the linguistic spirit of the text, the faculty that animates the striving to achieve wisdom and thus the process of participating in ‘the wise’ (or ‘the one who is wise’), and, ideally, the promise of becoming wise. Wisdom (sophia) is what binds mortals most closely to the One Logos. Fragments B 32 and 41 should be interpreted together; both beginning with the same three words: hen to sophos, which can be translated variously as ‘one’ (thing) ‘is wise’, or ‘one is wise’, or perhaps as ‘the wise is one’ (in B 41: ‘the wise is one, recognising the ordering intelligence which steers all things through all things’; in B 32: ‘the only wise one, is unwilling and willing to be called by the name Zeus’). Only the ‘wise soul’ can recognize and attune its whole being to the Logos governing the whole world process. The obstacles to self-knowledge Those who seek gold dig much earth and find little. (B 22, Clement, Stromateis 4.4.2) The structural connection oilogos and psyche also sets the scene for Heraclitus’ theorizing about the obstacles to self-knowledge. Genuine self-knowledge or sophrosyne (sophronein) is extremely difficult to achieve, being subject to two different orders of limitation—one on the side of the knowing psyche, which recurrently turns away from self-reflexivity to settle upon the conjectures and opinions of tradition; the other derived from the difficulties of comprehending the dynamic self-movement of the world process itself. In Heraclitus’ conception all processes of knowing participate in the flowing configurations of temporality and becoming. And every process of manifestation brings with it an irreducible aspect of darkness and occlusion. Fragment 123, for example, emphatically asserts that reality is far from being a manifest order; in fact, reality also dissimulates (‘Phusis loves to conceal itself) and, in general, unfounded guess work and conjecture will not advance knowledge of the most important matters (B 47, 86). Here, only rigorous and lifelong self-inquiry can open the soul of the inquirer—those who commit themselves to the way of self-reflexivity (‘understanding’ (epainontos) in 112) will have to investigate many difficult things (the eu mala in B 35). Individuals must first destroy the vanity and conceit of spurious knowledge (B 43, 46, 50, 72) if they are to stop acting like sleepwalkers and transcend their prejudices (B 2, 73, 75, 89, 104). Despite these limitations Heraclitus is not a sceptic or nihilist; his aim is to stress the difficulties of inquiry, but knowledge and self-reflection are possible and by following the correct path human beings can come to know the true logos of things (101, 108, 113 and 116). Heraclitus expresses a deep faith in the intelligibility of the cosmic order—without the Logos no knowledge, not even the most concrete empirical knowledge would be possible. Understanding and self-knowledge are within the range of human possibilities: ‘All men 273

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have the capacity of knowing themselves and acting with sophrosyne (moderation, self-control, wisdom)’ (B 116) and ‘If you do not expect the unexpected you will not discover it; for it cannot be tracked down and offers no passage’ (B 18, Clement, Stromateis 2.17.4; cf. B 1 and B 2). The most fundamental limit to knowledge derives from the human condition itself—human reality as fragile, evanescent, and finite: the inescapable fact that every person must die coupled with the immeasurable obstacles and difficulties in the way of authentic knowledge. Almost predictably, death serves as a potent symbol of the finitude of all human aspirations. While ignorance is a kind of living death, physical death makes its appearance as the ultimate icon of limit which no mortal can transcend. This may have been the relevant context for B 21, that death is only adequately understood when we are fully awake, that is, when we are reflexively aware of the inherent limits of human nature and its possibilities: There await people when they die things they neither expect nor (even) imagine’.60 While all human beings have the potential of self-knowledge (B 116), the obstacles to understanding and sound thinking (phronesis) are numerous. Most people live lives pervaded by ignorance and ungrounded opinion. Many of the extant fragments are variations on the idea that vice has its roots in the chronic ignorance of human beings: • the constitutive ‘deafness’ of humans with respect to the Logos (B 1, 2, 72, 78, 113, etc.); • the deceptions of the senses and the illusory nature of sensory ‘knowledge’ (B 45, 46, 101, 107); • the failure to understand the commonality of the Logos (B 1, 2, 72, 113, 116); • the distraction of corporeal needs and pleasures (B 9, 11, 13, 37, 110, etc.); • the ‘moist’ or drunken soul (B 77, 117) compared with the wisdom of the ‘dry’ soul (B 36, 118; cf. B 85 and B 1); • the deleterious influence of ‘idols of the tribe’: opinions, ritual beliefs and practices, uncritical tradition (B 14, 15, 19, 104); • the weakness of imagination and the will to knowledge (B 18, 48, 51); • the failure to inquire comprehensively (B 35, 47); • the temptation to remain with manifest and superficial things (B 50, 54, 56); • conceit and intellectual vanity (B 95, 121); • false knowledge, speculation, and polymathy (B 129). The soul awake Man’s character is his daimon. (Fr. B 119; John Stobaeus 4.40.23)

Like the Logos which pervades nature, the kosmos is common to all those who are fully ‘awake’, but this single, common universe disappears for ‘sleeping’ souls—in sleep each person turns away into his own, private universe (B 89). It 274

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might be reasonably assumed that the division of humanity into ‘the awake’ and ‘the sleeping’ would be a highly unequal division—the majority vegetating in various forms of ‘sleep’—absorbed in worlds of their own (cf. the ‘private’ understanding of B 1 and 114). Since sleep and death are typical symbols of oblivion, ignorance, and forgetfulness, it is not surprising that they are put to full use as metaphors for those who live ‘forgetting’ that with which they are in most continual contact (B 72), not ‘listening’ to the Logos, or falling into anarchical worlds of their own interests and pursuits.61 And yet even in their private worlds, sleepwalking humanity is still bound by the measure of the Logos (the ‘worlds’ of the sleeping are still, after all, worlds); even the sleeping still participate in the cosmic process: ‘[Those who are asleep, Heraclitus calls] labourers and co-producers of what happens in the cosmos’ (B 75). The soul asleep One obstacle to self-knowledge lies in the soul itself—symbolized by a series of graphic images: the ‘sleeping’ soul, the ‘wet’ soul of those rendered insensible by wine (B 117), the soul of the dead, the ‘unlistening’ mind of those who have no awareness of the Logos and the soul of those who block knowledge from their soul after learning of it for the first time (B 1). Psyche is responsible for its own relationship to others and to the world process, for every person has a claim to self-knowledge, judgement, and wisdom. The soul is responsible for its own states (for example the ignorance which, as B 95 holds, it is better to conceal) and life (living apart from that which is always closest to it—B 16, 17, 18, 19). Heraclitus invokes the Pythagorean image of the soul’s attunement as a listening to the hidden harmony of phusis.62 For Heraclitus the fundamental alienation in human experience resides in a life that is out of harmony with the Logos.63 9 LOGOS AND KOSMOS The thunderbolt steers all things. (DK B 64) The cosmic fire The doctrine of ekpyrosis—the kosmos as a cycle of everliving fire—first makes its appearance in Fragment 30: ‘(This) world order (kosmos), the same for all, no god or man has made, but it always was, is, and will be, an eternal fire, being kindled in measures and being put out in measures’.64 The theme was frequently used in antiquity to characterize Heraclitus’ vision of cosmic change. Aristotle, in the De Caelo takes this reading for granted: That the world was generated all are agreed, but, generation over, some 275

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say that it is eternal, others say that it is destructible like any other natural formation. Others again, with Empedocles of Acragas and Heraclitus of Ephesus, believe that it alternates, being sometimes as it is now and sometimes different and in a process of destruction, and that this continues without end. (De Caelo 1.10.279b10–16) We know that the Lyceum read Heraclitus as an early cosmic theorist with the element Fire as a basic law and cause. The Aristotelian reconstruction assumed that Heraclitus was simply another cosmologist propounding a theory of universal origins and transformation. But returned to their larger context, Heraclitus’ ‘cosmic fragments’ appear to address problems other than those in natural philosophy. What Aristotle tried to refute as an inadequate physical thesis concerning the genesis and destiny of the heavens may not have begun life as a naturalistic theory at all. We have suggested that it was Heraclitus’ judgement about his predecessors’ ‘ignorance’ concerning the all-enduring Logos that motivated his generic critique of naturalistic inquiry. We are thus faced with the problem that the inherited Milesian vocabulary of phusis, arche, dike, and kosmos, ‘world-fire’, and so forth, is turned to very different philosophical ends. At the very least the ‘distanciation’—if not deconstruction—at work in the Heraclitean text, should make us hesitate before identifying Heraclitus as a protophysicist.65 We could also read Fragment 30 as one instance of Heraclitus’ playful deconstruction of the idiom of the Ionian natural philosophers. Knowing Heraclitus’ fondness for word-play and polysemy we are more than likely in the presence of a plurisignificant symbol when we come across the word ‘fire’ in his texts. Before identifying ‘fire’ with one of the four Elements, we might construct a ‘symbolism of fire’ as it may have operated for a reflexive thinker such as Heraclitus. What are the contextual references for such a phenomenology of fire? Fire as a physical process is a perfect sign (B 93) for the pure, elemental process of change and the unity of opposites that govern the cosmic cycle. Being the most ‘insubstantial’ and evanescent of the Presocratic Elements, fire symbolizes the dynamic, transformational nature of phusis in keeping with a vision of everything as endlessly coming-to-be and passing-away (as in ‘All things are an equal exchange for fire and fire for all things, as goods are for gold and gold for goods’ B 90). In the evanescent dance of fire there is nothing permanent or subsistent—fire is a pure process which leaves nothing it touches unchanged. As we have seen in the interpretation of the fragments above, for Heraclitus the cosmos and individual beings within it are not things but dynamic relations; hence, the perfect icon of relational transfiguration is the flickering, fragile, and transient flame (‘Fire’s transformations’—or ‘turnings’—are exhaustively described as immaterial exchanges, B 31). Like the flame, everything passes and is consumed—‘redeemed from fire by fire’, 276

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in Eliot’s words, or in the language of an earlier visionary ‘paying the penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice’ (Anaximander, Fr. 1). And the transformation changes the psyche: in thinking of the kosmos as a vast cycle of fire, we alter our everyday perception of different forms of fire (they now become ‘forms’ of a common law of change). The poetry of fire redefines the experience of mundane fire and its pervasive presence in human experience. The flame Heraclitus invokes is the eternal fire of the cosmos itself (B 30, 50, 51, 60), restlesssly ‘turning’ (trope) from epoch to epoch (cf. B 16, 66, 76). Fire, without the support of a sustaining ground (arche), without transcendent intervention or divine judgement, returns all things in an endless cycle of creation and destruction. The most destructive element holds the secret of cosmic equilibrium (Fr. 64: ‘Thunderbolt steers all things’). Fire concretely symbolizes the mobile unity at work in the macrocosmic conflict of opposites—what Hegel correctly divined as the principle of ‘absolute unrest’. The psyche as a microcosm obeys the same dialectical laws as the macrocosm. Reality is an endless process of change (B 30). Fire combines and fuses the most elemental opposites. It is the source of lifegiving warmth (the principle of the hearth, civilized rituals, the altars of the City, technical knowledge, and culture), but also the universal destroyer that visits death on men and Cities; as a volatile medium between life and death, fire must have struck Heraclitus as a powerful image for the ultimate lack of distinction between the qualities of life and death, a neutral medium in which everything may be exchanged (B 90; cf. B 41, 54, 123). If ‘things’ in the Heraclitean world are nothing but their powers or capacities, then fire symbolizes the identity of different powers, understood as an oscillation between the most extreme possibilities of the flame; and in the extreme, these qualities are frequently beyond human control (fire is a gift of the Gods (in many mythologies) or is stolen from the Gods (in the Greek Promethean legend)). It embodies a ‘divine’ aspect (Zeus being the Lord of Light and wielder of the Thunderbolt). Fire—like the Logos—is that strange ‘something’ which is both ‘nothing’ and ‘everything’, an intangible process in which all tangible realities have their source and being. Fire is thus the perfect symbol for animation (the ‘dry’ psyche). It symbolizes purification and death. It is the most elemental of the elements, the most living and the most destructive. It is, moreover, the most resistant to reflection and explanation (how do we explain the ‘nature’ of fire other than through fiery metaphors—a limitation that has not significantly changed with the discoveries of modern science). The child who asks ‘What is fire?’ will almost certainly be sent away empty-handed. Life is fire and death is its absence—the return of the psyche to earth and water; and while we do not have explicit textual evidence that Heraclitus embraced the Ionian doctrine of hylozöism, he certainly accepted that universal mobility was the distinctive property of life and even, perhaps, that the varied forms of life are at root forms of fire: hence, that which is most living—the psyche—is also closest to the nature of fire, while things that become ‘moist’ 277

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are on the road of decay (B 12, 36, 77, 117, 118, cf. 85). Individual things are mortified as an exchange with fire (as one thing lives the death of another— B 62, 76, 77). Without fire (and its ‘contradictions’) there would be no ‘order’ at all (B 114). Fire is also a symbol of what is most ubiquitious and yet unrecognized, the Element most common to all existence (the Logos envelops and delineates every thing like Light from the Sun); the form of fire appears with every differentiated thing (and informs every inquiry to ‘distinguish each thing according to its nature and explain how it is ordered’, B 1). Light is the natural symbol of the dry soul and intelligence more generally. Yet light (like insight) is absent from everyday thought and action; it is the unnoticed yet elemental medium of all thought and praxis, a unitary background for all distinction, differentiation, and intelligent action. Fire, like the sun, is both ancient and new every day (B 6, cf. B 99). Just as mortals ignore the Logos, so they ignore the source of all illumination and are, instead, fixated upon the objects which stand out from the ground of light; what is most precious—the purest gold of light and fire—is most ignored (cf. Pindar, Olympian I.1–2). Fire is also ubiquitious in another incarnation—in the soul, the consuming fire that lies at the root of passion and love (and thus at the basis of the continuing existence of species life, ensuring that one generation will accept the fate of imminent death while leaving another generation of descendants to the same fate—B 20). Heraclitus could draw upon a standard opposition in ancient Greek culture in interpreting the cosmic fire on the paradigm of Eros. Both eros and the panpyric kosmos are animated by the two antithetical forces of ‘need’ and ‘satiety’ (B 65): just as mortals are consumed by eros, so the whole universe is trapped in an ‘intolerable shirt of flame which human power cannot remove’. Human existence is consumed by one of the many incarnations of fire, ‘consumed by either fire or fire’.66 But the oldest symbolic linkages connect fire with the gods—especially with the thunderbolt of Zeus. Heraclitus exploits this ancient symbolism in a number of ways. It is most evident in his notion of the ‘divine’ qualities of fire. Like Zeus, fire—the thunderbolt—steers the totality of things (B 64); like the gods, fire is everlasting and immortal—the ‘ever-living’ process (pyr aeizoon of B 30) which ‘judges’ and ‘condemns’ all finite things; fire is what preserves wisdom and intelligence in the human soul (in the sense that ‘a dry soul is wisest and best” B 118): ‘Fire, comes suddenly upon all things, will judge and condemn them’ (B 66; cf. 94); ‘Fire lives the death of earth and air lives the death of fire; water lives the death of air, earth that of water’ (B 76); ‘The totality of things is an exchange for fire, and fire an exchange for all things, in the way goods (are exchanged) for gold, and gold for goods’ (B 90) (Kahn gives the translation: ‘All things are requited for fire, and fire for all things, as goods for gold as gold for goods’, Kahn, 1979:45). Fragment 60 might also be seen as another expression of the elemental exchange in which the upward and downward path are one and the same. Fire 278

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symbolizes the ‘Justice of Zeus’ which is also an exchange of evil for evil. Later interpreters frequently view the idea of measured exchange (and similar ideas in Empedocles) as prefiguring the idea of the conservation of matter and the doctrine of the eternal return of nature through its diverse transformations.67 An equally ancient symbolism relates fire, divinity, and the origins of civilization. Since Fire represents the ‘swiftness’ of thought and mind—the spirited intellect and intelligence of fore-thought, it was a natural bridge between gods and mortals (and consequently, for ‘souls it is death to become water’, Heraclitus, Fr. 36). In Greek mythology it is directly connected with one particular god, Prometheus, the god most hated by Zeus for stealing fire and bestowing this gift on mankind.68 Prometheus’ theft of fire (and with it, the crafts, technology, and all other civilizing arts) founds the possibility of an authentically human community (symbolized by the triune structure of familial hearth (oikos), arts (technai), and city cults (polis), but also by those other civilized pursuits—pride (hubris, in emulating the gods’ knowledge and use of fire—Heraclitus’ notion of the Thunderbolt), conquest, and war (polemos)). Both fundamental human possibilities—civilization and war-are derived from the divine ability to anticipate, to use the ‘flame-like’ skills of knowledge, cunning, and judgement symbolized by the original transgressive act of the ‘fore-thinking’ benefactor of mankind.69 It is particularly appropriate to see Prometheus’ transgression as the auspicious act which makes a common humanity—symbolized by the boundaries of the polis—possible. Fire becomes the perfect eikon of communality in that sociality and society are formed by those who are gathered about the familial circle of fire, who learn to speak and order their lives within the light of this ‘hearth’ (just as rejection by the primary community of family, tribe, or homeland is to be thrown out of the light into the darkness and violence beyond the limits of the City).70 But mankind is also punished by the fiery destruction unleashed by Pandora, who also embodies the sensuous fire of passion: Pandora is, through her excessive animal sensuality, a fire to make men pay for the fire that Prometheus hid and stole from the gods. But she is more than this. She is herself a hidden trap, a double being whose appearance disguises and masks the reality… Pandora is an evil but an evil so beautiful than men cannot, in the depths of their hearts, prevent themselves from loving and desiring her. (Vernant, in Detienne, 1977: xxviii) Thus we return to the point where we began this essay. If Fire makes cities (and civilization) possible, it also brings cities to ruin in revolution, war, and natural catastrophes (unleashed in the myth by opening Pandora’s box: ‘her first action is to lift the lid of the jar and release all the evils men had hitherto not known: hard labour, sickness, painful old age and death’ (Vernant, in Detienne, 1977:xxviii)). And it is not insignificant that Heraclitus lived through a long period of permanent revolution and change, a period in which the 279

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traditional basis of Ionian civilization was both literally and figuratively consumed by the fire of history.71 10 PROCESS PHILOSOPHY For the God, all things are beautiful and good and just. (Heraclitus, Fragment 102, Porphyry, Quaestiones Homericae (on Iliad 4.4)) Heraclitus was right: we are not things, but flames. (Karl Popper, 1990:43) In this chapter I have tried to situate Heraclitus’ text, Peri Phusis, both in its immediate social and historical context and in its larger ‘intertextual’ bearing as the first articulate project of reflexivity in Western European theorizing. Heraclitus appears as a ‘logological’ thinker, concerned with thinking out some of the paradoxical consequences of a radically self-implicating vision of the universe as a reflexive Whole. Heraclitus thus emerges as an individual concerned with a rationality that is shared by the cosmos and human communality. In this sense, he is first and foremost an ‘ethical’ thinker. His vision of reflexivity, as we have seen, culminates in the notion of self-involving process, symbolized in the metaphorics of Fire and universal Change. Not without reason do interpreters of Heraclitus speak of him as the father of ‘Process philosophy’. Every part of the world process, from nous to the birth and death of kosmoi, exemplifies the law of interminable process. We can draw these threads together by specifying Heraclitean reflexivity as simultaneously a dialectical philosophy of process and, more importantly, an instance of the dialogical process of philosophy. As all reflexive thinking presupposes temporality (and thus, mobility, change, and transformation-‘the stream of becoming’ in Nietzsche’s phrase), what we usually abstract as ‘knowledge’ is subject to a double temporality: as a ‘product’ or ‘moment’ of thoughtful ‘inquiry-in-process’ and as an example of temporally constituted reality in general. If the cosmos is ‘an everliving Fire, kindling in measures and extinguished in measures’(Heraclitus, Fr. 30), then all thinking must in some sense be responsive to the radical temporality of its own mode of appropriating the real and thus to its own temporalized form and categorial work. The idea is common to a whole range of process philosophies today which follow Hegel in tracing their project to Heraclitus.72 For Hegel, the enigmatic sage of Ephesus was a speculative forerunner of the Logic of Spirit; it was Heraclitus’ worldhistorical role to have grasped the world process—the Absolute as Becoming, the Universe as a ceaseless flow of events—or more abstractly as a Unity of Opposites: ‘The One distinguished from itself, unites with itself.’73 For Hegel, Heraclitus was the first thinker to conceptualize reality as a dialectical process. Whether or not it borrows Hegelian idioms, all subsequent ‘process 280

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philosophy’ follows the path laid out in Hegel’s reading of Heraclitus.74 Whether we think in the terminology of vital biologism (Bergson, early Nietzsche), pragmatic relativism (S.Alexander, G.H.Mead), relationism (F.H. Bradley, Schiller, Mannheim), transcendentalism (Husserl), Platonism (Whitehead), dialectical materialism (Marx, Engels, Lukács), the Will-to-Power (Nietzsche), naturalistic evolutionism (Whitehead, Dewey, and James), neo-pragmatic conventionalism (Rorty), theological evolutionism (Hartshorne), or evolutionary eschatology (Teilhard de Chardin), ‘process philosophy’ essentially involves applying Heraclitus’ insight that Becoming (duration, temporality, change, history, and so forth) is the law and truth of Being. All post-Hegelian process philosophy follows Hegel’s proposal that the essential medium of thought is time, or as Hegel phrased this in the early part of the nineteenth century: ‘nonbeing immediately in being and being immediately in non-being’, the ‘transition’ out of being into non-being symbolized by the ‘absolute unrest’ of fire—absolute disintegration of existence, the passing-away of the ‘other’ and the ‘same’, the unity of existence and non-existence.75 If the logos of Being (now interpreted variously as ‘Nature’, ‘Spirit’, élan vital, ‘Reality’) is Process, then the logic of Process will necessarily have to adopt a temporal form. Again Hegel sets the pattern in determining the logic of process as dialectic (or as Marxism would later say, as dialectical logic): Nature is the never-resting project of universality and totality (Hegel’s absolute unrest of a self-alienating God), and the totality is the transition of the one into the other, from division into unity, and from unity into division—the immediate unity in opposition which returns into itself as a speculatively reconciled process of differences.76 If we grant the moderns’ version of Heraclitus and accept that the ‘essence of Being’ is process or, as Bergson says, radical becoming, we might expect philosophers of process to reflect on the self-involving, immanent commitments of their own position, that is, they might explore its reflexive consequences for the status of their own inquiries. Unfortunately, however, with the exception of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic, process metaphysics has been profoundly unreflexive about the categorial language of its own presuppositions and even more profoundly deaf to the ‘dialogics’ of Heraclitus’ original text. Hegel was the first to grasp the significance of Heraclitus’ notion of process: Appearance is the process of arising into being and passing away again, a process that itself does not arise and does not pass away, but is per se, and constitutes reality and the life-movement of truth. The truth is thus the bacchanalian revel, where not a member is sober; and because every member no sooner becomes detached than it eo ipso collapses straightway, the revel is just as much a state of transparent unbroken calm… In the entirety of the movement, taken as an unbroken quiescent whole, that which obtains distinctness in the course of its process and secures 281

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specific existence, is preserved in the form of a self-recollection, in which existence is self-knowledge, and self-knowledge, again, is immediate existence. (1967:105–6) Yet Hegel gives no reflexive account as to why the truth as a ‘bacchanalian revel’ (‘Die Wahre is so der bacchantische Taumel’) is a perfect stillness within the ‘riot’ of existence. He cannot provide a coherent account of why selfrecollection is secure in its grasp of the Whole or why the temporality of the Self stands at the still centre of the manifestation of Being. Order and foundational coherence is posited, as it were, by fiat. As metaphysical responses to a premetaphysical discourse, our modern process philosophers systematically elide the reflexive question of their own discursive grounds—how, for instance, within the questions and categories of systematic metaphysics are we to theorize process as disorder, unpredictable transformation, the appearance of the strange and the new?77 Hegel as we have seen theorizes in the metaphysical language of Subject and Substance—of self-reflection and ‘divine Substance’, negativity, alienation, objectification, and so forth. How, in Heraclitean language, does the intuition into the ceaseless movement of all things stand in relation to the goal of self-knowledge in ethics, religion, and politics? We are simply to take on faith that the past phases of manifestation are preserved in memory and can be recalled and recovered by the philosophical Self. We avoid Nietzsche’s question: how are we to live in the midst of this absolute vortex? In place of reflection, process thinkers resort to either a literal archaeology (of origins) or, more speculatively, to a teleology of process as the progress of divinity (as in Bergson’s conception of the élan vital of evolution créatrice, or Whitehead and Hartshorne’s organic evolutionism). In the end the solution to the riddle of existence is to posit a world-immanent Logic—in whose self-moving categories we find condensed the whole process of the Real becoming true. Heraclitus’ Logos is transformed into Hegelian Logic, change refigured as the workings of God in the world. Logic—as reflexive Spirit—captures ‘the structure of the whole in its pure and essential form’. What Heraclitus called phusis is now recovered as the life of the Notion (Begriff), a spiritual process governed by and manifest in an underlying logical development where the concrete shape of the content is resolved by its own inherent process into a single determinate quality. Thereby it is raised to logical form, and its being and essence coincide… It is therefore needless to apply a formal scheme to the concrete content in an external fashion; the content is in its very nature a transition into a formal shape, which, however, ceases to be formalism of an external kind, because the form is the indwelling process of the concrete content itself. (1977a:115) Heraclitus is faulted for lacking genuine scientific knowledge of the 282

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immanent self-movement of the Whole. Heraclitus could not actualize the labour of the negative, the ‘strenuous toil of conceptual reflection, of thinking in the form of the notion’. But Heraclitus is a process philosopher in the very special sense that what is most worthy of thought—phusis as eternal transformation—is for him the first topic of any reflexive inquiry—a thought that has profound implications both for the form of the Self and for the ethical ideal—for what Hegel once called the only association proper to humanity, the community of conscious life. But its firstness is itself an expression of Logos: Nature is domesticated as the self-manifestation of Spirit—Spirit made visible. Behind Nature lies the ontologically superior work of intelligibility itself, the universal logos which governs all things—‘mortal and immortal’; and speculatively, this process is the highest object of knowledge undercutting all distinction between practical and theoretical, appearances and essence, opinion and science (an insight that is partially preserved in Aristotle’s metaphysics in terms of the superiority of the theoretical life and in Hegel’s approach to the autonomy of Reason as speculative thought). It is not the simple truth that everything changes which makes logological reflexivity a human imperative, but the strange fact that an intelligible Logos pervades all change—that the divine moment itself, as it were, becomes preeminently visible in theoretical reason and self-knowledge. And thereby theorizing and self-knowledge participate in the ground of the ‘good, just and beautiful’ order of the Logos. Yet the Logos is not an origin, a foundation, or telos of truth, but a process of transformation. This is the truth that has emerged from the experience of Fragment 101—‘I have searched out myself. And with notable exceptions it is this divine horizon which eludes modern metaphysical appropriations of Heraclitus (for example where Hegel refigures this process as the self-development of the Idea: Being or phusis transfigured into the self-development of the Begriff). In the process, Heraclitus’ uniquely reflexive discourse is lost. In place of a reflexive encounter with his thought, we have a metaphysical narrative of the dialectics of Spirit. And in the light of this we should perhaps redraft Hegel’s maxim to read: ‘There is no thought of Heraclitus which I have incorporated in my Logic.’

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7 ELEATIC ONTOLOGY FROM XENOPHANES TO PARMENIDES AND BEYOND The Greeks trusted to nature, trusted the natural propensity of the mind, trusted language above all, in so far as it naturally externalizes thought. Rather than lay blame on the attitude of thought and language toward the course of things, they preferred to pronounce the course of things itself to be wrong. Such, indeed, was the sentence passed by the philosophers of the Eleatic school. And they passed it without any reservation whatever. (Henri Bergson, 1919:331) Xenophanes and the unity of God 1 2 3 4

Introduction Xenophanes’ critical reflexivity Xenophanes’ natural theology From Xenophanes to Parmenides Parmenides and the unity of Being

5 6 7 8 9

Introduction The beginnings of ontology: the philosophy of absolute Being The logological presuppositions of Parmenidean ontology Parmenides’ reflexive Logos Parmenides’ later impact: the origins of metaphysical modernity Melissus’ revision

10 The infinity of Being 11 Against plurality Zeno on the One and the Many 12 Introduction 284

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13 Zeno as a reflexive thinker 14 Conclusion: the genealogy of logic XENOPHANES AND THE UNITY OF GOD Let these things be stated as icons to the truth. (Xenophanes, DK B 35) 1 INTRODUCTION Parmenides of Elea—or Velia, near Paestum on the south-western tip of Italy -is generally recognized as the founding father of a tradition of ontological thought which profoundly influenced the development of Classical philosophy. Along with Heraclitus he is the single most important individual thinker in shaping the language and general world-view of European metaphysics. In this chapter I wish both to uphold this literary representation and open lines of interpretation which qualify the thesis that ‘Western thought’ begins with Parmenides. I will suggest that the roots of Western metaphysics are to be found in poetry, not logic. Parmenides was born in the last decade of the sixth century (c. 510 BC) and ‘flourished’ around 470 BC. He was thus an older contemporary of Socrates. His two pupils, Melissus of Samos and Zeno of Elea, essentially elaborated and defended his conception of the unity of Being. Before turning to Parmenides’ thought, however, it is necessary to explore the ideas of an earlier figure-Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 565–470 BC)—who formulated a remarkably similar conception of the unity of God one generation before Parmenides’ birth. Xenophanes’ logos, in fact, is the key link between the earlier Milesian tradition of cosmology, Pythagorean mathesis, and Parmenides’ poem on Being. This is the grain of truth in the tradition which depicts Xenophanes as the teacher of Parmenides and the source of the latter’s vision of the unitary essence of Reality.1 Xenophanes was an Ionian, a native of the city of Colophon on the east coast of Asia Minor. He left Colophon as an exile around 545 BC (after the city’s conquest by the Persians under Cyrus in 546/545 BC), spending most of his later life in the Western colonial cities of Sicily. The violent subjugation of Ionia by the Persians was thus the formative event of his life. Scholarly opinion tends to see Xenophanes primarily as a poet and only reluctantly extends to him the epithet ‘philosopher’. In antiquity Xenophanes was known as a poet-philosopher, although the traditional description of him as a ‘rhapsode’ (DL 9.18–21) is somewhat misleading (Burnet, 1930:115). However we categorize this ambivalent figure, for our purposes he is symptomatic of the emergence of a critical spirit directed forcefully against the doxa and prejudices of his predecessors. 285

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In literary history Xenophanes is notable as one of the inventors of a poetic form of hexameter verse known as the Silloi (‘squint-eyed verses’ or satirical verse). He wrote a long poem On Nature and other poetic works in hexameter, iambic, and elegiac metre.2 He may also have achieved public notoriety as a legislator and social reformer for his native city-state (B 1, 13–24; B 2; B 3; DL 9.20). He is often—probably mistakenly—depicted as the father of the Eleatic tradition and even as the first natural theologian in Greek culture.3 2 XENOPHANES’ CRITICAL REFLEXIVITY But the gods have not revealed everything to mortals from the beginning; rather, by seeking they discover better in time. (Xenophanes, from Stobaeus, Anthology 1.8.2 (DK 21 B 18)) We owe at least two outstanding intellectual discoveries to Xenophanes. First, he was one of the first philosophers to develop a critical attitude toward the Homeric pantheon and consequently toward the tradition of Archaic religion and Greek culture more generally. And second, in the light of his critique he began to conceptualize ‘the divine’ in non-anthropomorphic terms as a transcendent, unitary God. These unorthodox views may have been one of the factors leading to his exile from Colophon. He seems to have been something of a self-publicist since we learn from the doxographers that he recited his own works as he wandered ‘through the land of Hellas’ (DK 21 B 8). His vision of the unity of God had a profound impact upon Parmenides’ theory of the Way of Being and, later, upon Anaxagoras’ transcendent conception of the world Mind or Nous. How did Xenophanes communicate his extraordinary vision of divinity? Unlike the earlier Milesian natural philosophers Xenophanes presented his thought in the traditional Ionic metres of epic—elegiac and dactyllic hexameters. And many of the extant fragments of his writings lean toward aphoristic parody and satirical verse. This verbal experimentation is usually viewed as part of Xenophanes’ sceptical stance toward the traditional media of Homeric culture. But it may be more readily explained as a consequence of his material circumstances and peripatetic form of life. His wandering existence after the ‘coming of the Mede’ prefigures a later stream of thinkers and teachers who appear in Plato’s dialogues under the generic guise of ‘Sophists’ (and to this extent it is apt that Kirk and Raven describe Xenophanes as ‘a true sophistes or sage, prepared to turn his intelligence upon almost any problem’ (KR: 168; cf. Nietzsche, 1962: §10, 76)). In a sociological sense, Xenophanes and the later Sophists are indicative of the growing importance of marginal groups, intellectuals, and journeying ‘theorists’ who began to formulate their claims to truth on what they personally witnessed rather than on what opinion or tradition dictated. The attitude of mind was also typically highly critical of customary ethical beliefs and religious 286

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doctrines. His thought and way of life, therefore, indicate the existence of social and ideological changes of some importance in the early history of European reflexivity. With Xenophanes we find an individual using a relatively traditional genre to articulate a novel and critical view of knowledge and nature. Yet somewhat ironically, Xenophanes recorded his critique of Homer and the whole mythological tradition by writing in the same hexameter metre of the epic. The sociological character of his actual or anticipated audience is also an important index of changing literary conditions following from the principle that a ‘new truth’ presupposes and prefigures a ‘new audience’. Xenophanes’ hybrid transitional style and generic critique of his predecessors’ errors reflects the growing tension between the legacy of epic poetry-which would still have been crucial to the prestige of the aristocratic courts and citystate festivals—and the new, prosaic world of the powerful oligarchies and ‘enlightened’ courts of Greece. In the wake of a wave of oligarchical and democratic revolutions many of the city-states enjoyed a wave of economic prosperity, evidenced by an increase in population and the appearance of educated audiences demanding new forms and literary practices (we find evidence of these changes in the extant fragments of Heraclitus). Xenophanic philosophical poetry can be regarded as one particular response to these volatile social and political conditions in the late sixth century. And it may have been the friction between the old form and new content that led him to question the moral foundations of Homeric culture. At the level of literary reflexivity then, Xenophanes’ crucial problem was one of difference: how to convey a new truth to a community saturated by the literary practices of a powerful oral canon? How to innovate within a powerful cultural tradition? Although we have no direct evidence that Xenophanes suffered from an ‘anxiety of influence’, his texts do present indispensable evidence of the creative interplay between tradition and innovation during this period of Greek history. And the target of his literary ressentiment is the immense power of the Homeric logos—for the thoughts of all men have been touched by Homer (kath’-Homeron in Fr. B 9). Something like ‘critique‘ became vitally important as a way of relating to a strong poetic tradition. Xenophanes might even be described as having initiated the critical deconstruction of the Homeric canon. The directness and freshness of Xenophanes’ language is evident in his vivid description of a festive scene, a preparation for a wedding or symposium: For now behold, the floor is clean (katharos), and so too the hands of all, and the cups. One places woven garlands round our heads, another proffers sweet-scented myrrh in a saucer. The mixing-bowl stands there full of good cheer, and another wine is ready in the jar, a wine that promises never to betray us, honeyed, smelling of flowers. In our midst the frankincense gives forth its sacred perfume; and there is cold water, sweet and pure. Golden loaves lie to hand, and the lordly table is laden 287

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with cheese and with honey. The altar in the centre is decked with flowers all over, and song and revelry fill the mansion. It is proper for men who are enjoying themselves first of all to praise God with decent stories and pure words. But when they have poured a libation and prayed for the power to do what is just—for thus to pray is our foremost need—it is no outrage to drink as much as will enable you to reach home without a guide, unless you are very old. But the man whom one must praise is he who after drinking expresses thoughts that are noble, as well as his memory concerning virtue allows, not treating of the battles of the Titans or of the Giants, figments of our predecessors, nor of violent civil war, in which tales there is nothing useful; but always to have respect for the gods, that is good. (Xenophanes, Fr. 1, trans. Freeman 1959) For a comparable example of direct, lucid language we would have to turn to Plato (e.g. in the Symposium at 176A and passim). Xenophanes’ encomium shines with a clear and simple teaching, but one which had, in the cultural context of its enunciation, deeply disquieting and even revolutionary implications. Homer and the whole mythopoeic tradition are suspended at the lintels of this text, barred from the limpid space of festive acts, objects, and celebrations—for such unedifying ‘stories’ (muthoi) would taint and corrupt the purity and directness of the new image of a respectful life. For Xenophanes the earlier Greek stories are barbaric, wild myths without a reasonable claim for civic repetition, let alone precedence in the hearts and minds of his imaginary audience. We should not darken the soul with such irrational myths, but strive to bring the mind before what is truly good (arete) by means of icons in harmony with the demands of the logos, not tradition.4 Another striking instance of this transitional reflexivity is his use of the ‘sacred’ hexameter to convey a distinctly sober and even ‘profane’ meaning. For example, speaking of Iris, the goddess of the rainbow and messenger of the gods, we are advised to forget her Homeric role as handmaiden to Zeus and Hera—mediating between Sky and Earth—and instead envision the natural phenomenon itself: ‘What mortals call Rainbow (Iris), that too is a cloud, purple and scarlet and yellow to see’.5 The nature of Xenophanic critique What were the main concerns and themes of Xenophanic critique? Xenophanes’ major targets were Homeric theology—the Archaic ideology elaborated from the language of the Homeric poems—and unthoughtful views about the nature of the gods. But he also satirized the Greeks for their obsession with physical excellence and athletic Games—activities which played an integral role in the cultural hegemony of Greek society. From a contemporary perspective these contestations may seem relatively 288

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inconsequential; yet by understanding the institutions of fifth-century Greek culture we can appreciate their radical meaning. The Pan-Hellenic Games and Homeric theology were by this period intertwined in a powerful system of political practices; from a sociological perspective the integration of sport and politics was increasingly central to the legitimation and reproduction of political power and prestige of the new oligarchs. Thus by isolating ‘Homer’ and ‘the Games’ for criticism, Xenophanes was attacking the cultural foundations of Greek society and its imaginary institutions—or more concretely, he was satirizing the ruling groups and classes who bolstered their socioeconomic and political hegemony by staging expensive festivals for the masses of their respective poleis. As we have already seen in Chapter 2 of Volume 2, Homer was much more than a poetic or literary tradition. By the end of the sixth century, Homeric tradition represented a sacred body of knowledge codifying the values of an idealized Hellenic way of life. The Games were not simply sporting events; they were regarded as the embodiment of the divine auspices of the state, symbolic occasions that ritually enacted the self-image of the whole polis. By questioning the value of these institutions, Xenophanes was effectively interrogating the axiological foundations of political identity (it is interesting that Diodorus Siculus attributes a similar critique to Solon: ‘Solon believed that the boxers and short-distance runners and all other athletes contributed nothing worth mentioning to the safety of states, but that only men who excel in prudence and virtue are able to protect their native lands in times of danger’ (9.2.5)). The polemic against Homer and the Games makes Xenophanes the first radical ‘cultural critic’ in European literature. Xenophanic critique was not a ‘critique of knowledge’ in its modern sense; it was a criticism of the underlying institutional forms of reflexivity which define and legitimate forms of knowledge. In one sense Xenophanes’ project is much more radical than Kant’s epistemological criticism, as it questions the values informing a whole way of life. Xenophanes treats ‘knowledge’ and ‘culture’ as parts of an integral whole, and we cannot deconstruct the conditions of knowledge without interrogating the conditions of the possibility of a culture. The apparent topic of Xenophanic critique, then, is Homeric ideology and its codification throughout Greek Archaic culture, but its deeper theme is the incapacity of an individual or society to comprehend and articulate the truth of the Whole. Furthermore, the idea inspiring such a comprehensive programme of axiological criticism suggests a new charter of values—a new form of life centred around the culture of reflexivity itself. This is why Xenophanes is of such seminal importance for our investigation of the genealogy of the forms of self-reflexivity. The only other figure of comparable status during this period of Greek history is Heraclitus. Like Heraclitus, Xenophanes found his own voice by criticizing the illustrious dead, and among those he faulted were Homer, Hesiod, Thales, Pythagoras, and Epimenides: ‘Homer and Hesiod attribute to the Gods all 289

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things that are shameful and a reproach among mankind: theft, adultery, and mutual deception’ (B 11; cf. B 12). The criticism of Homer in Fragment 11, however, is bound up with the criticism of the institutional ‘incarnation’ of Homeric values, the Pan-Hellenic Games, the predominance of the gymnasion and the palaistra in Hellenic life. By rejecting the athletic contests as an ideal Xenophanes moves against the grain of Greek aristocratic discourse. For Xenophanes there is no necessary relationship between athletic (or more generally ‘belligerent’) excellence (arete) and the just City. Physical skill, horsemanship, strength, and the like are of no direct relevance to a community’s moral excellence (eunomia) or the wisdom (sophia) of its citizens. In fact activities like boxing and the pancration pervert the Good. Xenophanes inverts the traditional scale of values; an athlete trained to bodily perfection, but knowing nothing of wisdom, is only half a man. He goes even further: the pursuit of wisdom should be ranked higher and be regarded as more useful than the brute strength of men and horses. Everyday opinion is mistaken in praising athletic strength and skill, for it is wisdom that leads to a just society: only reflexivity can sustain the life of the polis. By rejecting doxa and orthodox opinion, we are instructed in another version of excellence, oriented toward a source of arete that is truly first in nature and in human conduct. This Xenophanes finds in the authority of knowledge and wisdom. As an alternative to Homeric culture he proposes the more difficult path of episteme, knowledge achieved through reflexive inquiry. No doubt physical skill and health will form a part of such a life, but the excellence of the body without the foundational excellence of the mind and soul produces barbarism. The critique of Homeric culture licensed the claim that ‘modern poiesis’—in the form of Xenophanes’ philosophical vision of reason—rather than ‘epic poetry’ should carry the torch of education and wisdom; and that Xenophanes’ own discourse should play a vanguard position in leading mankind to a new poetic and political dispensation (identified in the poem with ‘good order’ or eunomia). Philosopher-poets should assume the role of legislators for mankind. The critique of the institution of the Games is grounded in an even more comprehensive ‘critique of religion’, focused in particular on Hesiodic cosmogony and Homeric epic narrative. Xenophanes rejects every traditional account of divinity on two related counts: first, their descriptions demean the divine, and second, they fail to embody reason in their logoi. Both charges converge upon one central point: we must reject all anthropomorphic mimesis and imagery when speaking of absolute transcendence: ‘Mortals believe that gods were born and dress themselves like men, and look and talk as a man does’ (Fr. 14); conventional religion depicts the gods engaged in all the worst vices of human beings: ‘Homer and Hesiod attribute to the gods all things that are shameful and a reproach among mankind: theft, adultery, and mutual deception’ (Fr. 11, Sextus Empiricus, Adv. math. 193). When measured against the authority of experience, intellect, and reason, 290

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these accounts prove to be puerile, barbaric, and unfit to serve as the voice of civilized society: the gods of Olympus are nothing more than mythical projections of human needs, desires, and relationships (cf. Heraclitus Frs 5, 14, 15). Men have projected their own image upon the gods and then taken this image for reality. As men are born, clothe themselves, and use language to communicate so the gods conduct themselves in a similar fashion. Once more, we should note that the criticism of anthropomorphism in Fragment 14 (Clement Stromata 5.109.2) in the context of early Greek culture had immediate political and cultural consequences. Religion and political institutions were inseparably connected; and any attack on religion was invariably seen as an attempt to destabilize the civic order. 3 XENOPHANES’ NATURAL THEOLOGY Xenophanes also formulated original ideas about the nature of the physical world. These are indicative of a secular and naturalistic approach to terrestrial and meteorological phenomena. 3.1 Naturalism and scepticism Against the evidence of the senses and received traditions, he advocated the practice of inquiry and critical reason. He directs his naturalistic scepticism against all dogmatic epistemic claims. This surfaces in such basic claims as Fragment 29: ‘Everything is born of earth, and everything returns to the earth’ (cf. B 28 on the infinite ‘depth’ of the earth; and B 27, 29, 30, and 33 on the origins of mankind from earth and water; also Hippolytus, Ref. 1.14.3– 5). We have already noted the same naturalistic orientation in his account of the rainbow: ‘And she whom they call Iris, she too is actually a cloud, purple and flame-red and yellow to behold’ (B 32). Aëtius also cites Xenophanes’ claim that the sun and the stars are formed from clouds (Aëtius 2.20.3), and Hippolytus refers to his thesis concerning innumerable suns and moons (Ref. 1.14.3) (similarly at A 38 on the stars, A 40–5 on the sun and moon) and his speculation about recurrent inundation and catastrophic environmental change from the discovery of the fossils of sea creatures in the quarries of Syracuse (Ref. 1.14. 5; DK 21 A 33). Xenophanes also affected a sceptical stance toward the possibility and extent of human knowledge. To gain wisdom is an arduous task, requiring much effort and travail, for ‘Truly the gods have not revealed to mortals all things from the beginning; but mortals by long seeking [by inquiry] discover what is better’ (B 18, Stobaeus, Anth. 1.8.2). And we are not even sure that truth is possible—only God can be said to possess certain knowledge: As for the certain truth (saphes), no man has known, nor will any know it, concerning the gods and about all the other things that I am saying. 291

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For however much he might chance to say what has actually been brought to pass, still he himself does not know; it is opinion (dokos) that is constructed in all cases. (DK B 34, Sextus Empiricus, Adv. math. VII, 49, and 110)6 One well-known fragment qualifies his own wisdom concerning the nature of God: even under the most optimum circumstances all that mortals can hope to attain are icons resembling the truth: ‘Let these then be held as opinions/ conjectures resembling (eikos) the truth’ (DK B 35, Plutarch Symp. IX.7.746B). 3.2 The critique of anthropomorphism and the pretence of absolute knowledge (Frs DK 21B 10–16) Anthropomorphism is the root error of every unreflexive attitude toward the gods. Xenophanes’ well-known ethnology of cultural projection appears in Fragments 15 and 16: The Ethiopians [the generic Greek term for Africans during this period] imagine their gods as black with snub noses. The Thracians imagine their gods as blue-eyed and red-haired. The Egyptians imagine their gods as light-complexioned with black hair. If oxen and lions had gods and could paint them, their gods would be like oxen and lions. But the divine is one and has no countenance and no colour. (DK B 15, B 16, Clement, Stromata 7.4. 22.1) Or in the deconstructive humour reported by Clement of Alexandria in his Stromata—Miscellanies (5.14.109): If cows and horses or lions had hands or could draw with their hands and make the things men can make, then horses would draw the forms of gods like horses, cows like cows, and they would make their bodies similar in shape to those which each had themselves. (B15) In place of such unreflexive beliefs Xenophanes advanced his own conception of God as a transcendent divinity without any concrete predicates: God is an absolute Unity, a ‘One God’ utterly distinct from any of the conventional divine attributions.7 3.3 The absolute unity of god Xenophanes’ critique culminates in an attempt to understand ‘the divine’ in non-anthropomorphic terms as ‘the One’ (to hen). Where ‘mortals think that gods were born and that they had garments and voice and shape like them’ (Fr. 14; cf. B 11 and B 12), the truth is that the ‘one God’ is beyond such predicates, 292

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in no way similar to man either in body or thought (Fr. 23; also Frs 23–6). God is One, the divine unity of nature and being: ‘One god, greatest among gods and men; In no way similar to mortals in body or in mind’ (DK 21 B 23).8 Xenophanes’ account of the unity of God is not, however, a negative theology. His Godhead functions in a characteristically Ionian way. First, God is a living, sensing, thinking being: ‘God sees as a whole, thinks as a whole, hears as a whole’ (DK 21 B 24). The seeing, thinking, listening God is also a perfectly motionless existence. The divine Being causes the whole kosmos to move while remaining absolutely motionless, as ‘is seeming’ or befitting an eternal and deathless divinity: ‘God remains in the selfsame place without moving; nor is it fitting for him to move hither and thither, changing his place’ (DK 21 B 26). Finally, Xenophanes is at pains to stress that the immobile Godhead governs and controls the world by mind: as the creative origin of the kosmos God moves all things, setting ‘all things in motion’ by the Thought of his Mind (noou phreni): ‘Effortlessly he sets all things astir; by the power of his mind alone’, DK 21 B 25, Simplicius, Physics 23.19 (in Fr. 25, the crucial part of the Greek sentence reads ‘apaneuthe ponoio noous phreni’— God—the One (to hen)—sets all things into motion by Thought while eternally remaining completely motionless).9 We see that Xenophanes is still irresistibly drawn to anthropomorphic descriptions—ironically given his rebuke of Homer for using similar predicates -in the same moment that he demystifies earlier pictures of the Godhead: God is still possessed of a body of some kind; God is the sensorium of Being— an existence who sees, hears, and thinks as a whole; ‘the divine’ which remains motionless while setting everything in motion by the thought of his Mind. Yet these predicates block any simple form of monotheism or pantheism. God and World are not identical; otherwise why would some account of God’s activity be necessary? God is closer to the Nous of Anaxagoras or the ‘steering’ process we have already met in Anaximander’s Apeiron. But unlike the latter, Xenophanes’ self-thinking divinity is not the vortex or the Prime Mover of the Universe. We witness a return of repressed metaphors— predicates which Xenophanes has never really abandoned. He has simply displaced traditional images with icons of divine unity and mindfulness. God is pictured in self-reflexive metaphors (a practice which Aristotle would continue in his Metaphysics when describing the First Cause of the universe— the Unmoved Mover—as Self-Reflexive Thinking, a Self-Thinking-Thought).10 4 FROM XENOPHANES TO PARMENIDES Xenophanes was a remarkably creative transitional figure in the development of ontological reflection. He combined the inspiration of a god-intoxicated enthusiast with the sober mind of one acquainted with the limits of human knowledge (Gomperz, 1920: vol. 1, 164). In the same creative act he created a new form of ontotheological speculation and provided the instruments for 293

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the critique of all such theorizing. His mode of thought was still embedded in the world of Archaic culture and unlike his successor Parmenides he developed the concept of the unity of God ‘by reaction from Homeric anthropomorphic polytheism’, whereas Parmenides would arrive at the absolute sphere of Being by logical inference (KR: 171). Xenophanes opened two paths: one leading to a natural theology of radical transcendence (‘God’ or ‘Being’ is completely alien to or radically different from all our available descriptions and ordinary modes of comprehension), and the other leading to a concept of pure reason or Nous. It is not inconceivable that Parmenides began his own poem on Being by attempting to reconcile these two themes in the unity of Being and Thought.11 For Xenophanes the One is ‘greatest among gods and men’ (Fr. 23). Where Thales found the world to be full of gods (and may even have identified ‘the divine’ as the mind of the cosmos), Xenophanes identifies God with Unity, with the Whole and the arche of all things, ‘gods and men’. God is not a material or substantial arche of the universe, however, but the oneness of a divine, immobile ‘thinker’. Whether we call this ‘early monotheism’ or the beginnings of ‘rational theology’ is beside the point. What is crucial is the rejection of everyday accounts of ‘the divine’ and the recommendation to think deeper about the true nature of transcendence which Xenophanes now links with an ethical concept of the Whole. It was this resolute defence of transcendence which makes Xenophanes a forerunner of Parmenides’ thought.12 Another textual link between Xenophanes and Parmenides is provided by Fragments 18 and 34–6 which speak of the difficult Way of Truth: genuine knowledge requires the pain and suffering of a quest, it is an arduous journey rather than a sudden insight or disembodied possession: ‘The gods did not reveal, from the beginning, all things to mortals; but in the course of time, through seeking we may discover what is better’ (Fr. 18). While the opinions gained by the senses (what Parmenides would call the illusory Way of Seeming) deceive, the pursuit of truth is possible through rational inquiry; but even here there are limits that cannot be crossed: But as for certain truth, no man has seen it; nor will there ever be a man who knows about the gods and about the things of which I speak. And even if by chance he were to speak the final truth, he himself would nevertheless be unaware of it; opinion (seeming) is fixed by fate upon all things. (Fr. 34) We have to accept the limits to inquiry; compared to God no man is wise: we must remain eternally vigilant, guided by the poignant rule: ‘Let these things be stated as conjectures, icons of truth’, Fr. 35. However, these ‘resemblances’ or rational icons are not nothing; they adumbrate the possibility of a genuine knowledge of things to be gained by resourceful investigation. Xenophanes’ philosophy makes no sense if we approach his epistemology as a negative 294

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scepticism in the style of later Hellenistic Pyrrhonism. The path of seeming is no second-best, but simply a recognition of the limits of cognition and the fragility of the human condition. Xenophanes may have also speculated about the different ‘grades’ or ‘degrees’ of knowledge; indeed Fragment 18 with its ‘truth-revealing’ view of thinking and inquiry supports this view (cf. Fränkel, 1975:336). What is fundamental here is that he took the significant step in defining knowledge as a finite process gained through experience: whatever knowledge was granted to human beings was as secure—or as fragile—as the way of a journey (B 18, 34, 35, 36, 38). ‘Knowledge’ cannot be gained by mere speculation on the nature of things in the style of earlier thinkers; it is gained through work and effort, and will be as rich as the human possibilities of interrogative journeying. Like his favourite icon of the Journey, knowing is both a process and an experience—where mortals strive to discover ‘what is better’. Knowledge is ‘experience’ in the sense that the German language gives to the word erfahrung—a quest that involves work and selftransformation. One important corollary of Xenophanes searching ‘Way of Truth’ is that there can be no unequivocal terminus of reflexive experience; neither the Gods nor Absolute Truth are to be posited as the foundation or justification of research: reflexive inquiry is possible without the burden of absolute certainty (‘as for certain truth, no man has seen it’).13

PARMENIDES AND THE UNITY OF BEING It is all one to me where I begin; for I shall come back there again in time. (Parmenides, Fragment 5) I have a kind of reverence, not so much for Melissus and the others, who say that ‘All is one and at rest’, as for the great leader himself, Parmenides, venerable and aweful, as in Homeric language he may be called;—for him I should be ashamed to approach in a spirit unworthy of him. I met him once when he was an old man, and I was a mere youth, and he appeared to me to have a glorious depth of mind. And I am afraid that we may not understand his words, and may be still farther from understanding his meaning. (Socrates, in Plato, Theaetetus 183E–184A) Parmenides seems to fasten on that which is one in definition, Melissus on that which is one in matter, for which the former says that it is limited, the latter that it is unlimited; while Xenophanes, the first of these partisans of the One (for Parmenides is said to have been his pupil), gave no clear statement, nor does he seem to have grasped the nature of either of these causes. Now these thinkers, as we said, must be neglected for the purposes of the present inquiry—two of them 295

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entirely, as being a little too naive, viz. Xenophanes and Melissus; but Parmenides seems in places to speak with more insight. (Aristotle, Metaphysics 1. 5. 986b15–30) 5 INTRODUCTION In terms of the impact of his thought on his contemporaries and immediate successors, Parmenides has been described as the Kant of the ancient Greek world. Classical philosophy followed in an epigonal relationship to the debates generated by Parmenides’ revolutionary ideas. Indeed his Poem on Being is frequently cited as the source text of Western metaphysical thinking—the origin of an ontology of absolute Being. Parmenides was a native of the city-state of Elea in southern Italy. He was born between 515 BC and 492 BC and may have lived well into the period of the Greek enlightenment (c. 440 BC).14 He was the son of a wealthy Eleatic family and is said to have founded a school—influenced by the Pythagorean communities of southern Italy—in the neighbouring Italian cities, where he taught his own rigorous ontology to the Elean élite. He was also an active politician, famous as a legislator for his native city of Elea (Plutarch, Adversus Colote 1226A). Theophrastus and Diogenes Laertius make him a pupil of Xenophanes and a certain Ameinias, a Pythagorean ‘who converted him to the quiet life’—presumably the philosophical life of contemplation (DL 9.23). In his dialogue Parmenides, Plato has the elderly thinker visit Athens during the Great Panathenaea of 449/450 BC accompanied by his pupil, Zeno, conversing with the youthful Socrates and contesting the everyday Heracliteanism of common-sense and the more elaborate doctrines which grounded knowledge in sensory experience (Parmenides 127A-C; cf. Athenaeus, The Deipnosopbists 11.505ff.; DL 9.25). This would give a dramatic date around 450 BC making Parmenides a man in his sixty-fifth year.15 His main work, an epic poem on Being which formed the centrepiece of his work ‘On Nature’ (DL 8.55–6), is conventionally dated to the period 480–475 BC.16 6 THE BEGINNINGS OF ONTOLOGY: THE PHILOSOPHY OF ABSOLUTE BEING 6.1 The Unity of Being: the concept ‘einai’ Parmenides was one of the only thinkers of the late Archaic period who lived to see the beginnings of Classical philosophy at Athens. Indeed Socrates may have been one of Parmenides’ contemporaries. And Plato, as we have observed, could stage an idealized confrontation between the young Socrates and the 65-year-old Parmenides in a dialogue named after the philosopher.17 As a colonist of the Italian city of Elea, Parmenides would have had a first-hand 296

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experience of Pythagorean metaphysics and Orphic religion as well as some knowledge of Heraclitus’ cosmic theorizing and Xenophanes’ theology18 and perhaps the new pluralist natural philosophy of Leucippus and Democritus. Traditional histories of Greek philosophy present his intuition as both an attack on the philosophy of Heraclitus and popular ‘Heracliteanism’ and as a radical continuation of the monistic implications of the earlier search for a unitary arche of all things. His poem on Being is often described as the first text to provide a purely rational account of the unity of Being by rigorously deducing the impossibility of Non-being (and with it the problematic of naturalistic change that formed the centrepiece of Milesian cosmology and the idea of universal change associated with Heraclitus). He resolved the Milesian problem of the cOne over the Many’ by logically denying the intelligibility of one of its terms: difference, plurality, and the manifold world appearing to the senses do not exist; only Being can be said to ‘be’. Reason has no other ‘object’ than absolute Being. In this way, the problem of the ‘One-in-the-Many’ is solved by absorbing all sensible existence into the intelligible unity of Being. Generation, change, and multiplicity are simply illusory appearances. There ‘is’ in fact only ‘the One’ (to hen) and since the One is timeless, tenseless existence, the singular topic of pure reason is absolute presence—the eternal unity of Being. This is the precise point where the project of early Greek protophilosophy becomes fundamental ontology. And in this sense it is correct to claim that Parmenides’ thought begins and ends with the question of the necessary nature of absolute Being. Or said more liguistically, Parmenides’ thought explores the ‘timeless’ predicates implicated in any statement containing the term ‘being’ or ‘is’. To say the same in logological terms, Parmenides’ text raises the question of the logical status of a discourse that could correspond with the ‘truth of Being’: what kind of speech can convey the divine ‘oneness’ of to on? Abstracted from its literary context the deductive elimination of Nonbeing and Plurality from the word einai, ‘to be’ or ‘Being’, might be reconstructed as follows: (i) Only Being is (esti=‘[it] is’); (ii) for Being ‘to be’, it must be one (hen); (iii) the One-Being must be unchangeable, neither coming-to-be nor passingaway (or else, definitionally, it could not be said to ‘be One’—to ‘be One’ Being must be identical with itself); (iv) hence, Non-being cannot be: what common sense calls ‘the Many’ (things, objects, differences, plurality, change, becoming, etc.) are in fact the Same (the many are illusory appearances of Being which remains, self-centred as the totality of ‘what is’: Being can neither come to be nor pass away, it is forever the Same and thus to ‘think Being’ is to think that which does not change); (v) ‘therefore’ thinking and being are one and the same thing, only ‘Being is’. 297

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6.2 The unity of being and thinking We should now enter into the strange paradox of Parmenides’ ‘solution’ of the problem of the One and the Many. What is the significance of the thought that ‘thinking’ and ‘being’ are one? and that only Being is? What, in other words, is the significance of conceiving the unity of Being and Thinking as Identity? Fragment 3 reads: to gar auto noein estin te kai einai (cf. DK 28 B 8, lines 34–6). As might be expected, this phrase has been translated and interpreted in many different ways. Its most literal rendition points toward a thoroughgoing logic of identity: ‘For to think and to be is one and the same thing’(Taran, 1965:41). If the stress is placed on ‘thinking’ (noesis, noein) we produce a gloss which articulates the identity of the sayable and the existent: ‘Thinking and the thought that being is are the same, for you will not find thinking apart form that which is, in relation to which it is uttered.’ Or ‘What can be thought is only the thought that it is’: it is the same thing for thought and for being. Only an absolute, timeless, permanent ‘being’ is food for thought: thinking and being are the same. If the accent is placed on its ontological reference, the sayable and the existent are one and the same ‘entity’: ‘The same thing is there to he thought and is there to be’ (in the sense that ‘Thought is not distinct from being, for it is thought of the existent’ (Zeller, 1969:61; cf. Windelband 1956:59– 60: ‘Being (das Sein) alone remains when all difference has been abstracted from the content determinations of actuality. From this follows the fundamental doctrine of the Eleatics, that only the one abstract Being is’). Wherever there is thought there will always be the thought of what is or exists (for only Being can be said to truly be: hence the ‘timeless’ thesis, estin einai: ‘to think of anything is to think of it as being’ (Cherniss, 1977:81), ‘because the same thing is there for thinking and for being’ (Gallop, 1984:57). We cannot think of that which ‘is not’, that which has no existence. Every knowable domain must conform to the logic of identity. This is the radical rule of thought which Parmenides transmits to his successors. Or, finally, in a more deconstructionist vein: ‘the thinking of being as presence in logos’.19 The common core of these versions is contained in the idea that only Being as the One (to hen) can be the object of thought; Non-being in any of its modes or appearances is literally unthinkable. Thus Überweg: he [Parmenides] founds the doctrine of unity on the conception of being: only being is, non-being is not; there is no becoming. That which truly is exists in the form of a single and eternal sphere, whose space it fills continuously. Plurality and change are an empty semblance. The existent alone is thinkable, and only the thinkable is real. (Überweg, 1887:54) Any ontological science or cosmology concerned with the temporal genesis of Being from Non-being is thus radically misconceived—and quite literally, an incoherent project. This is the substance of Zeller’s gloss: ‘The same thing 298

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exists for thinking and for being’ and for Kathleen Freeman’s reformulation: ‘that which it is possible to think, and that which is, are identical’ (repeated in John Burnet’s translation, 1930:173). If we delete the reference to ‘things’ we come close to the version proposed by recent deconstructionist commentators: ‘For One are Thinking and Being.’ This is Heidegger’s version of Parmenides as one of the first Western thinkers to articulate the concept of Being as aletheia: Being is always ‘already-there’, the ‘a priori’ unveiling presupposed by all subsequent thinking and comportment. Thus the line ‘to gar auto noein estin te ka einai should be translated: ‘Being is the same as the apprehending of the entity in its being’ (1992a: 148; cf. Heidegger, 1992b). Less speculative minds, however, have viewed Parmenides’ statement ‘to think and to be are the same thing’ formulated in DK B 8 more prosaically, for example, as a poetic statement of the basic law of formal logic, the law of identity. Parmenides discovered the principle of logical identity, which later became the canonic rule of non-contradiction in the syllogistic algorithms formalized by Aristotle. However, from our knowledge of Presocratic patterns of thought— particularly of earlier cosmological speculation and philosophical discourse, this kind of interpretation is seriously flawed. The principle of noncontradiction was certainly used by Parmenides (and as we will see, overused by his disciple, Zeno), but it was not the central theme of his poem. Despite his antagonism toward his predecessors, Parmenides’ central intuition is closer to the spirit of Ionian cosmology with its notion of phusis that ‘presences’ or ‘generates’ Being than it is to the principles of Aristotelian logic. His thought moves in the discursive field of utterances such as ‘Being must come from Being’ or ‘Out of Nothing comes Nothing’. Zeller’s gloss preserves some of these older connotations: ‘Only that knowledge has truth which shows us in all things this one invariable being, and this is reason (logos)’ (Zeller, 1969:61). It may even be anachronistic to conceptualize Parmenides’ notion of ‘thinking’ with the language of ‘thought’ as this has developed within modern reflective philosophy from Plato and Aristotle onwards. For example, consider the way Windelband shapes Parmenides’ sentence into the terminology of German idealism: In a still obscure and undeveloped form the correlation of consciousness and Being hovered before his mind. All thinking is referred to something thought, and therefore has Being for its content. Thinking that refers to Nothing, and is therefore contentless, cannot be. (1956:59) Following this path we produce a reading in which ‘being’ and ‘thinking’ are treated as conceptual synonyms: ‘being and thought are the same thing’.

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6.3 The Poem on Being To navigate in these aporetic straits we have no other alternative than to turn to the text and explicate its logological presuppositions. The first thing we observe is that Parmenides’ conveyed his thoughts on the absolute unity of Being in a hexameter poem on Being (or on ‘Nature’).20 One hundred and fifty-four surviving lines of his poem are said to have come from his lost work On Nature preserved in the writings of Simplicius in the course of his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics (144.26). Simplicius we recall was a Neoplatonist commentator on Aristotle’s works who wrote in the sixth century AD. Earlier references to Parmenides’ work can be found in Theophrastus’ Periphuseos historia. The Pröem to the verse work is also preserved by Sextus Empiricus in his Adversus mathematicos (7.11 1ff.)— probably lifted from an unknown Sceptical Academic author or even from Stoic sources. Other references to the work can be found in Plato, Aristotle, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Plotinus, and other ancient commentators.21 To go further into the Parmenidean universe we must turn to the poetic text of his extant thought and examine not merely what is said—as above— but also how the thought was codified and presented. 6.4 The rhetorical construction of Parmenides’ poem Parmenides presented his theory of Being in an epic poem which might be titled The Way of Being or The Way of Truth. This singular textual act was manifestly flying in the face of the Milesian shift away from ‘oral’ genres and toward prose accounts of the kosmos and nature; to this extent at the level of style Parmenides’ thought marks a return to the earlier precedent of Xenophanes’ literary praxis. The text is divided into three parts: a ‘Pröem’ or introductory section—the prooemium consisting of thirty-two lines, a section usually referred to as ‘The Way of Truth’ (or Aletheia) (seventy-six lines), and a third section, ‘The Way of Seeming’ (forty-four extant lines). Fragment 1 is thought to contain most of the prologue of the work; it sets the mythological framework for the heroic quest for a knowledge of true Being, situating the famous contrast between Truth and Opinion (Being and Seeming) by means of a range of traditional rhetorical images and rhetorical strategies. We can begin our deconstruction of the work by systematically explicating these strategies. For the purposes of analysis I have divided the poem into sections using square brackets; the commentary which follows refers primarily to the text enclosed by these brackets. The Pröem: Fragment 1 (28 B 1.1–32) [1]

The mares which carry me as far as my desire reached…

Parmenides—or, more precisely, the ‘youth’ who acts as the ‘hero’ or actant 300

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of the poem—commences his journey with desire (thumos/Eros), the traditional figure for love and need (cf. Diotima’s speech in Plato, Symposium 201D–212A). Thumos is usually translated as ‘appetite’, ‘anger’ or ‘spirit’ (‘spirited’—as we have seen in Homer thumos is the source of both human affectivity and intellect) but in the context of Fragment 1 might be more appropriately understood as ‘desire’. Eros is personified as a feminine source of insight—it is the goddesses and not ‘the God’ who lead Parmenides’ soul to the place of light and truth (aletheia). Eros seeds the desire to know the truth of the Whole: a spirited ‘need’ to see the nature of Being unmediated by the persuasive illusions of doxa and common sense (what later tradition designated as the ‘Way of Seeming’), to escape from the erroneous ways and beliefs of ‘mortals’, and achieve enlightenment (cf. an analogous linguistic context in Heraclitus DK B 85). The goddesses are, as we shall see as the poem proceeds, solar divinities—‘daughters of the Sun’ (Helios): the same glowing Sun that grants an illusory light to sensory knowledge and the manifold visible world of appearances—which Parmenides as a seeker after the Absolute (well-rounded Truth—Aletheia) has to pass beyond in order to discover the Truth, ‘the unshakeable heart of well-rounded Truth’—‘the unshakeable heart of persuasive reality’(B 1.29–30; cf. B 8.51). These images may have been drawn from much more ancient hymns—particularly to the ‘sun god’ Apollo. The journey into an unfamiliar landscape will take the philosopher away from every city and onward to the Goddess of Truth. [2]

the goddesses who were driving…the well-discerning horses were straining the chariot and the maidens were leading the way…

The metaphor of a journey by chariot driven by gods or goddesses to the ‘abode of the Gods, to steep Olympus’ is a stock motif in Homer (for example, the goddess Iris leading the goddess Cypris to safety after she had been wounded by the hero Diomedes, Il. 5.361ff.); the image of inquiry as a journey, as we have seen, was central to Xenophanes’ epistemology and becomes the leitmotif of Parmenides’ poem (Gallop, 1984:6); horses also function as a concrete symbol for the directive energy of the passions and eros—we still speak of ‘bridling’ the emotions and ‘curbing’ desire. Together these figures concretize the abstract idea of the philosopher’s quest as a path (oida, way) which transcends everyday life, a journey involving the inquirer’s whole thumos, taking him, like Odysseus, ‘far from the well-worn paths of men’ (B 1 27). Note also that the horses are ‘discerning’ or ‘sagacious’ (in Coxon’s translation, 1986. 45), but they still require guidance from the ‘Daughters of the Sun’; in placing his soul in the hands of the goddesses Parmenides’ text recalls Hesiod’s use of the figure of the Muses (Theogony, Prologue, 29–35) to disavow personal responsibility for articulating the Real and the True as a divine Whole (but cf. Works and Days 10.661–2); for an account of Parmenides’ poem on Being as competing with Hesiod’s Theogony see Jaeger, 1947:90–108, esp. 92–9; also Mourelatos, 1970: ch. 1). 301

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[3]

The axle in the naves…glowed…whenever the maidens, daughters of the Sun, having left the Palace of Night, hastened towards the light, having pushed back their veils from their heads…

The Chariot’s glowing Axles, the Sun, the goddesses as daughters of the Sun, and Light all rhetorically prefigure the coming contrast between absolute Truth and Darkness. The contrast between light and darkness is, of course, the key rhetorical figure in this part of the text. The ancient polarity runs through the earliest literature of Greece, particularly in the opposition of the realm of the Gods and the gloomy realms of Hades and Tartarus—the Halls of Night ‘that even the Gods abhor’ (Hesiod, Theogony 736ff.; cf. the parody in Aristophanes’ Birds). In Hesiod the realms of Light and Night (the ‘house of Night’ (744)) are also guarded by massive bronze doors (Theogony. 749–50; cf. ‘the gates of the Sun’ at Od. 24.11–12 and 10.86). Light—the videological metaphor par excellence—is the concrete medium of Truth. Non-being is symbolized by Darkness, Sleep (‘the brother of death’), and Death (‘The radiant Sun (Helios) never looks upon them with his beams, neither as he ascends into heaven, nor as he descends from heaven’ (Theogony. 760–1). The ‘revelatory’ image of truth is symbolized by the unveiling of the goddesses-the veil is lifted as they move out of darkness and face toward the domain of Light (phaos). In the Iliad, Hera’s Chariot is itself an icon of glowing light, constructed as it is from gleaming metals: ‘its curved wheels of bronze, eight-spoked, about the iron axle-tree, bronze tires, silver naves with a car plaited with gold and silver’ (Il. 5.725ff.). The goddesses leading the soul along the Path of Truth are already ‘in the truth’, revealing their faces to the fortunate witness of ‘the true’. As a passage fraught with danger both charioteer and passenger must prepare themselves for the forthcoming revelation. A contemporary textual example of this imagery can be found in Pindar: ‘First did the Fates in their golden chariot bring heavenly Themis, wise in counsel, by a gleaming pathway from the springs of Ocean to the sacred stair of Olympus, there to be the primal bride of the saviour Zeus. And she bore him the Hours with golden fillet and with gleaming fruit—the Hours that are for ever true (aletheia)’ (Pindar, 1919:515). The goddesses’ act of throwing back their veils has a particular resonance with the Greek word aletheia, which can be translated as ‘revealing’ or ‘unveiling’. [4]

Gates separate the paths of Day and Night…filled with great folding doors, of which Dike, whose vengeance is stern, holds the alternate keys. The maidens addressed Dike with soft words, cunningly persuading her to thrust instantly aside the bolted bar from the gate…

The passage from Night into the light of Day is not without resistance. The gates marking the ways of Night and Day (of Non-being and Being) are guarded by Dike (Justice/Retributive Justice) who the maidens ‘persuade gently’ to unlock and throw open to the thumos of Parmenides. We 302

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immediately think of Heraclitus’ Fragment 94 which holds that ‘the sun will not overstep its measures, otherwise the Furies, ministers of Justice, will find it out’. The figure of ‘avenging Justice’, goddess of retribution, guarding the Way toward Truth, also indexes the sociopolitical content of Parmenides’ Pröem and its underlying conception of Being. Some commentators, like Herman Fränkel and before him Hans Kelsen, have suggested that this ethicaljuridical conception of the world prefigures the idea of a law of nature as an absolute norm. In early Greek poetry Dike is personified as holding the scales of retribution, measuring out the ‘just portions’ of right and wrong to mortals and gods. Dike apportions rights and wrongs without concern for the appeals of reasons of men. Hence the idea of the ‘implacability’ of Dike. But Dike is also linked to the beginnings of wisdom. In Aeschylus, for instance, we find the workings of Justice as a symbol of the connection between truth and suffering. ‘Wisdom’ (at Agamemnon 250–1, mathein) is gained at the price of suffering. Parmenides has to some extent humanized the remorseless impartiality of Aeschylean Justice: Dike is open to rational persuasion. Only divine intervention (significantly, persuasion by means of ‘soft words’ and ‘cunning’ devices) removes the obstacle to the Path of Being; the bolt is withdrawn instantaneously, the Path is opened in a sudden release of the lock. For Parmenides’ indebtedness to Homer and the epic tradition at this point see Coxon, 1986:9–13: Hera and Athena drive through the gate of heaven to speak to Zeus, who is on the summit of Olympos; Parmenides drives through the gate of the region of light to visit the goddess who with other divinities inhabits it. Hera’s chariot is described as ‘flaming’; the axle of Parmenides’ chariot ‘blazes’. The gates of heaven in Homer open of their own accord; so perhaps do the gates of Parmenides’ fundamental revelation of Being as the Real. The gate in Homer is in the keeping of the Horae (viz, Eunomia, Dike and Eirene); that in Parmenides is in the keeping of Dike. (9–10) Cf. Mourelatos, 1970:40–7, 71 passim; Fränkel, 1975:351–70, 351–2. [5]

the gates open, disclosing a wide, gaping space…straight through the gates, the maidens drove the horses and the chariot along the path…

The Hesiodic images of Theogony 736ff. recur. Immediately beyond the Gates, lies a ‘wide opening’, Space, Chasm, or Abyss: the ‘place’ immediately behind the Gates invites further movement and reflection; we must follow the path to its destination (the Way to truth is a ‘disclosure’, but nothing ensures that the open path will be followed). Cf. Gallop on the significance of the point at which Night and Day meet: Even the antithesis between Night and Day, which will later emerge as the foundation of all other mortal dualisms has there been transcended. 303

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In that region all is a single, undifferentiated unity. Hence the scene of Parmenides’ poetic ‘vision’ anticipates the conclusion of his philosophical argument. The setting of his ‘revelation’ neatly encapsulates its content. (1984:7) [6]

the Goddess received me kindly, took my right hand in hers, spoke and addressed me thus:

The Goddess of Truth receives the searcher for truth, takes the philosopher’s right hand in hers, and speaks to him with ‘gladness’. The youth of the poem -emblematic of Parmenides’ self—is taken into the confidence of the Goddess. After transcending the vast chasm between the world of mortals and after struggling to survive the passage through the Gates of Justice and House of Night, the philosophos has already displayed considerable courage and commitment with respect to the task of knowing the truth—he is received, understandably, as already someone who is participating in divine things, a person open to the radical insight into the total illusion of what passes for human ‘knowledge’. Making the Goddess’ speech the ultimate source of wisdom also allows Parmenides to avoid the danger of hubris by displacing the ground and authority of his insight into the nature of Being to an omniscient divinity; while this has a manifestly rhetorical function in the text it also has a latent syntactical motivation in stemming reflexive criticism: how could this insight into pure Being be rendered intelligible by the speech of a finite being -the concrete person named Parmenides? The speech of the Goddess, in transcending mortal perspectives, functions as a divine perspective upon the Whole—as it were, the speech of Being itself. Cf.: Unlike a human speaker or thinker, she may claim without instant selfcontradiction to be speaking and thinking of a birthless and deathless reality. Her speech and thought about it are perpetuated in Parmenides’ verses: she continues to dwell upon it for all time, whether anyone heeds her words or not. Thus, her authority not only underwrites the deliverance of a mortal poet’s reason; it also raises those deliverances to the only level on which they could possibly make sense.22 [7]

‘Young man, who in company of immortal charioteers come to our dwelling…welcome—for no evil destiny has sent you out to come this way (it is indeed a way remote from the paths of men); no, it is by divine command and right…’

The philosophos is welcomed by the Goddess herself and consoled that this is not the place of death; the way is granted by Right Ordinance (Themis) and Justice (Dike) (lines 27–8). The Goddess recognizes the ‘right and just’ auspices of the genuine seeker after truth: only those guided by Right can find the Way of Truth in its remoteness and uncharted nature. 304

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[8]

‘You will learn everything: both the immoveable heart of well-rounded Truth, and the opinions of mortals, in which there is no truly convincing force—nevertheless, you will learn how these opinions, which pervade all things, had to be acceptable’

The Truth of all things encompasses the true way of ‘well-rounded Truth’ (Simplicius’ Aletheis eukukleos) and its opposite, the world of seeming and appearances—the opinions of mortals in which there is no true belief at all (edes broton doxas, tais ouk eni pistis alethes): This journey then is simply the Pythagorean katharsis, which Plato identifies as the philosopher’s study to free the soul from the body and as proceeding by a road which is the sole avenue in human life to the discovery of reality and life with the gods. The prologue may and probably should be read as an account of the way in which the poet at some moment actually experienced his past pursuit of the philosophic life and his first achievement of a state of philosophic illumination.23 Fragment 2 (B 2.1–8) [9]

Come, I will tell you (and you should accept the word when you have heard it), the ways of inquiry which alone are to be thought: the first, that says that [It] is, and that it is not possible for [It] not to be—this is the path of true persuasion, for it follows Truth; the other [path], that says that [It] is not and that it must be that [It] is not—this Way, I tell you, is undiscoverable; for you can neither recognise that which is not, nor articulate it

The Goddess speaks and asks assent for the Truth of the Two Paths of Inquiry ((h)odoi, paths or roads, is the plural of hodos); there are only two ways of inquiry: one is the Way of Truth and one leads to the impossible thought that Being is-not. However the second path is, paradoxically, said to be unrecognizable, unthinkable, undiscoverable: the Path of Non-being (Being is-not). The Way of Truth is the Way of Being—which the text describes as the Path of Persuasion (Peitho, 2.4) attending upon the Truth. The ‘unthinkability’ of the Way of Non-being forms the premise for the famous ‘linkage’ of thinking and Being. This is expressed in a thesis concerning the unity of Thinking and Being: the telos of true persuasion is truth itself, while the path of seeming is unthinkable or, literally, ‘unsayable’ (‘phrasais’ from phrasis). Yet, somehow, this unsayable-unthinkable orientation still appears as a ‘way’ (hodos). What exists for thinking and for Being is ‘the Same’.

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Fragment 3 (B 3; Plotinus, Enneads 5.1.8; Clement, Stromata 6.23) [10] For the same is there to be thought and is there to be (to gar auto noein estin te kai einai). to gar auto noein estin te kai einai: what is not cannot be said or thought: literally, articulated or pointed out (phrasais); Being cannot be drawn apart from Being. In Coxon’s translation ‘for the same thing is for conceiving as is for being’ (1986:54); Gallop also draws attention to the continuous coupling of ‘speech’ and ‘thought’ throughout the Way of Truth, 1984:31, n. 18. Fragment 5 [11] It is all the same to me from what point I begin, for I shall return again to this same point. Prefiguring the ‘Sphericity’ of Being: the Sphairos being, for Parmenides, a central eikon (see below on Parmenides’ ‘Iconic Logic’); Beginning and End are One, eternally returning paths of Thinking and Being. Fragment 6 (B 6.1–13) [12] For the same is there to be and to be thought; for To Be is possible and Nothingness is not possible…for this latter path I debar you…[and from the path of those for whom] To Be and Not To Be are regarded as the same and not the same… The reaffirmation and emphasis of Fragment 2. The two Ways of inquiry separated in Fragment 2 are conflated into a Third Way: the way that asserts both Being and Non-being. The Way of Non-being (‘Nothingness is possible’ and ‘Being and Non-being form a unity of opposites’—a position that was popularly associated with the name of Heraclitus) is blocked. Mortals must be warned against the illusory path signalled by the belief that ‘to be and not to be are the same and not the same’. The proscription of B 6.3 is repeated in B 7.2. The text then presents the Way of Being and the Way of Seeming, placed in the mouth of the Goddess. The narrative requires the listener to abandon sensory knowledge and attend to what is to be narrated purely from the perspective of Reason (Logos), to follow the muthos as a rigorous demonstration of the ‘unthinkable’, ‘unnameable’ nature of the way of Non-being. The Way of Being [13] There is only one Path, namely [It] is [Being] (esti); along this way there are many signs showing that Being is uncreated and indestructible, whole, unique, motionless and complete. Nor was, will it be, because it is 306

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altogether now, a coherent Whole, for what birth will you seek for it? By what way and from what did it grow? What is called Being is the only path of inquiry and knowledge—literally the only path that can be spoken of or told, that [Being] is: monos d’eti muthos odoio/leipetai os estin. The signs (semata) of this path are many: what is is Uncreated, Eternal, Motionless, and possesses the completeness befitting a Perfect Whole. [14] I will not allow you to say or think that it came from what is not, for it cannot be said or thought that it is not. Besides, what necessity would have driven it to begin from nothing? The inquiring soul is emphatically warned against the Way (and discourse) of Non-being. Human saying is always a saying of what is; speech concerning what ‘does not exist’ or ‘is nothing’ is not simply incoherent, but impossible. [15] Being must be absolutely, or not at all… Being is a totality, a perfect Unity. And all speech concerning the Whole must respect this totality of Being. Reality must be understood as absolute existence, without origin, change, or development. We are, semantically speaking, at the point where the European tradition conceptualizes Truth as a presence sui generis and Being as the Real sub specie aeternitatis. [16] Justice has never released Being from its fetters to let it come into being or to let it be destroyed, but holds Being fast… The Whole—that is, Being—is bounded and encompassed by the Laws of Necessity (Ananke) and Justice (Dike). Justice has always held Being ‘in being’: it has never relaxed her hold (‘fetters’, ‘shackles’) to allow Being to come into being or to pass away. The text echoes well known dramatic epithets which symbolize Justice (Dike) and Right Order (Themis) as being held by the ‘yoke of Necessity’—the figure is a recurrent motif in tragic drama; for example the ‘burden of ananke’ in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon 215ff. [17] [Being] is or [Being] is not—it is already decided: to ignore the one Way as unthinkable and nameless and to allow the other path as the Way of Being and Truth… Coming-into-Being has been quenched and Destruction is Undiscoverable… Undiscoverable: un-seen, beyond thought and perception, therefore beyond comprehension or unthinkable. Fragment 8 [18] Being is not divisible, since it is all alike, nor any more or less, so as to 307

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prevent itself from being Whole, but all is full of Being. Therefore, it is totally coherent [continuous]; for Being is close to Being. Being is not commensurable with the Void or any kind of absence. It is a perfect totality. The Whole, being perfectly homogeneous, cannot be divided into parts or elements, and thus has nothing oppositional in its constitution. This leads many interpreters to speak of an indivisible ‘plenum of Being’ in reconstructing Parmenides’ concept of the One: Being is continuous and full of what is. The One cannot, for this reason, be called a kosmos, having no internally differentiated elements, symmetrical parts, or articulate structure. [19] Motionless, in the limits of mighty bonds, without beginning, without ceasing, since Becoming and Destruction have been driven far away, and true proof [conviction] has rejected them; the Same remaining in the Same, resting with Itself, remaining firmly there: for powerful Necessity holds it in the bonds of the limit, which constrains it round about, because it is not right that Being should be without a limit, since it is not lacking in anying. If Being were lacking, it would lack everything. Motionless=akineton (from kinesis, change). Sameness or self-identity excludes Difference, Plurality, and Change. Being non-temporal (without beginning or end) Being has no temporal properties: it is absolutely Present or Identical with Itself (it cannot be represented in any tense other than the absolute present). The sameness of Being is bound by necessity which requires external limits (peiratos) to Being: Being is an intelligible Whole, not anApeiron (contra Anaximander). The polemic with Anaximander is at its most explicit where the text affirms that it is against ‘the Law’ (themis) that Being should be unlimited: if Being lacked anything, it would lack everything. Every concrete dimension of the Unlimited is to be opposed in thinking of the finitude and unity of Being. [20] The same thing is to be thought of and is the thought that it is, for you will not find thinking apart from Being, for which thought is expressed. For there was, is, and shall be nothing else besides Being, since that has been found by Fate to be Whole and Motionless; therefore, all things that mortals have established, believing to be true, are just a name. Becoming and Perishing, Being and Non-being, change of position and alteration of brilliant colour. Repetition of the theme of Fragment 3: the wholeness, self-sufficiency, and autonomy of Being as to on. Without the thought of Being, all human truths are conventions (nomoi) and ‘mere names’. The assumption that things change, that difference exists, that time runs through all things are ‘truths’ only by convention (nomos). To think truly is to articulate the logos of Being as what is absolutely True. Approaching Reality from the perspective of difference, plurality and change is to be deceived by the suasive power of signs and classifications. 308

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The ‘names’ of language are a web woven to save the appearances. Language misleads mortals about the true nature of what underlies their classifications and discourses—and this is the unchanging totality of Being. Behind appearances only Being truly persists as the same unchanging Whole. [21] Since the limit (peiras) is at the extremes, Being is complete on every side, like the mass of a well-rounded sphere, equally balanced from its centre in every direction. For it must not be any greater or any less in this direction or that; since neither is there what is not, which would stop it from being joined together, nor is it possible that Being could be in one way more, in another way less, than what is, for as a Whole it is free from imperfection, equal to itself in all directions, it meets its limits in a uniform way. Again the repetition of the leitmotif of Fragments 2–6; repetition of the figures of Limits, Bonds, Fate, Necessity combined in two icons: the ‘justice’ of the ordered Limit and the Sphericity of Truth. The text does not claim that Being is a ‘well-rounded Sphere’, only that the Whole is like ‘the mass of a perfect Sphere’ (8. 42–9, esp. 8.43–4)—it should be thought by icons of limit or peiras, again continuing the intertextual polemic with Anaximandrian and Pythagorean modes of thought. The Way of Seeming (Simplicius, Physics 38.29–39.21) By contrast with the Way of Truth, the Way of Seeming is a kind of limit notion of the unnameable ‘being of Non-being’ (the thought that ‘things which are-not are’). The Way of Seeming is also that which ‘ought not to be spoken’ -it is ‘unjust’ to pursue the way of doxa and so the mind must be restrained from pursuing this way; it is usually identified with the path of the senses and common sense (mortal opinions), of everyday cognition as a world of change, opinion, appearances, multiple perspectives, and oppositions (the elemental oppositions of the Milesian cosmologists or the ‘unity of opposites’ in the book of Heraclitus for example). But the most frequent target is any discourse which admits contraries, most especially contraries drawn from sensible experience -such as Hot and Cold, Light and Darkness (B 7, 3–6 (Simplicius, Physics 78.6, 650.13) and B 9.1–2 (Simplicius, Physics 180.9–12)). The appearances of opposites are themselves symptoms of conflict and injustice. The ‘world of doxa’ or habit (ethos) has its grounds in sensory appearances; and sense perception discloses an illusory world of process and change. The ‘language’ of opinion, as a structure of conventional rules and arbitrary names, cannot be the standard of Truth or the yardstick of fidelity to the Truth. The way of Truth lies along a completely different path from the way of sensory knowledge and is governed by a different order of intelligibility. In the Parmenidean universe, as we have seen, such a standard must be absolutely 309

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eternal and unchanging. True Reality admits no change. Only Being as a realm of full, timeless presence (single, indivisible, homogeneous, timeless, changeless, and motionless ‘like a well-rounded Sphere’) is beyond all change and doubt. And only the Way of Being can serve as a criterion of what must, by reason and necessity, be true. Truth is to be found in thinking the One and not in Difference, the realm of Opposites, or any other kind of articulate ontology. While the former is the way of Reason, the latter is the realm of sense-percep-tion and the groundless opinions of mortals. This latter path, the way of sense-experience, must be abandoned. Being can only be thought as a sphere of undifferentiation—an identity without difference. 6.5 The significance of the hexameter form in Parmenides’ thought At first sight it appears strange that the founding father of ontology selected the epic form as a vehicle for his revolutionary ideas, communicating his account of pure Being in the form of an Orphic parable. On further reflection, however, we find a deep-rooted affinity between genre and its philosophical content. What could have been more appropriate for this magisterial insight into Being than a theophanic poem describing a journey of the knowing soul to the Goddess of Truth? The rigour of the epic poem itself may have even have been selfconsciously adopted as a tangible image of the thought it sought to convey. Since Parmenides’ text advances a critique of language, everyday prose would not be a suitable vehicle for the insight into Being. And this ‘seeing’ is no longer the vision offered by the senses, but the vision that a later tradition would call theoria. By adopting the perspective of the Goddess, we are to abandon the prosaic ‘names’ and ‘categories’ of everyday discourse. Envisioning Being demands an experience analogous to a religious conversion. To see the transcendent Whole we must not merely engage in further research or acquire a new scientific or cosmological paradigm. All such paradigms, designed to save the phenomena of the world, are in principle inadequate. Cosmological inquiry is rejected as a refinement of common sense. The signs of everyday language are themselves part of the illusory Way of Seeming. Ordinary language leads away from the truth of Being into the mire of ‘cominginto-being and perishing’, ‘being and not being’, ‘changing place’, and ‘exchange of glowing colours’. Where earlier poetry had invoked the Muses of song and truth, Parmenides is driven by a Chariot to the Goddess of Truth whose speech forms the dramatic substance of the text. It is the Goddess as the voice of pure reason who imparts the truth to Parmenides: the original insight into Being is a gift from her. Truth is not a possession of Parmenides as a visionary genius, but is granted by the Goddess to those with the necessary commitment (eros in the first lines) and insight. Eros animates and accompanies the traveller through the Gates of Light and Darkness. The icons of the Chariot, the obstacle of the Gates of Night and Day, Justice, and the final telos of Truth all emphasize the 310

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difficult ascent to Being. Like Odysseus in the Odyssey, the initiate to Truth must be guided by a Goddess. And from the logological perspective which traces modes of thought to their specific textual forms and rhetorical contexts, these images of the Pröem are indispensable to the philosophical purpose of Parmenides’ work as a whole.24 Stylistically, the text of the poem is a paradigm of precise imagery and parsimonious execution. Metaphors and icons form an integral fabric woven about the dominant motif of the Journey to Truth. In Pythagorean lore and Orphic rites, the image of divine ascent symbolized rebirth and reincarnation. Before the soul can be restored to its primal state, before we can attend to the message of the Goddess, we must purify the soul of Night and attend to the Light. Some even see the trace of an ancient solar mythology in these lines (cf. Frame, 1978:158–9). The logos spoken by the Goddess demands a total change of attitude (symbolized by the dangerous passage through the Gates and sojourn in the House of Night). The language is particularly rich in videological imagery. Truth (aletheia) is revealed as light (B 1, 8–12); the ‘seeing’ happens instantaneously—as the bolt holding the Gates separating Night and Day is flung back. Darkness is to Light as the Way of Seeming is to the Way of Being. The Journey guided by the daughters of the Sun [‘daughters of Helios’] takes our voyager away from the Palace of Night toward the Light of Truth. Light—in its most concrete and sensory forms—is, of course, an allegory of rational inquiry itself. Truth must always accompany insight and revelation; while error, ignorance, and seeming are recognizable only from the measure of light. Light, like truth, moreover, is a gift (‘The Goddess received me kindly…’); the spirit of inquiry is a desire to be quenched, a longing for Being, for what is True-in-itself (the absolute sphere of ‘wellrounded Truth’). While the term should not be used in its eighteenth-century sense, the disclosure of the truth that only Being is can only be described as an experienced ‘enlightenment’.25 At the crucial stage of the Journey, before the Doors of the Goddess, stands Justice—Dike—holding the power of life and death and, in Archaic Greek symbolism, a vengeful, retributive Goddess. Here, the experience of truth is rescued from disaster by the sole means of inquiry available to human beings -persuasion, the logos of reason and self-reflection. Divine persuasion is necessary to secure further progress. Justice cannot be ignored or bypassed, but must be confronted and persuaded to reveal the path that leads to knowledge. Dike speaks of the inquirer as returning along the road to truth. Finally, it is a divine being who initiates the seeker, after transcending the avenging powers of Justice. And the Goddess reveals the truth by her logos. Furthermore, the words of the Goddess are simple and direct. As Heidegger observed, referring to lines 1–6 of Fragment 8, these few words stand like the Greek statues of the early period. Being and essence stand forth in clear lines, objective, palpable, without any esoteric symbolism or veiled chiaroscuro. Like the truth of Being, the words of the Goddess assume a statuesque quality, 311

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an ideality and purity unprecedented in early Greek prose or philosophical poetry. From this point in the poetic allegory—once our seeker after truth is in the presence of the Goddess of absolute Being—the earlier concrete icons of the ‘road’ [hodos] and ‘journey’ fail and are replaced by icons more fitting to the transcendent logos itself—in fact replaced with some of the most severely abstract notions of early Greek language. It is as if the text was saying that from this point we can ‘see’ and ‘hear’ only with the help of pure Reason. At this precise juncture in the text, epic poetry shades into epic ontology. Even prior to a thorough analysis of the philosophical significance of Parmenides’ allegory we can say that the choice of epic form resonates with the substance of his thought: the choice of an epic literary form shows or displays what is to be thought by iconically codifying the revelatory nature of truth.26 And it is precisely at the point of fusion of epic metre and philosophical idea where Parmenides strikes the modernist chord that would echo throughout the work of his successors, Plato and Aristotle: authentic knowledge of the Whole—that is, of Being—transcends sensory perception and unreflexive opinion; the absolute is only given in an intellectual insight into the totality, ‘the immoveable heart of well-rounded truth’ and cannot be found in ‘the opinions of mortals, in which there is no truly convincing force’ (B 1.29–30). The truth can be known only by intelligence and thinking (noesis). With these lines we are already in the world of Classical Greek philosophy as ontotheology.27 7 THE LOGOLOGICAL PRESUPPOSITIONS OF PARMENIDEAN ONTOLOGY If we were to give a formula of the ‘absolute presupposition’ of Parmenides’ thought, it might be a thesis close to the Latin expression Ex nihilio nihil fit: Nothing can come out of Nothing. Only Being can be said to be, and thus only what participates in Being can be thought and understood. We have seen in earlier chapters that Greek culture had a profound antipathy toward the idea of Non-being in all its forms and imagined existence in the visual metaphorics of presence, particularly corporeal presence and form. One fundamental frame for this way of thinking lay deep within the Greek language, with its characteristic intentional verbs of seeing and knowing—eidenai, noesis, noein, noos (or nous). Like the English word ‘thought’ the Greek terms have a wide and diverse range of applications. ‘Thinking’ can assume a very narrow cognitive sense or it can refer more broadly to the presence of intelligence or reflection in human affairs. These verbs impart a strong perceptual organization to the ancient Greek idioms for reflection: in effect, knowing is interpreted as a type of ‘seeing’ (an act of theoria carried out by the theoros); and perceiving tends to be understood as a veridical experiencing of what is, ta onta—the ‘things that are as they essentially are’. It is but a short step to conceive of knowledge as the revelation of the essence of things, of seeing into the nature of being by 312

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the soul’s intuitive vision. ‘Genuine’ knowledge is thus not only knowledge of ‘what is’, but of the essence that is manifest in ‘the things that are’—an attitude which will eventually license the Platonic interpretation of knowledge as an insight into the Idea. The strong sense of intentionality in the Greek verbs for knowing, especially the videological sense of presenting an ‘object’ to the senses or before the ‘mind’s eye’ naturally tended to strengthen two further fundamental presuppositions of early Greek thought: the centrality of ‘mind’ or ‘intellect’ in the process of ‘coming-to-know’ and the semantic linkage between the idioms of ‘thinking’ and ‘being’. Nous—mind or intellect—was seen as the natural ‘place’ of knowledge, and this was frequently understood not as sensory knowledge, but as ‘the intellectual contemplation of Being’ (in Coxon’s words, 1986:17). With the discovery that ‘nous’ was most active in the field of speech and language, we come to the third basic presupposition of this perspective: only the reflective mind can give an account or logos of Being. Nous must be able to articulate its knowledge as a logos. Saying and knowing are two sides of the same process: saying what is is taken to be strongly intentional (what is must ‘be’ accessible to truthful discourse). Within this discursive matrix a proposition such as Parmenides B 3 ‘Thinking and Being are the same’ (‘what can be thought’ and ‘what is’ are one and the same) would be more or less a truism (Being is ‘Being-known’). Finally we should also recall the theological motifs in the idea of pure reflection as a divine arche. Parmenides’ ‘teacher’ Xenophanes says of the divine arche that ‘it stays always in the same place, not moving; nor is it fitting for it to pass to different places at different times; rather, exempt from toil, it moves all things with the thought of its mind (nous)’ (Simplicius, Physics 23.19 (DK 21 B 25, B 26). On the basis of this verbal infrastructure Greek philosophy moved effortlessly toward the great Parmenidean (and later Platonic) abstractions: Being, the Same, the One, Identity, the Unity of the One beyond Being and Non-being. To understand the mechanism in more detail it is necessary to reconstruct Parmenides’ case against ordinary language and philosophies of difference. 7.1 The attack on difference: Fragment 2: The Way of Truth or the Way of Enquiry (B2.2–4) The central Parmenidean intuition is that pure reality (we will follow the Greek verb and call this ‘Being’) excludes all change, heterogeneity and, indeed, difference. How did this radical critique of difference proceed? We can reduce the essential argument to the following steps: (i) (ii) (iii) (iv)

Only Being is, Non-being cannot be. We can only affirm of Being (on—‘that which is’) that ‘it is’ (estin). Truth can be sought only of Being. Non-being or ‘What is not, cannot be thought of or named’ (DK B 17); and ‘It is necessary to assert (say) and think (noein) that this is Being; for Being is, and Nothing is not’ (Fr. 6.1–2). 313

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(v) Being is One, Eternal, Uncreated, Motionless. (vi) Knowledge (of Being) cannot be gained through the senses, but only by Reason or Mind (Nous). (vii) Reason (Nous, Logos) is always a ‘thinking of Being’. (viii) Reason is also bound (by fetters, Dike, Necessity) to Being: ‘for the same thing is for thought [understanding, conceiving (noein)] as is for being’ (Fr. 3). (ix) All knowledge apart from the divine knowledge of Being is opinion, as valueless as shadows, a domain of nothingness. Only Reason (the divinely authorized Logos) provides the measure of truth: ‘What is there to be said and thought is there to be’ (cf. 8.35–6). (x) Reason demands that Being should have no internal differentiation, therefore Being must be continuous, not merely without mobile parts, without articulations at all (and hence without growth, change, destruction, or sensible properties). Thought simply reaffirms the ‘being of Being’: Thought entails Being; Non-being is unthinkable. It is as if Parmenides has accepted the conventions of his native Greek grammar which fuses ‘thinking’ and ‘being’ as the presuppositions of ‘authentic’ knowledge and then proceeds to draw out the logical consequences of this identity. ‘What’, he seems to be asking, ‘are the necessary conditions or presuppositions for thinking, inquiry, and truth-telling?’; ‘What must Being be (be like?) if thought and knowledge in the strongest sense are to be possible?’. This surfaces most clearly in Fragment 3 where the logological assumptions come to the surface: it is the same thing to think and to be, in Fragment 7 where we are to ‘judge by discourse (logos)’ the truth that only Being is, and to conclude in Fragment 8 that ‘Only one account (muthos) is left: that Being is’.28 From this preliminary investigation we can already see that the Parmenidean universe differs from its Presocratic predecessors in a number of fundamental respects: (i)

(ii)

Unlike Thales and Anaximenes, the One in Parmenides’ conception is radically immaterial; it has become a purely abstract icon (‘like’ a perfect Sphere); it cannot be identified with any one entity or concrete mode of being (this is the fundamental sense in which Heidegger’s reading is correct: ‘Being is not a being. Thus the esti that is emphasized in Parmenides’ saying cannot represent the Being which it names as some kind of a being. Translated literally, the esti thus emphasized does mean “it is”. But the emphasis discerns in the esti what the Greeks thought even then in the esti thus emphasized and which we can paraphrase by: ‘It is capable’… To be capable of Being means: to yield and give Being. In the esti there is concealed the It gives’ (1972:8). Unlike Anaximander’s Apeiron, Parmenides world is ‘bounded’ and 314

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totally complete; nothing can be ‘generated’ or ‘differentiated’ from Being because Being has no internal articulation; this is the fundamental reason why what Heidegger detects as the ‘unthought’ of esti, namely ‘It gives’, cannot be part of Parmenides’ thought: Being is precisely the Whole that ‘gives nothing’, that has nothing to give, that is complete in itself, a bounded totality (‘Being is thought, but not the “It gives”. The latter withdraws in favor of the gift which It gives. That gift is thought and conceptualized from then on exclusively as Being with regard to beings’, Heidegger, 1972:8). (iii) Unlike the Pythagorean Kosmos of Limit and Unlimited, Parmenides’ Being is an absolute unity; the Being is not the Being-of-beings, for this implies differentiation and separation if only ‘analytically’ or ‘in thought’. (iv) Being is not presented as Divine or as the Mind (in the Anaxagorean sense of Nous) which sets the vortex of phusis into play. (v) Finally, against Heraclitus (or more probably ‘Heracliteanism’) with its theory of universal becoming and change (the dialectic of Being and Non-being), Parmenides defended Being from the perspective of Reason (where common sense sees change everywhere, Reason comprehends Order).29 This preliminary reconstruction of contexts takes us to the outskirts of Parmenides’ text; we can now enter the play of signs (semata) itself and explore the text in more detail as a network of deconstructive practices. 7.2 Parmenides deconstructed: the predicates of true Being Deconstructing Parmenides’ text in this manner allows the central notion— Being alone is the Whole—to appear as its central rhetorical achievement; ‘rhetorical’ in the sense that Parmenides manipulates the prepositional structure of predication relating to the verb ‘to be’, suppressing the grammatical subject to say [It] is. In the text, ‘is’ (esti) stands on its own. The verbal stem has no ‘subject’ or intuitive predicates. The Way of Truth is coded in the sign ‘is’, or more simply ‘Being’. Metaphorically, the verb ‘to be’ should not reach further than this strange ‘proposal’: ‘esti’ or, as the poem narrates, the Goddess censures the way of saying that Being is predicated with ‘change’, ‘development’, ‘division’, ‘colour’, and so forth. We are encouraged to think solely of the substance of a subjectless proposition, a kind of non-proposition or anti-predication, if this is intelligible. Language drives the mind to differentiate by way of the one-inmany structure of the Greek copula—as an unconscious armature of predicative articulation—while reverential thought adheres to identity and sameness (the paradoxical ‘copula’ without a concrete subject or referential predicates). The concrete nature of the ‘subject’ and ‘predicates’ of Being are suspended to allow thought to think more analytically of the simple structure of ‘saying something’. 315

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The question, ‘What are the predicates of Being?’ contains the more radical problem, ‘Can Being have any “predicates”?’ If ‘[Being] is’ is grammatically subjectless, it is also tenseless: Being is now, a present coherent Whole, not having either past or future (it neither was nor will-be, but is eternally). Consequently the verb stem must present Being paradoxically as a timeless present, giving the abstract structure: [Being] is [Now]. ‘[It] is’ is necessarily an absolute presence, the perfect Sphere held as a totality by Necessity. Parmenides’ counterintuitive ontology of pure Being is generated by following the austere demands of thinking guided by Greek grammar: because the thinking of Being must (in the logological sense of ‘must’) be a ‘thinking of the Whole’, this thinking cannot attribute any of the standard preferred predicates to [Being] is. ‘Is’ is its own non-predicative predicate. The ‘copulative’ esti debars any further ‘copulation’ between Being and ‘its’ predicates. It is as though Parmenides both accepts and rejects the copulative structure of predication, as though his own deductive Reason (Logos) was impelled by some self-imposed necessity to think and say ‘that’ which antedates the predicative organization of all speech, to name—in other words—the ontological ‘presence’ of Being. Perhaps Parmenides’ innovative languagegame followed a sequence of syntactical deletions (as transformationalgenerative grammar has taught us to say), stripping away his predecessors’ predicational work to reveal the unassailable ontological presence of Being (the residue being the ‘object’ of pure theoria) giving the following table (where the square brackets indicate a syntactical deletion or erasure of a grammatical variable-here the grammatical subject-and the hyphen involves a semantic ‘compression’, where the grammatical subject and copula ‘saturate’ one another, until in the structure depicted as (vii) there is neither subject nor verb, but merely the copulative verb stem, esti—the presence of Being itself): (i) (ii) (iii) (iv) (v) (vi) (vii)

S is P S is P0 S is S-is [S]is [S]-is Is

Being is Water (Fire, Air, Earth) (Being is One (God, Unity, Sphere, Whole, etc.) (Being is) (Being-is) ([Being] is) ([Being]-is) (Is)

In the terminal grammatical form of (vii) the participal or infinitive form of the verb ‘to be’—esti—appears to take the compound role of subject and object: ‘to be’ or ‘is’ is reflexively predicated of itself. We are left with the ‘reflexive tautology’ of pure thought: Being is Being. Yet this abstract sequence is internally disrupted—or deconstructed—by the presence in the poem of two paths: the Way of Being (to on) and the Way of Non-being (to me on). The latter path is introduced as an icon of an incoherent Logos, an impossible form of speech and thought: from that which Is, that 316

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which Is-not, cannot Be (Fr. 2). In Parmenides’ deviant idiom of the subjectless, predicate-free ‘is’ there is no grammatical space for the predicates of change and nothingness. Every predicate we choose to attach to the subject of Being introduces difference and plurality into ‘that which is’ and to this extent takes ‘Non-being’ into ‘Being’. Linguistically we can only say Being: the way of ‘[Being] is not’ and ‘[Being] is-and-is-not’ are literally impossible (Frs 3, 6.1–2, 8.38– 41). Predication leads away from the perfect Sphere of Being into illusory thought (‘that Being is spatial, quantified, relational’, and so forth). The really Real has no heterological characteristics—it simply is. Only ‘is’ ‘signifies’ the path of genuine inquiry, the path of to ontos on as Plato would say. By the rules of his own theory (or, to be more precise, by the standards informing the Logos of the Goddess), concepts such as ‘Non-being’ and ‘Change’ are pseudo-predicates which devalue the unity of Being. Yet they are continually in play within Parmenides’ text. Indeed, the basic rhetorical contrast which forms the theme of this whole rhetoric of reflection—the contrast between the Way of Being and the Way of Seeming—becomes meaningless without the contrastive polarity of Being and Non-being. From inside this contrastive structure we have to recognize Non-being as literally unavailable, impossible, unseeable, and unsayable, by comprehending the impossibility of the Way of Seeming. But to understand this we have to admit the presence of non-presence to make sense of the text’s recommendation. It is easy to see that the rhetorical function of negativity in Parmenides raises difficult problems-difficulties which accompany every negative ontology— rather like Wittgenstein’s practice of continuous reference to logical form which the doctrine of the Tractatus excluded in principle. Parmenides’ aporia can be stated in another way: if the doctrine of the Two Ways is a true account, then the unity of Being is false; if the unity of Being is upheld, there cannot be two Ways of inquiry. Ontological monism as an articulated proposition is necessarily aporetic.30 7.3 Parmenides’ transcendental deduction? One recent hermeneutic strategy has been to view Parmenides’ project as an inquiry into the intelligible conditions of referential speech, reconstructing the text as an exercise in transcendental logic. Parmenides was still in essence doing cosmology, but his approach to the question of the Whole is now reflexive, by introducing the concept of Being as a transcendental ground for intelligible cosmological discourse. Charles H.Kahn has summarized this position as follows: The concept of being in Greek philosophy refers to the nature of reality or the structure of the world, in the very general sense of ‘the world’, which includes whatever we can know or investigate and whatever we can describe in true or false statements. The question of being is then: 317

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How must the world be structured in order for inquiry, knowledge, science, and true discourse or, for that matter, false discourse to be possible?31 Our immediate response to this reading is to ask why, if Parmenides’ theorizing is most directly concerned with the intelligible structure of the cosmos, the category of kosmos does not occur in the text as the central term in his account of Being? And, more specifically, why does the text explicitly link the two misleading predicates of ‘light’ and ‘night’ with the idea of naturalistic cosmology (B 8.53–61). Kahn’s approach assumes the synonymy of the concepts of ‘Being’ and ‘Kosmos’ in order to warrant a reading of the poem as a foundationalist project—that is, in providing the necessary grounds for ‘inquiry, knowledge, science and discourse’. Or, since these concerns all point in the same direction, Parmenides’ problem was one of defending the concept of absolute truth. Here it would seem that Parmenides’ and Plato’s ontology run in parallel, posing and solving the same question: how can speech be true? Kahn also links this interpretation with the opening question of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: how must the world be structured if logic and scientific language are to be possible? Since for Plato (who Kahn treats as a logical development of Parmenides’ position) knowledge is assimilated to discourse, and discourse is analyzed in the predicative form ‘X is Y’, the problem of knowledge and true discourse becomes, in part at least, the problem of predication (Kahn, in Sprung, ed., 1978:40). Kahn’s concluding sentences, articulating the relationship between being and knowledge, might form a suitable beginning for a more reflexive inquiry into the deconstructive rhetoric of Parmenides’ text: for the Greeks, the question of being is originally asked within the context of an inquiry or search for knowledge of the truth. But it is eventually answered within the context of a theory of predication or logos, the expression of true cognition in rational discourse. A doctrine of being is a theory of what the world must be like for such inquiry, cognition, and discourse to be pursued with any chance of success. (Kahn, in Sprung, ed., 1978:41–2) A related strategy is to claim that Parmenides was not merely the inventor of logical thought or deductive entailment, but that he introduced something like a transcendental argument premised on the ontological requirements of a unitary logos—moving from the evident existence of a phenomenon (in this case the existence of Reality) to an analysis of its necessary presuppositions. Coxon (1986:19), for example, writes: [Parmenides’ poem] offers an analysis of its presuppositions, and which may be regarded as an attempt to answer the questions, ‘what must reality be, if it is knowable by the human mind, and what is the nature of human experience?’32 318

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7.4 The iconic logic of Being The iconic predicates of Being and Truth Parmenidean ontology is based on the exclusion of difference in all its imaginable forms: real, conceptual, logical, ontological, and so on. To be. Being must be given absolutely or not at all. Only propositions concerning Being are intelligible—statements about Not-being are, a priori, meaningless. And we have seen that there is no middle ground between ‘To-Be or Not-toBe’ in this ontology. The Way of Being rules out of court every utterance concerned with the ‘Not-to-Be’ or the ‘is-not’. Being is synonymous with an undifferentiated Whole: Being-is-Being. These assertions appear to be the sum total of Parmenides’ wisdom. As we have noted, the Goddess promises a rational logos of the Way of Being. Yet every logos presupposes differentiation both in the structure of its topic and within the articulation of its form. Speech itself is a work of articulation; every possible statement presupposes a structure of predication, an apophantic syntax, and semantic rules. We do not simply name, we say something about something, frequently to someone, and—though with less security—with some sense, and for some reason. Each one of these contexts involves a logic of predication, and thus an implicit matrix of difference. But Parmenides’ text ostensibly blocks the way of predicational difference. The Goddess cleaves to Identity, yet her speech inevitably presupposes difference. In fact, the Goddess engages in a complex revelation of Being’s different characteristics: she differentiates Being by means of a whole network of metaphorical predicates. But metaphor should have no rational place in the Parmenidean universe. How is this aporia to be unravelled? The simplest stratagem—and the one that I will pursue here—is to approach the text as a powerful work of rhetoric, to read the discourse as an ironic myth operating with a logic of eikons rather than a predicative logic. Iconic logics work with symbols that ‘show’ or are persuasively ‘similar’ to an otherwise inacessible or unconceptualizable phenomenon. Where the logic of predication assumes a background of real differentiation (for example, an available world of stable referents to which its signs are unequivocally attached), iconic logic uses difference to turn the listener or reader back to the grounds of difference that lie in a deeper unity or ‘oneness’: ‘real’ differences are real from the referential standpoint of achieved predication, but hypothetical difference and the emergence of difference per se are the concern of icons. For Parmenides’ purpose, what is ultimately ‘real’ is not the manifold of concrete things and their properties, but Being sans predicates, and the differential textures of icons are but heuristic figures for displaying unity as the ground of reference, difference, and intelligibility (and self-reflexively, for establishing the intelligibility of self-referential ontological discourse). One later example of this procedure is the ‘negative’ path followed by 319

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Euclid in laying out the axiomatic foundations of geometry (Elements, Book I, ‘Definitions, postulates and common notions’). Note the appearance of negative predication in the key axioms: (1) A point is that which has no part (if we replace ‘point’ by Being, we produce a geometrical icon of Parmenides’ Sphere), (2) a line is breadthless length, (5) a surface is that which has length and breadth only, (13) a boundary is that which is an extremity of anything, (14) a figure is that which is contained by any boundary or boundaries, and the most famous of them all, the ‘parallel postulate’ (23): ‘Parallel straight lines are straight lines which, being in the same plane and being produced indefinitely in both directions, do not meet one another in either direction.’ The great commentator on Euclid, Proclus, is one of the first to note the importance of this procedure, connecting it explicitly to the thought of Parmenides. For example, in his analysis of Definition (1) he writes: Negative definitions are appropriate to first principles, as Parmenides teaches us in setting forth the first and ultimate cause by means of negations alone. For every first principle is constituted by a different essence from that of the things dependent on it, and to deny the latter makes evident to us the peculiar property of the principle. For that which is their cause, but not any one of the things of which it is the cause, becomes in a sense knowable through this method of exposition. (Proclus, Commentary) In a more epistemological idiom, iconic logic takes its measure from Xenophanes’ maxim that we should let well-founded knowledge pass for ‘semblances of truth’. A more contemporary linguistic rendition of these claims is to say that from a Parmenidean perspective our everyday terms and concepts expressing ‘Non-being’ (and, correlatively, our everyday consciousness of Nonbeing in all its forms and modalities) are actually iconic predicates; if they have any employment in the Parmenidean world they must actually name Being as ‘what is’, for in this world only Being exists and can be said to exist. Our quotidian predicates for Non-being are parasitical names which when viewed rightly will be grasped as icons of Being. Parmenides’ ontological claim is grounded on the evidence of pure thinking: despite appearances only the wholeness and unity of Being is really Real. Let us investigate these issues more systematically. The iconic ‘names of Being’ We can regard the crucial phrasing of Fragment 8 as the most emphatic instance of iconic discourse. In fact the fragment begins in the wake of negation: Only one account is left: that Being is. On this road there are very many signs (semata): that Being is ungenerated and imperishable, entire, unique, unmoved and perfect; it never was nor will be, since it is 320

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completely whole, one, indivisible. For what origins of Being will you look for? As the Goddess claims, there are various semata (indications, traces, signifiers) by which Being shows itself; and although these ‘icons’ appear to be predicates— the ‘many names of Being’—they actually function as signposts pointing toward that which has only one name (‘that “It is” [esti]’); they are traces of the Unity of Being. Being can have no ‘parts’ in the same sense that it can have no ‘beginnings’ or ‘origins’: ‘it must either be entirely or not be at all’ (Fr. 8.3–6; 8.9–10). Being is (i) One, (ii) Uncreated (ungenerated) and Indestructible (imperishable), (iii) Whole, (iv) Indivisible (uniform), (v) Motionless (immovable), (vi) Perfect (complete like a perfect Sphere), (vii) Timeless or Eternal, (viii) Continuous, and (9) Bounded or Limited. These attributes are not names of ‘parts’, ‘aspects’, or ‘dimensions’ of Being (which is One, Whole ‘well-rounded truth’, immobile, indivisible, continuous, etc.), but metaphors—iconic signifiers—of the Absolute. They expand the basic visual-spatial language-game indicated by the statement [Being] Is by indicating what the whatness of Being ‘really is’; they amplify the original intuition into the wholeness of Being. Where ‘is’ does not promote itself as an epistemic claim (Being, for Parmenides is not a predicate), these further spatial predicates are inevitably interpreted as ‘knowledge claims’—they spring, let us remind ourselves, from the Goddess of Truth herself, they are demonstrably a true logos of the Way of Being. At this juncture, the ancient problem of the One and the Many appears in a new light. Being must be preserved in its integrity as a Whole, yet to say precisely this is already to divide the One through predication. The claim ‘Being is One’ presupposes division or difference. Parmenides reminds his contemporaries that all they can consistently claim is that Being is One and nothing else. Yet how, given this manifold of aspects, can Being still be absolutely One (to rejoin Fr. 8: Being must be absolutely, or not at all). How, as Plato would pose the problem, can Being be One and a totality of differential parts? (Sophist 244E). How, if speculative thought is genuinely motivated by the notion of the unity of Being can it also preserve negation, plurality, and modality? How can thought prevent Parmenides’ insight from congealing into what Nietzsche called the rigor mortis of the One, the coldest, emptiest concept of all, the hypostatized mythology of Being-in-Itself ? It is one of the ironies of the history of philosophy that Parmenides’ poem on the unity of Being precipitated a range of problems linked with the concept of difference, questions that formed the starting point of the philosophical problematics of Plato and Aristotle—the nature of predication, the place of negative predicates in descriptive language, the nature of change, ignorance, the relation of thought and language, the role of universals in statements, and so on. For Parmenides Reason seems locked in the tautology, ‘Being is Being’. Yet Being can be indicated through the following icons: (i)

uncreated/ungenerated/everlasting; 321

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(ii) eternal/timeless/indestructible or imperishable; (iii) whole/entire/indivisible; (iv) unitary/unique; (v) immobile/unmoving; (vi) perfect/indivisible; (vii) unchangeable (non-temporal); (viii) continuous or homogeneous (Being cannot be more here and less there); (ix) spherical (as befits a perfectly complete or ‘finished’ totality: a ‘well rounded Sphere’, ‘bounded’ B 8.5–10; B 8.10–18 and lines 26, 30, and 49); (x) a plenum. Many of these issues are thrown into relief once we approach Parmenides’ text as operating with an implicit doctrine of iconic predication (a precursor of the iconic logic of the necessary Forms of Being later developed by Plato). Here we must question Taran’s analysis (Taran, 1965:227–8). While agreeing that Parmenides’ framework cannot be understood in the terminology of Milesian thought or post-Aristotelian logic (Parmenides did not—and perhaps could not—say ‘Being is Matter’ or ‘Being is Thought’) it is not enough to say that the ‘names of Being’ are purely negative. In fact they are not ‘predicates’ in a formal or functional sense at all; they are icons of the timeless integrity of Being, similar to Plato’s use of mythic symbols and reflexive operators (such as ‘Being-itself’ or ‘the Idea itself’). Rather than functioning as ‘negative predicates’ denying or limiting the self-identity of Being, they are affirmative metaphors displaying the unity of the One. Inversely, the Non-being of the phenomenal world cannot be predicatively asserted: the predicate ‘Non-being’ is literally unavailable; we cannot say of anything that it is non-existent. Hence the Way of Seeming must also be ‘shown’, not stated. The beingness of beings cannot itself be stated—since every subject-predicate schema already presupposes the unity of the subject (qua Being). As Taran rightly argues, Parmenides bracketed all and any theories about the phenomenal world—any theory of appearances was as good as any other since every phenomenal theory presupposes the reality of Non-being. Parmenides has no theory about Seeming in general— he simply displays it as a no-way, a logically closed path, but can say nothing about the world of human experience, other than show it to be nothing, an illusion (Taran, 1965:227–8, 230, 232). One interesting consequence of this approach arises at this point. Logically the contrast between the Two paths is iconic—in this case, an allegorical icon whose limited truth-value is granted by the guidance of the Goddess. Once inside the terms of the metaphor, the ‘twoness’ of inquiry is negated, for from the perspective of Being there can be only one path: what appeared to have been a way turns out to be non-existent. This in turn entails an iconic relation 322

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between truth and seeming, being and appearances, not a real difference. If appearances are, they are as the manifestations of Being (more accurately, appearances are the manifestations-of-Being). There can be no difference or duality between Being and phenomenal appearance. Change is but an apparent phenomenon; beneath appearances lies the perfect integrity of intelligible Being. However, what was an iconic distinction for Parmenides (and if we follow Taran here, for Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the Atomists) became an ontological difference for Plato. Plato doctrinalized a position that was originally formulated in iconic space. In Parmenides’ ontology there could be no intelligible ‘dialectic’ of identity and difference (other than an icon to warn individuals of the Way of Seeming), nor any ‘relation’ between the Same and the Other for the reason that the main aim of his thought was precisely to dismantle the terms of this difference. Parmenides is the great enemy of Difference. Any dualism which posits ‘true Being’ over and against ‘appearances’ is to be rejected—for appearances, like things, relations, events, and effects belong to the realm of Non-being. Being is not a source of ‘appearances’ nor a cause of the world. Similarly, Parmenides could not affirm a chorismos between objects and the Idea or an ‘ontological difference’ between beings and Being. In fact, the opposite appears to have been the case: he formulated an ‘ontological non-difference’, a commitment to the notion of the One that could not possibly be divided (into parts, events, beings, levels of appearances, etc. of any description). In the last analysis the iconic status of Parmenides’ logos was lost for later Greek metaphysics as they read their own doctrine of predicational identity and difference into what was a very different problematic—the questionframe of an iconic ontology. Iconic discourse, reflexive inquiry, and constructive rhetoric were the three great victims of this ideological elision. Iconic discourse The word ‘icon’ is a central term of art in logological investigations. In the context of this discussion it does not correspond to the subset of sign functions demarcated by Charles Sanders Peirce, but rather responds to an imperative of certain ways of speech, traditionally thought of as mythopoeic or metaphysical. We have seen that thinkers like Xenophanes, Heraclitus, and Parmenides in the European tradition relate their thought to the question of being and origin (arche) not by descriptive or explanatory forms of language, but by inventing counterintuitive modes of speech that grant a central place to ‘indications’, ‘signs’, ‘traces’, and ‘pointers’ (semata). Such pointers function as ontological ciphers in the sense that they induce a self-reflexive moment by turning listeners toward a prior relation with the Whole which grounds all discourse. One of the paradoxes of reference is that language is habitually organized 323

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into the semantic and syntactical frames required for thematizing objects and referencing things in the world; however, such structures fail to pose the question of the nature of reference itself (linguistic reflexivity) or the nature of being such that any kind of reference is possible (ontological reflexivity). Iconic discourse represents an initial response to this situation in the sense that no way of speaking can directly ‘name’ or predicatively describe what makes naming, reference, and description possible. From the framework of common sense, reflexive discourse can only appear as a misuse of language or an exercise in regressive circularity. Iconic discourse violates the holy grail of everyday usage: that speech should be predicatively anchored to objects. But the unique role of iconic speech is to question mundane reason. What makes reference possible is not itself an object. By transgressing the stipulations of everyday speech philosophy occasions attitudes of doubt, reflection, and dialogue. Icons are thus the lyric gestures of dialogic thought, images which sting unreflexive forms of life into reflection. Iconism is the spur of wonder. We can contrast predicational with iconic discourse in the following manner: apophantic logics presuppose the routine referential achievements of everyday, assertoric, predicative speech: speech corresponds to objects (and states of affairs) when true; but ‘being’, ‘unity’, ‘world’, ‘existence’, ‘referents’, and so on, are not themselves predicative topics. Speech organized about saying necessarily leaves the ground of saying unsaid and, as a consequence, reflexively unexplicated (this ground cannot, without contradiction or infinite regress, appear as another predicate or predicative state of affairs). By contrast, iconic discourse questions the presuppositions of apophantic usage and speculatively attempts to address the nature of what grounds and authorizes speech. In Scholastic usage reference to the very terms which facilitated reference was thus generally referred to with the term ‘transcendental’ and categories such as ‘being’ and ‘unity’ would be described as ‘transcendental terms’. But in a more phenomenological terminology, iconic attitudes ‘bracket’ referential praxes in order to explore reflexively the manifest grounds and intentional modalities of such achievements. Iconic speech ‘turns back’ upon the operative reflexivities that are constantly at work in the most mundane instances of reference. Hence an initial formulation might run: the contrastive structure of predicative and iconic logics runs parallel with the contrastive structure of unreflexive and reflexive speech, cognitive attitudes, and modes of consciousness. Predicative truth-claims have a different status from iconic conjectures; one of the differences between Presocratic inquiry and Classical philosophy can be formulated as a contrast between the hypothetical attitude of iconic communication and the absolute claims made by predicative speech. Prior to the texts of Aristotle, inquiry into the truth is always presented as a telos, a possibility and ‘approximation’ to Being, but never something concretely present or condensed to an inventory of statements. The earliest thinkers do not occlude the human moment of inquiry—whether it is Heraclitus’ psyche 324

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with its infinite horizon in the Logos, Xenophanes’ semblance of divine truth, or Democritus’ suspicion that mortals remain cut off from the Whole. Informing these positions is an ethic of perennial inquiry, literally a life lived for re-search, a reflexive eros that cannot be terminated by an absolute truth or final, predicative pronouncement. Truth will never be absolutely present either as a foundation or a ground: truth is the telos of the inquiring life itself. Predicative truth favours monologue and authoritative speech forms, its paradigm being the systematized, definitive statement (for example, Aristotle’s physical and biological treatises and Euclid’s deductive synopsis of Greek geometry). Iconic inquiry, however, gravitates toward disputation, dialogue, and questions which generate argumentative discussion. A similar parallel can be found in Aristotle’s demotion of ‘rhetoric and dialectic’ in favour of ‘logic and physical science’: where the former deals only in hypothetical premises and semblances (enthymemic reasoning), the latter delivers absolute truth from self-grounding axioms. Iconic speech (whether hypothesis, rhetoric, or dialectic) is ‘transcended’ as an immature phase of predicative speech (repeating in the sphere of logic what Aristotle attempted in reviewing the ‘physical opinions’ of his predecessors). To return to Parmenides’ text: we should not think of the Goddess’ names of Being as descriptive predications (in Aristotle’s sense); rather we should ask after their use. And one of the functions of Parmenides’ icons is to evoke a sense of the unity of Being, rather than stating this in propositional functions. An icon is a simile of unity, a finite attempt to explicate the intelligibility of discourse by means of discourse. This is where Xenophanes’ poetry is redeemed by Parmenides. For example, Empedocles pictures the cosmos as a bounded Sphere, ‘full of Being’, like an absolute, motionless Whole: ‘From something not existing at all, it is impossible that something should grow. Total annihilation is equally unthinkable, and it is impossible that it should happen, for each thing will eternally be where it has been set forever’ (DK 31 B 12); ‘Nothing of the Whole is empty, nor does anything overflow’ (DK 31 B 13); ‘No part of the Whole is empty; so where could anything more come into it?’ (DK31B14). For both thinkers, the Sphere (Sphairos) was a perfect image of Being— not the real, physical sphere of Geometry, but the divine Sphere, the archtype or Form of all sphericity. Parmenides takes Empedocles’ thought one further step along the road of abstraction: ‘But he [God], on all sides equal and altogether infinite, the rounded Sphairos, exultant in surrounding solitude’ (DK 31 B 28); ‘From its back no twin branching arms are swinging; it has no feet or swift-moving knees, or sexual organ shaggy. It is a sphere, on all sides equal unto itself’ (DK 31 B 29); ‘In it there were not to be seen the swift limbs of the sun nor the earth’s dense vegetation; not yet the sea. So much was the Sphairos firmly embedded within the secret compactness of harmony, spherical all round, exultant in surrounding solitude’ (DK 31 B 27).33 ‘Being is in a state of perfection from every viewpoint, like the volume of 325

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a spherical ball, and equally poised in every direction from its centre. For it must not be either at all greater or at all smaller in one regard than in another’ (Fr. 8.40–9, esp. 8.43–4; trans. Coxon). The Sphere has no beginning or end in the sense of generation (like Anaximander’s Apeiron), yet it is bounded by the fetters of Dike. It is ‘full of Being’—like a continuum or plenum—yet cannot be divided. For if the Sphere lacked Being it would lack everything. The Sphere of Being is perfect presence, yet it is held in its limits (which again suggests finitude). Compared to Empedocles’ icon, Parmenides’ imagery is closer to the idealized objects of Pythagorean mathematics. The poem resolves these icons into the famous lines: ‘Since the limit is at the extremes, Being is complete on every side, like the mass of a well-rounded Sphere, equally balanced from its center in every direction’ (DK 28 B 8).34 7.5 Grammatical mistakes 7.5.1 From Aristotle to Nietzsche Similar paradoxes arise from the side of ‘thinking’. What form should ontological thinking of this radical kind take? Is there a more arcane Parmenidean ‘Science of Being’ hidden behind the apparent ‘foolishness’ of the thought that only Being is thinkable (cf. Plato, Parmenides 128D)? Such a ‘science’ claims to be a ‘consciousness of Being’, yet also denounces the nothingness of any division, distinction, or differentiation. And thinking, like every other mode of consciousness displays an intentional structure, as a consciousness-of something. Difference is already operative in the very structure of noesis. To maintain the integrity of his own thinking of Being, Parmenides must logically deny the intentionality of mundane awareness: Being is not an ‘object’ or ‘noema’; it is not a point of reference for a manifold of noetic acts. To accept intentionality is to affirm the ontological difference which, as we have seen, is precisely what Parmenides’ text denies. There can be no difference ‘in’ consciousness, no dispersion of thought into act and content, but rather an undivided ‘thinkingBeing’ thinking Being. Everyday forms of consciousness, we must assume, in positing Being as a term of reference, object, or predicate, fall into the Way of Seeming (this would also include all interpretations of the Sphere of Being as a material plenum or Pythagorean object). They treat the unity of Being as an apparent unity in a pregiven horizon, whereas Parmenides’ problem was to explore the question of the nature of the horizon itself. We recall that the Way of Seeming is a journey of persuasion, but it is also the ‘nameless’ and ‘un-articulated’ path of Fragment 8.16–18, the path of ordinary beliefs (doxa), sense-perception and ‘knowledge-by-acquaintance’ (doxas broton). What does appear to be assumed in the text is a non-intuitive concept of ‘objectless thought’, a mode of thinking which thematizes upon ‘unity as such’—perhaps a cognitive stance close to meditation or contemplation as a surrender to the undifferentiated oneness that is Being 326

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(rather than to the oneness of Being). Perhaps Parmenides’ aporia is a product of grammar, where different understandings of ontological unity are at stake: (i) predicated unity (‘the unity o/Being’), (ii) identified unity (‘the unity in Being’), and (iii) existential Unity (‘unity as Being’). As an exercise in speculation the concept of pure Being moves from the predication and identification of ‘oneness’ to an iconic vision of unity as Being as the existential ‘one’ antedating the language of predication and the intentionality of everyday thought. Existential unity is given as an ‘intuition’ of Being or it is not given at all. Like a via mystica the unity of consciousness and Being coalesce in a timeless, immobile Now, Parmenides’ intuition of the Sphere of Being would necessarily have to exemplify the timeless quality of Being itself. The paradoxical notion of ‘objectless thought’ is possible only if Being and thinking were somehow ‘the Same’. But the thought persists that we are justifying the unjustifiable, being led astray by grammatical extrapolations of the kind that led Parmenides into similar reflexive waters. In fact many important thinkers have suggested that the root of Parmenides’ reflexive ontology lies in local grammatical errors. According to Aristotle, Parmenidean monism derived from a grammatical mistake or, more precisely, from a grammatical oversight. Parmenides asserts that only Being is and that necessarily Being is One, tacitly assuming that the Greek verb ‘to be’ is exhausted in predications of existential unity (What is, just is; and What is, is one). Yet the little word ‘is’ has many senses. ‘Is’ can be found in adjectival predications (what Aristotle calls quality) or in nominal constructions. Parmenides’ logic fails to distinguish the most elementary cases of predication such as the ‘is’ of nominal reference (‘that which is white’) from the ‘is’ of qualitative predication (‘whiteness’)—let alone fully appreciate the spectrum of categorial meanings and functions of the verb ‘to be’. Instead the verb ‘to be’ is restricted to one function, that of asserting unity and proceeding within this stipulative frame to model a universe where only unity could be said to be. The ontological exclusion of plurality, growth (genesis) and change (kinesis) arises from an inadequate theory of the complexity of predication. Eleatic ontology, in other words, flows from a grammatical mistake which manifests itself as an unreflexive understanding of the workings of language.35 Analogous reflections arise with respect to Parmenides’ notion that ‘thinking and being are the same’. To interpret this dark saying it is necessary to distinguish different uses of the copula: (i) Predication, (ii) Identity, and (iii) Existence. This suggests three interpretations of Parmenides’ equation: (i)

(ii)

Predication: thinking and being are the same in the sense that all thinking is intentional, a thinking-of something (we have noted above that everyday Greek epistemology was particularly emphatic on this intentional aspect of verbs of perception and knowing); Identity: ‘thinking’ and ‘being’ are synonymous; 327

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(iii) Existence: the objects of thinking, what is ‘in’ my thinking exist; that which cannot be thought cannot exist. These versions are conflated in Fragment 3. In other words, Parmenides’ thesis that ‘Being-is’ fails to discriminate Predication, Identity, and Existence in the copula; the text treats all speech about Being as existential: all that can be coherently said of Being is that Being exists. Kirk and Raven put this quite simply: Parmenides unconsciously conflated the predicative and the existential senses of the Greek word esti (KR: 269). Further predication or identification necessarily contaminates the pure unity of Being.36 But ‘Non-being’ may well have predicational uses without having any existential reference. A similar argument can be constructed using Fregean semantics—approaching Parmenides’ ontology with the duality of prepositional sense and reference. Other interpreters take the argument further, understanding Parmenides’ ‘is’ in the sense of Identity: Parmenides’ aporetic thought is an expansion of a logical tautology: Being is Being (and the corollary: Non-being is not). Nietzsche thus speaks of Parmenides’ ‘tautological truth about Being’. ‘Being’ is an empty concept produced by projecting a tautology upon the universe: ‘the One’ is a mere flatus vocis (1962:77). 7.5.2 Charles Kahn on the Greek verb ‘to be’ Further clarification of the grammar of the Greek verb ‘to be’ can be found in Charles Kahn’s well-known article (Kahn, 1973). Kahn identifies three basic uses of the verb: The copulative use of ‘einai’ ‘To be’ as a copula, where the verb appears with a predicate adjective (‘I am tall’), a predicate noun (‘I am a man’), or a prepositional phrase (‘I am in the conference room’); this usage subsumes the ‘is’ of existential identity (‘I am C.K.’); the underlying trope is the idea of the predicate ‘p’ being linked, connected, tied, conjoined, etc. to the subject of the sentence: in ‘S is p’, ‘p’ is ‘determined’ of S, without being identical or synonymous with S (in Hegelian parlance the form of the judgement S-is-p expands to read ‘the particular is the universal’). The existential use of ‘einai’ ‘To be’ in its existential use or ‘the family of uses with an existential sense’ (‘God is’; ‘Socrates is not’; ‘There is a city of Ephyre in the corner of horsenourishing Argos’).

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The veridical use of ‘einai’ The veridical or truth-claiming function, taking the paradigm: ‘Things are as you say (that they are)’ or, in more colloquial English: ‘Tell it like it is’, where the assumed subject of the verb is a sentence or a sentential content, frequently articulating a proposition describing ‘what is the case’ or ‘what is real’. Veridical sentences are prototypical epistemic claims. Kahn’s argument in its briefest form is that the third usage, the veridical/ truth-functional notion is historically first and that Parmenides’ ontology should be viewed from the perspective of a ‘fit’ between truthful thinking and veridical being; the other uses of the verb ‘to be’ (the copula and existential uses) are secondary or derivative of the veridical function. In essence ‘Being’ is synonymous with ‘the True’ (what can be said ‘to be so’, ‘to be the case’, ‘to be true’, and ‘to be real’) and thus to think truly is to think the truth of Being: the key to the philosophic use of to on and related terms in Plato, as in Parmenides, is provided by the veridical construction (‘Things are as you say’, or ‘It is as you suppose’), and not by the existential or the copula uses. (Kahn, in Sprung, ed., 1978:39)37 To ‘know’ what is true is thus to enunciate the truth of things as they are disclosed—a state of affairs which an auditor assesses by interrogative frames such as ‘Are things disclosed as he says?’ and ‘Has his logos hidden the nature of things?’ This is how we should understand the Greek ontological question, ti to on? (‘What is being?’). Is it possible to accept these logicogrammatical clarifications and still defend the coherence of Parmenidean thought? Perhaps Parmenides’ project is an attempt to create a form of thinking which antedates logic? Fragment 3 can certainly be given a protophenomenological interpretation. Noesis in its veridical uses refers to human awareness of intelligible reality—‘thought’ consciously attending to its object (noemata, to on) as what is unhidden and intelligible. The inner connectedness of thinking and being is an intentional relation disclosed by human reality in its comportment toward beings (modifying Husserl’s famous thesis to claim that all consciousness is consciousness-of Being). Hence a reflexive ‘thinking-awareness’ can be nothing but a ‘thinking-being’ (the human being) being aware of Being. Being gathers noesis as an essential part of Being; Being opens toward thought and enables thinking and speech to occur; in other words, noesis is already part of the horizon of Being to the extent that thinking is an intelligible unity. And for thinking to be intelligible and truth-claiming, Being must already be (as in the existential sense of ‘be-present’, ‘be-visible’, ‘bethere’). We can only ‘tell it like it is’, if the ‘it’ is already disclosed for the telling. Thus we do not need to invoke an ecstatic loss of awareness for the thinker before Being, let alone assume that Parmenides personally experienced a unio mystica with pure Being; rather, we can read Parmenides’ dark saying as a 329

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thesis about the veridical nature of human awareness and its reflexive relation to the horizon of Being: all intelligible consciousness rests on a unity bound by the horizon of Being. 7.5.3 Indo-European sources This kind of reconstruction is supported by the philological relationship between the words for ‘true’ and ‘being’ in the Indo-European language group: the primitive German form *santha, from the Indo-European *sont (present participle of the root *es, ‘be’); the Greek word for ‘being’ from *esont like the Sanskrit-sant (adj. being, good, true); Anglo-Saxon soth (the German word for ‘true’ (wahr) displaced the older word soth; see Boman, 1960:202). Boman’s commentary is instructive: ‘Even though the positive expression for ‘true’ does not occur in Greek, the concept of truth in Sanskrit is typically Greek: ‘that which is’ is the true and to that extent is also the good. This is certainly the Platonic doctrine of Ideas in nuce; therefore, some light is thrown upon the mysterious sway that Plato has held over the minds of men in the West for two thousand years. Plato made it possible to give expression to the unconscious and therefore most profound thoughts of the Indo-European peoples on the nature of reality. (1960:202) 7.5.4 Martin Heidegger on the etymology of ‘Being’ Martin Heidegger has proposed an analogous interpretation in explicating Parmenides’ text. Heidegger distinguishes three different, though related, etymological stems of the verb sein, ‘to be’: (i)

from the Sanskrit root es or asus, ‘life’ or the living as ‘that which from out of itself stands and which moves and rests in itself’ (the self-standing, Eigenständig)—hence the verbal formations esmi, esi, esti, asmi to which correspond the Greek eimi and einai and the Latin esum and esse; (ii) from the Sanskrit vasami, Germanic wes and wesan, to remain, dwell, sojourn, belong (‘continue to be’)—hence the German word Wesen, ‘essence’, ‘being’; (iii) from the Indo-European root word bhu, bheu, Greek phu-, Latin fu-, German beo-(Old English beon) later transformed into been, giving rise to be: ‘to emerge’, ‘to become’, or ‘to come to stand and remain standing’ (1973a: 70ff.). According to Heidegger the original root of the Greek phusis still traces the experience of ‘being’ as presencing or the unconcealment of being as truth (aletheia): ‘that which emerges into the light.’ Thus phyein is rendered as ‘to shine, to give light, and therefore to appear’ (Heidegger, 1973a: 71). 330

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In Heidegger’s reading Parmenides is not a thinker who has committed elementary mistakes in logic or grammar, nor a thinker who has reduced Being to subjectivity (or, conversely, conflated subjectivity with Being); rather he has articulated a logos concerning the place of human reality within the essence of Being-of Being interpreted as ‘disclosure’ oraletheia. Parmenides grasped the nature of Being itself as ‘truth-like’ (a-letheia, which Heidegger translates with the German word ‘Unverborgenheit’). The guiding principle of Parmenides‘ thought is the reciprocal bond between apprehension as an alethic possibility of human being and Being as ‘truth’—the binding of thought and Being metaphorically articulates Being as Logos. His texts articulate the fact that the being of truth lies in unconcealment and enduring-dwelling— die Unverbor-genheit, forerunner of the notion of Being as presencing. It is in this context that we should approach the thesis that ‘you will not find thinking without Being’ or, inversely, Being without thinking. Being as a Whole embraces both within the horizon of truth. Thinking and Being, once we have left the surface oppositions of common sense and doxic theorizing are tied to one another as if by fetters (in the hyphenated ‘thinking-being’). Human beings cannot ‘be’—endure, dwell, become-present—without ‘thinking-being’. Consequently Being is the fundamental ‘topic’ of all radical thought: thinking itself is possible only within the intelligible horizon of Being (which Parmenides calls ‘truth’) as the always pregiven Whole—ancestor of the colloquial expression ‘the whole truth’. Fragment 5 might now be translated to read: wherever thinking begins—with doxa, science, craft, or philosophy, it always returns to the same point, which is Being as the presencing of beings. To talk and act at all presupposes the Whole; yet the Whole is never fully present to the senses: we cannot see, taste, smell, or hear the Whole (Being’s presence includes its absence). The Whole is iconic—the wellrounded Sphere from where we begin, the firstness of all beginnings, the origin of all praxis. Reflexive speech which refers to its own ‘tiedness’ with the Whole is noesis or insightful discourse. It is speech which respects the truth of things. This is what Parmenides recalls by means of his ontological icons. These are simulacra of Being, they point or show the Whole in metaphorical gestures. As reflexive discourse, Parmenides’ and Heraclitus’ thinking follow a common path; both centre their reflections on speech, thinking, language, reason, and the intelligible measure of all thing, the Logos (Being). Logos and Aletheia move upon the same plain of truth-saying discourse. The Logos (like Being) never sets, it is absolute presence. Given these preliminary remarks we can understand why Heidegger reads Fragment 8, lines 1–6 in the following way: But only the legend remains of the way (along which it is disclosed) how it stands with being; on this (way) there are many indications: how being, without genesis, is without destruction, complete, alone there without tremor and not still requiring to be finished; nor was it before, nor will it 331

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be in the future, for being present it is entirely, unique, unifying, united, gathering itself in itself from itself (cohesive, full of presentness).38 The ‘totalizing’ image of Being indicates the wholeness of Being as presencing—nothing that exists or ‘has being’ can be excluded from the horizon of presence (even absence has its distinctive modes of presencing). 8 PARMENIDES’ REFLEXIVE LOGOS If this general reorientation is taken, then Parmenides’ text appears as one of the first reflexive discourses in the history of Greek theorizing. Its reflexivity does not, however, consist in the discovery of transcendental reflection concerning the necessary assumptions of true speech—where truth is understood as the ‘fit’ between an apophantic structure and states of the world. Rather, Parmenides’ question concerns an order of ‘truth’ anterior to predicative claims, prior indeed to any notion of the rightness or correctness of statements and their referents. Heidegger’s argument suggests that what is at issue is a different notion of ‘truth’ (and with it, a different understanding of ‘Being’) as primordial disclosure, as Ground not in the sense of a fixed substratum upon which the play of beings can be enacted, but rather as the original and continuing revelation of Being. This is reflexively articulated as the Same (Thinking-Being) which forms the topic of thought. In the exegesis above, Parmenides’ aporetic text invites the reader to enter its iconic structure—where ‘what is’ is neither denied nor affirmed, but formulated as an occasion to return to the essence of Being, which Parmenides calls Truth. Again, such an iconic configuration antedates questions of ‘truth’ in the sense of correctness or correspondence; it provides a more radical horizon for the very idea of searching for truthful statements about the world and for engaging in any kind of inquiry at all. Whatever the detailed merits of Heidegger’s gloss, its importance undoubtedly lies in proposing the notion of aletheia in Parmenides’ text not as a solution to philosophical problems, but as a thoughtful impetus to deeper levels of reflexive inquiry. Parmenides’ rhetoric does, indeed, interweave, Being, Thinking, and Truth in the service of a unitary objective—the comprehension of the Whole; but the articulation and significance of this constellation is still ‘to be thought’. Parmenides does not ‘resolve’ the question of reflexivity (as the belonging-together of thinking and being); he opens the issue of transcendence for further thought. 9 PARMENIDES’ LATER IMPACT: THE ORIGINS OF METAPHYSICAL MODERNITY The ‘reception history’ of Parmenides’ text proves to be as complex and convoluted as the texture of the original poem. For those disinclined to exercise the principle of charity, at best Parmenides instituted the tradition of deductive 332

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reason and logical modernity. He systematized and demonstrated the powers of deductive argument as a philosophical method. The entry ‘Parmenides’ in the Oxford Classical Dictionary condenses this orthodox interpretation in the following synopsis: Parmenides is the first philosopher to consider the intrinsic meaning of the term ‘to be’ and to assert that what can be known must ‘be’ and that nothing else can ‘be’. His account of the three ways is the earliest discussion of philosophical method; his rejection of the third way, the earliest formulation of the Law of Contradiction; his notion of a proposition as a way to be followed, the establishment of the method of demonstrative proof in philosophy; his knowledge of the object and method-of knowledge (nous) from those of belief (doxa), the separation of philosophy from science.39 But Parmenides also provided a lead to those who would bifurcate the world into the realm of true Being and the fluctuating world of sensory opinionbeginning the ‘modern project’ of metaphysics, defining the later conceptual stock for both Platonic-Aristotelian thought and the language-games of the dialecticians and Sophists. Aristotle ranked Parmenides as the first individual to conceptualize the unity of Being as an explicit topic. Being is not merely posited or assumed to be true; rather it is shown to be necessarily true on the basis of deductive argument. To borrow Hegel’s terminology, Parmenides inaugurated the idea of discursive Vernunft by proposing a reasoned logos or Begriff of Being. Parmenides first grasped Being as an abstract totality. Both Platonic dialectic and Aristotelian logic were later developed as techniques for reconstructing the type of problem implicit in Parmenides’ theory of thinking and being. Furthermore, much of European metaphysics can only be fully understood when approached as different responses to the Parmenidean universe of pure Being. All questions in fundamental ontology, for example, commence with the problem of the commensurability or incommensurability of Being and the ontic manifold of beings: in what ways are the variegated forms and modes of being said ‘to be’ and what, ultimately, is the essence of Being? How can epistemic claims be made of ‘parts’ of Being? What can be said truthfully about the Whole of Being? Or, formulated in a more epistemological idiom, what form does ‘knowledge-of Being take? What claims can be reasonably made concerning Being and its modalities? How can Being be said to form an ‘object of knowledge’? In what way are thinking and being connected? In his own century his poem both revolutionised the study of physics and metaphysics, which it distinguished for the first time, and provided the foundation for the relativism and agnosticism of the sophists. His investigation of the sense of the verb ‘to be’ and associated attempt to argue rigorously was the precursor of both Platonic and Aristotelian 333

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logic. His treatment of Being as substantial was developed by Socrates and Plato into the theory of Forms and lies recognizably, as Simplicius remarked, behind Aristotle’s theology. The Sceptics of the third century BC and later appealed to his criticism of the sensible world for support, while on the other hand an awareness of his originality as a physicist is shown by various writers from Posidonius to Galen. Finally the reverence for him expressed by Plato ensured that he was still read and cited in support of the revival of Platonic metaphysics and contemplation from the third to the sixth century of the Christian era.40 Other philosophers have given Parmenides’ speculative innovations a much more negative gloss. Nietzsche, for example, saw in Parmenides’ thought the power of abstract reason to deny the concrete experience of the senses and the life-world in favour of the bloodless abstractions of theory. Parmenides was the true founder of metaphysics, escaping from the empirical world of the illusory senses ‘into the rigor mortis of the coldest emptiest concept of all, the concept of Being’ (Nietzsche, 1962:80–1). He eviscerated Presocratic naturalistic inquiry and instigated the search for certainty. Indeed for Nietzsche, Parmenides’ poem is the source of Europe’s obsessive pursuit of logical certainty: What astonishes us is the degree of schematism and abstraction (in a Greek!), above all, the terrible energetic striving for certainty in an epoch which otherwise thought mythically and whose imagination was highly mobile and fluid. ‘Grant me, ye gods, but one certainty’, runs Parmenides’ prayer. (1962:81) Paradoxically, the theorist who pursued the unity of Being inaugurated the dualist world-view of metaphysics which would culminate in the later quest for an axiomatic criterion or ground from which certain knowledge might be warranted. In this he is the father of what later came to be termed ‘epistemology’, a source of arguments for a sceptical tradition which runs from Protagoras to Pyrrho and down to Descartes and Hume. Nietzsche claimed that the whole European ontotheological tradition had been created by falsely projecting the grammatical metaphors of Being and Certainty upon concrete experience: The concept of Being! As though it did not show its low empirical origin in its very etymology! For esse basically means ‘to breathe’. And if man uses it of all things other than himself as well, he projects his conviction that he himself breathes and lives by means of metaphor, i.e., a nonlogi-cal process, upon all other things. He comprehends their existence as a ‘breathing’ by analogy with his own…man imagines the existence of other things by analogy with his own existence, in other words anthropomorphically and in any event, with non-logical projection.41 334

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It is but one further step to recover Parmenides’ theorizing as not merely foundational for the project of logic and Western metaphysics, but to see his thought as prefiguring the Western project of modernity—to view Parmenides as the ideological founder of rational logical analysis, deduction, and axiomatic demonstration. In other words, Parmenides stands at the dawn of the metaphysical quest for absolute Truth. Parmenides established the logical method of demonstration. In its subject matter the thesis introduced a new general concept into the scientific study of the world, that of ‘Being’, ‘existence’. The One God of Xenophanes who was the spherical All and the power of thought that moved it had evolved into the scientific fundamental concept of an ontological system of metaphysics; ‘Being’ was ‘the one and all’, also divine, but no longer a God. Its more precise definition shows that Parmenides not only created the general concept of metaphysics, but was also the first to analyse it, still in a scheme of contrasted opposites… So Parmenides laid the foundation of scientific metaphysics and the theory of knowledge, and likewise of logical method. Ruthlessly his contrasts and valuations broke up the world as it exists in thought; he robbed it of visible, sensual reality, and left only the intellectually real (idealism). No outrage upon man’s naive sensations or common sense deterred him; his paradoxes flew in the face of both, but they are stated quite definitely and clearly and methodologically argued. Their consequences were tremendous in theory because they involved recognition of the task that theory had to perform, that of re-stating the world of experience consistently, logically, and without prior assumptions, and likewise the admission that theory was capable of performing it; mathematics and psychology too, were equipped with their ultimate fundamental concepts and methods… In practice, too, the consequences were tremendous, for people had to accustom themselves to admit what was most contrary to common-sense if it were logically proved, as, for instance, the unreality of the tangible and the visible. The era of fully scientific inquiry had dawned, of ruthless logic, progress, and the liberation of personalities.42 And yet within the metaphysical problematics of logic, language, epistemology, and ontology lies the Presocratic question: how is the transcendence of Being to be truthfully comprehended?

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MELISSUS’ REVISION For there are two labyrinths of the human mind, one concerning the composition of the continuum, and the other concerning the nature of freedom, and they arise from the same source, infinity. (G.W.Leibniz, 1989:95) Melissus was a native of the island of Samos in Ionia. He was born in the last decade of the sixth or first decade of the fifth century (c. 485 BC) and died around 420 BC. He came from a wealthy family; we know that he was the son of a certain Ithagenes and that he was actively involved in public life, serving as both a statesman and an admiral of the Samian fleet. He appears in the historical record during the attempt of the island to secede from the Athenian tribute system. In a momentous naval encounter in 441/440 BC he defeated the Athenian fleet under Pericles’ command (Plutarch, Life of Pericles 25–6, DK 30 A 3). Of his later life and subsequent history we know very little,43 although he was well known in antiquity as a disciple and defender of Parmenides’ ontology and appears to have attempted something like a rational reconstruction of his predecessor’s arguments, translating them into straightforward Ionian prose. His major philosophical treatise, On Nature or On What Exists, is referenced by many later writers in antiquity and seems—at least by the time of the Lyceum—to have been a popular work of Parmenidean speculation (DK 30 A 4). The book may have been the first European text explicitly to take up the ideas of a living contemporary and engage in a defensive revisionary exegesis. Where the original took the form of hexameter verse, Melissus turned to the rigours of deductive prose. His reformulation and defence of the school’s basic position in response to objections suggests that interpretive conflicts over the ‘correct’ reading and significance of Parmenides’ work were already in evidence by the middle of the fifth century. 10 THE INFINITY OF BEING Melissus’ major revision of the Parmenidean account of Being centres on his criticism of the Eleatic’s conception of Being as finite. He appears to have accepted a rather literal interpretation of Parmenides’ Way of Being and, faced with the paradox of having to accept a view of absolute Reality as a Sphere with finite limits, attempted to rescue the Absolute by reviving the concept of an infinite universe. He may have known Anaximander’s book On Nature or the work of Milesian natural philosophers exiled to Samos. We can assume that his revision was intended to be a response to the standard questions prompted by Parmenides’ poem: ‘What, then, lies beyond the limits of Being?’ and ‘How do you account for change and transformation in Nature if Being is held absolutely motionless by the fetters of Necessity?’ To avoid 336

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postulating ‘Non-being’ or—even worse—the Void, Melissus abandoned the iconic images of the original poem to propose a compromise doctrine between a fully Milesian naturalism and Parmenides’ vision of unchanging Being. Given this problemstellung, Melissus asserted that ‘what is’ is both One and Infinite (DK 30 B 7). His central idea was to accept the concept of actual infinity as necessary for logical and scientific purposes. For Parmenides Being is one, indivisible and finite; for Melissus Being is one, indivisible and infinite. Aristotle analyzed Melissus’ reconstruction in the following way: Parmenides conceived of the unity of Being as a unity of definition (logos understood as definitory formula of truth—the language of essence), but Melissus treats the oneness of Being as a material unity—an infinite material substance (Met. 986b20–21; cf. Alexander, Met. 43.1–44.6: ‘one of them, looking to the matter, said that being is unlimited, while the other, looking to the form, said that it is limited; so that even if these men do not speak of any cause, nevertheless the things of which they do in fact speak and towards which they were tending are among the causes that have been enumerated’). Aristotle’s great commentator, Alexander may have had the text of Physics 3.6.207a15–20 before him, which reads: Hence Parmenides must be thought to have spoken better than Melissus. The latter says that the whole is infinite, but the former describes it as limited, ‘equally balanced from the middle’. For to connect the infinite with the all and the whole is not like joining two pieces of string; for it is from this they get the dignity they ascribe to the infinite—its containing all things and holding the all in itself—from its having a certain similarity to the whole.’ While Melissus is of no great significance for the originality of his ideas or for his contributions to fifth-century philosophy, he is important as evidence of the literary transmission of Eleatic logic during this period and, more especially, for the extent to which epic hexameter had been sublimated into philosophical prose as it entered the great debates on the nature of Being and Non-being, the One and the Many, Truth and Falsity in the latter part of the fifth century. ‘Certainly’, we can imagine Melissus reasoning, ‘Being is One indivisible Whole and must therefore be an ultimate reality without genesis or end. But the One unchanging Whole cannot be finite. It is in fact infinite.’ Yet how to conceptualize this strange non-objective ‘object’? The only possible solution was to make the One an infinite, eternal, homogeneous material plenum: ‘the One is always homogeneous [literally, like itself’], and being homogeneous cannot perish, become greater, suffer change of configuration or any alteration’ (Fr. 4). The main propositions of the prose work On Nature or On What Exists can be summarized as follows: (i)

that what exists is uncreated and eternal; 337

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(ii) that Being is One and Whole; (iii) that Being is infinite (but not necessarily in magnitude or temporally); (iv) that Being is incorporeal (embodiment entailing difference and plurality) and homogeneous; (v) that Being is an incorporeal plenum.44 Each of these ontological predictions indexes a range of polemics about the nature of ‘what is’ in the sixth and fifth centuries. Melissus can be viewed as defending the Parmenidean conception of ‘absolute Being’ against the counterclaims of a range of alternative ontologies. Among these the proponents of sensory knowledge as disclosing reality, pluralist theories of change following Empedoclean ideology, naturalist acounts of the universe as a dynamic process of rarefaction and condensation (associated with Anaximenes and Diogenes of Apollonia), Heraclitean arguments for continuous transformation, and even the earliest appearance of atomic theories (including motion, the void, and perceptual objects). It is undoubtedly in the context of this kind of polemical debate that we should locate Melissus’ work. A complex history of theoretical controversies lies behind Aristotle’s reconstruction of Melissus revisionary work in the following terms: (i)

if Being is infinite and since the concept of ‘infinity’ belongs to the category of magnitude or quantity, Being is said to be both ousia (one ‘substance’) and plural; (ii) if Being is both substance and quantity, then it must be two rather than one; (iii) if it is only substance, then it cannot be infinite, for it would be without magnitude, neither finite nor infinite; (iv) how, finally, can Being be both corporeal and incorporeal? Accepting either (ii) or (iii) entails rejecting Melissus’ revision of Parmenides’ account. The divine Diogenes Laertius makes Melissus into an agnostic revisionary, working hard to render Parmenides’ ontology into a rational, defensible theory. Being or ‘the universe’ (recalling that one of the titles of Melissus’ book had been ‘On What Exists’) is unlimited, but yet it is still unitary (‘unchangeable’ and ‘immobile’), uniform, and full of matter. For such a universe, all motion (kinesis) is apparent. ‘Real motion’ is a contradiction in terms. Significantly, Diogenes’ version construes Melissus as a precursor of the sceptical tradition on the question of the divine origins of the kosmos or the existence of the gods—a position prefiguring (if not even confused by Diogenes with) the agnostic perspective of Protagoras: ‘he said that we ought not to make any statements about the gods, for it was impossible to have knowledge of them’ (DL 9.24). 338

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The eternal Melissus may have corrected Parmenides’ account by beginning with the ‘eternity’ and ‘divinity’ of Being. Being as ‘the Whole’ is not the final resting place of cosmological thought—for Being is grounded in the divine. As with Parmenides’ description of Being, ‘What is’ has not come into being from Non-being. Whatever is without beginning or end could not conceivably be described as ‘finite’ or ‘bounded’—for without inception or telos, it must be infinite. Only that which has no beginning deserves to be called the One and the divine. For only what has a beginning can be described as finite; ergo, Reality must be infinite. The One has Being as its source; Being has always existed; it is impossible for Being to have emerged from non-being: That which was, was always and always will be. For if it had come into being, it necessarily follows that before it came into being, nothing existed. If however nothing existed, in no way could anything come into being out of nothing. (B1) The Infinite On the question of the finite and the infinite, Melissus takes a stand against Parmenides and Zeno: not having come into being and without finite limit or end, the One must necessarily be infinite (Frs 7, 8, 15; cf. Aristotle, Met. 986b20–6; Physics 185a10). Another main argument for the infinity of Being is the consideration that if we accept the bounded character of ultimate reality, this boundary would itself have a limit and the limit would be ‘greater’ than Being which it encompassed: ‘For if it is infinite it will be one. For if it is two, they cannot be infinite, but they will have limits against one another’ (B 6); but if this was the case, Reality would not be absolute; therefore Being must be infinite; we might also note that the typical Greek antipathy toward the idea of the void plays a role in this argument: what bounds finite Being would not itself be being, but the void; to avoid positing the void, we must affirm the infinity of Being—even against the master Parmenides himself. If we accept Being as a finite Sphere this introduces the Void once more as its encircling ‘medium’. Postulating the infinite nature of Being avoids the void. Aristotle tried to undermine this type of argument in several of his works— Physics 186a6ff. and Sophistic Elenchi 163b13, 164b35 are notable attempts to confront the concept of infinity as it emerged out of Eleatic speculation. For Aristotle’s purposes both Parmenides and Melissus produce their paradoxical conclusions by arguing sophistically from unclarified and ambiguous premises. The Eleatics’ fundamental error is to begin with the idea that ‘being’ has only one meaning, whereas in reality it has many different senses (Physics 186a25): ‘Parmenides must assume not only that the word “is”, whatever it may be predicated of, has only one meaning, but also that it 339

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means “is identical-with-Being”, and that “is one” means “is identical-withUnity” (Physics 186a–186b). Incorporeality The defence of the timeless Eleatic One appears to have been of such overriding importance in Melissus’ thought that he was prepared to introduce the paradoxical ‘theme’ of an ‘incorporeal infinity’ and an ‘immaterial plenum’ as the only coherent way of justifying the Absolute. If the One has neither beginning or end (temporally) and cannot be considered as a bounded Sphere (spatially), then it is wrong to describe it in physical or sensible icons; a spatialized concept of Being makes no sense; Being is not an entity, but the matrix of entities; it is not a place (topos) in space or a part of a continuum, but the source of space; the only predicate that fits the infinity of Being is the timeless attribute of incorporeality. Being has absolutely no spatial or temporal properties: it a pure, homogeneous incorporeal infinity (B 9). 11 AGAINST PLURALITY Another important part of Simplicius’ report (De Caelo 558.17–559.13) is an account of Melissus’ criticism of pluralist accounts of Being, both of the commonsense and Milesian varieties. By admitting plurality, we also admit change, and with change comes the concepts of the void, motion, and perceptible contraries. But change is precisely what Parmemdes’ ontology denies. Being must not be confused with phenomena that come into being and change. Such phenomena simply reflect the evidence of the senses but fail to comprehend that which underlies the Many—which is, of course, the revised Parmenidean unity, the fundamental monad of Being qua Being. Behind sensory appearances only the One exists. The Many cannot be said to exist in the full sense of the term ‘being’. It was Zeno, however, who developed the aporetic character of the pluralist position as a way of vindicating the Parmenidean theory of the One.

ZENO ON THE ONE AND THE MANY My writing is an answer to the partisans of the Many and it returns their attack with interest, with a view to demonstrating that the hypothesis of the Many, if examined sufficiently in detail, leads to even more ridiculous results than the hypothesis of the One. (Zeno, in Plato, Parmenides 128B)

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12 INTRODUCTION Zeno of Elea was a pupil, then a friend, and eventually leader of the Eleatic school after Parmenides’ death. Plato scurrilously portrays him as Parmenides’ lover (Parmenides, 127A–B, 127C, 127A–128D; cf. Sophist 216A and 241D, Phaedrus 261D where Zeno is described as the Eleatic Palamedes and the reference to Zeno as Parmenides’ paidika in DL 9. 25). He was born in the early part of the fifth century and is known to have come to a tragic end around 430 BC after being involved in a failed conspiracy against the tyrant Nearchus who had Zeno tortured and executed (DL 9.26–7; Diodorus Siculus 10.18). Plato’s Socrates meets Zeno on his visit to Athens in 450 BC, which Plato gives as the date when his books were brought to Athens for the first time (Parmenides 127C). In the Parmenides, Zeno is presented as a celebrated author of a book of paradoxes defending the motionless unity of Being by showing the incoherence of those who accept that ‘Being is Many’. The text defending Parmenides’ ontology appears to have been something of a bestseller in the intellectual circles of Athenian society—an early forerunner of the Sophistic treatises later in the century.45 Zeno perfected the art of ‘dialectical’ demonstration or ‘hypothetical’ argument (Simplicius calls Zeno ‘double-tongued’ for his skill in providing equally persuasive arguments for two opposed sides of a case) and was famous in antiquity for his conceptual paradoxes—particularly the famous paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. We can thus approach Zeno as the first propagandist of a philosophical ‘theory’—with full self-consciousness he invented deductive procedures to defend the Parmenidean view of Being as an unchanging, immobile One and polemicized in favour of a monist ontology. By popularizing these controversial positions Zeno attempted to provide the Parmenidean theory of the unity of Being with a logical framework, pushing the Unitarian ontology to its uttermost paradoxical limits and demonstrating that a consistent ontology based on unity could hold its own against the counterclaims of either common sense or pluralism. In other words, Zeno was a controversialist and polemicist—and perhaps the greatest exponent of logical reflexivity in antiquity. With his work we are in the presence of a new faith in logical argumentation coupled to the task of vindicating ‘the hypothesis of the One’ by purely deductive reasoning. If reason demands that Being be One and common sense claims Being to be manifold and changeable, it is the latter rather than the former that is to be rejected.46 13 ZENO AS A REFLEXIVE THINKER What are the techniques of reflexive thinking put into play by Zeno’s arguments against difference and the Many? Simplicius’ commentary on Aristotle’s Physics is the key source for Zeno’s arguments against difference and motion; his text incorporated one of the 341

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most extensive citations of fragments from Zeno’s prose work. Zeno developed his famous paradoxes of infinite differentiation by taking Parmenides’ account of absolute Being as a major premise and philosophical framework. At this juncture the Presocratic problem of the One and the Many was fused with the newly discovered powers of logical reflexivity. Its result was dialectical argumentation. The set-piece arguments presuppose the principles of logical identity and non-contradiction, although these have not yet been formalized as logical principles. His demonstration of the conceptual and real impossibility of motion and ‘the Many’, for example, are unintelligible without this background of identity thinking. His first target may have been everyday discourse itself; the paradoxes achieve their effect by attacking common sense as a tissue of unreflexive beliefs accepted without argument or rational justification. Everyday reason is typified by the idea that the world is manifold and that difference makes a difference. Zeno sets out to discredit the assumptions behind these unconscious axioms, by first turning these axioms into ‘hypotheses’ and then into postulates that can be logically deconstructed. The vogue for logical deconstruction was not without its playful and ‘showman’ aspects: we can imagine the sign on the hoarding: Come and listen to the man who can demonstrate why there is no motion in the world! Here the context of the intellectual debate is particularly important. Zeno’s strategy was to focus his attack of doxa on the two most coherent theories of plurality and change—Pythagorean number theory and popular Heracliteanism. Both doctrines had become storm-centres of controversy and debate in mid-fifth-century Italy: Parmenides’ vision of Being dissolves sensory experience into nothingness, Heraclitean teachings render the same result in terms of the flux of natural things, while Pythagorean mathematics had generated its own aporias with the discovery of so-called ‘irrational’ numbers— numbers not expressible as whole integers. Pythagorean mathematics, with its spatialization and materialization of numbers, had opened the way for a spatiotemporal universe as an infinite continuum—a metaphysical image which flew directly in the face of Parmenides’ theory of Being. The partisans of ‘infinity’ ideologically prepared the way for the Athenian reception of Milesian natural philosophy. And the root of this mathematical infinity was the assumption concerning the manifold of mathematical ‘objects’. As Burnet has suggested it is only if we regard the arguments of Zeno as directed against the assumption that things are a many, that is to say a ‘multitude of units’, that their real significance can be understood. According to the Pythagorean view, geometry was simply an application of arithmetic, and the point only differs from the arithmetical unit in so far as it is a ‘unit having position’. (1960:82–3) 342

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This is the polemical setting in which Zeno began to construct logical proofs for the unity of Being and to discredit ‘infinity’ by showing that its assumption would lead to self-negating absurdities. The results of these efforts are today known as ‘Zeno’s Paradoxes’: Now this treatise opposes the advocates of the many and gives them back their ridicule with interest, for its purpose is to show that their hypothesis that existences are many, if properly followed up, leads to still more absurd results than the hypothesis that they are one. (Parmenides 128E) For the purposes of this study of the emergence of reflexive experience, however, Zeno’s paradoxes are less important for their intrinsic content than as evidence for a growing self-consciousness of dialectical reasoning. In fact under closer analysis, many of his ‘paradoxes’ turn out to be aporetic wordgames. It was perhaps Zeno who began the popular association between philosophical activity and hair-splitting logical analysis. And we find many of the traditional logical puzzles in Zeno: dilemmatic reasoning, riddles to spur thinking into action and generate further reflection, logical puzzles, conceptual subterfuges—for example, the paradox of Parts and Wholes in the Grain of millet and the heap of millet (Simplicius, Physics 1108.14–28), the playful introduction of the aporetic ideas of ‘the infinitely small’ or ‘infinitely large’ (Simplicius, Physics 139–0), arguments against spatial and temporal infinity (Simplicius, Physics 562), and so forth.47 But as cultural documents, Zeno’s word-games provide invaluable evidence of a growing linguistic and logical consciousness concerning the premises and conceptual organization of mundane reasoning. Moreover, the debates these word-games generated provide evidence for the growing importance of sophistic argumentation and contentious debating techniques—which receive their first explicit formalization in Zeno’s text. 13.1 Elenchos Zeno’s general strategy of elenchos can be formalized as follows: elenchos is the ability to argue opposite sides of a case: that Being is one and many, like and unlike, at rest and in motion (Phaedrus 261D). The particular technique of elenchos that Zeno was especially noted for was the so-called reductio ad absurdum argument—literally the reduction to absurdity. Like the Eleatic school in general, the defence of the unity of Being was primarily directed at the commonsense arguments for Motion and Plurality. How did the reductio ad absurdum proceed? (i)

First, a statement or logos that was accepted as ‘self-evident’ was proposed; this formed the argument or thesis (for example, The World is a Manifold of Mathematical Units or All things are in Continuous Change); 343

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(ii)

second, the isolation of at least one necessary conceptual or logical presupposition of the thesis (for example, the assumption of the continuum as a realm of finite parts, elements, or discrete processes); (iii) the deduction of at least one ‘absurd’ consequence from such a presupposition, typically by constructing a possible world governed by this presupposition (Achilles and the Tortoise, the Stadium, and so on), showing its ultimate illogicality or incoherence; (iv) generalizing from the absurd particular model or possible world to a general critique of the thesis (for example, by arguing that the general principle of multiplicity or becoming is incoherent). As a logical technique this is frequently spoken of as a method of supposition in that it proceeds by assuming the truth of a thesis, isolating some presupposition acceptable to its proponent and deriving absurd or illogical consequences from the original postulate. In Zeno’s own paradigm cases the central supposition is the idea of an infinitely divisible or discontinuous manifold (a spatial or temporal magnitude), and the aim of the demonstration is to show that such an assumption entails absurdity and should therefore be replaced by a counterthesis, that is by a supposition not involving difference or divisibility. Zeno thus attempts to prove the incoherence of both a Pythagorean world of discontinuous magnitudes and a Heraclitean world of contraries and change. These are to be replaced by assumptions supporting a Parmenidean universe of pure Being. It should be emphasized that Zeno’s own image of Pythagorean mathematics was influenced by spatial and videological metaphors. His paradoxes therefore all follow the model of a spatially discontinuous ‘object’. Behind the whole enterprise lay the idea of preserving thinking and reason from incoherence and logical contradiction by returning to the philosophy of the One. In a very different context and with much more refined dialectical concepts, Plato would later attempt a similar rescue operation to preserve pure Being and Logos from the conventionalizing and relativizing work of doxa, rhetoric, and sophistry. Plato acknowledged the impact of Zeno’s elenchos by having the arch-paradoxer read extracts from his famous work to Socrates in the Parmenides. What are the mechanisms of this dialectic in practice? 13.2 The spatial paradoxes (i) (ii)

Thesis: Space exists. Presupposition: ‘Space’ (or ‘place’) must be ‘in’ something on the supposition that everything that exists is ‘contained’ in something (here ‘to be’ is ‘to be in space’). (iii) The absurd consequence: Space must be in space (and so on ad infinitum creating a ‘hyperspace’). 344

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(iv) Generalized conclusion: To avoid the absurdity of such a superspace (iii), Thesis (i) must be false, ‘therefore’ ‘Space does not exist’. Spatial magnitudes (i)

Thesis: a finite manifold (e.g. a series) contains parts separated from one another by discrete, determinable magnitudes, (ii) Presupposition: between each interval there is a further manifold, and so on ad infinitum. (iii) Absurd consequence: there exists a ‘real’ or ‘finite infinite’, (iv) Generalized conclusion: Thesis (i) is false, the manifold does not exist. Family variants of this type of paradox all involve the Pythagorean view of magnitude as a ‘string’ of spatially extended point-numbers—which itself rests on the wider videological assumption of discrete magnitudes or intervals. The effect of Zeno’s argument is to focus attention upon the underlying concepts or conceptual network implicated in our everyday beliefs and mathematical theories. 13.3 Paradoxes of plurality 13.3.1 The Great and the small Plurality requires there to be both an infinitely great and an infinitely small entity; both raise paradoxical consequences (we can always ‘add’ or ‘subtract’ from either the Greatest or the Smallest). The Greatest runs on to Infinity, the Smallest peters away into nothingness. 13.3.2 The divided continuum If Being has magnitude it can no longer be described as One. Anything with magnitude is divisible, and the operation of division can be repeated in principle indefinitely. By admitting magnitude, we turn the One into a Many. The concept of ‘divisibility into parts’ is thus crucial to Zeno’s aporetic purposes. Admitting a divisible One leads to the absurd concept of the infinite continuum: the infinite division of a unity once difference (or division into parts) is accepted is illustrated by the impossibility of crossing such an infinitely divided line or continuum.

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13.4 Paradoxes of motion These are typically referred to under the headings: 13.4.1 Achilles and the tortoise The impossibility of Achilles ever being able to catch up to a tortoise given a head start in a race; a paradox based on the infinite divisibility of spatial relations—here in an ever-decreasing progression. Achilles must first reach the point from which the tortoise began the race; by then, however, the tortoise has moved another interval, and by the time Achilles has reached this point, the tortoise has moved ahead once more, and so on indefinitely. Achilles can never catch the tortoise ‘since’ an infinitely divisible continuum cannot be crossed in a finite time. 13.4.2 The paradox of the flying arrow Time and space are infinitely divisible; a flying arrow must be halfway to its destination at some point, but if it is halfway through its flight at this point, it must have been at a point halfway between the start and this point, and so on ad infinitum: ‘therefore’ the arrow never moves. 13.4.3 The dichotomy The paradox of the dichotomy arises from the infinite divisibility of any magnitude. Thus any given line can in principle be divided an indefinite number of times. In principle, the argument goes, there is no ‘limit’ to physical division. Every ‘finite’ magnitude, in other words, can be shown to be an ‘infinite’ continuum. 13.4.4 The moving rows The impossibility of two mobile rows of objects running parallel to each other crossing an open space. The argument is a variant of the dichotomy or equal division of a line that can be continued indefinitely.48 These arguments are all based on the idea of the recursive division of spatial or temporal magnitudes to create an infinite continuum (Aristotle, Physics 239b14ff.). Simplicius in his commentary on Book Six of Aristotle’s Physics formulates the problem as follows: If there is motion, it is possible in a finite time to traverse an infinite [number of things], touching each of them; but in fact this is impossible; consequently, there is no motion. And he proved the conditional premise by using the division of magnitudes to infinity: for if every magnitude is divisible into an infinite [number of things], it would also be composed 346

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of an infinite [number of things]; thus, a thing that is moving [over] and traversing any magnitude whatever would move [over] and traverse an infinity and would touch an infinite [number of things] in a finite time, in which [time] it will traverse the whole finite [magnitude]. (947, 1) If every line can be divided, then the same dichotomic procedure can be recursively repeated to create an infinitely divided (or dichotomized) continuum. The operation can ‘go on forever’. Time is conceptualized as an infinite series of discrete ‘moments’—a ‘line’ of intervals. From this premise it ‘follows’ that the smallest line we can construct or imagine turns out to be an ‘uncrossable’ continuum, the consequence of positing such a continuum being that any object moving across such an imaginary line has to be stationary at some point, but if this is the case, the object must be stationary between these points, and so on. No motion is possible given a possible world where space and time are constructed from point intervals. The arrow apparently moving across an infinitely divisible continuum is actually stationary; Achilles can never catch up to the tortoise that has been given a fractional head start. As Aristotle noted, however, these so-called paradoxes are generated by the assumption that time is composed of discrete present moments or ‘instants’— like a string of discrete ‘nows’; once this premise is abandoned the paradoxes no longer hold, other than as conclusion in a sophistic language-game (Physics 233a22–3). In other words the argumentative force of the stationary arrow paradox depends on a false major premise: ‘if everything always rests or moves whenever it is against what is equal, and what is travelling is always in the now, the travelling arrow is motionless’ (Physics 239b5–7, 239b30–5, 263a5– 263b9; cf. On Generation and Corruption 325a1–15). Simplicius generalizes this proof by distinguishing the concept of ‘actual infinity’ from ‘potential infinity’: Zeno’s paradox…arose by way of the equivocality of the infinite and by substituting the infinite by extremes for the infinite according to division. For it would be impossible to traverse this infinity in a finite time and to touch a thus infinite [number of things], but traversing a magnitude infinite according to division in a time infinite according to division is in no way absurd. Zeno took magnitude as actually divided into an infinite [number of things], but he did not further [take] time [that way], even though it is similar to magnitude. But [Aristotle] here solved Zeno’s puzzle in this way, by saying that there is nothing absurd in traversing things infinite in one way in a time infinite in a similar way. (948, 1) Zeno’s paradox is generated if time is treated as actually infinite; it dissolves once we think of time as potentially infinite: For in fact the time too is divisible to infinity. But the infinity is potential 347

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and not actual. Accordingly, it will traverse a potentially infinite number of [bits] of the magnitude in a potentially infinite number of [bits] of the time. (1013, 1 20ff.; on the ‘Achilles’ argument see 1013, 1 30–1015, 125) The ultimate philosophical purpose of Zeno’s argument was to demonstrate the absurdity of introducing division, plurality, or the manifold and thereby strengthen the apparently absurd ‘indivisibility’ of the One. The ‘absurdity’, of course, only follows if we are shocked by the aporetic character of the concepts of ‘infinite’ space, ‘infinite’ time, or ‘nothingness’ (the terminus of infinite division/divisibility). These paradoxes lose their appeal and cogency once we reconceptualize space and time: What Zeno actually does prove is that space and time cannot consist of points or moments which themselves have magnitude, or that the elements of a continuum cannot be units homogeneous with the continuum constructed out of them. He shows, in fact, that there must be more points on the line, more moments in the shortest lapse of time, than there are members of the series of natural numbers, or, what comes to the same thing, that, though every continuum is infinitely divisible, infinite divisibility is not an adequate criterion of continuity. That, however, is all he undertook to prove. We know from Plato that his work was an argumentum ad homines, and as such it is entirely successful. (Burnet, 1960:85) This illustrates one of the central functions of dialectical argument—even at its most playful: to force common sense and everyday cognition to reflect upon and perhaps revise taken-for-granted concepts and theories (here, the view of space and time as two ‘strings’ of isolated intervals or moments, or, as Henri Bergson would later argue, the fallacy of modelling duration upon discrete spatial extension).49 For Zeno, elenchos was subservient to a metaphysical aim—to demonstrate the impossibility of any differentiated whole (as entailing the existence of discontinuous intervals, infinite divisibility, the void, infinite magnitudes, etc.) and thereby to show that Being must be a motionless unity or plenum. It was this objective which occasioned Socrates’ ironic question: Is that the purpose of your treatises, to maintain against all arguments that existences are not many? And you think each of your treatises is a proof of this very thing, and therefore you believe that the proofs you offer that existences are not many are as many as the treatises you have written? (Parmenides 127E) 348

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14 CONCLUSION: THE GENEALOGY OF LOGIC The work of Parmenides and Zeno was crucial for the genealogy of logical reflexivity which received a major impetus from their rigorous defence of the unitary conception of Being. Parmenides’ Sphere of Being refracted into the icons of Order, Immobility, and Necessity precipitated a radical shift in logical and philosophical theory. Indeed the relentless concentration on the problem of ‘Being’ and its logical entailments generated something like a new philosophical research programme. In terms of its substantive content, the programme revolved around the controversies that followed in the wake of the logical and epistemological paradoxes. Parmenides’ mystical poem forced his contemporaries and successors to think about logic, demonstration, language and—in the late fifth century—proof theory. As we have seen, these themes were taken up most resolutely by Zeno, often called the founder of dialectical argumentation. Ironically, by creating metaphysical disputes logic experienced a rapid period of growth, and by the end of the fifth century what had begun as intellectual games of elenchos and antithetical disputation had flowered into an active field of logicomathematical research. Logical reasoning was thus set on the path of formalization. 14.1 Dialectical reasoning We can certainly rank Zeno as one of the founders of logical reflexivity which, in the Greek world of the fifth-century enlightenment manifested itself in the polemical traditions of dialectical reason. In this sense he can be claimed as the originator of hypothetical-dialectical reason.50 The most immediate impact of Eleatic logic was undoubtedly upon the Sophist movement and in particular the radical reworking of the method elenchos in the dialogical activities of Socrates, and through Socrates’ precedent, the dialectical writing and philosophical discourse of Plato. As we will see in Volume 4, travelling Sophists began to make a living by selling their skills in argument, polishing elementary techniques of proof into virtuoso performances. Apparently frivolous problems turned out to have revolutionary consequences in the growth of knowledge and reflexive inquiry. In the process, however, Parmenides became a victim of his own success. The ‘auratic’ language of pure Being was drawn into the vortex of sophistic debate as merely another line of argument: the ‘partisans of Being’ would be playfully opposed to the ‘partisans of the Flux’ (for example, in Gorgias’ famous lampoon on Being and Non-being). It was the Sophist movement that mounted an all-out attack on absolute Being as the metaphysical basis of tradition and conservatism. ‘What if, the Sophist suggested, ‘Being is subject to the elenchos?’ ‘Parmenides thought he was the voice of fundamental Ontology when in fact he was engaged in nothing more “awesome” than projecting the conventions of grammar—embodied in everyday Greek—upon the universe’. Ontology is 349

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merely a formalized metaphor drawn from the grammatical disposition of Greek sentence structure. Reflection should now turn toward the syntax and semantics of what Parmenides and Zeno both took for granted: it should explore the hidden ‘dialectic’ of thought and language, logic and grammar.51 14.2 Mathematical reasoning Another effect of the Parmenidean revolution was to encourage theorists to undertake a fundamental inspection of taken-for-granted ideas and beliefs, with the consequence that many of the basic categories of formal thought received more careful clarification and critical justification (for example, the beginnings of the process of critical definition which eventually led to the axiomatics we know as Euclidean geometry). Three concepts in particular were seen as particularly important for the foundations of the formal and mathematical sciences—the concepts of space, time, and infinity.52 14.3 Sceptical and deconstructive reasoning Over half a century of logicomathematical speculation elapsed prior to Aristotle’s great enterprise of analytic formalization. Aristotle, as it is often said, invented formal logic, but he could only pursue this project from within a tradition informed by the work of Parmenides and Zeno. From this point onward it is possible to trace a coherent, if frequently discontinuous, history of Western logical theorizing, culminating in the symbolic logic, axiomatic theories, and algorithms of the present day. The intellectual framework of this logical enterprise was constructed in the language-games of Presocratic Greece. And this, in turn, was only possible within a wider cultural context of systematic self-reflection. Far from being separate from cultural presuppositions, the discourse of logical reflection displays and celebrates an older tradition of dialogic reflexivity. As an explicit codification of informal reasoning, logic is part of a more general poetic reflexion upon language, grammar, and thought that is one of the singular achievements of fifth-century culture. Parmenidean ontological poetry was simply one important occasion for this experiment in logicolinguistic reflection. We thus have another instance where a fertile tradition of speculation is necessary as the matrix of reflexive criticism. We should observe, finally, that Parmenidean reflexivity also produced unpredictable and unintentional effects on the language of reflection and intellectual argument itself. Aristotle, for example, would construe Parmenides’ work in a very one-sided manner determined by his own version of Platonic metaphysics. Parmenides’ ontology was respecified as a tacit commitment to the two-value arche of formal reasoning: a thing can be said to be true or not to be true. The ‘not’ in negative propositions is a reflection of the unbridgeable gap between a thing being true and being false. Logical contradiction knows no third value (this is the rational secret of Parmenides’ Ways of Being and 350

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Non-being). From this point onward, logic becomes an instrument for saying what is true and what is false. Aristotle, in other words, interpreted Parmenides and Zeno as the first of his predecessors to construct a deductive and argumentatively defended ontology. Where the mythopoeic ontology rests on an implicit digital syntax (‘It is/is not’), Zeno’s dialectical proofs already explicitly assume the binary principle of excluded middle and point the way to a true resolution of the problem of error, untruth (pseudos), and deductive proof. And for Aristotle, the ground of all reasoning lay in formal models of rational proof and a digital conception of truth. Thus by the time of Socrates and the Megarian logicians, binarity and digitalization are the unquestioned instruments of new modes of inquiry and thought patterns. Between Parmenides and Aristotle the Sophist movement effectively’ spread this logical ideology throughout the city-states of Greece. Not surprisingly the same period saw the emergence of a new digitalized lexicon of logical reflection: axioma, dialektike, eristike, elenchi, antilogikos, misologoi, topica, apodeixis, logike, aporia, and so forth. It would be no exaggeration to claim that the decades from around 480 to 400 BC constructed the cultural parameters for a far-reaching digitalization of thought, determining the intellectual orientations for later logical and epistemological practices (Zeno in particular provided a powerful stimulus for Aristotelian and Stoic logic as well as for later Sceptical and Pyrhhonist epistemological doctrine). Because of these beginnings it might also be said that Greek logic never transcended its own agonistic horizons: argumentation was viewed as a competitive struggle modelled as a zero-sum game of truth and falsity. Zeno had left the instruments of dialectical argument with an aura of paradox. The Sophists would ultimately inherit this legacy and construct an educational programme which promised to teach the techniques of winning every time. In its most extreme manifestations, intellectual debate would assume the appearance of a life-and-death struggle for absolute certainty.

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8 PLURALISTS: EMPEDOCLES, ANAXAGORAS, AND THE BEGINNINGS OF GREEK ATOMISM There must be either one principle of nature or more than one. (Aristotle, Physics 184b15) Empedocles 1 2 3 4 5 6

Introduction The limitations of human experience The fourfold roots of Being Eternal cyclical change: the One from the Many, the Many from the One The soul and God From Empedocles to Aristotle Anaxagoras

7 8 9

Introduction Anaxagoras’ general philosophical outlook Nous as the World-Mind The Atomists: Leucippus and Democritus Leucippus of Miletus Democritus

10 Introduction 11 The Democritean vision of the atomic universe 12 Conclusion: ancient and modern Atomism Overview We have seen that during the fifth century Milesian natural philosophy was 352

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popularized by figures like Diogenes of Apollonia as a form of material monism. Over the same period Pythagorean number metaphysics drifted inexorably toward a type of radical dualism elaborated around the opposed principles of the Limited and the Unlimited. But Pythagoreanism was also reinterpreted as implicitly containing a strong commitment to the Many in the form of an unlimited universe of corporeal ‘atomic’ Numbers (a doctrine which we have seen formed one of the main targets of Zeno’s logical paradoxes). Moreover, Eleatic ontology opposed all three tendencies with its own conception of Being as an unchanging, immobile ‘One’. For the advocates of absolute Being, even the term ‘kosmos’ was inapplicable to the order of the Whole. All that could be said was that Being is. From the ‘discovery of the Kosmos’ as a sacred knowledge of the Whole we seem to end with either a disenchanted world of infinite kosmoi or the blank denial of the reality of the world as process and change. By the first decades of the fifth century we have, so to speak, the scandal of three apparently exclusive versions of Being: Physicalist Monism, Dualism (including mathematical pluralism), and Ontological Monism. In an oversimplified and schematic fashion, this aporetic situation still described the philosophical field around the middle of the fifth century. At that point three associated streams of thought assumed the task of reconciling the unity of Being with the heterogeneous plurality of experienced reality. The postParmenidean systems (in Kirk and Raven’s terms) attempted to break the deadlock by mapping a third route between monism and dualism. This is the coded message in Plato’s Sophist (at 242D): Certain Muses in Ionia and Sicily realized that…the safest thing…was to say that that which is is both Many and One, and that it is held together by Enmity and Friendship. ‘For while being separated it is always being brought together’ [Heraclitus, Fragment 10], say the stricter of these Muses. The milder, however, softened the assertion that this is always the case, and say that the universe alternates: at one time it is One and at peace through the power of Love, at another time a Multiplicity and at war with itself owing to some sort of Strife. All three post-Eleatic discourses—exemplified by the writings of Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the Atomists Leucippus and Democritus—theorized in the wake of Parmenides and Heraclitus from the perspective of a pluralist universe, of the Many-in-the-One. They each, to varying degrees, grant ontological status to ‘the Many’, and use this new insight to criticize their predecessors’ question-frames and solutions. While it is certainly inaccurate to treat Pluralism as a dialectical response to the aporetic streams of Presocratic thought, it is evident that Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Leucippus, and Democritus theorized by contesting the problematics of their illustrious predecessors and, with explicit self-consciousness, attempted to resolve the problems inherited with these discursive formations—most simply and dramatically rendered in the conflict between the contradictory conceptions 353

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of truth and Being represented by the Eleatic, Pythagorean, and Heraclitean traditions. Simplified to its bare essentials Pluralism attempted to deconstruct the ‘antinomies’ of Parmenidean and Pythagorean ontology.1

EMPEDOCLES 1 INTRODUCTION What do we know of Empedocles’ background, life, and work? After the Persian invasion, the cities of Greek Asia Minor lost their commercial and political hegemony; the centre of gravity of power in the Greek world shifted westwards to the mainland city-states, to southern Italy, and to Sicily. Athens and Sparta were growing in influence and wealth and the effects of the Athenian imperial confederation were already evident. The period of Empedocles’ life—c. 495 to c. 435 BC—saw momentous social changes in political life and intellectual culture. Empedocles thus straddles the end of the Archaic age and the beginning of Classical Greek civilization. He was born in Acragas (now called Agrigentum or Agrigento), a city which was, after Syracuse and Gela, one of the most powerful and commercially successful Sicilian cities of the sixth and fifth centuries. The polis itself had been founded between 580 and 570 BC by Ionian colonists from Gela (Rhodes). His grandfather of the same name is said to have won the horse-race at Olympia in 496/495 BC. At this time Sicily was particularly favoured as a receptive environment for new ways of thinking and cultural experiments. Ionian natural philosophy and cosmology, mathematical inquiries introduced by the dispersed migrants of the Pythagorean Order, and Eleatic speculation circulated as exciting new theories of the Cosmos, the physical world, and human experience. By virtue of their geographical and commercial centrality Sicilian cities like Syracuse and Acragas played an important role in spreading these new spores of thought and the Acragantines in particular appear to have been in the vanguard of these changes. Empedocles was thus fortunate to have ‘flourished’ in the middle decades of the fifth century in one of the most turbulent and creative periods of Sicilian history.2 During the late sixth century Sicily was the island of ‘tyrants’ (among the most outstanding of these individuals being Panaetius tyrant of Leontini, c. 610 BC, Hippocrates of Gela, c. 505 BC, Phalaris, Theron the Emmenid, and Gelon (d. 478 BC) in the city of Acragas, and Hieron of Syracuse). This creative—if violent—political interregnum paved the way for the new ‘democratic’ constitutions of the fifth century. Like his patron Theron, Empedocles was a many-sided—even a divided and ambivalent—figure straddling two different universes of discourse—one, the prephilosophical world of magic and myth, the other, a cosmological discourse redolent of the naturalistic speculation of the late fifth and fourth centuries. He steps onto the stage of Greek thought as a magician, miracle-worker, and natural physicianphilosopher. This Janus-like figure composed a work with the Milesian title, Peri Phuseos (On Nature, three books) and another treatise in the Pythagorean— 354

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or even Orphic—style—called Katharmoi (‘Purifications’, two books) setting out an inventory of quasi-magical purification techniques designed to secure the soul’s fate after death. Both titles are probably later inventions of the doxographical tradition beginning with Aristotle’s resolute attempt to understand poets like Empedocles as individuals struggling to produce abstract thought without the conceptual language of philosophy. It was the poem on Phusis—with its doctrine of the fourfold ‘roots’ of reality in the elements Earth, Fire, Air, and Water—that would have a decisive impact on Aristotle’s worldview. The Katharmoi is usually dropped from the philosophical canon as a ‘mythico-religious’ work. Here, however, I will suggest an alternative approach, cleaving to the hypothesis that Empedocles’ reflections on the soul were an integral part of a single coherent corpus centred upon the reflexivity of the self. Empedocles also seems to have been active as a democratic statesman in Acragantine politics after the collapse of the Emmenid dynasty, a teacher of rhetoric, and—some have suggested—a ‘wonder-worker’ and charlatan. Diogenes thus relates several stories concerning Empedocles’ semi-magical power to manipulate natural forces—often in the context of particular civic ends, for example in the story of his redirecting a river to save the city of Selinus from pestilence (DL 8.60, 61, 63–4, 66, 70). His political involvements (presumably after 472 BC) are indicative of the influence of the philosophical and legislative activities of Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Xenophanes. But his democratic leanings would have prevented him from fully participating in the Pythagorean clubs—a significant biographical and contextual factor in accounting for his own peripatetic lifestyle and ‘prophetic’ self-image. Yet from the content of the Purifications it is beyond reasonable doubt that he was deeply attracted by the Pythagorean doctrine of metempsychosis and the Orphic impulse toward magic and auratic expression (cf. B 112, 115, 117, 128). Indeed Hippolytus, in Refutation 6.24, traces the cosmic forces of Love (Philia) and Strife (Neikos) to the Pythagorean conflict of the Limited and the Unlimited: For Love makes the cosmos imperishable and eternal, so they think— for substance and the cosmos are one—but Strife disperses and differentiates and tries to make the cosmos many by dividing it… And according to them Strife is the creator of all the things that come into being, but Love is the one who acts as guardian and takes forethought for the whole that it should remain and brings together into one the things that have been divided and scattered from the whole, so that it may remain and be one. Neither Strife dividing the cosmos nor Love adding the divided parts to the cosmos will ever cease. Some such, so it seems, is the arrangement of the cosmos according to Pythagoras. (trans. in Osborne, 1987a: 267)3 The significance of these auratic fragments within the larger corpus is impossible to appreciate when abstracted from the complex and shifting discourse formations of the period. We have already mentioned the Pythagorean sects 355

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and medical genres. But another powerful source-text mediating his dialogue with his contemporaries and predecessors is Parmenides’ magisterial poem on Being. Parmenides’ celebration of the unity of Being may have been the direct foil for his own poem on the ‘roots’ of Becoming. Undoubtedly his central idea of a cyclical cosmic struggle between Love (Philia) and Strife (Neikos) as forces in nature encouraged Aristotle’s reading of his work as a halfway house between mythic poetry and cosmological speculation (Aristotle speaks of consulting Empedocles Verses’ (epos) at Met. 985b1–5). But we need not interpret this ambivalence as a sign of a divided mind. Empedocles may have consciously tried to combine the calling of natural philosopher and philosopher-poet, stressing one role or the other at different points in his career (in this context it is relevant that Diogenes connects him with Pythagoras as a renegade from a Pythagorean school, interpreting Fragment B 129 from the Katharmoi as a coded reference to Pythagoras: ‘There was living among them a man of profound knowledge, who had acquired the greatest wealth of wisdom, one expert in every form of skilled activity’; cf. Porphyry, Life of Pythagoras 30 and Iamblichus v. Pythag. 67; Hippolytus, Ref. 6. 26: ‘For the Pythagoreans believe in the reincarnation of souls, as also Empedocles does, Pythagorising’). Whatever the conjectural status of the biographical facts, the figure of Empedocles as a philosopher-poet-scientist is an apt metaphor for the decisive fifth-century transition toward a more explicit mode of abstract reflexivity, a kind of philosophical centaur—in Werner Jaeger’s image—with a head of theory grafted uneasily upon a poetic body (the Roman author, Lucretius followed Empedocles’ hybrid style in his De Rerum Natura). His death by suicide—throwing himself into the crater of Mount Etna—is most probably a Hellenistic fiction.4 2 THE LIMITATIONS OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE Empedocles’ life-long dialogue with Parmenides and Pythagoras is evident from his views on the nature and limits of human sense-perception as a path to wisdom. By nature human beings have a restricted and partial understanding of things. In particular the human senses are not suited to an understanding of the Whole (B 3). The perceptual origins of human knowledge—however miraculous in their functions (Fr. 84)—always contain the marks of partiality and finitude. The senses lead common sense to affirm the reality of change or coming-into-being from that which has no reality. Mortals only glimpse parts of the Whole (B 39), limited as they are to the fragmentary evidence of their senses (B 2.1–8), the limitations of personal experience, and the inherent weakness of the mind (2, 15, 39). The mind itself is conditioned by the physical and physiological constraints of its embodiment. Empedocles takes his general attitude toward human limits from Xenophanes and Parmenides. Divine matters cannot be sensed by the eyes or touched by the hands; if truth is present it remains elusive and difficult to the 356

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majority of human beings (Frs 114, 132, 133, 136). As with Parmenides’ wisdom, truth is preserved and guarded by the sacred Muse—Calliope in B 131. Given that the Whole—like Parmenides’ Being—is not an object of senseperception or empirical determination, the claim to know must be made in terms of the ‘divine’ element in human experience. And this invariably refers to the intellectual faculties of the psyche. If we wish to see into the true nature of things only intellect is fitted for the task: only what is ‘spirited’ can reach out toward things and know the ultimate nature of the Real (but note B 3, verse 9; cf. Sextus Empiricus Adv. Math. 7.122–4). As with Parmenides’ epistemology, questioning the limits of the senses does not lead to scepticism, but to a renewed respect for the powers of reflection (noien) and reason (nous). Only the light of reason can hope to comprehend the Whole which is, for Empedocles, the realm of the ‘really real’ and true knowledge (episteme). The failure to comprehend the Whole is one of the roots of human error and conflict (cf. 31 B 2, 39): separated from the kosmos mankind is in a sleepwalking state lacking insight into the Cosmic cycle to which the human species integrally belongs. This may also have been derived from the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. Perhaps this ‘community’ of part and Whole, human and divine ‘insight’ within the Cosmic cycle is the motivation behind the ‘like-by-like’ doctrine of Fragment 109: For by earth we see earth, by water water, by ether bright ether, and by fire flaming fire, love by love and strife by mournful strife. But the heart of his critique of common sense and ‘superficial’ wisdom derives from a view of divine wisdom hidden deep within the psyche. As a ‘thinker of transformations’ Empedocles follows Pythagoras and Heraclitus in making the soul’s reflexivity the centrepiece of his world-view. Psyche and thought pervade all things (‘Everything has intelligence and a portion of thought’).5 The psyche stands forth as the living symbol and medium of transfiguration. Indeed, the two great tensions in the human soul—Love and Strife—are the powers that Empedocles selects in elaborating his theory of the cosmic cycle. The Parmenidean influence on Fragments 11, 13, and 14 is well established: mortals perceive the world under its aspect of coming-to-be and passingaway, thinking that Reality admits creation and destruction; they fail to grasp the perspective of the Whole where Reality has no origination and suffers no destruction. Like Parmenide’s ontology his theorizing is informed by a revolutionary intention. Empedocles’ auditors must abandon their uncritical ideas about genesis and destruction and move toward the truth of the Cycle of eternal Being.

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3 THE FOURFOLD ROOTS OF BEING Both On Nature and Purifications are written in hexameter verse. Empedocles also follows Parmenides’ precedent by making the unchanging integrity of Being the foundation of his cosmic vision: Being always is; creation ex nihilo is impossible (DK 31 B 11). Hence all beings are formed from a configuration of ungenerated elements (Frs 8, 11, 12). Consequently, no being can be created or brought into existence from Non-being. There is no void in Being (31 B 17). Being forms a totality like a sphere (Frs 13, 14). But at this point Empedocles makes a critical departure from his predecessor. Where Parmenides had postulated a completely homogeneous unity of Being, Empedocles introduces the idea of Being as a totality of four indestructible elements. Being is differentiated into four primordial ‘roots’ (rhizomata). The rhizomata doctrine With no formal argument or explicit justification Empedocles posited the existence of a plurality of archai. The eternal elements form a dynamic mixture producing the great cycles of the Cosmos. With this single step Empedocles became the first theorist of Difference. Being is certainly ‘the Absolute’ and to this extent uncreated and divine; but unlike the Eleatic doctrine, its nature is grounded in the absolute existence of a fourfold structure of indestructible elements. Difference and heterogeneity are part of the original constitution of the world-stuff. These are symbolized by four unchanging root elements, personified as gods: Shining Zeus (Fire), Life-bringing Hera (Air), Aidoneus (Earth) and Nestis (Water): Warm, Dry, Cold, Wet (Fire, Air, Earth, Water) (B 6; Hippolytus, Ref. 7.29: ‘Zeus is the fire and Life-bringing Hera is the earth which brings forth the fruits of life, Aidoneus is the air because we look at everything through it but it alone we do not see, and Nestis is the water. For this alone is the vehicle which becomes the cause of nourishment to all things that are nourished, but in itself it cannot nourish them…These are the chief points that hold together the whole theory of the cosmos, to sum it up schematically: water and earth—the constituents of the things made; fire and breath—the instruments and efficient causes; Strife and Love—the things that create by craftsmanship’). Common sense misleads the mind into accepting birth and death as ultimate realities (B8, B9). Against the evidence of sense-perception Empedocles believed that the true picture was radically different—the world is nothing but an eternal dance of the immutable elements combining and disengaging in dynamic cycles. The elements of the Hot (thermon). Dry (xeron), Cold (psukhron), and Wet (hugron) underlying all things are not themselves created or destroyed. Existing things have not come into being or passed-away into nothingness, but are generated from combinations and rearrangements of

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the eternal elements. The elements themselves are eternal and, it is to be assumed, equal in potency (B 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 15). To underline the central point Empedocles speaks of the ‘mixing’ or ‘mingling’ of the fourfold roots of reality. All finite things are created through a ‘configuring’ of the elements in definite proportions or logoi (B 8, 11). What people call ‘growth’, ‘generation’, ‘change’, and ‘destruction’ is in reality an invisible process of mixing and separation. While common sense stays with the surfaces of becoming, theoretical Reason returns to what remains eternally the same, namely, the cosmic cycle of Being—this may have been one source for Aristotle’s theory of the hupokeimenon or ‘substance’ that underlies all physical transformations: while things are altered when the laws of ‘comingling’ change, Being conserves itself through its transformations (B 21.9–12). One important part of the rhyzomata doctrine is the idea that the configuring process is governed by a ‘rational’ mechanism: the elements are combined according to definite ‘ratios’ (and perhaps also in set ‘phases’ (B 17.27–9)). To see the world aright is to uncover the fixed ratios (logoi) by which all things are composed. The abstract form of this idea would deeply influence the thought of Plato and Aristotle—and may be considered as a separate source of the Logos doctrine which we have examined in Chapter 6. Aristotle noted that Empedocles was inclined to reduce these four elements to their most powerful member, Fire, perhaps for two reasons: because all the other elements are opposed to Fire and also to recognize and honour Zeus, the source of fire (cf. On Generation and Corruption 2.3.330b19 and 318b2– 7; Met. 1.4.985a23–29ff., esp. a32). And in his related commentary, Hippolytus breaks the six Empedoclean components into three groups: two material ones, earth and water; two instrumental ones, by which the material roots are ordered and changed, fire and air; and the two powers of Love and Strife that work the material by means of the instruments (Ref. 7.29; cf. Met. 984b1–4 where Aristotle locates a similar mechanism in Parmenides’ philosophy). Aristotle implies that this reduction of the four ‘roots’ to two basic contrary forces (Fire and the group of Earth-Air-Water) is implicit in Empedocles’ poetical works (985b3–4)—the implication being that Aristotle had access to texts which elaborated the rhyzomata doctrine in greater detail. Love and Strife The Spherical universe is constituted from a finite number of elemental opposing forces—the most important being the cyclical struggle of Love and Strife. Phusis has a binary aspect—it is constructed from a mixture of uncreated elements and it changes by means of opposing forces: Nature neither contracts nor expands, but is an endless transformation of the original elements. Without the oppositional ‘struggle’ of Love and Strife the eternal roots of things would remain lifeless. Empedocles appears to have been aware of the problem of accounting for the sources of transformation within the ‘Sphere of Being’. 359

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The elemental components of all existing things are in a continual process of rearrangment, ever forming new constellations under the impress of the forces of Love and Strife. Change is, however, held in order by an immobile Circle— typically identified as a god or World-sphere. Empedocles may even have anticipated the Anaxagorean idea of God as pure thought or Mind ‘darting through the whole cosmos with its swift thought’ (134). The divine Sphere oscillates from One to Many and Many to One governed by a divinely ordained cycle of opposites—the interminable struggle between the force of Love (Philia, Philotes) and the opposite force of Strife (Neikos).6 What better allegory of the endlessly oscillating political conflict of the Sicilian city-states than the dialectical image of erotic attraction and violent repulsion—Philia and Neikos? Aristotle appears to have read Empedocles’ doctrine on Love and Strife as a response to the concrete presence of both disorder and ugliness in a universe that is ordered and beautiful. Indeed in appraising the nature of things, it is the bad that outweighs the good: if one follows up and appreciates the statements of Empedocles with a view to his real meaning and not to his obscure language, it will be found that Love is the cause of good, and Strife of evil. Thus it would perhaps be correct to say that Empedocles in a sense spoke of evil and good as first principles, and was the first to do so—that is, if the cause of all good things is absolute good. (Met. 1.4. 985a5–10) In Aristotle’s judgement, the only progress reflection had made down to the time of Empedocles was to have adumbrated quasi-physical principles of natural change, namely the material cause and the efficient cause of motion— but, as he is quick to qualify ‘only vaguely and indefinitely’ (985a10–14): They are like untrained soldiers in a battle, who rush about and often strike good blows, but without science (episteme); in the same way these thinkers do not seem to understand their own statements, since it is clear that upon the whole they seldom or never apply them. (985a15–20) The key offender is Anaxagoras, who avails himself of Mind as an artificial device (mechane) for producing order, and drags it in whenever he is at a loss to explain some necessary result; but otherwise he makes anything rather than Mind the cause of what happens. (985a18–21) While Empedocles resorts to causes to a greater degree than Anaxagoras ‘he does not attain to consistency in their use’: for example, Philia—one of his main explanatory powers—often differentiates (krinein), while Neikos—the other power—frequently unites (sunkrinein): 360

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because whenever the universe is differentiated into its elements by Strife, fire and each of the other elements are agglomerated into a unity; and whenever they are all combined together again by Love, the particles of each element are necessarily again differentiated. (985a25–9) 4 ETERNAL CYCLICAL CHANGE: THE ONE FROM THE MANY, THE MANY FROM THE ONE Being can now be theorized in the language of Unity and Plurality: the Manyin-the-One can be explained by a dynamic ‘interaction’ of root elements perennially oscillating from the state of One-from-Many to Many-from-One (a mechanism that could also be interpreted as an allegorical icon of the movement from autocratic tyranny to oligarchy and back again). The overdetermination of either Love (the traditional icon of unity, attraction, identity, oneness) or Strife (icon of difference, differentiation, dispersion, disunion, repulsion) becomes the explanatory key to physical genesis (Frs 17, 26). Where the force of Love dominates the Many are gathered into a unity in the One (to hen), then the cycle turns toward Strife which leads to a period of difference, discord, and heterogeneity—until the whole process repeats itself. We have a duality not a dualism, an interplay prefiguring the dialectic of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Consequently Philia never completely eliminates Neikos: they are bound together in a tensile structure. Love and Strife are tied to each other in a dynamic equilibrium of conflict and temporary reconciliation. And this relationship is governed by cyclical rhythms. Time reduces every totality to its elements as it configures the elements into a new whole. No part of Being is ever completely lost or destroyed (in keeping with the Pythagorean emphasis on the preservation of life through transmigration and the proscriptions against killing and eating ‘ensouled’ creatures). That the world was generated all are agreed, but, generation over, some say that it is eternal, others say that it is destructible like any other natural formation. Others again, with Empedocles of Acragas and Heraclitus of Ephesus, believe that there is alteration in the destructive process, which takes now this direction, now that, and continues without end. (De Caelo 1.10.279b12ff.) It is interesting to observe Aristotle correcting Empedocles’ poetic language, extracting a core of free-standing philosophical truth from his poetry. Aristotle tropes the Cosmic cycle as a forerunner of the Platonic insight into the formative idea of the Good. As with the Hesiodian and Parmenidean insight into Eros, Philia is a fundamental force in human existence (Frs 17, 20), symbolizing the principles of identity and unity, while Neikos expresses the forces of disunity and difference. Empedocles has ‘ethicized’ the world-order, the Good becoming the principle of Love (985a4; 1075b1). 361

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The dynamic imagery of cosmic change and cyclical transformation (Sphairos, Neikos, Philia, and so on) extend to the duality of the sexes, the genesis of natural species, and even to the origins of mankind; the eternal cycle has in its past cosmic ‘experiments’ produced monstrosities and arbitrary combinations as it mixes and recycles the elements of Being (at B 61). Many commentators have detected intimations of an evolutionary conception of origins and even intimations of the mechanism of natural selection in Fagments 57, 59, 60, 61, and 62 (cf. Aristotle, De Caelo 300b25; De Anima 430a28; Physics 2.8.198b29). In Empedocles’ vision the whole Cosmos is subject to interminable change and transformation. But the change is governed by an orderly cyclical law. What is gathered together into a whole is destined to disintegrate as the principle of Strife overtakes the principle of Love. Every Unity is internally undermined by its opposing moment—every Utopia (Identity) contains a Dystopia (Difference). The ensuing pluralization of the root elements, however, reaches its extreme limit and is again drawn into a Whole. The whole world process is governed by cyclical processes of mixing and interchange (B 8.3). Only the four elements and the two principles of change themselves—indivisible, eternal and immutable— remain eternally the Same. The elements of things suffuse and pervade one another in an interminable process of exchange: intermingling composition, distribution, interchanging shifts of eternal and unchanging elements governed by the dominance of either Love or Strife in their make-up (B 8, 9, 17). Empedocles uses the metaphor of the painter mixing his colours (Fr. 23) as a figure of this process of blending. Only the God beyond Being and Non-being, the God untouched by opposition represents the Whole: God is the perfect Sphere ‘in all directions equal’ (Frs 27, 28, 29; cf. B110). Perhaps the inner mechanism of this swing toward and away from Love as the force of Identity was something like the Anaximandrian Necessity in which an imbalance in one element is corrected by a movement in the direction of its opposite number. Where Love gains the upper hand the structure of PhiliaNeikos is overdetermined in the direction of Identity—a situation which disturbs the perfect mixture of the elements in the Sphere—and this disequilibrium promotes the growth in power of its opposite, which having ‘corrected’ the imbalance proceeds in its own right to overdetermine the structure, so repeating the cycle. This ‘see-sawing’ movement might be described as the dialectical structure at the heart of Empedocles’ theory of cosmic change. In many respects the alternating structure of Love and Strife prefigures the contemporary definition of a structure (or even ‘structure-indominance’). It indirectly confirms Heraclitus’ insight that the mutual imbrication of opposite forces is necessary for change and development— that the ‘positive’ is unthinkable without the ‘negative’, that identity presupposes difference. The outcome of this hybrid discourse is a composite and unstable reconciliation of earlier Parmenidean and Heraclitean speculation on the nature of Being and Change.7 362

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5 THE SOUL AND GOD If psyche can be found throughout the universe (and every mode of being possesses an aspect of ‘intelligence’), then the human soul is integrally related to God. But this is not the divinity of Olympian religion. God is the eternal Sphere of the Cosmos itself: ‘There are no two limbs branching from its back, no feet, no swift legs, no generative organs: it was a Sphere, equal to itself from all directions’ (B 29). The One cannot be experienced through the senses for the divine is not a thing and has no body, but is ‘holy and ineffable’ Mind (Nous) which ‘darts through the whole universe with its swift thoughts’ (Fr. 134). Like the Heraclitean Logos, Nous spans the ‘broad-ruling Air’ and ‘boundless Light’ (Fr. 135), but can only be intuited with the eye of thought (Fr. 133; cf. Aristotle, Met. 1000a28;De gen. corrup. 333b21).Empedocles joins Xenophanes and Parmenides in celebrating the unity of God as Nous or pure, transcendent Intellect. 6 FROM EMPEDOCLES TO ARISTOTLE Aristotle’s own idea of natural causation as well as the later Atomism of Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius may be regarded as notational variants of Empedocles’ rhizomata doctrine. According to the latter all physical entities are derived from a table of interrelated oppositions, governed by the dynamic ‘oscillation’ of Love and Hate. The Empedoclean basis of Aristotelian physics can be seen if we construct the famous doctrine of elements by superimposing it upon the later theory of natural oppositions working on the Hyle or primary matter:

Figure 4 Table of Empedoclean oppositions and transformations 363

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For Aristotle, natural things are ‘generated’ through the action of opposite principles or as the compound effect of opposites (Physics 188b–189a10). The basic dynamics of nature are distributed into contrastive couplets or oppositional forces. In other words antithesis is the ultimate root of natural forms and change, and since ‘antithesis is fundamental and implies duality, the ultimate principles, though limited in number, must be more than one’ (189a20). Oppositional ‘struggle’ is the universal logos of natural change and transformation. Difference, duality, and the antithesis of primary elements are necessary if we are to give an intelligible and comprehensive account of phenomenal change. In Aristotle’s scheme, these polarized elements—the moist or wet (hugron), the dry (xeron), the hot (thermon), and the cold (psukhron)—are determinations of primary matter, combining into conglomerates (cold-wet, cold-dry, hot-dry, hot-wet) to form the physical entities and substances which we meet in everyday experience. The generation of substances from the fourfold table of elements was later termed alloiosis (or generation through synthesis (suntheton), mixis, or krasis): water is wet and cold, earth cold and dry, so that if the wetness is conquered there will be earth; and again, since fire is dry and hot, whereas earth is cold and dry, if the cold is destroyed there will be fire from earth. Clearly, therefore, the generation of the simple bodies will be cyclical, and this is the easiest way in which change can take place—on account of the presence of counterparts in consecutive pairs of elements. (On Generation and Corruption, 331b1–10) In On Generation and Corruption (315a20–5; 334a6; cf. 330b4–331b) he criticizes the traditional table of elemental opposites for failing to distinguish between unity and elements and for not providing the physical mechanism of ontic production: Are we to regard the One as his ‘original real’? Or is it the Many—i.e., Fire and Earth, and the bodies coordinate with these? For the One is an ‘element’ in so far as it underlies the processes as matter—as that out of which Earth and Fire come-to-be through a change of qualities due to ‘the motion’. On the other hand, in so far as the One results from composition…whereas they result from disintegration, the Many are more ‘elementary’ than the One, and prior to it in their nature. (On Generation and Corruption, 315a20–5) Ultimately what is prior to the fourfold elements and their opposition—that which ‘underlies’ all substantial alterations—is Substance itself, the hypokeimenon which elsewhere he calls ousia and ‘prior’ or ‘primary’ matter (On Generation and Corruption, 314b1–5). We know that Aristotle added a fifth, superlunary element to the traditional Empedoclean inventory of 364

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sublunary elements to create a framework that lasted, in its many versions, until the modern period (see De Caelo, Book 1, ch. 9).8 In terms of the reach of his influence upon later Greek philosophical language, the only comparable figure from this period is the Ionian philosopher of nature, Anaxagoras.

ANAXAGORAS Through the weakness of sense-perception, we cannot judge the truth. (Anaxagoras, Fragment 21; Sextus Empiricus, Adv. math. 7.90) All things which have life (psyche)…are ruled by Nous. (Anaxagoras, Fragment 12) I once heard someone reading from a book of Anaxagoras and saying that it is Intelligence which arranges and is responsible for everything. This explanation delighted me and it seemed to me somehow to be a good thing that mind was responsible for everything—I thought that in that case mind, in arranging things, would arrange them all, and place each, in the best way possible. So if anyone wanted to discover the explanation of anything—why it comes into being or perishes or exists— he would have to discover how it is best for it to be or to be acted upon or to act …Now, my friend, this splendid hope was dashed; for as I continued reading I saw that the man didn’t use his mind at all—he didn’t ascribe to it any explanations for the arranging of things but found explanations in air and ether and water and many other absurdities. (Socrates, in Phaedo 97B–98C) 7 INTRODUCTION When the magistrates of the city [of Lampsacus] asked him what he would like to be done for him, he said: ‘Let the children have a holiday each year in the month of my death’. The custom is still observed. (Diogenes Laertius 2.14) Anaxagoras was born in the seventieth Olympiad (sometime between 500 and 497 BC) and died at the age of 72 sometime around 428/427 BC. His home town was the small city-state of Clazomenae on the Ionian coast which in the fifth century was in Lydia, but is today near the city of Izmir in Turkey. Chronologically he was an older contemporary of Archelaus, Socrates, and Euripides. Diogenes regarded Anaxagoras as a disciple of Anaximenes—but this is most probably a traditional epithet for those second or third generation thinkers and natural philosophers who lived and worked in Ionia. He appears 365

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to have left Clazomenae in his middle years, atttracted by the growing reputation of Athens as a centre of intellectual and cultural experimentation. And it would not be mistaken to think of him as an ‘ambassador’ for the Ionian conception of natural cosmology which was still a rare and controversial ‘import’ at Athens during the middle decades of the century. For those who attended Anaxagoras’ private lessons or who read from his book On Nature—like the young Socrates—he was one of the authentic spokesmen of the ‘new science’—or what we would call today naturalistic inquiry. Along with Archelaus the Athenian, Anaxagoras was, for Socrates’ generation, the natural philosopher and living connection with the great Ionian tradition of independent scientific inquiry. His involvement with Athenian politics began with his close links to the aristocratic circle around Pericles during the period of imperial expansion. His reception in Athens around 480/479 BC—according to Diogenes ‘at the time of the archonship of Callias’9—undoubtedly influenced the pattern of his life. Anaxagoras became a resident alien or metic and by 460 BC was one of Pericles’ closest associates and political advisors.10 His scientific radicalism was coupled with a humanist and democratic outlook with regard to social and political issues. For the majority of Athenian citizens he may have represented the kind of individualist, free-thinking intellectualism that was increasingly associated with the ‘atheism’ of the Greek enlightenment and the first generation of Sophists. We know that he was indicted for his naturalistic views (or perhaps as the leading intellectual supporter of Pericles’ democratic cause) and went into exile to Lampsacus in the Troad around 440 BC (occasionally a later date is given c. 433–430). ‘Science’ in its Milesian form was still too unsettling for the citizens of midcentury Athens. Diogenes suggested that the charge against him was not only one of impiety (asebeia—the same charge that was later levelled against Socrates) for claiming that the sun was a red-hot mass of metal, but also an indictment for his Persian sympathies, for which he was given the death penalty (DL 2.7 (DK 59 Al): ‘Satyrus in his Lives says that the case was brought by Thucydides, Pericles’ political opponent; that the charge was not only impiety but also Medism; and that he was condemned to death in absentia. When he was told both of the condemnation and of the death of his children, he said of the condemnation that “Nature long ago condemned both them and me”’; cf. Plutarch, Pericles 32). For these reasons he has been frequently called the first philosopher of Greece properly speaking, the first ‘Athenian’ thinker. We hear of only one treatise from his own hand—a work On Nature or On Natural Science— which espoused a view of the cosmos and nature as self-regulating systems. And two apparently antithetical images of his work dominate later commentators: one pictures Anaxagoras as a natural philosopher who only recognized material causation; the other is the philosopher of Nous which sets the world-order in motion and governs its revolutions.11 In later Athenian 366

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history, when conservative critics accused someone of ‘Anaxagorism’, they invoked this amalgam of atheist materialism, naturalism, and intellectualism. 8 ANAXAGORAS’ GENERAL PHILOSOPHICAL OUTLOOK taphainomena—the things that are apparent—are a vision of things that are unmanifest. (Anaxagoras, Fragment 21a) Naturalism Among the early fifth-century philosophers Anaxagoras stands out for his defence of a naturalistic approach to the whole of phenomenal reality. The remains of his writings suggest that he was committed to a sceptical epistemology, a materialist natural philosophy, and a humanistic approach to ethical and political questions. He was in these respects a true figure of the Periclean enlightenment and forerunner of the Sophists. He may have been the first Greek philosopher to have had his work published in large numbers—his book was still circulating in later antiquity as a ‘work of science’ (as Diogenes relates, ‘he was also the first to publish a book with diagrams’ (DL 2.11; cf. 1.16)). The extent of his naturalistic views are evident even from commentators as far removed from his work as Diogenes Laertius and Sextus Empiricus. Anaxagoras ‘held the Milky Way to be a reflection of the light of stars which are not shone upon by the sun; comets are a conjunction of planets which emit flames; shooting-stars are, as it were, sparks thrown off by the air’ (DL 2.9). He was prosecuted by the Athenians for announcing that the sun was a material body twice the size of the Peloponnese. ‘He held that winds arise when the air is rarefied by the sun’s heat; that thunder is a clashing together of the clouds, lightning their violent friction; an earthquake a subsidence of air into the earth’ (DL 2.9). Sextus Empiricus preserves the fragmentary text, asserting that appearances are a glimpse (opsis) of things non-evident (DK 59 B 21). Naturalistic inquiry explores the world of phainomenai to disclose that which is hidden. And the disclosure of the hidden structures of Being is the exclusive preserve of the logos. Hippolytus (Ref. 1.8.3–10) cites his claim that the sun and moon and all the stars are fiery bodies carried by the revolution of the aether; the moon reflects the sun’s light; it is eclipsed by the earth, screening the sun’s light, and occasionally by bodies crossing the moon; tradition designates him as one of the first to examine the causes of eclipses (cf. Cratylus 409A–B). But we also have evidence closer to the historical facts. Plato has Socrates refer to the numerous ‘biblia’ or ‘rolls of Anaxagoras of Clazomenae’ that are packed with naturalistic theories claiming for example that the sun is a fiery stone or the moon is composed of earth (Apology 26D–E). Aristotle 367

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offers further evidence of his imaginative speculation and wide-ranging naturalism. In his treatise the Parts of Animals at 687a7 he attributes to Anaxagoras the doctrine that human intelligence arises from the possession of hands (though Aristotle characteristically reverses the causal relation: it is because man is most intelligent that he possesses hands); Aristotle’s wording is reiterated by Galen (c. AD 131–200) in his work on the parts of the human body: mind is not the instrument of the hand, the hands are the tools of the mind; the hand is the instrument of instrument, evolved in the long history of manipulation and concrete transformation of nature.12 Scientific materialism Anaxagoras developed the naturalist framework of his Ionian predecessors to construct one of the first explanatory forms of science—or at least, one of the first materialist approaches to natural mechanisms irrespective of whether these were found in the field of astronomy, meteorology, physiology, the study of the human senses, or ethics. One of his most famous doctrines concerns the dynamics of the universe as a vortex of corporeal bodies—a rotating universe as an explanatory cause of the creation of both terrestrial and heavenly bodies.13 The force of abstraction Both his general epistemological stance and materialist view of mechanisms underlying phenomenal appearances, while rooted in the naturalistic attitude of the Milesian world-view, mark a new awareness of the power of abstraction. Anaxagoras followed Empedocles in accepting the limited evidence to be gained from sense-experience; but the true ‘inquirer’ must abstract from the appearances of things and uncover their underlying ‘causes’; and these ‘causes’ are profoundly material (once Nous or Intelligence has set the vortex into motion, things are governed by natural regularities). This orientation set Anaxagoras firmly against the purely speculative methods of his predecessors, in particular the abstract doctrine of Being which informed Eleatic logic but also the doctrine of the Void that was central to the Atomists (cf. Aristotle, physics 213a22–b2). The critique of Empedocles’ rhyzomata doctrine Anaxagoras may have introduced his own pluralist account of nature by criticizing the Empedoclean doctrine of the fourfold ‘roots’ of Being. This was, perhaps, the context for Aristotle’s depiction of the difference between Anaxagorean and Empedoclean pluralism: ‘he [Anaxagoras] assumes an unlimited number of distinguishable substances, from the first, as well as an unlimited number of uniform particles in each substance; whereas Empedocles 368

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has only his four so-called elements’ (Physics 187a25ff.). This could have taken the form of a direct attack on Empedocles’ poetical cosmogony with its underlying ‘mechanism’ of the cosmic cycle of Love and Hate. His own pluralist theory strikes out in the direction of a completely naturalistic account of comingto-be and passing-away. Empedocles’ magical ‘atomism’ was a halfway house— configurating elements of Parmenidean ontology and the Heraclitean vision of change—on the road to a consistent view of the ‘roots’ of things in an unlimited matrix of infinite, ‘atom-like’ seeds (spermata). Because of the homogeneousness and intertranslatability of these ‘seeds’—incidentally, further evidence of the abstract character of Anaxagoras’ imagination—they have been referred to as ‘homoeomeries’ since the time of Aristotle: Anaxagoras posited an infinity of principles, namely the homoeomerous substances and the opposites together, while Empedocles posits only the so-called ‘elements’. The theory of Anaxagoras that the principles are infinite in number was probably due to his acceptance of the common opinion of the physicists that nothing comes into being from not-being. (Physics, 187a23) Anaxagoras’ Theory of the Elements or Homoeomereity According to Diogenes’ summary, Anaxagoras ‘took as his principles the homoeomeries or homogeneous molecules (‘things with like parts’); for just as gold consists of fine particles which are called gold-dust, so he held the whole universe to be compounded of minute bodies having parts homogeneous to themselves’ (DL 2.8; cf. Fr. 3). The original plenum of matter is infinitely divisible and all its components enter into each part of the universe (Simplicius, DK 59 B 1). Diogenes’ and Simplicius’ texts lend some weight to the standard view of Anaxagoras as a prototypical Atomist or as prefiguring the central cosmological doctrine of Leucippus and Democritus.14 The homoeomeries or ‘seeds of becoming’ How could hair come from what is not hair or flesh from what is not flesh? (B10) Anaxagoras answers his own question by introducing his idea of ‘the homoeomeries’: for since whatever comes to be must arise either out of what exists or out of what does not exist, and since the later was universally held to be impossible, it remained that all things arose out of what existed, and so must be there already, only in particles so minute as to escape our senses. So he and his school argued that particles of everything must exist in 369

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everything else, since they saw all kinds of things emerging from each other. (Physics 187a–b; cf. Aëtius, Placita 1.3.5 (= Anaxagoras A46, DK 59 A 46)) In essence ‘hair’ can come into being because there are already ‘hair’ portions or infinitesimal ‘bits’ of hair or the components of ‘hair’ already in existence— and the same applies for every substance, both animate and inanimate (flesh and gold). Quite simply: everything has a ‘share’ in the make-up of every other thing (cf. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 1 .835–41). This ‘answer’ may have been directed at the leading presuppostion of the question: ‘hair’ does not in fact come from ‘what is not hair’, ‘flesh’ from ‘what is not flesh’—for their ‘portions’ are already in existence. In other words he resolves the puzzle of becoming by denying absolute creation or destruction: nothing is created from nothing; everything is configured from pre-existing ‘seeds’ or indestructible elements: The Greeks have an incorrect belief on ‘coming into being’ (ginesthai) and ‘passing away’ (apollusthai). For nothing comes into being or passes away, but it is mixed together (summisgetai) or separated (diakrinetai) from existing things. Thus they would be correct if they called coming into being ‘mixing’ (sumisgesthai), and passing away ‘being dispersed’. (diakrinesthai, B 17; Simplicius, Physics. 163. 20)15 Anaxagoras was in profound agreement with Empedocles in denying the possibility of creation ex nihilo and seeing the universe as endlessly reconfigurating elements (Anaxagoras, Fras 6, 11, 12); however, these ‘roots’ are no longer fixed, but rather form an open-ended and perhaps infinite set. Anaxagoras appears to have referred to these as infinite ‘seeds’ or spermata (‘There is no last term of smallness, for there is always something smaller’, Anaxagoras, Fr. 3). Every existent is constructed and deconstructed out of elements, each of which contains parts of every other element (‘in everything there is a portion (moira) of everything with the exception of Nous (Mind)’). Individuated entities are simply those beings which are quantitatively dominated by a particular ‘seed’ (‘Each existent is and was most manifestly those things of which it has most in it’, Fr. 12). The Parmenidean argument of the One in the Many is reversed in the doctrine of the Many in the One (in any thing there is everything, B 6). Thus by changing the balance or preponderance of substance in the original magma we can account for individuated substances—flesh, hair, gold, and so forth. The principle is extended to the table of opposite qualities—for these polarities are also a part of all things (B 8; cf B 21; Simplicius, Physics 164.26 (DK 59 B 6); cf. 156.13 (DK 59 B 12), 175.12 (DK 59 B 8)). The doctrine of universal ‘mixture’ is often termed homoiomery (after the idea of the infinite ‘homoiomeries’ (homoiomereiai) posited in his cosmology). 370

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In the beginning, as the opening sentences of his book On Natural Science assert, all things were together, an undifferentiated amalgam of infinite, microscopic parts; as if to confirm his affinity with Anaximenes’ theory, he claimed that in this aboriginal state ‘Air’ and ‘Aether’ dominated all things— primarily as a result of their infinite composition or dispersion (Frs 1, 2, 6, cf. Simplicius, Physics 155.23–7). Air and Aether, however, are themselves created by the violent process of separation or differentiation (apokrinontai) from the unlimited (Fr. 2; apokritheie in Fr. 4). The process by which things were separated off (apokrithenai) may have provided Anaxagoros with a mechanism to explain the genesis of the ‘seeds’ (spermata) of objects and their combinations (cf. Fr. 4). Where Parmenides theorized the immobile Sphere of Being and Empedocles posited an indestructible structure of eternal elements, Anaxagoras found an infinite magma of ‘atomic’ elements and opposites, each present to some extent in every part of nature (‘Everything is in everything’). The only exception to this universal rule is the existence he calls Mind (Nous), which stands apart from all material realities (although at B 11 Mind enters into the substance of things and in other fragments—most extensively in Fragment 12—Mind is presented as a ‘fine’ or ‘pure’ substance). Configurations of seeds Anaxagoras was in no doubt that the primal mixture consisted of an infinity of elements out of which all things had been constructed. ‘Infinite’ here may have meant both ‘infinite’ in number and infinite in terms of form (idea) and magnitude or size—the smallest particles of things: ‘For how can hair come from not-hair, and flesh from not-flesh?’ (B 10; cf. B 1). Anaxagoras argued that to avoid Parmenidean inertia or the unremitting flux of the Heracliteans we must accept that in the beginning ‘all things (khremata) were present in the Whole’ (Frs 4, 12; cf. 3, 6, 11, 12). Each ‘part-substance’ (meros) in some sense contains all other elements. The origin of all things can only consist of a combinatorial ‘etherial magma’ of infinite elements or ‘portions’. From this primordial magma arises the world of qualitative change (alloiosis), physical entities, planetary motion, and the whole panoply of the visible universe: everything is a configuring—separating off, blending, and combination—of atomic constituents. The concrete, physical things of everyday life—the khremata of the world, to borrow Anaxagoras’ own term (B 1, 4)—are products of the most intangible and invisible of the elements: Air and Aither (B 2). And, as he never stops repeating, these elements of matter are infinitely divisible (Fr. 3: ‘For even the smallest, there is no least, but always a less’). The primary bodies (somatikai arkhai) are infinite in number. Characteristically, Aristotle sides with Empedocles’ finitism in criticizing the infinite principles of Anaxagoras (‘Empedocles was far sounder in assuming a small limited number of prime substances’, Physics 188a; cf. Aristotle, Physics, 4.6.213a22; Alexander, Met. 27–8; similarly with Lucretius’ 371

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opposition to Anaxagoras’ ‘infinite’ elements at De Rerum Natura, 1.843–6 and 1.875ff.)). The criticism of Anaxagoras’ version of the apeiron is part of Aristotle’s general polemic against sceptical epistemology. Thus at all costs we must resist Anaxagoras’ thought that we cannot comprehend the number of original things or elements ‘either in reason or in practice’ (Fr. 7). If we accept the homoeomeric metaphysics, individual entities are to be explained as the configuration of elemental seeds; these are infinite in number, infinitely divisible, and completely different from one another. Change occurs through the ratios and balance of these heterogeneous seeds: most probably by a violent motion of stirring or mixing whereby opposites fractionate out of the original corporeal mass in which ‘Everything is in everything’ (B 4, B 11). Unfortunately the detailed mechanisms of this aggregation, separation, and blending of the seeds are not supplied: before these things were separated off, while all things were together, there was not even any colour plain; for the mixture of all things prevented it, of the moist and the dry, the hot and the cold, the bright and the dark, and of much earth in the mixture and of seeds countless in number and in no respect like one another. For none of the other things either are like one to the other. And since this is so, we must suppose that all things are in the whole. (B 4; Simplicius, Physics 155.26; 34.21; Met. 984a13) When ultimately pushed to give an explanation for configuration, Anaxagoras’s first line of retreat is to the doctrine of the interaction or polarity of opposites— the staple doctrine of the Milesian tradition—and when this position crumbles, to the doctrine of the World-Mind, precursor of the Platonic Demiurge and Aristotelian Unmoved Mover. When pressed: ‘But what causes the motion of the seeds?’ ‘What explains the separating out, blending and configuring of the infinite atoms?’ we are left with the Cause of causes: Nous–Mind which is separate from all things initiates the whole cosmic process. The universe is precisely a ‘kosmos’ because of the infinite ‘intelligence’ of the World-Mind. But asking further questions of Mind’s rotatory activity produces silence.16 9 NOUS AS THE WORLD-MIND When one man said that there is Reason (or Mind) in nature, just as in animals, and that this was the cause of all order and arrangement (cosmos, taxis), he seemed like a sane man in contrast with the haphazard statements of his predecessors. (Aristotle, Met. 984b15–19)

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The work of Nous (Fragment 12; Diels 59 B 12) Fragment 12 contains the clearest indication of Anaxagoras’ view of selfreflexivity as Mind (Nous). The text presents the divine principle of the universe as Thought or Intelligence—an omniscient, omnipotent, and infinite selfknowing presence governing all things: ‘Whereas all other things have in them a portion of everything, Mind is unlimited and self-ruled (apeiron, autokrates), and is not mixed with anything, but is just alone by itself (autos ep’heotou)’. Nous is essentially a ruling principle (kratein=to rule, ruling; auto-krates, to rule oneself). Mind controls the whole kosmos by using its power of pure reflexivity: ‘And Mind has power over all things, greater and smaller, that have life.’ To carry out this ultimate function Nous must admit no admixture of ‘non-mind’: Intelligence cannot be mixed with any khrema; its nature is to be pure Nous (autos ep’heotou): ‘For if it were not by itself but were mixed with anything else, it would partake of all things, if it were mixed with any (for in everything there is a portion of everything…), and the things mixed with it would prevent it from having power over anything in the same way that it has being alone by itself. For it is the thinnest (finest) of all things (khremata) and the purest, and it has all knowledge (gnome) about everything and the greatest strength.’ (cf. Simplicius, Physics 164.24 and 156.13 (DK 59 B 12). Intelligence exercises its power over the whole revolution in that it began to revolve originally. At first it began to revolve from a small beginning, and the revolution is spreading further and will spread further still. And the things that are being mingled together and separated off and distinguished—all these things Mind knew. And Mind set in order all things as they were to be, and as they were (before) but now have ceased to be, and as they are, and this revolution wherein now revolve the stars and the sun and moon and the air and the fire that are separated off. And this revolution caused them to be separated off; and from the rare is separated off the dense, from the cold the hot, from the dark the bright, and from the wet the dry. And there are many parts of many things; but nothing is completely separated or distinguished from anything else, except Mind. And Mind is all alike, both the greater and the smaller; whereas nothing other than Mind is like any other thing; but each single thing was and is most manifestly those things of which it has most in it.17 We can begin our exegesis of this important text with the central image of Mind’s autopoeic activity. Fundamentally Nous is self-activity, a power of self-reflexive control. Nous, in Plato’s words, ‘orders and holds the nature of all things’ as a unity, a power (dunamei) which carries and holds (echei) the whole of nature (phusis) (Cratylus 400A–B). As pure activity it must be separate from everything else—particularly from the universe which it sets into motion. In the playful ‘etymologizing’ Plato carries out on the words phusis and echei, the Nous gathers up the whole of nature (phusechei), and if 373

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we compress or condense this expression we construct the word for ‘soul’ (psyche), or as Anaxagoras says, Nous. As a universal arche, Nous is present throughout the whole natural order. And given that the order of nature forms a kosmos, then Nous must work to produce a ‘beautiful’ or ‘pleasing’ order. Aristotle is still tuned to this older sense of kosmos in describing Anaxagoras as one of the early thinkers who assumed an arche in things ‘which is the cause of beauty, and the sort of cause by which motion is communicated to things’ (Met. 984b20–2). Anaxagoras has naturalized the patriarch of Olympus, who now becomes sovereign Intelligence (DK 21 B 25). Nous is the arche of the Whole without being identical with the Whole. Mind by virtue of its separation from everything, its autonomy and solitude sets the whole cosmic process into motion. Nous—unmixed with anything else—originates the vortex motion of the universe: Nous took command of the universal revolution, so as to make (things) revolve at the outset. And at first things began to revolve from some small point, but now the revolution extends over a greater area, and will spread even further. (DK B 12, DK B 13) Undoubtedly it was descriptions from Anaxagoras’ work like Fragment 12 which encouraged Aristotle’s view of Mind as an ‘efficient cause’. For the Peripatetics, Nous was viewed as an eternal, world-moving Cause governing the rotation of the whole, setting the vortex in motion at the beginning of things. It moves everything, but is not itself moved (Met. 985a18; 1075b8–9; Plato, Phaedo 97C–99D; Alexander, Met. 32.1–20). Alexander: ‘For they [Anaxagoras, Hermotimus, and others] made a principle the cause [responsible for the fact that things] not only come into being and move, but do so in the right way; for Mind [is a cause] of this sort’ (Met. 32.15–20). Mind or Spirit was also interpreted as a corporeal agency—an impetus from outside the system of seeds and elemental opposites. Like the Anaximenean explanation of finite things through mechanical processes of condensation and rarefaction, Anaxagoras explains multiplicity by means of the spiralling forces of rotatory motion (rotation in a plane causes the many things to separate out and distinguish themselves from one another through a range of different phases). In essence this type of explanation is a revised form of Anaximenes’ corporeal physics (Hippolytus, Ref. 1.8.3–13). But Mind is also a transcendent, intangible source of things—Nous actively configures the mixture into substantial things (Frs 12, 13, 14); it possesses the autonomy and self-ruling properties of divine reflexivity: being omniscient, infinite, autonomous, and exerting self-governing control: • omniscient (‘it has all knowledge about everything and the greatest power’, B 12); in its omniscience Nous has its precursors in the ‘theology’ of Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Empedocles: ‘For nothing comes into being 374

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•

• •

• •

nor does anything perish, but there is a mixture and separation of things that are. So they would do right in calling coming into being “mixture”, and the perishing “separation”’; autonomous (as befits the arche of creation it is ‘the finest of all things and the purest’, B 12; ‘Nous which ever is, certainly still exists also where all things are’, (B 14); unmixed (separate from all things; cf. Aristotle Physics 256b14; De Anima 405b19; 429a19–20); eternal (‘And Mind, which is for ever, certainly is also now where everything else is—in the surrounding mass and in the things that are united with it and in the things that have been separated off’, B 14); omnipresent (eternally present in all existence, the invisible matrix of visible beings, B 21 A); self-control (‘Nous controls all things, both the greater and the smaller, that havelife’, B 12).

But alongside these images of Mind’s supranatural powers, the text still attributes Intelligence with causal and material properties: ‘at first things began to revolve from some small point, but now the revolution extends over a greater area, and will spread even further’; ‘The dense, moist and dark came together where (the earth) is now, while the rare, the hot, and the dry, moved outwards to the further part of the fire’; ‘From these as they are separated off, the earth is solidifed; for from clouds water is separated off, and from water earth; and from earth stones are solidified by the cold, and stones move outwards more than water’. The philosophy of Mind or Atomism? These descriptions certainly read like a chapter from a primitive vortex physics—a cosmology that would be recognizable to Democritus and, much later, to Descartes and Newton. They suggest that Anaxagoras attempted to hold both the material and the intelligible models of Nous in a kind of oscillating equilibrium. As Nietzsche observed: ‘The entire conception has a marvellous boldness and simplicity and nothing at all of that clumsy and anthropomorphic teleology that Anaxagoras is frequently accused of (1962: §17, 109). Once Intelligence has performed its initial act, the vortex of the material world takes over and produces further cycles of differentiation of its own accord (B 14 notwithstanding); the rotation that produces the masses of earth, ether, and air carries on the original work of Mind. The effect of this rotatory motion is to produce further ontic differentiation. B 12 also speaks of Mind’s lasting control, working like a universal law (‘And whatever they were going to be, and whatever things were then in existence that are not now, and all things that now exist and whatever shall exist—all were arranged by Nous’). We simply do not know how Anaxagoras reconciled this 375

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speculation with the reflexive thesis of Mind’s omniscience (having knowledge of everything, controlling everything, arranging things without any corporeal involvement). ‘Once Anaxagoras’ circle is moved’, as Nietzsche noted, ‘all order, all conformity to law and all beauty of the world are but the natural consequences of that first impulse to move’ (1962: §17, 109). This ontology seems to point to a completely materialist theory of the cosmos. We might take Socrates’ disappointment at Phaedo 97B–98B as an exegetical clue: Nous turns out to be a corporeal substance and material cause ‘like air and aether and water’. We have, in other words, the purest instance in ancient philosophy of a radical dualism of ‘Mind’ and ‘Matter’ (KR: 375).18 The ambivalent cosmology of Anaxagoras’ On Nature played a revolutionary role in shaping two apparently opposed tendencies of early Greek thought: a teleological current leading to a ‘spiritual’ cosmology, and a materialist worldview culminating in the doctrine of Classical Atomism (the Democritean ‘whirl’ of Atoms is a recognizable family-variant of the Anaxagorean News-impulse). Plato has Socrates single out this book as a work of some promise. Aristotle called Anaxagoras the only one of his predecessors who perceived Reason throughout the natural order. In making Mind the cause and source of motion in the Cosmos, Anaxagoras seemed like a sober man in contrast with the random accounts of his predecessors (Met. 1.3.984b15–20): ‘Those who thought thus stated that there is a principle of things which is at the same time the cause of beauty, and that sort of cause from which things acquire movement’ (984b20ff.; cf. 985a18 and 1075b8–9; cf. Plato, Phaedo 97–8). The idea of pure Intelligence as a prime mover absolutely distinct from the ‘material’ substrates it ‘moves’ became one of the basic principles of Aristotle’s own teleological outlook: So Anaxagoras did well to say that ‘Intelligence’ was unaffected (by the material universe) and free from admixture, since he regarded it as the principle of movement, and it could only be so if it was itself motionless, and could only control it if was itself unmingled with it. (Physics 8.5.256b25ff.; I have modified Wicksteed’s translation) The principle of Nous was even more influential in the evolution of Plato’s cosmology. Mind or Intellect is identified by Plato as the essential nature of the soul. Nous became the prototype for both Plato’s Demiurge in the Timaeus and Aristotle’s theological concept of the Unmoved Mover in the Metaphysics—even where Anaxagoras is criticized for failing concretely to demonstrate the causal functions of Reason: in the last analysis, his Nous is a deus ex machina introduced to fill an explanatory hiatus (Phaedo 98B–C, Laws 967B–D, Met. 985a15ff.; Alexander of Aphrodisias: He [Aristotle] says that Anaxagoras employed Mind as a deus ex 376

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machina, just as in tragedies the gods are dragged in by a stage device [to resolve] an impossible situation, a point which Aristotle himself has explained. He says the same about Anaxagoras as did Plato too in the Phaedo [98Bff.]. Met. 35.1–5) After Aristotle and the Neoplatonists the most important philosopher to build on Anaxagoras’ work was the German thinker Hegel. For Hegel Nous is simply another term for the transcendent World Spirit or Geist. Anaxagoras’ universal Intelligence is the first tentative conception of consciousness’ struggle to transcend the imagery of myth, cosmogony, and material monism and uncover the absolute sphere of independent Thought itself: ‘Thought as pure, free process in itself, is the self-determining universal…not distinguished from conscious thought. In Anaxagoras quite new ground is thus opened up.’ This Greek ‘philosophy of Mind’ prefigures the work of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle: ‘With the Nous of Anaxagoras, and still more with Socrates, there commences a subjective totality in which Thought grasps itself, and thinking activity is the fundamental principle.’ However naive and mechanical in its explanatory role, Nous expresses the ‘simple, absolute essence of the world’, a principle that is ‘universal for itself, sundered’, existing ‘in purity only as thought’. Nietzsche, finally, decoded the Anaxagorean ‘Philosophy of Spirit’ as an aesthetic model of world creation: Coming-to-be is not a moral but an aesthetic phenomenon.19 The other side of Anaxagoras’ cosmology—its materialist naturalism and determinist ‘atomism’—led in a very different direction, to an ontology of nature defined in purely atomic and mechanical metaphors. Leucippus and Democritus would generalize Anaxagoras’ natural philosophy into a comprehensive cosmic system. They would also explore the sceptical implications of Anaxagoras’ thought that ‘things that are manifest’ (ta phainomena) are visible traces of things that are unmanifest (Fr. 21).

THE ATOMISTS: LEUCIPPUS AND DEMOCRITUS I would rather discover one true cause than possess the kingdom of Persia. (Democritus, Fragment 118)

LEUCIPPUS OF MILETUS Nothing comes to be without grounds, but all things from a reason and by necessity. (Leucippus, Fragment 2) Leucippus (fl. c. 435–40 BC) and Democritus (fl. c. 420 BC) constructed a non-Parmenidean view of the universe by reversing the Parmenidean 377

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devaluation of Non-being and the opposition of the One and the Many. The Atomist theory of the Many ‘atoms’ moving in the One ‘void’ is its logical outcome. Leucippus was the author of The Great World System (Megas diakosmos or Great Cosmology) and On the Mind (Democritus is said to have written a Mikros diakosmos or Little World System). He was born in Miletus c. 470 and flourished in the decades around 450–440 (Diogenes gives Elea and Abdera as other possible cities of origin for Leucippus). But precise chronology is impossible for this thinker—and some historians have even doubted his existence (see DL 9.13, 9.30). His book The Great World System is the source text for Classical Atomism. In antiquity his name is always coupled with that of his pupil, Democritus of Abdera. For both Leucippus and Democritus the Void (to kenon) is ‘what is not’ (to de me on), while the Full (the plenum of Atoms) is ‘what is’ (to on). Hence, in Aristotle’s gloss, ‘they hold that “what is not” is no less real than “what is”—as Void is as real as Body—and they claim that these are the material causes of things’ (Met. 985b5–10). Diogenes echoes this: to te pan einai kenon kai pleres [somaton] (‘The All includes the empty as well as the full’, DL 9.30). As with Anaxagoras’ theorizing, one of his central concerns was to refute the paradoxes associated with Zeno the Eleatic—and behind Zeno, the great vision of the Unity of Being formulated by Parmenides. Leucippus seems to have attempted this by simply positing the common-sense reality of perceptual difference and multiplicity, explaining motion by means of the omnipresence of Non-being, in the shape of ‘the Void’. Coming-into-being is an arbitrary ‘movement’ from one state of atomic disorder to another through the void. His ‘atoms’ are infinitely pluralized, mobile Parmenidean spheres (‘the continuous indivisible One of Parmenides multiplied ad infinitum in an infinite empty space’, Burnet, in Livingstone, ed., 1921:71). Atoms (atomoi) and void (kenon) together are the sole source of material change and transformation. The ‘configurations’ (Aristotle speaks of ‘differences’ (diaphora)) formed by patterns of atoms are regarded as the contingent causes of all other things (Met. 985b12–14). Diogenes’ report reads: In a given section many atoms of all manner of shapes are carried from the unlimited into the vast empty space. These collect together and form a single vortex, in which they jostle against each other and, circling round in every possible way, separate off, by like atoms joining like. And, the atoms being so numerous that they can no longer revolve in equilibrium, the light ones pass into the empty space outside, as if they were being winnowed; the remainder keep together and, becoming entangled, go on their circuit together, and form a primary spherical system. This parts off like a shell, enclosing within it atoms of all kinds; and, as these are whirled round by virtue of the resistance of the centre, the enclosing shell becomes thinner, the adjacent atoms continually 378

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combining when they touch the vortex. In this way the earth is formed by portions brought to the centre coalescing. (DL 9.31–2) The only fragment of Leucippus’ work extant expresses with great simplicity the thought that the coming-to-be of entities and their persistence is rigorously governed by the causal force of material necessity: ‘Nothing comes to be without grounds, but all things from a reason (Logos) and by necessity’.20 In later European philosophy this was often regarded as the first appearance of the principle of ‘sufficient reason’.

DEMOCRITUS Truly we know nothing—truth is buried deep. (Democritus, Fragment 117) 10 INTRODUCTION Democritus was the most important student of Leucippus and may have taken over his non-Anaxagorean conception of the world process. He was born around 460 BC in the Ionian colonial city of Abdera in Thrace (now Avdira in northern Greece), had a reputation for being a polymath, wrote extensively on a range of physical, ethical, and social topics, and died in advanced years c. 371 BC. His written output appears to have been prolific, making Democritus the first encyclopaedic mind of the early Greek philosophers. The task of developing a complete materialist system of the universe—one that could explain all phenomenal appearances in terms of one elementary and, ideally, mechanical principle was Democritus’ main project. He seems to have taken the encyclopaedic demands of naturalistic explanation absolutely seriously—producing a body of writing covering every department of human experience. He is said to have composed more than sixty books in the fields of ethics, physical speculation, mathematics, music, and poetry. Tradition also credits him with various technical treatises. However, not one of the books cited by Diogenes Laertius (9.46–9) has survived as a whole (the lost works include texts with such suggestive titles as Cosmography, The Little World System, The Horn of Amaltheia, On Humour, On Colour, Causes of Sound, On the Planets, On Irrational Lines and Solids, Geography, On Poetry, On Homer or Correct Language and Glosses, Names, Tactics, Fighting in Armour, On Providence, and On Painting). Like the great Presocratic physicists Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, Democritus appears to have been driven by the dream of creating a vast synthesis of existing knowledge, from cosmology to ethics and practical engineering. Democritus is frequently regarded as a Presocratic philosopher but in fact 379

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he was a contemporary of Socrates—who may well have known him personally, or read from his voluminuous works (Plato is silent on all these matters, failing to mention Democritus by name in any of his accredited writings). In late antiquity Democritus was known as much for his contributions to ethics (for the Romans he was ‘the laughing philosopher’) as for his ideas on the atomic composition of the universe.21 In terms of his immediate intellectual affiliations, we can think of Democritus as extending and polemically defending some of the fundamental positions developed by his teacher, Leucippus. But behind Leucippus lies the great tradition of the Milesian cosmologist-navigators. Through his voluminous writings these naturalistic and atomic conceptions became very well known in Athens in the latter part of the fifth century. Unlike Parmenides and the Eleatic tradition he had no qualms about introducing ‘Non-being’ in the form of ‘the void’ (to me on). The void just as much as the atoms may be said to exist and play a role in the genesis and destruction of worlds. His work is also intimately connected with the rise of scepticism in the fifth century (one of the most quoted aphorisms from Democritus’ work being the statement: ‘Truly we know nothing. Truth is buried deep’ (B 117)). This is often seen as a precursor to the Protagorean idea that all knowledge is relative to the sensory apparatus of the knower, although given the physicalism of his predecessors it may be better construed as an instigation to more rigorous modes of physical inquiry. Yet it is possible to view Democritus as one of the sources of the most thoroughgoing relativist materialism in the ancient world. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his controversial doctrine of the plurality of worlds—an idea that returns Democritus’ thought, through his teacher, Leucippus, to the cosmology of Anaximander. In terms of the transmission and dissemination of Presocratic modes of thought Democritus can be seen as the living link between the great thinkers of the Archaic period and the scientist-philosophers of the Greek enlightenment. 11 THE DEMOCRITEAN VISION OF THE ATOMIC UNIVERSE Plato’s rule of silence regarding this prolific and important thinker echoes to the present day as a stimulus for further historical and critical reflection. Why is there no Platonic dialogue with the title ‘Democritus’?22 What was the Democritean vision which Plato tried to drown in silence? Where Parmenides and Zeno defended the unity of Being, Atomism asserted that the elements of reality or ‘atoms’ (atomata, literally ‘that which cannot be cut’) are infinite in number and form. Furthermore, behind the things of everyday experience lies an infinite world of unchangeable, invisible ‘units’. Natural things are formed from constellations of indivisible elements. Where the Eleatics perceived absolute immobility and order, Atomism grasps the Many as constantly being formed from processes of combination and 380

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separation. Objects are effects of an underlying realm of atomic configurations. Where the Pythagoreans deconstruct the world of substances into pointillistic Numbers or monads, Atomism posits an infinite realm of ‘point-substances’. Reality is brought into being through an interplay of the Many and the Void. Perhaps this was the context of Leucippus’ vision of natural necessity: Nothing comes into being without reason, but everything arises from a specific ground and is governed by necessity. In the Latin writer, Lucretius, this becomes the axiomatic starting point of all natural philosophy: ‘that no thing is ever by divine power produced from nothing’ (De Rerum Natura 1.150, cf. 155–6, and passim). Atoms and Void The development of this fundamental idea in more empirical directions was the central task that Democritus set himself. And he appears to have devoted his life to its construction and systematic elaboration. To accomplish this project he needed to invert and secularize Parmenides’ vision of unitary Being. Instead of Unity, the universe was powdered into a multitude of whirling, thing-like, indivisible atoms endlessly uniting and separating in a abyssal Void—the latter perhaps modelled on an absolutely empty space, precursor of the concept of the vacuum (hence ‘to kenon’, ‘the empty’). But these ultimate monads still possessed many of the properties of the Parmenidean Sphere: uncreated, indestructible, indivisible, and so on. Only the atoms and the empty void truly exist; everything else in the universe is merely thought as existing (DL 9.44). In Burnet’s eloquent phrase, Democritus followed Leucippus in giving the Pythagorean monads the character of the Parmenidean One (1930:336). The ‘principles’ of nature—to use Aristotle’s language—are physical, plural, and infinite. The structure of things is to be sought in differences of shape (skhema or idea) and configuration of an unlimited number of corporeal ‘archai’ (Physics 184b20ff.; Met. 1.4.985b4–10; De gen. corr. 8.324b35ff.). Shape (idea), order (taxis) and position (thesis) in the distribution of atoms within the void are the sole relationships required to explain the genesis of entities (‘and they call shape (skhema) “rhythm”, order “mutual contact”, and position “turning”’ (Alexander, Met. 36.5–6). Following the historical reconstruction of the Peripatetics the general doctrine was often designated with the term synkrisis (the aggregation of ‘substances’ (ousiae)). Aristotle’s student, Theophrastus has the same doctrine in mind in comparing the formative principles of substances and the material universe with the Democritean doctrine of structuration. In his Metaphysics he observes that of sensible things the heavenly bodies possess order, at least, in the highest degree…for in these if the ordered is not everything, still it is the 381

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greater part. Unless indeed one were to take the shapes to be such as those that Democritus ascribes to the atoms. (Theophrastus, Metaphysics 9.34) We also know that Democritus and other Atomists often spoke of these ‘shapes’ as ‘ideas’ or forms (skhema, which Theophrastus refers to in his work On the Senses 64–72 and passim). Aristotle illustrates these distinctions with a well-known alphabetic analogy: thus A differs from N in shape (or form), AN from NA in arrangement or ordering, and Z from N in position. Different types and modalities of being are thus reducible to definite configurations of atoms. Alexander appears to be commenting on the geometrical basis of this figure in the following gloss: Some manuscripts contain this reading: ‘And these men [the Atomists] too proceed in the same way as do the mathematicians. If this were the reading, Aristotle would be speaking about Plato, because as Plato, in [attempting] to make bodies come into being from mathematical objects, generates the different bodies in accordance with the different [shapes] of the triangles and their number [Tim. 54Aff.], so [the Atomists] also used the different shapes of the primary bodies to generate the things [made] out of these latter. (met. 36.11ff.) The universe in each of its parts and as a whole is governed by physical mechanisms. Random occurrences are the products of a deeper ground of physical necessity. Divine intervention, ‘fate’, and ‘providence’ have been completely removed from the Atomic world picture. The question concerning the original motivation of the atomic vortex is left unasked and unanswered—although later interpreters speak of ‘the whirl’ of original separating-off or even chance generation as the source of cosmic origination (Simplicius, Physics 327.23–6; in Aristotle’s report, Democritus views the whole universe and all possible worlds is the product of chance configurations of atoms and void (Physics 196a25—30)). The postulate of eternal motion is invoked when the question of justification is raised. This, of course, was deeply unsatisfactory to Aristotle: ‘As for motion, whence and how it arises in things, they casually ignored this point, very much as the other thinkers did’ (Met. 985b21; ‘But they do not say from what source natural things have the beginning of their movement; for the movement [produced] by things striking one another is forced (biaios), but forced movement is subsequent to natural movement’, Alexander, Met. 36.25). The apparent pattern and orderliness of natural phenomena are the products of endless chance configurations and eternal motion (De Caelo 3.300b). In effect Democritean Atomism asserts that the human perception of design in the universe is an illusion and that the true explanation of order lies in chance arrangements. Contingency and chaotic configurations rather than necessity and determinism are the key to the whole kosmos. 382

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Innumerable worlds If we pierce the skin of the world we find a strange, valueless, and lifeless universe composed of constellations of Atoms and the Void; moreover, the fabric of our own material bodies, thought, and lives is also bound up with this anonymous dance of elements—weaving their way through infinite worlds without the slightest recognition of human values. The universe the Greeks call ‘kosmos’ is in fact only one system among an indefinite, perhaps an infinite, number of world systems (kosmoi). At Physics 196a25 Aristotle refers to Democritus as explaining the universe and ‘natural kinds’ through chance configurations. The idea that there is but one unique, finite kosmos is rejected as a prejudice of commonsense thinking. The atomic science of Leucippus teaches us to recognize a vastly extended world of mutating worlds (Hippolytus, Ref. 1.13; and DL 9.30–2, 9.44–5). Chance, not necessity, governs the world of atoms: The worlds are unlimited; they come into being and perish. Nothing can come into being from that which is not nor pass away into that which is not. Further, the atoms are unlimited in size and number, and they are borne along in the whole universe in a vortex, and thereby generate all composite things—fire, water, air, earth; for even these are conglomerations of given atoms. (DL 9.44) Given that the principles of all things are infinite and indestructible, it was natural to conclude that the possible constellations of atoms were also infinite. In the hands of Epicurus this would become a staple doctrine of Atomic cosmology. Epicurus openly embraces the theory of infinite worlds: ‘[Furthermore], there are infinite worlds both like and unlike this world of ours. For the atoms being infinite in number…are borne on far out into space…there nowhere exists an obstacle to the infinite number of the worlds’ (Letter to Herodotus 45; cf. Letter to Pythocles 88–90). Primary and secondary qualities The materialist vision is condensed in the idea that we inhabit one of an infinite and endless number of possible worlds. Human knowledge can never achieve certainty, but must forever remain conjectural. Sensory experience— later called ‘secondary qualities’ by John Locke—misleads the mind into attributing sensory qualities such as ‘colour’, ‘heat’, ‘taste’, and so forth, to things that are intrinsically devoid of such qualities. The senses are not a sure guide to the nature of reality. Sensation is simply a reception of the ‘impressions’ or eidola of things (‘We see by virtue of the impact of images upon our eyes’, DL 9.44; Theophrastus, On the Senses 50; Aristotle, De 383

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Sensu 438a5; Alexander of Aphrodisias, On the Senses 56.12). Being the films of atoms, eidola (singular, eidolon) are merely the simulacra of things. Each sensory organ is constrained to the fluctuating appearances of sensory data which vary according to the situation of the recipient, environmental conditions, and context. Such secondary properties and their names are mere conventions: only by convention (nomos) are there sweet, bitter, hot, cold, colour, and so forth (DK 68 B 125). And what the surface of convention hides is ‘the true world of atomic motion’, a world as strange and bizarre as the imaginings of myth—the world of Atoms and Void. Democritus’ view of sense-perception and the limited competence of the senses betrays the influence of sceptical currents which tended to reduce knowledge of the natural world to the impressions things make upon the senses. This Protagorean perspective held that ‘objectivity’ or ‘external fact’ is always mediated by sensory impressions. The revelatory powers of sensory consciousness taken for granted by many of the fifth-century thinkers are questioned from the perspective of a new kind of theorizing based on the fallible character of sense-perception. We can regard the whole debate as an index of a widespread concern during this period with the ‘relationship’ between sensory experience and their objects (for example, Theophrastus’ well-known work On the Senses summarizes this whole line of inquiry, see Stratton, 1964 for a translation of Theophrastus’ text). The impact of Democritus’ thought upon Theophrastus’ phenomenology of the senses is well known (see On the Senses 50–8, 60–82). Indeed it is possible to trace the distinction between primary and secondary qualities and the associated idea of the representational role of sensory impressions ‘mediating’ between senses and their objects to this climate of thought. Even our own contemporaries are still indebted to this model of perceptual meditation; consider A.J.Ayer’s Democritean conclusion; ‘We have seen that the world cannot be prised away from our manner of conceiving it: and our conception of the world is something that philosophers can help to change (1976:235). The doctrine of the infinity of worlds is one of the unique—and for Democritus’ contemporaries most unsettling—features of ancient Atomism and it is perhaps this unnerving idea that attracted the attention of the Athenian philosophical community. ‘Where in the vast spaces of these innumerable worlds’, we can imagine the incredulous citizens asking, ‘are we to find the gods described by traditional religion and Homer?’ ‘What intermundane spaces do the gods now inhabit?’ ‘Are the gods themselves simply the products of atomic motion and mechanical operations?’ To counter Zeno’s elenchos Atomism proposed a world picture in which infinity (infinite atoms in infinite configurations), motion (physical things and their secondary qualities are created by temporary ‘groupings’ or aggregates of mobile atoms), and void (the corpuscular elements or stoiechei stream through a vast space of nothingness) are central postulates. Atomism posited a world of infinite matter—precursor of Lucretius’ materie aeterna in De Rerum Natura 1.238ff. 384

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With the atomic store of ‘matter’ as a hypothesis we need no longer invoke the actions of gods. The gods are dispensable. Atoms rather than Zeus now take centre-stage. Nature’s configurations are produced by infinite worlds of ‘bodies unseen’ (De Rerum Natura 1.328). These ‘non-rational’ invisible constellations are posited as the arche and cause of the visible universe (On Generation and Corruption 314a20ff.; Met. 985b4; cf. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 1.329ff.). As the Athenian Comic dramatists suspected, the gods had been retired without ceremony to the Islands of the Blest. This, then, is the Democritean ‘truth’ behind phenomenal appearances: endless worlds have come into being through atomic configurations, differentiation, and dedifferentiation (the vortex) and this process will continue eternally (‘coming-to-be’ and ‘passing-away’ is but the surface perturbation on a vaster ocean of creation and destruction). Unlike Parmenides’ Sphere, the Atoms are in constant motion and interaction—indeed a cosmic equivalent of Brownian movement from which objects and worlds are contingently evolved. The essence of the kosmos is composed of bodies and void (cf. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 1.420–1). Resolving the central Presocratic question? Democritus is the true heir of the Milesian cosmologists and the Anaxagorean spirit of scientific inquiry. He simply cuts through the Gordian knot of Eleatic thought by resolving the whole world process into atoms and void (KR: 426). On the basis of this speculative physics we are to abandon every cosmology which appeals to a ‘First Mover’ or ‘First Cause’—whether of the Anaxagorean variant which posited Nous as the controlling factor in the universe or the poetic nexus of Strife and Love in Empedocles’ vision. Instead the Universe is to be construed as the fortuitous product of the quantitative movements and dispositions of atoms; its origins and causes are to be sought in purely materialistic and mechanistic principles: these atoms move in the infinite void, separate one from the other and differing in shapes, sizes, positions and arrangement; overtaking each other they collide, and some are shaken away in any chance direction, while others, becoming intertwined one with another according to the congruity of their shapes, sizes, positions and arrangements, stay together and so effect the coming into being of compound bodies.23 Mechanism and Chance rather than Teleology and Design are the key principles of the Atomic kosmos. By accepting the subjectivity of sensory qualities we can turn our minds in the direction of a completely rational— that is mechanistic and materialist—account of the universe, one which makes no principled distinction between the spheres of mind or matter. Matter and its geometrical ‘rhythms’ are all that are required to give an exhaustive account of reality. 385

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Mechanism and mechanical explanation Aristotle claimed that only Democritus among his predecessors explicitly theorized the distinction between surface appearances (mundane knowledge, doxa, the subjectivity of sense qualities) and depth structure (science, essence, ousia). He is the only individual to have considered the problems of natural science with any profundity, and he accomplished this by virtue of discovering the correct method of inquiry. Following in the steps of his mentor Leucippus, he explains genesis, change, and transformation by uncovering structural laws of substances. His denial of the reality of ‘secondary qualities’ is a logically corollary of this commitment to method: from the perspective of scientific method ‘colour’ and ‘sound’ are superficial appearances which need to be explained by resolution into deeper causes—in Democritus’ programme, a reduction to the quantitative ‘geometrical’ combinations of atoms (cf. Met. 1042b9–15; Theophrastus On the Senses 63, 69–70). The same approach was extended to such ‘qualitative’ matters as intelligence and the human soul (Theophrastus, On the Senses 65–9). Psyche is no longer a divine gift, but an atomic process similar to other natural phenomena. If Atomism was to serve as a comprehensive metaphysical framework, it must be able to explain the nature of the soul in naturalistic terms. The Democritean conjecture is quite economical: being closely related to ‘fire’, the soul is nothing but a constellation of fiery, mobile spherical atoms. As the soul is one of the most mobile of natural phenomena it must be compounded of the smallest and most kinetic atoms. In other words, the psyche should be treated as a paradigm case of autokinetic, self-moving activity and explained by the laws of this type of motion: while everything is moved by the psyche, the psyche is self-moved (De Anima 403b–405b; cf. Aristotle’s report in De Anima 403b25–30, 405a8: ‘Democritus believed that the soul and reason were one and the same thing, and that they belonged to the class of primary and indivisible bodies, and had the capacity of motion because of the smallness of parts and shape. Now the most mobile shape is the spherical, and such is the shape of reason and of fire’). Like the motes whose Brownian motion was often used as an image for the dance of atoms, the soul is composed of spherical atoms—in their fiery state they are able to penetrate or permeate the material world, animating things while remaining at rest themselves. Just as the World-Mind of Anaxagoras moves the whole universe, so the atomic psyche moves the body as a purely corporeal process. The soul may appear to be divine, but its deep structure can be explained in physical terms. Respiration would thus naturally appear as an exchange of elemental atoms, the intake and expulsion of streams of corporeal elements to sustain life. Like the ordinary exchange of breathing, the soul is in constant self-motion: it is characteristic of these theories that the production of movement is the central function of the soul; and the soul is the source of movement in other things, but is itself self-moving. From Aristotle’s point of view, Leucippus and Democritus can be admitted 386

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to the community of experiential science and natural philosophy (we have already noted that Aristotle devoted a lengthy work to the exposition and criticism of Democritus’ ideas). Their views on matter and soul are more sophisticated than their Presocratic precursors in these fields. They avoided the sophistical reasoning of ‘mere dialectical thinkers’, and began the hard work of physical science (On Generation and Corruption 316aff.; De Anima 405a8; cf. DL 9.45).24 But for Aristotle’s taste, the Atomists took their science too literally, eliminating every aspect of design or teleology not definable in material or mechanistic terms. We can now appreciate why Plato’s silence was so complete: Atomism was the most explicit and thoroughgoing rejection of the language of purpose and ‘final causes’ in fifth-century intellectual culture (as Aristotle observed, Democritus ‘omitted to speak of a final cause’ (On the Generation of Animals 789b). The mechanical world-view of the Atomists had absolutely no place for the concept of telos or purpose of any kind. These propositions can be given a logological interpretation: in the discourse formation of Atomism there was no conceptual ‘place’ for the idea of ‘purpose’ or ‘teleological cause’. Quite simply, Democritus’ basic conceptual framework was premised upon the rejection of final causes as basic principles. Natural necessity We can now reconstruct the ideological context of Democritus’ famous aphorism: ‘I would rather discover one cause than gain the kingdom of Persia’ (Fr. 118). Atomism articulated a distinctive and self-conscious concept of causal explanation by rejecting ordinary language accounts of phenomena expressed in the existing idioms of religious and mythical discourse. This has been described as ‘eliminative atomism’: to see the world aright we should eliminate all purposive or teleological accounts of phenomena in favour of descriptions involving the lawful connections of atomic motion. Atomism coupled the question-frame of materialism to the explanatory rule of mechanism, creating a concept of research as inquiry dedicated to the methodic disclosure of the underlying laws governing phenomena. ‘All things happen by virtue of necessity, the vortex being the cause of the creation of all things, and this he [Democritus] calls necessity’ (DL 9. 44–5; Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus 76). Convention and relativism ‘Sweet exists by convention, bitter by convention, colour by convention; atoms and void (alone) exist in reality’ (Fr. 9, cf. Frs. 11, 125; Galen, 1985:114; Sextus Empiricus, Adv. math. 7.135–9) It is now understandable why Democritean Atomism was regarded as the fulfilment of the naturalistic programme of world explanation inaugurated by the first Ionian natural philosophers. Here for the first time the whole 387

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world of sensible appearances, value, and social emergence is stripped down to ‘matter’ and ‘motion’. Even the terms ‘matter’ and ‘motion’ are inadequate as every observable entity is, for explanatory purposes, reduced to the configuring of matter-in-motion. Democritus’ materialism is the historical link in a chain which stretches from the older Ionian cosmologists to the world of the Athenian Renaissance. His epistemology posits two ‘objects’ of knowledge: first, the sensory knowledge of physical objects, the objects of perception which common sense reifies into the nature and truth of things (the world of middle-sized, coloured, spatiotemporally arranged entities), and, second, the ‘objects of knowledge’ wholly without secondary qualities, the deterministic world of atoms and void behind the quotidian world. The physical appearances of things hides their ‘true’ nature. Only reason—intellect informed by atomic theory—can uncover the true world, the law-governed realm of atomic configurations. Democritus pursued the atomic epistemology to its end, eliminating ‘purpose’, ‘design’, and ‘intentionality’ from any rational description of the universe. Even the vocabulary of psyche is to be replaced by a causal vortex of atomic movements. A book like the Timaeus with its ‘Demiurge’ crafting the world from a blueprint of absolute Forms is inconceivable in the Democritean universe. For the latter the world is a mechanical system to be explained purely in material-causal terms. Human nature and values are the contingent products of ‘mindless’ atoms. It was this aspect of ancient Atomism that was revived in the seventeenth century by Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), Robert Boyle (1627–91), Robert Hooke (1635–1703), Christian Huyghens (1629–95), and Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), eventually to be incorporated—through the writings of philosophes such as La Mettrie (1705–51) and the Baron d’Holbach (1723–89)—into the ideological fabric of early modern science. The ancient problematic of atoms moving in the void was reformulated as the mechanistic philosophy of corpuscular matter in motion. 12 CONCLUSION: ANCIENT AND MODERN ATOMISM Yet despite these shifts in question-frames, Democritus’ Atomism was still motivated by the central problem of the Presocratic thinkers: the problematic relationship between the Many and the One within the framework of a divinely ordered Kosmos. The cosmos now has become one of a plurality of kosmoi, one part of a vast material plenum of indestructible, indivisible elements (atoms). What began as a vision of beauty is theorized as a mechanism of atoms and the void. Classical Atomism, in other words, remained a speculative framework. Its basic metaphysical character can best be summarized as a set of ontological commitments: (i)

The cosmos is ruled by necessary physical laws of atomic configuration 388

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(ii)

(iii)

(iv) (v) (vi)

(vii) (viii)

(ix)

(x)

(the rule of Zeus or cosmic Justice can be dispensed with for scientific purposes). Surface appearances are the effects of primary, unobservable atomic configurations (the natural philosopher must always look behind the stated motivations and reasons and uncover causal connections). Sensory knowledge (aisthesis) hides the truth about nature (phusis): reality never coincides with appearances (this might be contrasted with the later ‘sense-data theory’ of Lucretius, where sense-perception provides the ultimate criterion of certainty: ‘What can we find more certain than the senses themselves, to mark for us truth and false-hood?’ (De Rerum Natura 1.699–700). Science and physical inquiry provide the only path to truth. The psyche (along with human consciousness and community) can be explained by reference to physical mechanisms. Atomic configuration entails a plurality of worlds created by natural mechanisms rather than one world governed by divine intervention or mythic forces. Every universe can be ultimately reduced to the physical motion of atoms within the void (kenon). The structural arrangement or disposition of a universe can only be explained in terms of material motions and atomic combinations (qualitative appearances hide the true quantitative, structural arrangements of things). The world is not organized into perfect forms or ‘natural kinds’ in the sense of Platonic eide or Aristotelian ousiae. The ultimate origin of atoms and void is beyond physical knowledge and a subject of metaphysical speculation (the inexplicable first ‘whirl’ of Chance or Fate that would continue to reverberate through the Atomist tradition from Democritus to Lucretius down to Gassendi, Descartes, Newton, and modern scientific cosmology). The kosmos is infinite (the infinite extent of space and time, for example in Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 1.984ff.).

Atomism presented its scientific cosmology as a solution of the great antinomy of Being and Becoming; beneath this apparent ‘contradiction’ was a sphere of reality where both the Eleatic One and the Heraclitean Flux could be reconciled, a ‘Greater World System’ in which the unitary void and the manifold of atoms could explain being and becoming. The Democritean Atom is, as it were, Parmenides’ Being at the level of the microcosm, while the macrocosm of corporeal bodies and changes represents the Heraclitean Flux, an emergent by-product of the laws of atomic combination.25 It is as though Democritus had set himself the problem of later dialecticians—how to resolve the One and the Many, Being and Becoming—by shifting its terms to another plane—in this case to the discourse of physical science. Ironically the war between Being and Becoming was resolved in the language of atoms and 389

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causes. This becomes the fundamental axiom of Epicurus’ atomism. The universe is an uncreated, unchangeable material plenum of atomic elements. The world is not created: ‘the universe always was such as it is now, and always will be the same. For there is nothing into which it changes: for outside the universe there is nothing which could come into it and bring about the change’ (Epicurus, To Herodotus 39). Epicurus thus envisions an unbounded cosmos of atomic particles and their inestimable forms of ordered combinations: ‘In each shape the atoms are quite infinite in number, but their differences of shape are not quite infinite, but only incomprehensible in number’ (To Herodotus 42). By the late fifth century this framework was recast in terms of the conflict between convention (nomos) and natural order (phusis). From the perspective of nomos the world is a conventional structure of sensible appearances; but from the standpoint of phusis it has an underlying pattern or structure. We have seen that Classical Atomism attempted to integrate both standpoints. On the one hand Atomism claimed that appearances are conventional constructs— ‘sweet’, ’bitter’, ‘hot’, ‘cold’, ‘colour’, and other sensory perceptions are relative to the disposition, character, and physical condition of the perceiver. On the other hand, the ‘truth’ (and thus the ‘identity’) of things lies beneath the surface of sensible appearances in a non-sensible world of phusis, here interpreted as the kosmos of atoms and void. In a text like DK B 125 Democritus is not— unlike Hume—suggesting that causal connections are merely conventional associations, but rather that they are relatively inaccessible and ‘unknown’ to the mind which adheres to the ‘surface’ appearance of things. While senseperception is captivated by the orderly play of appearances, the faculty of reason offers genuine access to the underlying structure of reality—and this is now postulated as the invisible atomic order ‘behind appearances’. Democritus appears to have been aware of the paradoxes of his own epistemological standpoint. In a fragment reported by Galen he dramatizes the tension between the evidence of the senses and the call of reason in the famous aphorism: ‘Unhappy mind, after taking your proofs from us do you try to overthrow us? The overthrow will be your downfall’ (Fr. 125—DK 68 B 125, cf. DK 68 B 11; Sextus Empiricus, Adv. math. 7.137). Like the epistemology of the cynics and sceptics of a later generation, Democritus’ cosmology questions the world-as-taken-for-granted and the epistemic credentials of common sense; yet there is no universal or generalized scepticism in ancient Atomism; in the final analysis we can have no secure knowledge of appearances other than as the effects of underlying structures—structures that are by nature imperceptible. What common sense naively assumes to be identical, tangible, concrete, and ‘real’—for example, the sensory qualities of physical things and their causal operations—is in fact an imaginary formation occluding the real object of knowledge. This opposition between surface appearances and underlying structure will be repeated throughout Greek philosophy in different guises and enters early modern thought as a standard 390

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set of rhetorical ‘problems’ accompanying naturalistic inquiry when it sets its face against dogmatism and metaphysics. Atomic doctrines—often amalgamated with the Heraclitean physics of fire—became very influential during the Hellenistic fourth century, mainly by way of the Epicurean and Stoic schools. Atomism was eventually latinized in Lucretius’ poem, De Rerum Natura where its earlier naturalistic and even atheistic motivation are foregrounded. ‘I proceed’, Lucretius informs his reader, ‘to unloose the mind from the close knots of religion’ (De Rerum Natura 1.921ff.). Of course this was already implicit in Democritus’ theory of physical causation. Consider, for example, the idea of atomic configuration given by Simplicius in his commentary on Aristotle’s lost work On Democritus: As they [Atoms] move they collide and become entangled in such a way as to cling in close contact to one another, but not so far as to form one substance…for it is very simple-minded to suppose that two or more could ever become one. The reason he [Democritus] gives for atoms staying together for a while is the intertwining and mutual hold of the primary bodies; for some of them are angular, some hooked, some concave, some convex and indeed with countless other differences; so he thinks they cling to one another and stay together until such a time as some stronger necessity comes along from the surrounding and shakes and scatters them apart.26 The same concept of physical mechanism was recycled in Lucretius work, to be revived eventually during the Renaissance in the fifteenth century. For Lucretius only the void and material atoms have true reality: all other things are formed from these atomic ‘seeds’ (De Rerum Natura 1.483–502). As the void is infinite there must be an infinite number of atoms and worlds (2.1048ff.). The chaos of the atomic world is illustrated using the famous image of motes in sunlight: Do but apply your scrutiny when the sun’s light and his rays penetrate and spread through a dark room: you will see many minute specks mingling in many ways throughout the void in the light…as it were in everlasting conflict, struggling, fighting, battling in troops without pause, driven about with frequent meetings and partings, so that you may conjecture from this what it is for the first-beginnings of things to be ever tossed about in the great void.27 To conclude: Chapter 1 began with the Ionian cosmologists interpreting ultimate reality as a transcendent order of Being. For the earliest thinkers, the world process was part of a divine Kosmos. The speculative consequences of this ‘discovery’, however, gave rise to very different intellectual orientations and cosmological frameworks. The cosmologies of the Pluralists represent a terminus of two centuries of debate and controversy on the nature of the 391

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world-order. In place of the divine unity of Being we are left with a vision of infinite worlds created and destroyed by atomic collisions and fusions. The Kosmos is still governed by Necessity, but the legality of being is now one of efficient mechanisms and material processes. The physical universe is merely a chance arrangement of the motions of invisible elements. The existence of infinite worlds follows from these premises: since there is illimitable space empty in every direction, and since seeds innumerable in number in the unfathomable universe are flying about in many ways driven in everlasting movement, it cannot by any means be thought likely that this is the only round earth and sky that has been made. (De Rerum Natura 2.1048ff.) The life-world, as phenomenologists say, has been displaced by a metaphysical theory. In Harold Cherniss’ words, the last great construction of Presocratic philosophy remained a speculative framework. All things are now to be deciphered as contingent ‘combinations of matter’—‘when its motions, order, position, shapes are changed, the thing also must be changed’ (De Rerum Natura 2.1019–1022). Originally developed to resolve some of the fundamental problems precipitated by Eleatic ontology, Atomism was turned to relativist and nihilist ends in the hands of the Sophists. Unlike its modern counterpart, ancient Atomism was not inspired by the experimental desire to determine the laws of motion of atoms in order to control the natural order. This is even more evident in the Atomism of Epicurus (341–270 BC) and his Roman successor, Lucretius (c. 100–c. 55 BC). In the work of these later figures, Atomism was almost completely divorced from the philosophy of nature to become a practical therapy of self-control and this-worldly happiness (ataraxia). As Lucretius claimed, the ‘terror and darkness of the mind must be dispersed, not by rays of the sun nor the bright shafts of daylight, but by the aspect and law of nature’ (De Rerum Natura 3.90–3). Once separated from the great stream of Presocratic inquiry, its critical epistemology was readily absorbed by the generic scepticism of the Hellenistic age, helping to create an attitude of mind that would obstruct the development of science for centuries.

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INTRODUCTION: TOWARD A SOCIOLOGY OF PHILOSOPHICAL CULTURE 1

2

See Hegel, 1955, 1956, 1977a; Johann Gottfried von Herder, Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1968); Friedrich Schiller, Uber die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschens (On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (London: Oxford University Press, 1967); Friedrich D.E.Schleiermacher, ‘Foundations: general theory and art of interpretation’, in Karl Mueller-Vollmer, ed., The Hermeneutics Reader: Texts of the German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986): 72–97; Nietzsche, 1962. Also R.Hinton Thomas, The Classical Ideal in German Literature, 1755–1805 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939); E.M.Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958): Philip J.Kain, Schiller, Hegel, and Marx: State, Society, and the Aesthetic Ideal of Ancient Greece (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1982). For explorations of the links between Greek culture, German Idealism, and modern thought see F.Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987) and Robert C.Solomon and Kathleen M.Higgins, eds, The Age of German Idealism (London: Routledge, 1993). Solomon’s short work Continental Philosophy since 1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) provides a useful introduction to this topic. The trope of ‘cultural health’ and ‘vitality’ applied to Greek antiquity is a theme that runs through the writings of German philosophy from Hegel and Hölderlin to Marx and Nietzsche and deserves a much more extended analysis than we offer in this introduction (for essential texts see Hegel, 1956 and relevant sections in his Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (1975); for Marx’s remarks on Greek art in his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy see Marx and Engels, On Literature and Art (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976): 82–4, also the section on the culture of antiquity, 185–211 and the texts edited by Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawaski, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: On Literature and Art (New York: International General, 1973); Nietzsche, 1962:28–34. For Marx’s direct and extensive knowledge of Greek literature see S.S.Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (New York: Modern Library, 1954). Burckhardt, like Nietzsche, tended to substitute a form of Romantic Hellenism that idealized the spiritual ‘individual’ for the Neoclassical image of Apollonian Greece (see his Classical work Griechische Kulturgeschichte (1902)). Yet both share the neohumanist idea of Greek culture as centred around a religion of art. Nietzsche also followed Burckhardt in glossing his own writings as contributions to the 393

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4

5

genealogy of culture and, with reference to Greek antiquity, the history of a unified form of life or unitary cultural style (1962: §2). Another writer influenced by Nietzsche’s genealogy would later use the Burckhardtian word Geist in his famous essay on the Protestant sects and the rise of modern capitalism. Erich Heller writes informatively on Burckhardt and Nietzsche in his The Disinherited Mind: Essays in Modern German Literature and Thought (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1975): esp. 67–88, 301–26. We should note that this was the context in which Nietzsche identified earlier, uncritical accounts of Western philosophy as histories of metaphysical concepts, while failing to ask the self-reflective question of the origins of the metaphysical impulse per se. With the ‘death of God’, Nietzsche also implicitly anticipates the ‘death of metaphysics’ and the coming era of nihilism. Cf. M.Heidegger, Nietzsche, 4 vols (New York: Harper and Row, 1979–87). Another important work in this tradition is Georg Voigt’s The Revival of Classical Antiquity or the First Century of Humanism (1859). On the ‘Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes’ debate see Albert Rabil, Jr, ed., Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy: Volume 1: Humanism in Italy and Volume 3: Humanism and the Disciplines (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988). See in particular Paul Oskar Kristeller, ‘The place of classical humanism in Renaissance thought’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 4, 1943; Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought (New York: Harper, 1961); and his essay in Rabil, ed., 1988 (above): vol. 1, 5–16 and vol. 3, 515–28. Also of general interest are R.F.Jones, Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Background of the Battle of the Books (St Louis: Washington University Press, 1936); Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983); W.K.C. Guthrie, The First Humanists (London: John Murray, 1968); Stanley Rosen, The Ancients and the Moderns: Rethinking Modernity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989); and Charles Schmitt and Quentin Skinner, eds, The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). For thought on the linkages between ancient Greek and modern thought see C.M.Bowra, A Classical Education (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945); R.W.Sharples, ed., Modern Thinkers and Ancient Thinkers (London: UCL Press, 1993); Rosen, 1989; and George E.McCarthy, ed., Marx and Aristotle: Nineteenthcentury German Social Theory and Classical Antiquity (Savage: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1992): esp. Horst Mewes, 19–36, and Michael DeGolyer, 107–53. A.R.Lovejoy The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea (1936) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964); Lovejoy, 1955; Cassirer, 1963; Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964); Paul Hazard, La Crise de la conscience européenne, 1680–1715 (Paris: Boivin and Cie, 1935); Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987); on the conservative ideological context of the defence of Classical ‘values’ in the American academy see Brook Thomas, The New Historicism: And Other Old-Fashioned Topics (Princeton Princeton University Press, 1991) and H.Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism (London: Routledge, 1989). F.Grayleff, Aristotle and His School (London: Duckworth, 1974); Henry B. Veatch, Aristotle: A Contemporary Appreciation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974); Paul Friedländer, Plato (1928), 3 vols, 2nd edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969). For contemporary contributions to the history of ideas see the contributions to D.R.Kelley, ed., The History of Ideas: Canon and Variations (New York: University of Rochester Press, 1990. On the problems of ‘doing philosophy’ historically see the contributions to Peter H.Hare, ed., Doing Philosophy Historically (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1988). For more sociological 394

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14 15 16

17

reflections on these problems see Nisbet, 1980 and Orlando Patterson, Freedom: Volume 1: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1991). On the political assumptions of ‘the Classics’ within the English education system see J.E.Sharwood Smith, On Teaching Classics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977): chs 1–3; and B.R.Rees, ed., Classics: An Outline for the Intending Student (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970): 1–17, 18–35. Walter Burkert, Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972). Fränkel, 1960, 1975. Also cf. Onians, 1954. A good overview of these issues can be found in Lindberg, 1992. Sambursky 1962, 1963. Cf. Carl Boyer, A History of Mathematics (New York: John Wiley, 1968). Solmsen, 1942, 1975; F.Solmsen, Aristotle’s System of the Physical World: A Comparison with His Predecessors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1960); F. Solmsen, Hesiod and Aeschylus (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1949). Neugebauer, 1969, 1975: Part II. Sarton, 1952–9, 1993. Lloyd, 1970, 1971, 1979, 1983, 1987, 1991, esp. 417–34. Kirk 1962, 1974; G.S.Kirk, Myth, Its Meaning and Function in Ancient and Other Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); G.S.Kirk, Homer and the Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965); and G.S.Kirk, The Iliad; A Commentary: Books 1–4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). And, of course, the indispensable compendium on Greek philosophy edited by G.S. Kirk and J.E.Raven, The Pre-Socratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Collection of Texts (KR). For example, G.Vlastos, Plato’s Universe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975). Giorgio de Santillana, The Origins of Scientific Thought: From Anaximander to Proclus, 600 BC to AD 500 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press/Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1961). J.M.Rist, Stoic Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); Reale 1979–80, 1985, 1987. It is clearly important to distinguish between the traditional history of philosophy and critical historiography of philosophy which involves questions of the discursive constitution of philosophical thought in its social, intellectual, and political contexts. We will meet this distinction again in our subsequent typology of ‘configurational’ perspectives. Kahn, 1960, 1973, 1979; C.H.Kahn, ‘A new look at Heraclitus’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 1(3), July 1964:189–203; Raven, 1966; Furley, 1967, 1987, 1989; Furley and Allen, eds, 1970, 1975; Lloyd, 1983, 1987, 1991; Hussey, 1972; Barnes, 1979, 1982, 1987; Barnes, ed., 1984; M.Burnyeat, The Sceptical Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); M.Burnyeat, ed., The Theaetetus of Plato (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1990); Schofield, 1980; M.Schofield and M.C. Nussbaum, eds, Language and Logos: Studies in Ancient Greek Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); M.Schofield and G.Striker, eds, The Norms of Nature: Studies in Hellenistic Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Irwin, 1988, 1989, T.Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory: The Early and Middle Dialogues (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977); M.Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); M.Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays in Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); also Amelie O.Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 395

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18 Sharwood Smith, 1977:14. For ancient slavery see Y.Garlan, Slavery in Ancient Greece (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). Cf. the earlier indictment of Butler, 1935: chs 1–3. For the history of Classical scholarship see J.E.Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921); Bolgar, 1973; Pfeiffer, 1976. 19 The first quotation is from Moritz, 1970:26; the second formulation is Paul Feyerabend’s from his Farewell to Reason 1987–89:89, and the third, from B.R. Rees, ‘Classics at University Today’; the essays by Moritz and Rees can be found in Rees, ed., 1970. A sample of the recent literature emphasizing the social contexts of Greek thought might include Andrewes, 1956, 1967, A.Andrewes, Greek Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971); Baldry, 1965; Barker, 1918; V.Ehrenberg, The Greek State (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1960); V.Ehrenberg, From Solon to Socrates (London: Methuen, 1973); M.I.Finley, The World of Odysseus, 2nd edn Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977); M.I.Finley, The Ancient Greeks (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963); M.I.Finley, Aspects of Antiquity (London: Chatto and Windus, 1968); M.I.Finley, Economy and Society in Ancient Greece (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983); M.I.Finley, ed., Studies in Ancient Society (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974); Frankfort, et al. 1949; J.M.Hurwitt, The Art and Culture of Early Greece, 1100–480 BC (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985); L.W.Jones, The Law and Legal Theory of the Greeks (Oxford, 1956); Havelock, 1978: chs 2–10; G.Kennedy, The Art of Persuasion in Greece (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963); H.D.F.Kitto, Greek Tragedy (London: Methuen, 1961); H.I.Marrou, History of Education in Antiquity (London: Sheed and Ward, 1956); Murray, 1993; R.Sealey, A History of the Greek City States ca. 700–338 BC (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); A.M.Snodgrass, The Dark Age of Greece: An Archaeological Survey of the Eleventh to the Eighth Centuries BC (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971); A.M.Snodgrass, Archaic Greece: The Age of Experiment (London: Dent, 1980); A.M.Snodgrass, An Archaeology of Greece (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); C.G. Starr, The Origins of Greek Civilization, 1100–650 BC (New York: Knopf, 1961); C.G.Starr, Individual and Community: The Rise of the Polis, 800–500 BC (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); T.B.L.Webster, From Mycenae to Homer (London: Methuen, 1958); T.B.L.Webster, Greek Art and Literature 700–530 BC: The Beginnings of Modern Civilization (London: Methuen, 1959); T.B.L.Webster, Athenian Culture and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). 20 Farrington, 1947, 1961; Thomson, 1955; M.I.Finley, Politics in the Ancient World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); De Sainte Croix, 1981. On the occluded role of economic activities in ancient Greek history see M.I.Finley, The Ancient Economy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973) and Austin and VidalNaquet, 1977. The elision of socioeconomic relations has led, by reaction, to a trend to overemphasize the social and economic structure in ancient historiography. As John Percival observes, the ancient historian has a special responsibility to interpret Ancient History from the socioeconomic point of view in order to restore the balance; but it also means that his task is more difficult because the materials for it have not been preserved in sufficient quantity or detail. (in Rees, ed., 1970:69) It is not without interest that Marx submitted a thesis on ancient Atomism for his doctorate at Jena—‘The difference between Democritus’ and Epicurus’ philosophy of nature’(1841). 396

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21 If we are to understand what he [the philosopher] was trying to do and to what extent he succeeded in doing it, we must be aware of the tradition within the particular genre and cognate genres that lay behind him and, if possible, of the influence which he in turn was to exert over those that came after him. (Moritz, in Rees, ed., 1970:28) For an introduction to structuralism in the human sciences and literary criticism see John Sturrock, Structuralism, 2nd edn (London: Fontana, 1993). For work in this tradition see: É.Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1915); E.Durkheim, Pragmatism and Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); E.Durkheim and M.Mauss, Primitive Classification (1903) (London: Cohen and West, 1963); M.Mauss, Essai sur le don dans Sociologie et Anthropologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950); M.Mauss, The Gift (Glencoe: Free Press, 1954); M.Mauss, General Theory of Magic (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972); M.Mauss, Sociology and Psychology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979); L.Levy-Bruhl, Les Fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (Paris: Alcan, 1910); L.Lévy-Bruhl, Primitive Mentality (New York: Macmillan, 1923); L.Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1926); C.Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1963); C.Lévi-Strauss, Totemism (London: St Martin’s Press, 1964); C.LéviStrauss, The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld, 1966); C.Lévi-Strauss, The Scope of Anthropology (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967); C.Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955); C.Levi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978); C.Lévi-Strauss, The Naked Man: Introduction to a Science of Mythology—IV (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981); C.Lévi-Strauss, The View From Afar (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985); Vernant, 1990, esp. ‘The reason of myth’; J.P.Vernant, Les Origines de la Pensée Grecque (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962); J.-P.Vernant, Mythe et Pensee chez les grecs (Paris: Editions Maspero, 1966); J.-P.Vernant, ‘Introduction’, to Detienne, 1977: i-xxxv; J.-P.Vernant, Mythe en société en Grece ancienne (Paris: Editions Maspero, 1980); J.-P.Vernant and P.Vidal-Naquet, Tragedy and Myth in Ancient Greece (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981); Vidal-Naquet, 1986; Detienne, 1972, 1977; M.Detienne and J.-P.Vernant, 1991. 22 Nietzsche, 1962, 1967, 1968; Adkins, 1960: chs, 2–5, 1970; 1972: ch. 2; C.M.Bowra, The Greek Experience (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1957); N.Brown, trans., Hesiod’s Theogony (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953); G.Devereux, Dreams in Greek Tragedy: An Ethno-psycho-analytical Study (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976); Dodds, 1951, E.R.Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965); K.L.Dover, Greek Popular Morality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); K.L.Dover, Greek Homosexuality (London: Duckworth, 1978); J.Frazer, The Golden Bough (New York: Macmillan, 1936); R.Girard, Violence and the Sacred (London: Athlone Press, 1988); Guthrie, 1952, 1977; E.L.Harrison, ‘Notes on Homeric psychology’, Phoenix, XIV, 1960:63–80; J.Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903); A.Momigliano, ed., The Conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963); Lloyd-Jones, 1971; Rohde, 1925; R.A.Shweder, Thinking Through Cultures: Expeditions in Cultural Psychology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991); B.Simon, Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978). 23 To borrow Oswyn Murray’s metaphor, ‘the breaking of the wave is the product of 397

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forces far out in the ocean of time’ (1993:1). See Weber, 1981 for an explicit use of this ideal-type as a framework in researching the origins of modern capitalism; the famous essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1976a) is a study of the religious rationalization of everyday life; and The Rational and Social Foundations of Music (1958) is an investigation of the evolution of Western musical genres in terms of the rationalization of a particular cultural sphere. Important chapters from Weber’s essays on the sociology of religion can be found in Gerth and Mills, eds, 1948: Part 3, 265–359, esp. 265–301. We might also briefly mention other related perspectives. Like his more famous brother, Alfred Weber tried to theorize the dynamics of whole civilizations in terms of the encroachments of societal rationalization upon traditional, magical, and religious mentalities (e.g. 1947). Unlike Max Weber, he also attempted to diagnose the crisis of the modern world in his Farewell to European History (1947). The Russian sociologist Pitirim Sorokin constructed sweeping sociological theories of sociocultural dynamics which embraced both the Classical and modern periods. Analogous attempts can be found in the work of Alfred Kroeber and Ruth Benedict. The recent revival of the comparative history of civilizations has also been stimulated by the work of Karl Polanyi and Fernand Braudel. Braudel speaks of civilizations as global systems: ‘Civilizations are extraordinary creatures, whose longevity passes all understanding. Fabulously ancient, they live on in each of us; and they will still live on after we have passed away’ (Braudel, 1994: xxxvii). Cf. K.Polanyi, Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1968). 24 An extreme formulation of this view can be found in Oswyn Murray’s assertion concerning the ‘role of concepts in history’: ‘man lives in his imagination, and his history is the history of ideas’ (1993:1). Later in the text he adopts a more Weberian perspective: ‘new ideas, however well assimilated, help to create a new religious order, and thereby influence the foundations of society’ (1993:86). For more materialist approaches to the impact of ideas on sociocultural change see Gramsci, 1971; W.M.Adamson, Hegemony and Revolution: Gramsci’s Political and Cultural Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Finley, 1964; Winspear,1974; Wood and Wood, 1978; Alvin Gouldner’s creative exploration of the Classical origins of social theory in Gouldner, 1965; also Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on dialogue and its Socratic contexts; Eric Voeglin, Order and History: Volume 2: The World of the Polis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987). An important collection of essays appraising the role of ancient Greek thought in the formation of Marxism has been edited by George E.McCarthy, Marx and Aristotle. Nineteenth-century German Social Theory and Classical Antiquity (Savage: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1992). 25 Heidegger, 1967, 1973a; H.-G.Gadamer, Truth and Method 2nd revised edn (New York: Crossroad, 1989); H.-G.Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); H.-G.Gadamer, Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980); H.-G.Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982); H.-G.Gadamer, The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986); H.-G.Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Karl Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age (New York: Henry Holt, 1933). Also of interest in this context: Frithjof Rodi, ‘Historical philosophy in search of “frames of articulation”’, in Peter H.Hare, ed., Doing Philosophy Historically (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1988): 329–40; S.N.Eisenstadt, ed., The Origins and Development of Axial Age Civilizations (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986); G.E.McCarthy, ed., Marx and Aristotle: Nineteenth-century German Social Theory 398

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26

27

28

29

30

and Classical Antiquity (Savage: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1992); B.Nelson, On the Roads to Modernity: Conscience, Science, and Civilization (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981); Stock, 1983, 1990. This has given rise to the revival of both Platonist and Aristotelian philosophy, exemplified by the work of Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor: Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964); Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Viking, 1968); Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1981); Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (London: Duckworth, 1988); Taylor, 1989. See also K.Baynes, et al., eds, After Philosophy: End or Transformation (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987). Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (London: Tavistock, 1967); The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966) (London: Tavistock, 1972); The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) (London: Tavistock, 1972); The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1963) (London: Pantheon, 1973); Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979); The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978); Volume 2: The Uses of Pleasure (New York: Pantheon, 1985); Volume 3: The Care of the Self (New York: Pantheon, 1986). For the range of topics and approaches in such a history of cultural forms see R.Chartier, ed., A History of Private Life, Volume 3 (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press, 1989); R.Chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations (Oxford: Polity Press, 1993); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); N.Elias, The Civilising Process, 2 vols (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982 and 1987); N.Elias, An Essay on Time (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990); see also Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). On phallogocentrism in Greek philosophy in particular see Michèle Le Doeuff, The Philosophical Imaginary (London: Athlone Press, 1989); Michèle Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, etc. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991); A.Y. Al-Hibri and M.A.Simons, eds, Hypatia Reborn: Essays in Feminist Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990) Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978); Volume 2: The Uses of Pleasure (New York: Pantheon, 1985); Volume 3: The Care of the Self (New York: Pantheon, 1986); Michael Carrithers, et al., eds, 1985; L.Dumont, Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); S.Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (Oxford: Polity Press, 1992); J.J.Winkler, The Constraints of Desire (London: Routledge, 1990); cf. the older work of G.Misch, A History of Autobiography in Antiquity, 2 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950); Stanley Rosen on the essential conversation between the Ancients and Moderns as this informs modern cultures, The Ancients and the Moderns: Rethinking Modernity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989); Martha Nussbaum’s investigations of the interconnections between aesthetic, literary, and ethical themes in the texts of ancient poetics and philosophy; Malcolm Nagy’s comparative work on Indo-European poetics, mythology, and philosophy: G.Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); G.Nagy, Greek Mythology and Poetics (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990)). For example, Braudel’s magisterial study La Méditerranée et le monde méditer-ranéen à l’epoche de Philippe II (Paris, 1966). See his recent statement of the theme in A 399

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History of Civilizations (London: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 1994) (cf. the assumptions informing a work like Charles Tilly’s European Revolutions, 1492– 1992 (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1993)). Note Oswyn Murray’s admission that in his account of the development of early Greece he has emphasized ‘external factors over internal social developments’, especially ‘military developments and trade’ rather than changes in land tenure and the development of slavery (1993:3). 31 Vico was probably the first to recognize the importance of an expanded textual hermeneutics for a critical assessment of the primary data of intellectual history. See G.Vico, The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1944); G.Vico, On the Study Methods of Our Time (New York: BobbsMerrill, 1965); G.Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico (1744) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968); G.Vico, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); G.Vico, Selected Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). On the topic of everyday life in antiquity see Veyne, ed., 1987; Paul Veyne, Bread and Circuses: Historical Sociology and Political Pluralism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990). 32 See Logological Investigations, Volume 1, especially the introductory Chapter and chapter 12. Since in practice the rhetorics, instruments, and institutions of reflection develop together we require a broader sociological theory of rhetorical formations in studying culture from a critical and reflexive perspective. What I call ‘logological investigations’ are intended as preparatory studies for a radically reflexive paradigm of cultural theory. From the logological perspective we need to study the theory groupings, philosophical traditions, schools and institutions which codified and appropriated ideas. Important precedents for this kind of configurational research can be found in earlier paradigms of intellectual history. For example, Walter Benjamin’s Arcades project, Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Erwin Panofsky’s Die Perspektive als Symbolische Form and Alois Riegl’s Spätrömische Kunstindustrie. Bruno Snell’s Die Entdeckung des Geistes (trans. The Discovery of the Mind: the Greek Origins of European Thought) and his earlier Ausdrücke für den Begriff des Wissens in der vorplatonischen Philosophic (1924) remain classics in the history of ideas. We might also appropriate the insights of a rich tradition in the sociology of knowledge for this project. For example: K.Marx, Pre-capitalist Economic Formations (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1964); K.Marx and F.Engels, The German Ideology (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970); G.Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press/ London: Merlin Press, 1971); F.Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (in Marx and Engels, Selected Works: Volume 2 (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1962): 358–05); K.Marx and F.Engels, On Literature and Art (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976); L.Goldmann, The Human Sciences and Philosophy (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969); K.Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1991); K.Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952); K. Mannheim, Essays in Sociology and Social Psychology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953); K.Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1992); K.Mannheim, Structures of Thinking (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982); K.Mannheim, Conservatism: A Contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986). For recent attempts to rethink cultural experience in terms of interpenetrating fields of ‘discourse’, see Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); P.Bourdieu, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991); P.Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power 400

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33

34

35

36

37

(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992); P.Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993); C.Calhoun, E. LiPuma, and M.Postone, eds, Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993). For further debate on the strategies of revisioning modern intellectual and cultural history see Dominic LaCapra and Stephen Kaplan, eds, Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982); also D.LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); D.LaCapra, History, Politics, and the Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987); and D.Lacapra, Soundings in Critical Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). See Braudel, 1994; H.Butterfield, The Origins of History (London: Methuen, 1981); R.G.Collingwood, The Idea of History, revised edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); N.Elias, Time: An Essay (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992); P.Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). See Chapter 5 below on the Pythagorean form of life. Also Ferguson, 1975: esp. chs 4 and 5; and the work of Hayden White on the role of metaphor and rhetoric in cultural history: Hayden White, Metahistory (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). Cf. also Philippe Carrard, Politics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). See note 28. Cf. Bourdieu’s work on symbolic capital, practices, and cultural fields: Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); The Logic of Practice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993); An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (with L.D.J.Wacquant) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). For recent literature see Rich and Wallace-Hadrill, eds, 1991; O.Murray and S. Price, eds, The Greek City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Cf. the defence of the Greekpolis and its autonomous civic life in the writings of Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss and, lately, Alasdair MacIntyre (see note 26 above). For the cultural importance of the evolution of the modern ‘public sphere’ and its links to modern citizenship see Jürgen Habermas, The Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989). Also cf. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974); and David Chaney, Fictions of Collective Life: Public Drama in Late Modern Culture (London: Routledge, 1993). Thus the Greek ‘literary revolution’ in the sixth century displays features that are not found in other comparable situations: unlike the other eastern scripts, the Greek script was developed in a secular atmosphere, and used from the start primarily for secular activities. The absence of an established priestly caste and the already open nature of Greek government are fundamental to understanding the consequences of literacy in Greece: literacy strengthened tendencies already present in Greek society, but it does not explain them entirely. (Murray, 1993:101) See J.M.Camp, The Athenian Agora (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986): chs 1–2; M.Ostwald, Nomos and the Beginning of the Athenian Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). For a similarly informed configurational inquiry into later Christian culture see William E.Connolly, The Augustinian Imperative: A Reflection on the Politics of Morality, Volume 1 (London: Sage, 1993). Benjamin 401

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Nelson’s pathbreaking work, On the Roads to Modernity: Conscience, Science, and Civilization (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981) should also be mentioned. 38 Max Weber speaks of the crucial development of the institution of forensic speech in the Greek polis, ‘that is speech as a rational means for attaining political and forensic effects, speech as it was first cultivated in the Hellenic polis. Such speech could not be developed in a bureaucratic patrimonial state which had no formalized justice’ (Gerth and Mills, eds, 1948:433). See Lloyd, 1987, 1991; also Goody and Watt, ‘The consequences of literacy’, in 1988; Goody, 1977; Harvey J.Graff, The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture and Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987): esp. Part 1, 2–31; Havelock, 1976, 1978, 1982, 1986; Lindberg, 1992; P.B.Manville, The Origins of Citizenship in Ancient Athens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Murray, 1993: ch. 6, esp. 92–101; and Walter]. Ong, The Presence of the Word (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). 1 PRESOCRATIC THOUGHT AND THE ORIGINS OF WESTERN EUROPEAN REFLECTION 1 2 3 4

5 6

‘The first beginnings of European philosophy cannot be a matter of indifference to the historian’ (Copleston, 1961:21). Robins 1990:10. Reale, 1985: vol. 3, xxiii. An interesting text which incorporates the notion of ‘cosmos’ as ‘ordering’ and ‘marshalling’ troops occurs in Iliad 2 when the messenger goddess Iris advises Hector, leader of the Trojans, of the optimum way of organizing his forces: as many of Priam’s allies speak different languages, the captains of each contingent should take charge of their own forces, organize them, and lead them into battle themselves; in this way the best fighting order (kosmos) can be secured from a potentially divisive and heterogeneous congery of parts (Il. 2.794–806; cf. Il. 3. 1ff.): war, like all other parts of Homeric culture, is to be organized kata kosmon (cf. the ‘marshaller of the people’ at Od. 18.152). For kosmos as ornamentation— in this case the decoration of a horse pulling a war-chariot—see Iliad 4.145; also Aeschylus, Suppliant Maidens 246–7; Sophocles, Ajax 292–3; Plato, Republic 373C. Angus Fletcher, Allegory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964): 109–10. For the argument of the following chapters, it is important to note that Plato’s remarkable later work, the Timaeus, and with it his later theology and cosmology, were transmitted to Western culture via the translating activities of Chalcidius, a fourth-century Christian commentator. The most accessible edition of Chalcidius’ translation and commentary on the Timaeus is in the edition by J.H.Waszink, Timaeus, a Calcidio translatus commentarioque instructus (London and Leiden: Warburg Institute and E.J.Brill, 1962). If we ignore Posidonius’ influential translation and commentary (c. 100 BC) and the fragment translated by Cicero, it was Chalcidius’ Neoplatonic Latin text along with Boethius’ commentaries that exerted such a profound influence upon the revival of cosmological and ontological speculation in the later Middle Ages and early Renaissance period. In the idiom of our earlier remarks, the videological and allegorizing potential offered by the ‘cosmos-creating’ Demiurge—the divine Craftsman—would be grafted onto a literal Christian doctrine of World creation by a Creator God—the principle and source of all goodness, thus helping to construct an essentially modern conception of the ordered Universe—itself a fundamental assumption of the modern scientific view of Nature. Ironically a powerful ontotheological explanation of cosmic creation 402

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facilitated a naturalistic perspective on the laws and dynamics of created nature which would ultimately undermine the theocentric world-view. 7 The trope of theoria as ‘intellectual vision’ derives from the Pythagorean story of the three lives—those who come to the Games to trade, those who come to compete, and those who come to see (cf. Iamblichus, Life of Pythargorus, 58). 8 For the macro-microcosm urmetaphor see Conger, 1922 and Glacken 1967. Also of interest is Cassirer, 1972. 9 ‘The Greek word allegorikos, allegorically, is first known to have been used by the Stoic Cleanthes’ (Robins, 1990:22). Robins cites J.E.Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921): vol. 1, 149. However, we know that centuries before the Stoic and Neoplatonist interpreters the shadowy figure of Theagenes of Rhegium in the sixth century (c. 525 BC) had already embarked on a systematic programme of reconstructing Homeric verse as a vast allegory of moral and arcane wisdom. His peri Homeron even extracted a naturalistic philosophy and metaphysics from the Homeric Gods as personifications of the natural elements (see OCD: ‘Theagenes’, 1051). In the fifth century allegorical interpretation is associated with Metrodorus of Lampsacus. 10 Kant, 1970:23. This is often referred to as the nebular hypothesis of Kant and Laplace (the French mathematician and scientist, Laplace (1749–1827) formulated the same idea independently of Kant). 11 See AT: VI, 42–6. While the treatise The World contains the main discussion of Descartes’ cosmology it also appears in Part III of his Principles of Philosophy (in Descartes, 1985). The work appeared after Descartes’ death as Le Monde ou Traité de la lumière (Paris 1664, trans. 1979). 12 Cf. the ‘ur-words’ Ma’at (Maat) in ancient Egypt, Me in ancient Sumer and Tao in China. All these signifiers appear to have developed from a root meaning of ‘order’ to symbolize ‘truth’ and ‘justice’. For the Egyptian context see Frankfort et al., 1949. Like Tao in China, the Egyptian word Ma’at expressed the divine governance of the Cosmos, the power of measure, order, and justice over things. And like the ancient Greek themis and dike, moral attunement with Ma’at became the prerequisite for a ‘righteous’ existence. Thus at death the soul of the dead (symbolized by the heart) would be measured in the pan of a balance—the other pan containing the ‘feathers’ of Ma’at. All of these words are derived from the act of measuring, defining or inscribing a ‘way’. Ma’at, in particular, appears to have originated from the activity of levelling, straightening, correcting as paradigms of order and regulation: From that it can be used in the metaphorical sense of ‘uprightness, righteousness, truth, justice’. There was a real emphasis on this Ma’at in the Middle Kingdom in the sense of social justice, righteous dealing with one’s fellow men. That was the main theme of the story of the eloquent peasant, which comes from this period. Throughout his pleadings the peasant demanded from the high official simple justice as a moral right. (Wilson, in Frankfort et al., 1949:119–20) For the language of the Vedic Aryans and the ancient Iranian word rtá (or arta) meaning ‘order’, ‘normal’, ‘true’ see Filliozat, in Taton, ed., 1963:133–60, 134. The root ma also occurs in Hindu thought in a similar context of ‘measure’ and differentiated appearance (Maya in the Vedas); as ‘appearance’, maya hides the very source of order, directing inquiry to what is manifested and away from the ground of manifestation (hence its association with everyday reality as an illusory simulacrum or delusional flow of appearances: Maya refers to whatever lacks Being). For the word Tao, we have to turn to the Taoist ‘bible’, the Tao Tê Ching, which begins, 403

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The Way that can be told is not an unvarying way; the names that can be named are not unvarying names. It was from the nameless that heaven and earth sprang. The named is but the mother that rears the ten thousand creatures, each after its kind. (Arthur Waley, trans., The Way and Its Power, London: Allen and Unwin, 1934:141) 13 Cf. B51, 54, 123. 14 See Benveniste, 1971:379–84. 15 This phenomenological sense of ‘origin’ is preserved by Heidegger when he observes that what was thought in the language and poetry of early Greek thought is still present today, present in such a way that its essence, which is hidden from itself, everywhere comes to encounter us and approaches us most of all where we least suspect it, namely, in the rule of modern technology, which is thoroughly foreign to the ancient world, yet nevertheless has in the latter its essential origins. (Heidegger, 1977:158) 16 The problem of the degree of self-consciousness in different Presocratic thinkers immediately arises. The startling novelty of the language-games of theorists like Empedocles and Heraclitus suggests an acute awareness of the distinctiveness of their discursive praxis. I will return to this topic in Chapter 6. 17 The first text is from Plato, Timaeus 29D6–30A6; the second, Aristotle, De Caelo 2.4. 18 Emmanuel Lévinas has described the logocentric impulse in early Greek thought as follows: Perhaps the most essential distinguishing feature of the language of Greek philosophy was its equation of truth with an intelligibility of presence. By this I mean an intelligibility which considers truth to be that which is present or co-present, that which can be gathered or synchronized into a totality which we would call the world or cosmos…intelligibility is what can be rendered present, what can be represented in some eternal here-and-now, exposed and disclosed in pure light… The Greek notion of Being is essentially this presence. (in Kearney, ed., 1984:55)

19 20 21 22

23 24

For Lévinas the origin of the European dream of complete truth draws its inspiration from the totalizing equation of Truth and Presence—from the Presocratic ontology of presence. Like Jacques Derrida, reflection can only transcend this metaphysical horizon by subverting or deconstructing the original equation of truth and presence, dismantling the totalizing grammar of Being qua Totality (Kosmos, Sameness, Unity, Presence, Being, Totality). Cf. Theodore Kisiel, in Kisiel and Kockelmans, eds, 1970:181. Philebus 16D-17A. Heidegger, 1973a: 102. In his later writings Heidegger referes to this process with the German word for light, Lichtung. Cf. Hegel’s well-known play on the expressions for beauty and appearance: ‘The beautiful (Schöne) has its being in pure appearance (Schein)’ (1975:4). Heidegger, 1973a: 109. Heidegger, 1973a: 115.

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2 THALES AND THE ORIGINS OF IONIAN COSMOLOGY 1 2 3 4

Popper, in S.G.Shanker, ed., 1986:203. Also Popper in Furley and Allen, eds, 1970:130–53. Kline, 1985:53. For the history of the failed Ionian revolt against Persia see Herodotus, Books 5 and 6. Morris Engel, 1981:18. Also Mellaart, 1978: ch. 9. More general accounts can be found in J.M.Cook, The Greeks in Ionia and the East (1962); A.R.Burn, The Lyric Age of Greece (1960); and G.L.Huxley, The Early Ionians (1966). See Proclus, Commentary, 157, 250–1, 299; and Cohen and Drabkin’s observation: Recent researches have increased our knowledge of Egyptian and Babylonian mathematics before and after the rise of the Greeks and have indicated remarkable skill in calculation and in the solution of various types of problem. But all the evidence indicates that the ideal of rigorously deductive proof, the method of developing a subject by a chain of theorems based on definitions, axioms, and postulates, and the constant striving for complete generality and abstraction are the specific contributions of the Greeks to mathematics. (1948:1) Cf. Howard Eves’ observation: ‘The value of these results [Thales’ elementary geometrical proofs] is not to be measured by the theorems themselves, but rather by the belief that Thales supported them by some logical reasoning instead of intuition and experiment’ (1976:55). In Kline’s words, the mathematics of the Babylonians and the Egyptians ‘is characterized by the word empirical’ (1980:18– 19). But ‘empirical’ can be revalued as an honorific epithet. This is the path taken by John McLeish in countering the notion that Greece was ‘the fountainhead of the sciences’. In fact, McLeish suggests, the Greeks made a unique, but relatively minor, contribution to mathematical logic. They tidied up the body of knowledge about geometry, making it into an abstract system knit together by deductive logic… They created a climate of opinion in which arithmetic was also considered as an abstract system, with no practical application. But from the standpoint of modern, practical science, these contributions had the same kind of baleful, stultifying effect as the Greek views on society—for example, on education or the status of women—which still bedevil our cultural and social values. (1991:74)

John Burnet formulated the same thesis in the 1920s: the really striking fact is surely that Greek mathematics became sterile in a comparatively short time, and that no further advance was made till the days of Descartes and Leibniz, with whom philosophy and mathematics once more went hand in hand. (in Livingstone, ed., 1921:89) 5

Proclus, Commentary, in Cohen and Drabkin, eds, 1948:33–8; cf. Herodotus 2.123; Proclus’ account was written in the fifth century AD, Proclus’ dates being AD 412–85, and was itself derived from Eudemus’ lost work, History of Geometry (late fourth century BC). Compare the different account given by Aristotle, Met., 981b20–5; see also the translation of Proclus’ text by I. Thomas in Greek Mathematical Works, Volume 1 (London: Heinemann, 1939): 145–7, and the more recent translation by Morrow, 1970. The traditional image from the fifth-century AD Eudemian Summary— 405

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a picture constructed by the ancient Greeks themselves in the sense that Proclus worked with the now lost manuscripts of Aristotle’s pupil, Eudemus—is repeated by many contemporary historians of ancient mathematics including T.L.Heath, Paul Tannery, J.L.Heiberg, Morris Kline, H.G.Zeuthen, and O.Neugebauer. Mathematics and astronomy ‘played no more than a negligible role in the history of Egyptian science’ (Vercoutter, in Taton, ed., 1963:17). O. Neugebauer writes that Egyptian mathematics and astronomy ‘played a uniformly insignificant role in all periods of Egyptian history’ (1969:71), that mathematical formalization remained at ‘an extremely crude level’ (1969:80) and, if anything, acted as ‘a retarding force upon numerical procedures’ (1969:80). Similarly with Egyptian astronomy, which consisted of ‘crude observational schemes, partly religious, partly practical in purpose’ (1969:91). Neugebauer concludes with the judgement that it is only since the Renaissance ‘that the practical aspects of mathematical discoveries and the theoretical consequences of astronomical theory have become a vital component in human life’ (1969:72). See Neugebauer, 1969: ch. 4, esp. 71–96. We should correct this with a more accurate and balanced judgement of the significance of Egyptian mathematics and science in Egyptian society and its impact upon the Greek ‘achievement’: ‘the Greeks did not object to borrowing from Egypt whatever it deemed useful. Thus, through the Greeks, Egypt contributed greatly—in mathematics and also in medicine—to the progress of Western civilization’ (Lefebvre, in Taton, ed., 1963:16). 6 Proclus, Commentary, 34; and see the editors note 34, n. 2. 7 For evidence of his political activities see DL 1.25 and Herodotus 1.74, 75, 77.4–5, 170. 8 On the story of the distracted theoretician see Plato, Theaetetus 174 A; on Thales as a commercial speculator cornering the market in oil presses see Aristotle, Politics 1.2.1259a5; for the notion of the superiority of ‘the theoretical life’ over the life of practice see Plato, Rep. 435A and Laws 747C-D. 9 Met. 983b6–27, 984a1–5; cf. De Caelo 296b25–29; De Anima 405a20, 405b3. 10 1955:1.44–5. Hegel is thinking of the Aristotelian/Theophrastian definition of philosophy as the quest for the original causes of things (e.g. Physics 2.184b15ff.). For a general overview of the philological evidence see Peters, 1967:23–4 and McDiarmid 1970:178–238. 11 Cf. DL 1.24 (= DK 11 Al). This is the interpretation John Burnet favoured and used to attack F.M.Cornford’s thesis (in From Religion to Philosophy, 1957) of the religious origins of philosophical speculation. For Burnet, the Milesian thinkers were exponents of a fundamentally secular attitude toward the world: ‘This nonreligious use of the word “god” is characteristic of the whole period we are dealing with, and it is of the first importance to realise it. No one who does so will fall into the error of deriving science from mythology’ (1930:14, and n. 3; later he adopts a neutral position on Thales’ religiosity: ‘he may very possibly have called water a “god”; but that would not imply any definite religious belief, 1930:50). For Burnet the spirit of the Ionians in Asia was…thoroughly secular; and, so far as we can judge, the Milesians wholly ignored traditional beliefs. Their use of the term ‘god’ for the primary substance and the innumerable worlds has no religious significance. (1930:80; cf. Burnet, in Livingstone, ed., 1921:57–95, esp. 62–4) See Ortega Y Gasset, 1967:194; his comments on the disenchantment motif in Ionian philosophy are worth quoting in full: More astonishing than commonly regarded, is the fact that not a single text 406

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appeared among the Ionian natural scientists in which the slightest role was attributed to the traditional gods. Hence Thales’ assertion ought not to be interpreted in the sense that his ubiquitious gods are ‘divine’ in nature, but exactly the opposite. The statement is mildly ironic, and euphemistic in character. (1967:108) This, of course, is also Cherniss’ basic argument: To say that all things are full of gods, for example, may be to mean that all things are divine in a mystical or religious sense or equally to mean that nothing is, in the way that the author of the Hippocratic essay, ‘On the Sacred Disease’, asserts that all diseases are divine and all human, meaning that no disease is sacred in the religious sense at all. (Cherniss, 1977:62–88, 65) cf: If Thales did, indeed, say that water was the arche of all things (Aristotle, Met. 983b), the wonder of it all is not so much the substitution of water for Zeus (the mythologers had already personified Oceanus to serve the same genetic end), as the intrusion of arche for the mythologer’s pater. Thales (or perhaps Anaximander) was in search of a starting point other than the common mythological one of father and chose a term, arche, already in fairly common use, to express the new concept. The older senses of arche continued to be employed, but a radical new dimension had been added to the language. (Peters, 1967: x-xi) 12 The thought of its infinite mobility, its transformation into earth and air, its all-engulfing violence, could not but have held an important place in the minds of seafaring folk…its fluid state of aggregation and the important role that it played in the mobile life of nature determined his decision. (Windelband, on Thales’ choice of water as cosmological arche, 1956: 37–8) 13 Diogenes of Apollonia, in Burnet, 1930:353–4. 14 Kant, 1974a: 31–7; Hegel, 1955:1. 178–9, 184–5. 15 Mason, 1956:88. For the archaeological background to the first great cities and protohistorical urbanization see Whitehouse, 1977: chs 3–5 on Mesopotamia and ch. 6 on the Indus Valley civilization. Also Hammond, 1972: chs 3–6 on the emergence of the city and Mesopotamia, chs 14–16 on Greek cities, cf. WardPerkins, 1974. 16 See Cook, 1962: esp. 46–60, 68–88, 89–97. 17 In the sixth century BC the chief commercial centres were Miletus, Samos, Sinope, Byzantium, Phocaea, the cities of Rhodes, Ephesus, Aegina, Corinth, Athens, Chios and Corcyra; in the fifth century Athens was indisputably the leader, though the Ionian cities, with Corcyra, and Corinth, were still of first-rate importance. (Edwards, in Whibley, ed., 1968:518–20, 519) 18 Windelband, 1956:17. 19 See Edey, 1974. 407

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20 Weber, 1966:91–2. 21 Unfortunately only scraps of Phoenician writing survive and we have little solid written documentation upon which to reconstruct the nature of Phoenician thought and culture. For the Phoenician origins of alphabetic writing see Herodotus 5.57–9; Josephus, Against Apion, 1.28; cf.: ‘This very significant historical event is recorded mythically: Cadmus is said to have introduced writing from overseas, an acknowledgement of the alien origins of the historical Greek alphabet’ (Robins, 1990:13; Burkert, 1992: ch. 1, esp. 25–33; Murray, 1993:93). It is also worth noting that the ancient Phoenician city of Gubla/Byblos, twenty miles north of Beirut, is regarded as the source of the word ‘bible’. See also Harden, 1971 and Moscati, 1973. 22 Marx uses the example of ancient Phoenician commerce to illustrate the fragility of ‘forces of production’ prior to modern structures of communication and transport: How little highly developed productive forces are safe from complete destruction, given even a relatively very extensive commerce, is proved by the Phoenicians, whose inventions were for the most part lost for a long time to come through the ousting of this nation from commerce, its conquest by Alexander and its consequent decline… Only when commerce has become world-commerce, when all nations are drawn into the competitive struggle, is the permanence of the acquired productive forces assured. (1964:133) 23 Compare the negative evidence of ancient land-locked cities such as Sardis, Sparta, and Rome: the Romans did not develop a civilization of seaboard city states like the Greeks. Rome was a warrior-agriculturalist community, like Sparta, the least intellectual of the Greek States. Commerce was forbidden to the senators of Rome, whilst her merchants submitted to the values of their society, aspiring to become the owners of farming land. The Romans therefore lacked above all the quantitative and spatial thinking of the merchant-traveller, rendering them weakest in the mathematical sciences. (Mason, 1956:61) 24 The range and extent of Phoenician exploration is a matter of some controversy. The strongest claim is that they not only sailed as far as the Azores, but circumnavigated Africa: ‘One celebrated expedition in the service of Pharaoh Necho II of Egypt in the sixth century BC completely circumnavigated Africa from the Red Sea south and back via the Atlantic’ (Boren, 1976:75). 25 This maritime context may also account for the fact that Thales was said to have left no writings except a text with the title, Nautical Astronomy (Simplicius, Physics 23.29–33). For the Proto-Canaanite and Phoenician history of the Greek alphabet see Naveh, 1975 and G.R.Driver, Semitic Writing, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). While a consonantal alphabet in cuneiform appears at Ugarit, near Byblos in the fourteenth century BC, the first non-cuneiform alphabet appears in Phoenicia around 1200 BC (see Jean, 1992:52–3). Oswyn Murray suggests a maritime location for the construction of the Greek alphabet: ‘The most likely hypothesis is that Greek merchants adopted the skill of writing from Phoenician merchants in a trading post such as Al Mina’ (1993:95). The disappearance of the Phoenician script is tied to the destiny of Phoenician Carthage in the Western Mediterranean: ‘Phoenician inscriptions of eastern origin after the 3rd century BC are rare. But the number of Punic inscriptions (mainly from Carthage) increases in the late 3rd and early 2nd centuries until Carthage was 408

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26

27

28 29

30 31 32

destroyed in 146 BC. After the destruction of Carthage, the Phoenician script continued to be used in the Neo-Punic communities in North Africa until it ceased to exist in the 2nd century AD’ (Naveh, 1975:22; also Naveh, 1982andBurkert, 1992: ch. 1; more generally, Jeffery, 1990). In Pindar’s choral poetry the image of the Pillars of Hercules (or Heracles) appears as a metaphor for the absolute limits of human striving. To wish to go beyond this limit became a symbol for hubris or errant pride—for example in Olympian III where the poet celebrates Theron’s prowess in reaching as far, but not beyond, the Pillars of Heracles (line 43). On the creative interaction of Greek, Egyptian, and Phoenician culture during this period see Andrewes, 1956; Bury and Meiggs, 1975:64–7; and Hammond, 1959: Book II, ch. 1, 92–108. Burkert rightly speaks of ‘the orientalizing revolution’ during the ‘formative epoch of Greek civilization’—from about the middle of the eighth century to the end of the Archaic age (1992:8, 128–9: ‘It is precisely the Homeric epoch of Greece that is the epoch of the orientalizing revolution’, 129; cf. Murray, 1993:81–101. Like Burkert, Murray concludes: ‘it is this brief century of creative adaptation that began many of the most distinctive aspects of Greek culture, and so of western civilization’, 1993:101). Herodotus 1. 74, 75, and 170; for Thales’ astronomical discoveries see Theon of Smyrna, 198:16–18; the texts of Herodotus and Theon of Smyrna are included in Heath, 1991:1–2. Cf. the report from Diogenes that Thales ‘was admitted to citizenship at Miletus when he came to that town along with Nileos, who had been expelled from Phoenicia. Most writers, however, represent him as a genuine Milesian and of a distinguished family’, DL 1.22. DL 1.27. Kirk, 1974:302. The discovery of abstract concepts and the possibility of reducing complexity to a standard ‘unit’ or ‘identity’ is connected with the origins and spread of commodity exchange, particularly as mediated by the money form. As Marx observed: ‘A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is in reality a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’, 1961:71. See Sohn-Rethel, 1978; Thomson, 1955; and Farrington, 1947.

33 In the ancient world as now, trade has been the principal consumer of mathematical operations measured in terms of the sheer number of operations performed… In trade, we find the four arithmetical operations: addition to find a total, subtraction to strike a balance, multiplication for replication, division for equal partition. Logically prior to these operations, though not chronologically are a number of more primitive notions. There is exchange or equivalence… In this way, equivalence classes of value are set up. The abstract representatives of the equivalence classes, coins, are originally perceived to have intrinsic value, but gradually this value tends to become symbolic as one moves toward paper money, checks, credit lines, bits in a computer memory. (Davis and Hersh, 1981:90) The sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel emphasized the abstract ‘educational’ and self-reflexive cultural implications of the money-form: The projection of mere relations into particular objects is one of the great accomplishments of the mind; when the mind is embodied in objects, these

409

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become a vehicle for the mind and endow it with a livelier and more comprehensive activity. The ability to construct such symbolic objects attains its greatest triumph in money. For money represents pure interaction in its purest form; it makes comprehensible the most abstract concept; it is an individual thing whose essential significance is to reach beyond individualities. (1990:129) Money is thus not only a powerful force of individuation and social differentiation; in creating new needs and desires it is the foremost technology of the abstract imagination. For an alternative, religious-ritual account of the genesis of mathematics see A.Seidenberg, ‘The ritual origin of geometry’, Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 1, 1962:488–527, and ‘The ritual origin of counting’, Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 2, 1962:1–40. 34 The great German sociologist Max Weber is substantially correct in his observation that: ‘Even in a city like Carthage, and exclusively in the Persian Empire, the coinage of money appears only for the purpose of providing a means for making military payments, not as a medium of exchange’ (Weber, 1981:236– 7). In other words, the potential of early money was constrained by and restricted to basic military and economic needs defined by an essentially agrarian civilization; the history of money only begins when the confines of these simple acts of exchange are destroyed and new possibilities of monetarization are imagined and practically implemented; the commercial systems of Phoenicia and the Greek trading cities were the forcing ground for this technological imagination; cf.: The earliest coins were mostly of large denominations, unsuitable for retail trade, and the original purpose of coinage was probably to facilitate payments to and from the state, collection of taxes, stipends for mercenary soldiers and the like; in due course coins were found convenient for trade; by the fourth century there were small denominations used for retail trade, and Arisotle supposed that coinage had been invented for purposes of trade. (Rhodes, 1986:32)

35 36 37 38

Money in these systems was primarily tied to the mode of semiosis C.S.Peirce called the icon—money had to almost physically ‘represent’ its value (whether by reason of its precious substance, size, or weight or a combination of all three). The next key phases in the evolution of money only occur when money is redefined in terms of indexical representation and, finally, in the great revolution which introduced symbolic money (the first phases of which still replicate the earlier obsessions with iconic, ‘real’ value: the gold coin, then the government issued paper note, and finally, freed from all iconicism, electronic money). We should also recognize the deep hold of the ancient honorific practice of the gift of valuable metal and crafted objects in the ancient world—for example, the Thracian custom of giving visiting ‘kings’ silver drinking bowls as a sign of fealty when a great overlord was welcomed to a satrap city; wealth in this form functioned as a visible symbol of honour, authority and political recognition; the system of royal gifts may later have evolved into institution of civic gifts and prizes given for notable achievements (the tripods, statues, cauldrons, and weapons which play an enormous role in Archaic Greek culture). Bury and Meiggs, 1975:83–4. The classical reference is Herodotus 1.94.1. Bury and Meiggs, 1975:84. Robinson, in Whibley, ed., 1968:536–48, 537. Sear, 1977:5–6. For the Greek economy during the Archaic age see Austin and Vidal-Naquet, 1977. 410

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39 Bowra, 1965:60. 40 Cf. Burnet, 1930:40, n.1: Mandrokles of Samos built the bridge over the Bosporos for King Dareios (Herod. 4.88), and Harpalos of Tenedos bridged the Hellespont for Xerxes when the Egyptians and Phoenicians had failed in the attempt… The tunnel through the hill above Samos described by Herodotos (3.60) has been discovered by German excavators. It is about a kilometre long, but the levels are almost accurate. For further details see De Santillana, 1961:23–6; Farrrington, 1961:81; Farrington, 1947:28–54. For the growing split between manual and mental labour see in particular the work of Benjamin Farrington, George Thomson, and Alfred Sohn-Rethel. 41 In this context it is quite possible that Thales constructed a mechanical model of planetary motion. Cf. Cicero’s comparison of Thales’ solid globe with the hollow sphere constructed by Archimedes (De Re Publica 1.14.21–3). Archimedes’ astrolabe had been part of the spoils of the Roman campaign against the Sicilian city of Syracuse (the ‘grandfather of the consul Marcus Marcellus’ took home with him ‘nothing else out of the great store of booty captured’). Apparently this was one of several such celestial models owned by Marcellus (another more beautiful example was placed by the same Marcellus in the Temple of Virtue). Unlike Thales’ model, Archimedes’ had incorporated a dynamic, working mechanism which enabled him to accurately model the relative positions of the sun, moon, and planets: the invention of Archimedes deserved special admiration because he had thought out a way to represent accurately by a single device for turning the globe those various and divergent movements with their different rates of speed. And when Gallus moved the globe, it was actually true that the moon was always as many revolutions behind the sun on the bronze contrivance as would agree with the number of days it was behind in the sky. Thus the same eclipse of the sun happened on the globe as would actually happen, and the moon came to the point where the shadow of the earth was at the very time when the sun…[here the manuscript breaks off]. (Cicero, De Re Publica 14.22–15.23) 42 Schneider, 1931: vol. 2, 485–6. 43 It was probably from these Euboeans on the bay of Naples that the alphabet passed in the early seventh century to the Etruscans, whose letter shapes are related to Chalcidian; under Etruscan and Greek influence writing quickly spread to other parts of Italy—in particular to Rome, and hence to modern Europe. (Murray, 1993:95–6) Compare Max Weber’s suggestive—though undeveloped—idea that the ideographic script of Ancient China was one of the crucial cultural conditions which acted as a brake on the development of a more ‘efficient’ alphabetic system: ‘its pictorial character, was not rationalized into an alphabetic form’ (1951:123). 44 Kelsen, 1946. 45 Kelsen, 1946:233–48, 239. 46 Yet another possibility opened up was that of the rationalisation, standardisation and publication of law, which was to be a great and perhaps 411

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decisive factor in the political development of Greece, and important for the Presocratics also. (Hussey, 1972:8) The varied subject matter of early inscriptions (laws, lists, private and public gravestones, artists’ signatures, owners’ names on pots) suggests widespread use of writing. By the late sixth century an institution like ostracism in Athens similarly presupposes large numbers of citizens able to write at least the name of a political opponent. (Murray, 1993:97) 47 One very significant exception supports this generalization. This is the vital link with the prevideological culture of ‘material science’ cultivated in the work and writings of Archimedes and the scientists associated with the Library at Alexandria in the third century. I will return to these topics in Volume 5. 48 Peters, 1967: xi. 49 It would seem that the priestly scribes of Mesopotamia and Egypt recorded mainly those disciplines which they had developed themselves during the course of their duties: mathematics for the purpose of keeping accounts and surveying, astronomy for calendar making and astrological prognostication, medicine for curing disease and driving away evil spirits. Until later times they rarely recorded a knowledge of the chemical arts, metallurgy, dyeing, and so on, which belonged to another tradition, that of the craftsmen who handed on their experience orally. The rift between the clerical and the craft traditions was noted at the time. In an Egyptian papyrus of about 1100 BC a father advises his son: ‘Put writing in your heart that you may protect yourself from hard labour of any kind, and be a magistrate of high repute. The scribe is released from all manual tasks; it is he who commands.’ (Mason, 1956:23) As Ruth Whitehouse observed in relation to the centralized temple economies of Egypt and Sumer, without writing, ‘the administration of such a complex economic organisation would surely have been impossible’ (1977:66). An even better contrast with Greece is the highly urbanized, advanced civilization of ancient India where mathematical techniques and complex procedures that were even more impressive than their Western equivalents can be found. However these innovations and reflexive practices were institutionalized in a rigid social system, effectively used as an armature of the caste system. Due to the workings of the caste system mathematics in India was cultivated almost entirely by the priests; in Greece, mathematics was open to any one who cared to study the subject. Again, the Hindus were accomplished computers but mediocre geometers; the Greeks excelled in geometry but cared little for computational work… Hindu mathematics is largely empirical with proofs or derivations seldom offered; an outstanding characteristic of Greek mathametics is its insistence on rigorous demonstration. (Eves, 1976:187) 50 See Max Weber’s introduction to 1976a. For the history of Chinese science and technology see Needham, 1969a, 1969b, 1970a, 1970b. Also Haudricourt and Needham, inTaton, ed., 1963:161–78, and Mason, 1956: Ch. 7. 51 On Babylonian science see Mason, 1956: ch. 2; McLeish, 1991: ch. 3; Neugebauer, 1969; Sarton, 1959; Labat, in Taton, ed., 1963:65–121. 412

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52 Lefebvre, in Taton, ed., 1963:13–64, 14–15. For the despotic proclivities of ‘hydraulic civilizations’ see Karl Wittfogel’s classic work, Oriental Despotism (1957). 53 For the social contexts of Greek scientific thought and culture see Clagett, 1957; Cohen and Drabkin, eds, 1948; Sambursky, 1963; Sarton, 1952–9; Farrington, 1961; Michel, in Taton, ed., 1963:180–242. 54 Gramsci, 1971:330. 55 Gramsci, 1971:334. 3 ANAXIMANDER’S COSMOS 1 2 3

4

Robinson, 1968:40. Cherniss, 1977:70–1. DL 1.2.2, citing Apollodorus of Athens’ chronology; cf. Hippolytus, Refutation of all Heresies 1.6.7 and Pliny, Natural History 2.31. For Anaximander’s work and doctrine see Hippolytus, Ref. 1.6.1–7; cf. Burnet, 1930:51; Windelband, 1956:39. Still the most comprehensive introduction to his life and work is KR: 99–142 (now KRS); this should be followed by Kahn’s book Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology (1960), P.Seligman, The Apeiron of Anaximander (1962), and L.Sweeney’s Infinity in the Presocratics (1972): 1–54. Agathemerus, Geography 1.1. For a modern reconstruction of Anaximander’s map of the earth see De Santillana, 1961:26 and passim. Also: KRS: 104ff.; Cherniss, 1977, 66; Hölscher 1970:317–22. Cherniss draws attention to the discrepancy between the Aristotelian-Theophrastean picture of Anaximander’s work centring on scientific and cosmological themes with the evidence of his wider practical, intellectual, and cultural interests reported by those outside the doxographical tradition. An important hermeneutic reminder is embodied in this difference: study of the material that does not derive from this tradition [i.e., the doxographical tradition stemming from Theophrastus] has shown that Anaximander was not merely a physiologer in the Aristotelian sense and suggests that the orientation and the interests of the Ionian philosophy of Anaximander’s time were far different from what Aristotle would lead one to believe. (1977:66) While not ‘proving’ the primacy of ‘praxis’ (technical, practical, or praxiological thought) in Ionian theorizing, Cherniss’ point corroborates our general picture of the praxical, legal, and political orientation of sixth-century Ionian reflexivity (see Chapter 2 above). Cherniss reconstructs this background problematic as follows: Anaximander’s purpose was to give a description of the inhabited earth, geographical, ethnological, and cultural, and the way in which it had come to be what it was. His book began with a cosmogony and ended with a description of the contemporary world which was in a sense a commentary on the map of the inhabited world that he had charted; it proposed a theory of the origin of the earth and the heavenly bodies and their arrangement, explained the appearance of land-masses on the earth and of geological, geographical, and meteorological phenomena; and proceeded to account for the development of human life upon the land, the distribution of nations, and the origins and dispersion of civilization… This is Ionian ‘historia’ in its full sense, the investigation of all existence without specialization or compartmentalization. Anaximander is at once astronomer and geographer, 413

NOTES

cosmogonist and genealogist, meteorologist, biologist, anthropologist, and historian. (1977:66–7) 5 6

Also Herodotus 2.109; see KRS: 104. On Anaximander’s cylindrical model of the earth see the tesimony of Hippolytus, Ref. 1.6.3: The earth is poised aloft supported by nothing, and remains where it is because of its equidistance from all other things. Its form is rounded, circular, like a stone pillar; of its plane surfaces one is that on which we stand, the other is opposite. (in Heath, 1991:6)

For an innovative study of the manner in which the third-century Christian bishop Hippolytus reconstructed Presocratic thought from a tradition of ‘embedded texts’ see Osborne, 1987: Part 2. The book also includes a photographic reproduc. tion of Wendland’s text of Hippolytus’ Refutatio. 7 But note that the title On Nature may have been ascribed to the work many generations after Anaximander’s death. As we noted above, Cherniss’ reconstruction of the contents of this encyclopaedic work indicate interests that are far wider than Aristotelian ‘natural science’ or speculative philosophy: ‘the startling and important features of his thought are its universality of scope, its freedom from anthropocentric orientation, and the strictly impersonal causal nexus which is assumed to hold together all objects and events’ (Cherniss, in Furley and Allen, eds, 1970, 6) (see note 4). 8 Burnet, 1930:52; cf. KRS: 118. Werner Jaeger translates the same text as ‘But from whatever things is the genesis of the things that are, into these they must pass away according to necessity; for they must pay the penalty and make atonement to one another for their injustice according to Time’s decree’; he refers to this single Fragment preserved in the texts of the later commentators Theophrastus, Simplicius and Hippolytus as ‘a jewel precious beyond estimate’ (1947:34); Jaeger speaks of the text as the first philosophical theodicy (1947:36; cf. Fränkel, 1975:265–8). 9 Simplicius, Physics 24.13–25; this is Fr. 2 in Dox. Gr. and DK 12 B1 in DK. Cf. Burnet, 1930:33–7. 10 Simplicius, Physics 24.13–25; cf. Aëtius. 1.3.3 (D 12 A 14); Hippolytus reproduces the same gloss in his own commentary: the principle of all things being a certain form of the infinite which produces multiple universes; this nature is eternal and ageless and it encompasses all the cosmic systems; Anaximander was the first to use the term arche in this cosmological sense; and all coming-to-be emerges from an eternal motion. See Hippolytus, Ref. 1.6.1–7; Aristotle, Physics 203b11–13; Simplicius, Physics 6; Jaeger, 1947:24–8; Kahn, 1960:30–2, 166; Osborne, 1987:187–211, esp. 198–205; Burnet, 1930:31–8: ‘[Hippolytus’ Refutations of all Heresies] is drawn mainly from some good epitome of Theophrastus, in which the matter was already rearranged under the names of the various philosophers. We must note, however, that the sections dealing with Thales, Pythagoras, Herakleitos, and Empedokles come from an inferior source, some merely biographical compendium full of apocryphal anecdotes and doubtful statements’ (Burnet, 1930:36); Barnes, 1987:74–5; M. Riedel, ‘ARXH und APEIRON: über das Grundwort des Anaximander’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophic, 69, 1987:1–17. 11 De Santillana, 1961:36. 414

NOTES

12 Anaximander thus referred the world of experience to a reality beyond experience, the idea of which arises from a conceptual postulate. He characterized this transcendent reality by all the predicates which his mind conceived as requisite for the cosmic matter…athanaton [deathless]…; he described it as including all things (periechein) and as determining their motion (kubernan); and he designated it in this sense as to theion, (Windelband, 1956:40)

13 14 15

16

The sixth-century concept ‘periechein’ was later used as a keyword by Karl Jaspers. For Jaspers the thought of the ‘encompassing’ is a characteristic feature of speculative ontology. The ‘encompassing’ (das umgreifende) is Jaspers’ general term for transcendence as the non-objective horizon of horizons into which all determinate existence and knowing is located. Like Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological concept of the primordial Horizon, Jasper’s Umgreifende invokes the ‘source from which all new horizons emerge, without itself ever being visible even as a horizon’. While never ‘present’ or concretely manifest, the ‘encompassing’ is the principle of all things, the ground which enables existents to ‘be’. Preserving the distinction between Being and being (Sein and seiende) is also one of the key concerns of Heidegger’s concept of the ontological difference. As with Anaximander’s text, these versions of transcendence pose the question of the status and nature of discourse that strives to refer to the ‘indeterminate’: how are we to speak intelligibly of that which is beyond determinations? If speech is tied to things within the horizon, to seiende, how is speech about the Whole possible? Jaspers addresses this question by introducing the idea of ciphers which serve as icons of the Encompassing, giving indirect knowledge of the whole, without constituting a ‘standpoint from which a closed whole of Being would be surveyable, nor any sequence of standpoints through whose totality Being would be given even indirectly’. See Jaspers, 1957:52; 1959. Fr. 1; DL 9.57; KR: 427. Nemean 1.8–10; Nemean II.1–5, for instance. For arche in Homeric contexts see Myres, 1969:80–7. Physics 3.4.203b; cf. ‘there must be either one principle of nature or more than one’ (Physics 184b15). The idea of the limited—and ideally singular—ontological work of an arche is one of Aristotle’s fundamental contributions to ‘regional ontology’ (each generic region of existence is ‘governed’ by a single arche or principle). Philosophical reflection moves from the dispersion of the many to the unitary simplicity of the one. See Stokes, 1971. Physics 3.5.204b 22. A linguistic analysis of the polysemic metaphor of arche forms an important part of the introduction to Metaphysics Book 5 (Met. 5.1012b34– 1013a25); also see Met. 1.3.983b8; Physics 203b7ff. We should recall that it was the Aristotelian scholar Theophrastus who claimed that Anaximander was the first person to use the word arche in the sense of principle; also see Burnet, 1930:52–8; Adamson, 1908:7. Some historians of ancient philosophy claim that arche is the first explicit philosophical concept, originating as it does with the question-frame of Ionian cosmology and science. Windelband, for instance, refers to arche as ‘the first concept of Greek philosophy’ (1956:35–6): ‘What is the stuff out of which the world is made, and how is the stuff changed into single things?’ For Windelband, the concept of the arche marks the transition from cosmogonic mythology and theogonic thought to science: ‘The transition from the myth to science consists in stripping off the historical, in rejecting chronological narration, and in reflecting upon the Unchangeable. The first science was obviously an investigation of nature’ (1956:36). See Windelband, 1956:36–45. For discussion see W.A.Heidel, ‘On 415

NOTES

Anaximander’, Classical Philology, 7, 1912:212–34; Hölscher, 1970:281–322; Fränkel, 1975, 262–8. Hölscher emphasizes the mythological origins of Anaximander’s thought: Personification is the mythical form of the abstract. Thus while it is true that in Anaximander the arche had entirely divested itself of the mythological form, yet its peculiar being came in the end from the myth, i.e. its character as a power, its religious dignity and the living reality of the concept. (1970:322)

17 18

19 20

An extensive monograph could be written beginning from the lexical entry ‘arche’ in Dox. Gr. and DK. For arche as political dominance or hegemony—‘the reign of Oedipus’—see Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannos 49, 54–5. This is what Hans Kelsen (1946) has in mind by claiming that the Ionian thinkers, Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, derived their interpretation of the cosmos from the principle of monarchy (mon-archia signifying not only ‘beginning’, but also government and rule): ‘It is certainly not accidental that this philosophy of nature flourished at a time when the influence of oriental despotism became more and more apparent in Greece.’ Anaximander’s text on the cosmic principle of retribution is singled out as a turning point in the European definition of natural causality. ‘Here’, Kelsen claims, ‘for the first time in the thinking of mankind, the notion of an immanent law governing the whole universe is comprehended.’ ‘The reason why modern science still characterizes the relationship of cause and effect as asymmetrical and still maintains that the cause must precede the effect in time is that the cause was originally the wrong and the effect was the punishment’ (1946:237). Appian’s Roman History, Preface, 1958:3, 5, 12–13. Nietzsche speaks of Anaximander’s apeiron as the ‘womb of all things’ in 1962: §4, 47. We might compare this translation with Martin Heidegger’s gloss on the word arche: ‘On the one hand, arche means that from which something takes its origin and beginning; on the other it signifies what, as this origin and beginning, likewise keeps rein over, i.e. preserves and therefore dominates, the other thing that emerges from it. Arche means at one and the same time beginning and domination’ (Heidegger, Wegmarken (Frankfurt, 1967): 317); also cf. ‘It [arche] names that from which something proceeds. But this ‘from where’ is not left behind in the process of going out, but the beginning rather becomes that which the verb archein expresses, that which governs’ (Heidegger, 1962:81).

21 [W]ith Anaximander’s suggestion that the arche was something indeterminate (apeiron) an immense abstractive step away from the purely sensory had taken place. It opened the possibility that the arche was something more basic than what could be perceived by the senses, even though the apeiron was, at this stage, unmistakably material. Thus Anaximander opened the line of enquiry that led to the single spherical One of Parmenides with its related distinction between true knowledge (episteme) and opinion (doxa), and to the plural geometrical and mathematical archai of the Pythagoreans and the atoma of Leucippus and Democritus. (Peters, 1967:23) 22 The position is already clearly stated by Hegel where he praises Anaximander’s speculative advance over earlier Ionian ontologies as resulting from the fact that ‘absolute essence’ (Hegel’s understanding of the apeiron concept) is no longer a simple universal, ‘but one which negates the finite’ (1955:1.187). Nietzsche takes 416

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a more radical interpretive position, denying that the apeiron has any qualities at all: Now anyone who can quarrel as to what sort of primal stuff this could have been, whether an intermediate substance between air and water or perhaps between air and fire, has certainly not understood our philosopher at all. This is equally true of those who ask themselves seriously whether Anaximander thought of his primal substance as perhaps a mixture of all existent materials. (1962: §4, 47–8) 23 Schneider, 1931: vol. 2, 450. 24 Adkins, 1972:108–9. 25 Heidegger, 1971:38. But Heidegger has also interpreted the visual orientation of ancient ontology as the product of its earlier ‘productive’ paradigm which approached existence in terms of material shaping and configurating, guided by the look of the projected product: it is not surprising if this seeing, in the sense of the circumspective seeing that belongs to the ontological constitution of producing, becomes prominent also where ontology interprets the what which is to be produced. All shaping and forming has from the first an out-look upon the look (eidos) of that which is to be produced. Here it may already be seen that the phenomenon of sight which pertains to producing comes forward in characterizing the whatness of a thing as eidos. In the process of producing, that which the thing was is already sighted beforehand. Hence the pre-eminence of all these expressions in Greek ontology: idea, eidos, theorein. Plato and Aristotle speak of omma tes psuches, the soul’s eye, which sees being. This looking toward the produced or the to-be-produced does not yet need to be theoretical contemplation in the narrower sense but is at first simply looking-toward in the sense of circumspective self-orientation’ (1982:109) 26 Yet despite this major sea-change, Aristotle’s usage still keeps in touch with earlier Greek semantics. Consider, for example, the opening lines of Chapter 4, Book V of the Metaphysics: We call nature, in one sense, the coming to be of things that grow, as if one were to pronounce the u in ‘phusis’ long; in another, the first constituent out of which a growing thing grows; again, what makes the primary change in any naturally existing thing a constituent of the thing qua itself. As Myres describes the project of Aristotelian physics: ‘What the student of physis, then, has to do is to propound arkhai; to express, that is, in language the various kinds of initiatives which result in processes and lead to achievements or results in the world about us’ (Myres, 1969:184; cf. 182; also Burnet, 1930:363–4). Phusis became the foundational concept in the programme of natural inquiry as an archaeology of causes; and here aitia, archai, and phusis are inextricably linked. For Aristotle, the new vision of nature may have been reinforced by the metaphor of causal intervention or techne as an end-oriented sequence of crafted production. 27 See the translator’s note to the text of Prometheus Bound, 301. LS give Adrasteia as one of the names of Nemesis, suggesting the privative construction, ‘the Inevitable’. 28 Another interesting case derives from the Athenian law courts; it appears in Antiphon’s famous prosecution speech written as an indictment brought by a son against his stepmother for poisoning his father. The full case is contained in Sprague, ed., 1972:129–36; the term aitia can be found in the text on p. 134; 417

NOTES

also cf. n. 20. For the complex grammar of the language of guilt in Greek culture see the verbal contexts in which ‘Aition/Aitia’ occurs in LS; and ‘Aition (or aitia): culpability, responsibility, cause’, in Peters, 1967:16. The interplay between the language-games of early philosophy and Greek tragedy would obviously form an important topic for an extensive programme of logological research. 29 As Hussey observed: This concept of ‘the Unbounded’ is so important that something more must be said about its history and significance. The word apeiron is a negative adjective in the neuter formed from the noun peirar or peras. This noun has various applications in early Greek, most of which can be summed up by saying that the peras of X is that which completes X in some respect or marks the completion of X. So ‘to apeiron’ is ‘that which cannot be completed’, without any necessary specialisation to a spatial or a temporal sense. But the spatial and temporal senses were the most natural for it to bear at this time, namely, ‘spatially unbounded’ and ‘unending in time’. The most obvious role of ‘the Unbounded’ in the Milesian scheme was that of sustaining the observed world-order. (Hussey, 1972:17; cf. Sweeney, 1972, 1–54) Charles Kahn has translated ‘to apeiron’ as ‘what cannot be passed over or traversed from end to end’, construing this as an immense and inexhaustible plenum, body, or mass encompassing the world. The world’s divinity and its substantial reality derive from this formless ‘cosmic mass encircling the spherical body of our star-studded heaven’ (1960:233–4). The interpretation derives from Burnet (1930:58): ‘We must picture’, Burnet claims, an endless mass, which is not any one of the opposites we know, stretching out without limit on every side of the world we live in. This mass is a body, out of which our world once emerged, and into which it will one day be absorbed again. Worlds are being continuously broken off from this plenum, forming, developing, and disintegrating back into the Unbounded. A plurality of worlds proceeds from the Apeiron (Simplicius, Physics 1121.5). Because of its ‘negation’ of limit (peras), ‘apeiron is frequently translated as Infinite (cf. Aristotle, Physics 202b–208a). One commentator has suggested that we should view Anaximander’s Apeiron not merely as material or spatial unboundedness, but also as a temporal infinity (where the material of world production is ungenerated, deathless, and indestructible). Thus Leo Sweeney writes: ‘What is especially noteworthy is that at the very dawn of Western philosophical speculation someone said primal reality is the Infinite’ (1972:175). Others credit this idea of the Infinite arche as the first true beginning of Greek philosophy (Burnet, 1930:50–71; Sinnige, 1968:9; De Santillana, 1961:28; Jaeger, 1947:24–8; Kahn, 1960:30–2). We should also note that the concepts ‘Boundless’ and ‘Infinite’ are not equivalent expressions. To illustrate with a cosmological distinction from our own time: given non-Euclidean metrics for spatiotemporal curvature it is possible to model a universe that is both finite and boundless. A world can be thought as boundless without being infinite. On the god-like characteristics of the Apeiron see Kahn, 1960, 237–8: in addition to being the vital source out of which the substance of the world has come and the outer limit which encloses and defines the body of the cosmos, the apeiron is also the everlasting, god-like power which governs the rhythmic life cycle of this world. Thus it is not only the idea of the 418

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well-regulated cosmos which Greece owes to Anaximander, but also that of its regulator, the Cosmic God. Cf: Still another predicate was given by Anaximander to the Infinite, to theion, the divine… Anaximander’s matter is the first philosophic conception of God, the first attempt…to strip the idea of God of all mythical form. (Windelband, 1901:34) Both Guthrie (1962–81: vol. 1, 83) and Heidegger (in Holzwege) speak of the Apeiron as ‘the permanent Ground of Being’. 30 Simplicius, 24.13; Theophrastus, Fr. 2 (Dox. Gr. 475.3–5); Hippolytus, Ref. 1.6.1– 7; cf. Aristotle, Physics 187a; 203b7. Yet the question remains: how can the undifferentiated even be referred to? Speech, after all, presupposes a conventional ensemble of articulations and differences. The articulations of language require the work of limits as the ground of its possibility. Like the Parmenidean ‘Nonbeing’, Apeiron appears to lie beyond intelligible speech. If this world-forming ‘substance’ or ‘source’ (to use Aristotelian language) is conceivable and thinkable, only speculative thought with its intuitive sense of negation is adequate (the paradox of saying what the ‘indeterminate’ is: of even naming what is unnameable, without limit, boundary—and thus ‘definition’). Yet this activity is one of the central demands of theorizing. Thinking strives to reveal the ultimate nature of reality, to disclose something about the unique nature of different modes of being. This would turn Anaximander into a ‘negative cosmologist’ (by analogy with later ‘negative theology’). Reflexive speech can only say what the matrix is not, but cannot determine it positively by any concrete predicate or specific characteristic. But we have see that Anaximander formulates a positive account of the world process. He informs us that ‘coming-to-be’ is a ceaseless emergence from a matrix that is itself a ‘no-thing’. This led Nietzsche to compare Anaximander’s Apeiron and the Kantian Ding an sich, both being aporetic ‘non-concepts’ (1962:47). Cherniss observes: For Anaximander the apeiron was simply a boundless expanse of infinitely different ingredients so thoroughly mixed together as to be severally indiscernible in the mixture but which when segregated from the mixture are recognizable as all the differences of an articulated world; it is like nothing so much as that ‘limitless sea of dissimilitude’ into which, in the myth of Plato’s Politicus, the cosmos is periodically in danger of sinking. (1977:67–8) 31 Nietzsche glosses the idea of necessity as follows: ‘Where the source of things is, to that place they must also pass away, according to necessity, for they must pay penances and be judged for their injustices, in accordance with the ordinance of time’ (1962:45). In order that coming-to-be shall not cease, primal being must be indefinite. The immortality and everlastingness of primal being does not lie in its infinitude or its inexhaustibility, as the commentators of Anaximander generally assume, but in the fact that it is devoid of definite qualities that would lead to its passing. (1962:47) Cf. When Anaximander proposes this image as an explanation of the comingto-be and passing-away of things in the natural world, he is obviously 419

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thinking of their very existence as dependent on a state of having-too-much, for which they must make amends by ceding to others the things they now enjoy. A very similar idea appears in Heraclitus when he says that ‘these live the death of those, while those die the life of these’ [B 62]. (Jaeger, 1947:35) 32 ‘In this sense that themis represents the Latin fas, these dikai may provisionally be compared to the formulae of Roman legal procedure’ (Myres, 1969:80; also 98–145; and Lloyd-Jones, 1971: chs 1–3. 33 Myres, 1969:107. 34 The semantic refiguration of the term Dike in the sixth century BC illustrates the conflict involved in moving from a familial, tribal, or ‘honour-based’ system of traditional legality to a civic, contractual, or ‘achievement’-based legal system, an adumbration of some of the conflicts that would reappear in the growth of the idea of universal, natural law in the Hellenistic and Roman age. The Classical formulation of this ‘transition’ is still Henry S.Maine’s analysis of the shift from status to contract in his Ancient Law, its Connections with the early History of Society and its Relations to Modern Ideas (London, 1861). 35 Whitehead, 1967:10–11. 36 Lloyd-Jones, 1971: chs 1–2; Havelock, 1979: chs 1–3; Gagarin, 1986: chs 1–2. Also Vlastos, in Furley and Allen, eds, 1970:56–91, esp. 73–83. Also cf. G.Vlastos, ‘Solonian justice’, Classical Philology, 41, 1946:65–83. 37 Prometheus Bound 511–20; Supplicants 37. A similar grammatical construction appears in Solon’s phrase ‘en dike chronou’ (‘in the court of time’); see Ehrenberg, 1964:38. 38 Trans. Sandys. We might also compare the ‘guardian’ function of the Erinyes in Heraclitus (Fr. 94) and the Goddesses of Truth in Parmenides’ Pröema. Significantly for Pindar and for early tragedy, evil and punishment is associated with physical labour, peasant cultivation, and even mercantile commerce (‘vexing the soil with the strength of their hands…nor the water of the sea, to gain a scanty livelihood’) while goodness is rewarded with a life free from labour where souls ‘pass by the highway of Zeus unto the tower of Cronos, where the oceanbreezes blow around the Islands of the Blest, and flowers of gold are blazing’. 39 Aeschylus, Agamemnon 2.250–1. Cf. Nietzsche’s gloss on Anaximander’s tragic world-view: ‘the conditions for the fall from being to coming-to-be in injustice are forever the same; the constellation of things is such that no end can be envisaged for the emergence of individual creatures from the womb of the “indefinite”’(1962: §4, 50). 40 Edward Hussey is, once more, informative on this aspect of Anaximander’s thought: the lawlike behaviour occurs ‘by necessity’ (kata to chreon), which implies a power imposing the necessity, and ‘according to the assesment of Time’ (kata ten tou chronou taxin). The significance of this last phrase is unfortunately disputable, but it is quite possible that ‘Time’ is here thought of as the name of a divine power, namely the Unbounded. For the idea of Time as a divine power occurs, not only in Iranian religion, but in other Greek sixth-century writers: Solon, Pherecydes and Heraclitus. (Hussey, 1972:24) For the theme of Time in Pherecydes’ mythological account of creation see DL 1.119; Eudemus Fragment 117, DK 7 A 8 and the account of his life and work given in KR: 48–72. 41 See Supplicants 433–7. Cf. Heraclitus, B 80, B 126. Cf. Antigone’s invocation of 420

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the remorseless order of the unwritten laws ‘which live not for today or yesterday but forever and no-one knows their origin’ (Antigone 456–7). 42 KRS: 131; cf. Alexander of Aphrodisias, Meteorology 67.3 who probably copied the wording from Theophrastus’ original text. Cf. Aristotle Meteorology 2.355a21, cited in Burnet, 1930:63–4. For the fragments dealing with the formation of the heavenly bodies from cosmic rings see Burnet, 1930:66–70. Popper describes the theory of the ‘suspended earth’ as one of the boldest, most revolutionary, and most portentous ideas in the whole history of human thought… To envisage the earth as freely posed in mid-space…is to anticipate to some extent even Newton’s idea of immaterial and invisible gravitational forces. (in Furley and Allen, eds, 1970:133) 43 Diels (34), Anaximander A 30. See Aëtius, 5.19.4; Pseudo-Plutarch, Strom. Fr. 2; Hippolytus, Ref. 1.6.6–8; Plutarch, Symp. VIII, 730 E (DK: 12 A 30). See KR: 141–2. 44 KR refer to Anaximander’s ‘brilliant conjectures on the origins of animal and human life’; in their judgement Anaximander’s is the first attempt of which we know to explain the origin of man, as well as of the world, rationally… Incomplete and sometimes inconsistent as our sources are, they show that Anaximander’s account of Nature, though among the earliest, was one of the broadest in scope and most imaginative of all. (142) Cf. Reale’s gloss on these aspects of Anaximander’s thought: It is enough here to recall two of these scientific truths: first, the boldness of the representation of the earth that has no need of any material support (even for Thales the earth floated on water), and that it is supported by an equilibrium of forces; and second, the modernity of the notion that the origin of life began with acquatic animals and the consequent virtual presence of the notion of the evolution of species through adaptation to the environment. And this is already in itself sufficient to demonstrate how far the logos of Anaximander is beyond myth. (Reale, 1987:43; cf. Popper, in Furley and Allen, eds, 1970:132–3, cited in note 42) 45 ‘It [On Nature] is an early attempt at a natural history of the universe, essentially of the same kind as the nebular hypothesis of Kant and Laplace’ (Farrington, 1936:44). For a defence of the essential continuity between Anaximander’s cosmology and modern scientific cosmology concerning the origins of the universe from an indeterminate beginning see Munitz, 1986: ch. 2, esp. 26–7, and chs 6 and 7. 46 Hegel assembles a motley collection of ancient texts bearing on the ideas of developmental, differential, and cosmological change in Anaximander. See 1955:1.185–9. 47 DK 12 A 9, 10, 11, 14, 17. Cf. the ‘unlimited worlds’ mentioned in Aëtius, 1.7.12, Plutarch, Strom. 2 (cf. D. 12 A 10), in Hippolytus 1.6. 2–7, and also in Cicero’s De Natura Deorum 1.25; Cf. Zeller: ‘A trustworthy tradition which we can trace back to Theophrastus asserts that Anaximander in accordance with the postulates of his cosmology assumed a periodic alternation of creation and destruction in the universe and hence a succession of worlds without beginning or end. Apart from this he seems to have assumed the simultaneous existence of innumerable world-systems in endless space’ (1969:29); see also Nietzsche, 1962; 421

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48

49

50 51 52 53 54

55 56

57 58 59

Windelband, 1956: 41–3; Cherniss, 1977:67. F.M.Cornford has, however, argued against ascribing this doctrine to Greek thinkers prior to the Atomists. In presupposing the conception of ‘strictly infinite space’ it ‘belongs to the pluralist habit of mind, characteristic of the generation after Parmenides’ attack on the monistic systems of the sixth century’ (1965:177–8). See Aëtius. 2.20; Hippolytus, Ref. 1.6 and Plutarch, Strom. 2; Hippolytus: the stars are created from a circle of fire separated off from the world fire and encompassed by air; the visibility of the stars arises through a system of ‘breathing passages’; eclipses are explained when these apertures are blocked (Ref. 1.7). Also Glacken, 1967:9. De Santillana, 1961:39–40. See also Robinson, 1968:34–5 and Cornford, 1957:11: ‘Every step from that simple disposition of elemental provinces towards the multiplicity of things is a breaking of bounds, an advance toward disorder, a declension into the welter of injustice, rapine and war.’ Aristotle, The Politics 1253a35, ed. Stephen Everson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Physics 203b6ff. Exemplified for Aristotle by Thales’ teaching that ‘All things are full of Gods’; see De Anima 411a8, 645a17ff. Cf. Sinnige, 1968:13–14. Epicurus, Letter to Herodutus, in Epicurus, 1975:19–55, lines 41–2, 45–6; cf. Cicero, De Natura Deorum 1.25. See also the relevant Epicurean texts in Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers: Volume 1: Translations of the Principal Sources with Philosophical Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Kant, 1970:36. Kant, 1970:24, 36, 65, 139–0, 142, 149. Giordano Bruno’s heretical treatise, Of the Infinite Universe, appeared in 1584. Bruno also seems to have borrowed Anaximandrian concepts, buried under centuries of Latin translation; his account is structured by the motif of an infinitely magnified Godhead (comparable to Kant’s notion of the infinite attributes of God and Spinoza’s Substance with infinite modalities). Engels, 1962:79. Hegel, 1959:150. Nietzsche, 1962:46–7. 4 ANAXIMENES’ PNEUMATOLOGY

1

The central source for Anaximenes’ life and thought is Hippolytus’ Refutation of All Heresies 1.7.1–9, DK 13 A 7, transmitting texts from Theophrastus (‘Anaximenes is one of the philosophers on whom Theophrastus wrote a special monograph; and this gives us an additional guarantee for the trustworthiness of the tradition’, Burnet, 1930:73). For his simple and straightforward Ionian prose see DL 2.3. By contrast, Theophrastus describes Anaximander’s prose work as a text full of poetic idioms (in Simplicius, Physics 24.21–2; cf. Theophrastus, Physical Opinions, Fr. 2). Recall also the first lines of the book of Anaximenes’ student, Diogenes of Apollonia—who we know was greatly influenced by both the content and style of Anaximenes’ earlier work: ‘It is my opinion that the author, at the beginning of any account, should make his principle or starting-point indisputable, and his explanation simple and dignified’ (DL 9.57; DK B 1). Like Anaximenes, Diogenes is said to have made air, rather than water, the material principle of the world (Aristotle, Met. 984a5; cf. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, 1.707). ‘Anaximenes 422

NOTES

2

maintained that a pair of operations—rarefaction and condensation—was sufficient to generate all the familiar things of the world from the original and underlying air’ (Barnes, 1987:37). The Hegelian expression ‘the age of prose’ has been used as a title for a collection of essays by Erich Heller (1984). KRS: 158–9; cf. Cicero, Academica 2.37; Hippolytus, Ref. 1.7.2. Hippolytus’ text preserves the following account: When it [Air] is most even, it is invisible to our sight; but cold and heat, moisture and motion, make it visible. It is always in motion; for, if it were not, it would not change so much as it does. (1.7, cited by Burnet, 1930:73; see also Reale, 1987:45–7)

3

Simplicius, Physics 151.31, from Theophrastus, Fr. 2; see KR: 431–2; cf. Aristotle, Met. 984a5; Plutarch, Strom. Fr. 3. Theophrastus, in his critical analysis of the senses, refers to the theory of Diogenes of Apollonia which links sense-perception (aisthesis) with air (aer), connecting both to life and thought. One implication of Theophrastus’ remark is that Diogenes constructed a general theory of the human senses from Anaximenes’ account of rarefaction and condensation: Smelling is affected by the air about the brain; since the air is amassed there and is commensurate with odour; while the brain itself, with its ducts, is already of light consistency. But [the cephalic air] in some whose condition departs from this proper measure is too attenuated and does not unite with the odours… Hearing arises when the air within the ears is set in motion by the external [air] and transmits [this motion] to the brain. Sight arises when objects are reflected in the pupil… Taste arises in the tongue because of its open and soft texture. As for touch, he offers no explanation of its mode of action or of the objects with which it is concerned. (Theophrastus, On the Senses, 39–40, and passim 40–6, 46–8 for criticism, trans. Stratton)

4

KRS: 145; Hussey, 1972:27. Hippolytus, Ref. 1.7.2: when it is condensed and rarefied it appears different. For when it is dispersed into what is rarer it becomes fire, condensed again into air it becomes winds, cloud is produced out of air by felting, and then as it is condensed more water, even more so earth, and at its most dense stones. So that the opposites which have chief control of generation are hot and cold.

5

The ‘felting’ metaphor suggests a more appropriate translation of Anaximenes’ central explanatory mechanism as a ‘thickening’ and ‘loosening’ process. KR: 148; also cited by Burnet, 1930:74–5 and Reale, 1987:46; both Burnet and Reale approach Anaximenes as the fullest realization of the naturalistic principles of Ionian cosmology: He gave a cause which is in complete harmony with the principle, making Ionic naturalism in that way fully coherent with its premises. When Ionian philosophy is recovered, or will attempt to be recovered, with Diogenes of Apollonia, it will appropriately begin from Anaximenes. (Reale, 1987:47) The primary substance bears the same relation to the life of the world as to that of man. Now this was the Pythagorean view; and it is also an early instance of the argument from the microcosm to the macrocosm, and so marks the beginning of an interest in physiological matters. (Burnet, 1930:75) 423

NOTES

Many commentators see Anaximenes’ version of ‘air’ as the dynamic arche of all things as the great achievement and culmination of the Milesian tradition: ‘it marked the culminating point of the Milesian school of thought, which was continued but not carried forward by a line of lesser thinkers’, Hugh Tredennick, Introduction to Aristotle, Metaphysics Books I-IX (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978): xi. And We shall see further than when, at a later date, science revived once more in Ionia, it was ‘the philosophy of Anaximenes’ to which it attached itself. Anaxagoras adopted many of his most characteristic views, and so did the Atomists… Anaximenes marks the culminating point of the line of thought which started with Thales. (Burnet, 1930:79) Gregory Vlastos has argued a similar case for the influence of Anaximenes’ Aer cosmology upon Heraclitus’ theorizing (see Vlastos, 1970:413–29, esp. 423–9). 6 Frs 4 and 5. See Windelband, 1956:101–3. Cf. Peters, 1967:4: ‘what is striking in Diogenes’ conception is, of course, the association of a purposeful activity with his aer-nous.’ 7 Burnet, 1930:78–9. 8 Aristophanes, Clouds 227ff. Cf. Hippolytus: ‘And the earth [for Anaximenes] is flat, borne aloft upon Air’ (Ref. 1.7.5). For the powerful influence of Anaximenes upon Heraclitus see Vlastos, 1970:413–29. 9 Freeman, 1959:88. 10 DL 9.57; Simplicius, Physics 152, 18, 152, 22; Hippolytus, Ref. 1.7. 4–6, 7–13; Cicero, De Natura Deorum 1.10.26: ‘Anaximenes said that air is a god, that it is infinite and always in motion.’ Cf. the observation of Peters: ‘The connection aer-pneuma-psyche-zoe-theion remained a constant one’ (Peters, 1967:4). 11 Lightning is produced when the clouds are broken up by the force of the winds. For when they are broken up the flash is bright and fiery. The rainbow is produced when the sun’s rays fall upon solidified air. Earthquakes are a result of the earth being excessively altered by heating and cooling. (Hippolytus, Ref. 1.7.10, 11) Cf. Anaximenes believes that there is a single, moving, infinite first principle of all things, namely air. For he says this: ‘Air is close to the incorporeal; and because we come into being by an overflowing of air, it is necessary for it to be both infinite and rich because it never gives out’ [B 3]. ([Olympiodorus], On the Divine and Sacred Art of the Philosopher’s Stone 25, in Barnes, 1987:79) 12 Isaiah 3:20; Jeremiah 15.20; Onians (1954) provides an extended analysis of the main points. 13 Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, Act V, Scene 2. 14 Descartes, 1979: ch.5. 15 Engels, 1962:72. 16 Taylor, in Laurie, ed., 1973:145. This image of a universe endlessly oscillating between Being and Non-Being returns science to the questions first posed by the Presocratics, a ‘return’, however, mediated by the history and discourses of the physical sciences. 17 For Diogenes of Apollonia, see Freeman, 1959:88; Theophrastus’ account of 424

NOTES

Anaximenes’ theory is cited in Hippolytus, Ref. 1.7.4–6 (DK 13 A 7; see KR: 144–5). For the fragments of Diogenes of Apollonia see De Vogel, 1963, vol. 1, 83–4; KR: 427–45. Benjamin Farrington argued that Anaximenes’ central mechanism of condensation and rarefaction was derived from the practices of the Milesian felting industry: his idea was derived from the process of felting as practised in his native town of Miletus, which was famous for its woollen manufacture. In felting, the loose woven fabrics are subjected to heat and pressure and emerge reduced in volume but increased in density. The fulling-mill was thus the source of this brilliant suggestion. (1947:10) On the Greek term for ‘felting’ (pilesis), see Burnet, 1930:73, n. 3, 75–7. 18 Will, 1955:81–2, 89. 19 Vlastos, ‘On Heraclitus’, 1955: esp. 354. 20 ‘Protophysics’ does not mean that Anaximenes carried out physical measurements or constructed quantitative theories in the post-Galilean sense of these activities. Rather it means that he constructed the concept of a mechanical explanatory frame: ‘His analysis of all objects and events in the physical world as aspects and functions of a single quantitative process is the ultimate achievement that characterizes the orientation of Milesian philosophy’ (Cherniss, in Furley and Allen, eds, 1970: vol. 1, 10–11, 12). 21 Anaximenes is a pallid reflection of Anaximander… His arche was infinite, like Anaximander’s, but it was not indeterminate: rather, it was infinite air. And Anaximenes maintained that a pair of operations—rarefaction and condensation—was sufficient to generate all the familiar things of the world from the original and underlying air. (Barnes, 1987:37) 5 THE PYTHAGOREAN FORM OF LIFE 1 2

3 4 5

6 7 8

Trans. Jowett, modified. On his Samian origins, Herodotus 4.95–6, Iamblichus, v. Pythag. 3–5 (lamblichus refers to his parents as Mnesarchus and Pythais, descendants of Ankaius the colonist of Samos); cf. Porphyry, Life of Protagoras, 9, DL 8.3, and Diodorus Siculus 10.3ff. The classic source for ancient Pythagoreanism is still Walter Burkert’s Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism (1972). Bréhier, 1963:47–8. The original story can be found in Diodorus Siculus 10.11.1. The Pythagorean Lysis and his activities in teaching Epaminondas of Thebes occurs at 10.11.2. Ferguson, 1975:47. On the Pythagoreans as the spokesmen of landed conservatism see Winspear, 1974: ch. 4 and the description of the political situation in Bury and Meiggs, 1975:197. For the history of Pythagorean politics in the early citystates of Magna Graecia see A.Delatte, Essai sur la politique pythagoridenne (Liège/Paris, 1922); Von Fritz, 1940; Minar, 1942. On Philolaus as a seminal figure in the intellectual life of Thebes see Plato, Phaedo 61D-E and DL: 9.38. See Cohen and Drabkin, eds, 1948:2, n. 2. Aristotle, De Caelo 2.13.293a18, 293b; also Simplicius, Commentary on 425

NOTES

9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Aristotle’s ‘De Caelo’ 512; Aëtius, Placita 3.11.3; 3.13.1–2, in Cohen and Drabkin, eds, 1948:97. On the esoteric teaching (akousmata/acousmata) and arcane proscriptions of the Pythagorean Order (don’t stir the fire with a knife, don’t step over the beam of a balance, don’t eat beans, etc.) and the centrality of spiritual and mystical exercises see DL 8.17–20, 34; Porphyry, v. Pythag. 44; Iamblichus, v. Pythag. 61; Lucian, Vitarum auctio, 6; Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 4.11, 1–13 and Hippolytus, Ref. 6.26–8; Burnet, 1930:95–6; cf. Burkert, 1972:178ff., KR: 226– 7, and Detienne, 1977:49–52. Philolaus, DK 44 B 4. For Philolaus of Tarenturn’s text see De Vogel, 1963: vol. 1:15 and Freeman, 1959: ‘Philolaus of Tarentum’, Fr. 4. Cf. Philolaus, Fr. 4 (DK B 4); Alexander, Met. 40–1. Aristotle, De Caelo 2.9.290b12; Philolaus, DK B 6 and Alexander, Met. 40–1 for the important concept of cosmic ‘(h)armonia’. Cherniss, in Furley and Allen, eds, 1970: vol. 1, 19; cf. Burnet, 1930:170; Barnes, 1979: vol. 2, 76–94; Copleston, 1961: vol. 1, 37, n. 1; Furley, 1987, 51–3. Iamblichus, v. Pythag., 162 (see the recent translation of Gillian Clark, 1989); Aëtius 1.3.8 (DK 58 B 15). For the ‘table of opposites’ see Aristotle, Met. 1.5.985b23; 986a15ff., 1.8.990a; 1091a12–16,1080b18–21; De Caelo 300a15–17; Physics 203a10; cf. Plato, Philehus 16C, 23Cff., Simplicius, Physics 455.20 and Alexander, Met., 41–2. Nietzsche was perhaps the first to formulate this characteristic duality of ancient Greek philosophy as the cultural duality of the Apollonian and the Dionysian (1967: §§1–3, 7, 18, 24, 25). Met. 985b23–986a3; cf. De Caelo 268a8. For Proclus on the revolutionary importance of Pythagorean deductivism in the evolution of mathematical thought see his Commentary on Euclid’s Elements I, in Cohen and Drabkin, eds, 1948:35. Cornford, 1950:24. Benjamin Farrington, quoting Plutarch in Science and Politics in the Ancient World (New York, 1966): 29–31. See also Farrington 1936, 1961.

21 The field of ‘algebra’, as we call it, is relatively neglected during this remarkable increase in geometrical knowledge, and it is only in the work of Diophantus, probably in the third century AD, that we have any systematic treatment of this branch among the Greeks. The Greeks never achieved a fruitful union of algebra and geometry such as came in modern times with the rise of analytical geometry. (Cohen and Drabkin, eds, 1948:1–2) Cf: The problems that are today posed in algebraic symbols were represented and solved geometrically throughout antiquity, an approach that persisted through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and was even employed by Newton in the Principia, despite his invention of the calculus. (Wagner, in Wagner, ed., 1983:5–6) The observation of René Labat, that ‘unlike the Greeks, who were, above all, geometers, the Mesopotamians tended to reduce all mathematical relations to numbers, and to algebraize even purely geometrical problems’, requires a sociocultural and logological explanation (Labat, in Taton, ed., 1963:96). Labat regards the Babylonian mathematicians as the ‘real inventors’ of algebra (‘so much so that they enunciated even the Theorem of Pythagoras in numerical, not 426

NOTES

“spatial”, terms’), suggesting that the mathematician who came closest to algebraic functions in Greek antiquity—Diophantus—may have acquired his insights from Mesopotamian tablets (in Taton, ed., 1963:100–1). By virtue of its Babylonian roots, Diophantine algebra took a radically different direction from mainstream Greek geometrical analysis. The major innovations in modern mathematics took place at the interface of these two traditions: Modern mathematics was born from the synthesis of these two trends by Vieta, which showed quite clearly how different and yet how closely related they really were. The synthesis also brought out the full richness of Diophantine analysis and its relevance to three new mathematical currents: its fusion with the classical methods of applying areas led to geometrical analysis; the systematization of its purely algebraic procedures gave a tremendous impetus to modern algebra; and the development of its purely numerical part involving certain properties of integers became the basis of Fermat’s theory of numbers. (Itard, in Taton, ed., 1963:303)

22 23 24 25

The key to this ‘fusion’ was, of course, the contributions of the Arab mathematicians: ‘Euclid and other Greek mathematicians had freed geometry from the shackles of land surveys and building problems, enabling scholars to think about the abstract properties of space. The Arabs did a similar service for number’ (McLeish, 1991:140; also 137–56). Hippolytus, Ref. 1.2.2; 1.2.17. Hussey, 1972:76; cf. Fränkel, 1975:507. DK 21 B 7.4–5; DL 8.36. See DL 8.4–5, 8.19; Herodotus 2.123; Porphyry, Life of Pythagoras 7.19: ‘Pythagoras was the first to introduce these doctrines into Greece’; Iamblichus, v. Pythag. 20ff., 106–9,150 has Pythagoras visit the ‘bloodless’ altar at Delos, famous for its vegetarian offerings; Simplicius, Physics 732. 23–33; Diodorus Siculus, Universal History, 10.6.1–3: ‘Pythagoras believed in the transmigration of souls and considered the eating of flesh as an abominable thing, saying that the souls of all living creatures pass after death into other living creatures’; also see Rohde, 1925:346–7; Barnes, 1987: ch. 5; and Dodds, 1951:130ff. Compare the remarks of the Christian commentator Hippolytus on a similar view shared by Empedocles: Because of this cosmic-ordering of this divided world by destructive Strife Empedocles instructs his disciples to abstain from all living creatures. For he says the bodies of the animals which are eaten are the dwellings of souls undergoing punishment. And he teaches those who study these theories to be abstemious with regard to sexual intercourse with women, so that they should not aid and contribute towards the works which Strife creates, always dissolving and scattering the work of Love. (Ref. 7.29; and Diodorus Siculus 10.7 on the vegetarian rules of the

Pythagorean system) For a recent structuralist analysis of Pythagorean vegetarianism and its sociological significance see Detienne, (1977). ch. 2. Detienne highlights the ideological significance of these culinary rules: The choice between eating meat and vegetarianism involves more than just a diet. For the Pythagoreans what they ate was a way of accepting or renouncing the world. What, in fact, did eating or not eating meat mean to a Greek? In a society in which the consumption of meat was inseparable from the practice of making blood sacrifices—a practice which constituted 427

NOTES

the most important ritual action in the state religion—the refusal to eat meat cannot be regarded as a purely personal form of eccentricity or one confined to eating habits. On the contrary, it implies a wholesale rejection of an entire system of values which found expression in a particular type of communication between gods and the world of men. (1977:44) 26 27 28 29 30 31

Burnet, 1960:43. Hussey, 1972:76. Hussey, 1972:76–7. Schneider, 1931:451–2. Theaetetus 176B-C. Apology 3 8A. On philosophy as a divine eros, Plato, Symposium 210E-212A; Aristotle, NE 10.7.1177b33. On divine sophia as a measure of human knowledge see Plato, Theaetetus 145E; Euthydemus 288D; Phaedrus 278D; and Symposium 203E. For Aristotle’s important formulation of first philosophy as the pursuit of divine sophia, Met. 1.2.983a6–7; 6.1.1026a24–30; 11.4.1061b19. I will return to these themes in detail in Volume 4. 32 On Pythagorean mathematics see Heath, in Livingstone, ed., 1921:96–136. For more accessible introductions see Boyer, 1968; Carruccio, 1964:23–9; Eves, 1976: ch. 3; Eves and Newson, 1965:12–13; Fauvel and Gray, eds, 1987: chs 2–4; Heiberg, 1922: chs 2, 4. Boyer summarizes the achievements of the sixth century in mathematics as follows: the chief mathematical legacy of the Heroic Age can be summed up in six problems: the squaring of the circle, the duplication of the cube, the trisection of the angle, the ratio of incommensurable magnitudes, the paradoxes on motion, and the validity of infinitesimal methods. (1968:89) 33 For a similar attempt to articulate the presuppositions of Pythagoreanism as an influential ideological discourse see Mourelatos, ed., 1974:8ff. Historically and culturally, Pythagorean cosmology expressed a deeply conservative ethos. In logological terms Pythagoreanism codified an élitist conception of reflection and practice which I have termed the videological form of life. 34 Schneider, 1931:452. 35 I have quoted verbatim from Rougier, 1971:202, n. 6 and Hall and Hall, 1964: ch. 3. Simone Weil’s remarks are from her book On Science, Necessity and the Love of God (1968:13, 91). 36 As we will see in Volume 4, the impact of the Pythagorean form of life can be traced throughout the central texts of Plato and Aristotle (Republic 600; Phaedo 82–3; Philebus, Theaetetus, Timaeus; Met. 985b23ff.; Physics 3.4.203a10–15, etc.). In speaking of the rise of videological culture and the general project of the digitalization/mathematization of nature we have in mind changes in the social field which created the conditions for practices that gradually became grouped into the normative system we now call ‘mathematics’. Pythagorean ideology is important for its historical function in legitimating mathematical discourse as a norm of rigorous knowledge—that is, of mathematics as a foundational structure of internally coherent reasoning; and this, through a long and contradictory career, formed the historical model for any discourse aspiring to the title of ‘science’. The ideal of all subsequent physical theory would be one of mathematization and, ideally, of complete axiomatization. Pythagorean discourse provided the raw materials and orientation for this development; it does not explain, of course, the particular forms in which this project has been codified 428

NOTES

and refracted in later practices and institutions. This would form an important topic for a reflexive sociology of knowledge—in his particular case, a sociology of the social construction of mathematical knowledge inspired by metascientific ‘foundationalist’ aims (the relevant source materials for beginning such a project are now available in Fauvel and Gray, eds, 1987. For the subsequent history of mathematization, stressing the emergence of internal contradictions within the Classical programme, see Dirk J.Struik’s collection, A Source Book in Mathematics 1200–1800 (1986) and Morris Kline’s Mathematics. The Loss of Certainty (1980). Kline observes that the undermining of the Pythagorean project following the famous paper by Kurt Gödel led to the conclusion that ‘the concept of a universally accepted, infallible body of reasoning—is a grand illusion’ (1980:6). 37 For the place of optics within the division of pure and applied mathematics see Proclus, Commentary, in Cohen and Drabkin, eds, 1948:2ff., esp. 4–5. Attempts to formulate a rigorous theory of perspective may have played an important role in linking pure and applied optics; however, much of the fifth- and fourth-century work on the mathematics of perspective has been lost or is known only through the writings of later Alexandrian mathematicians. Vitruvius in his work The Ten Books on Architecture speaks of the interest in the optical properties of scene painting in the fifth century, mentioning a certain Agatharcus of Samos—a contemporary of Aeschylus—who was both a scene painter and who published a work on its optical basis (cf. Heidel, 1970:379); he also ascribes similar works to Democritus and Anaxagoras—effectively the first reference to the theory of perspective in European thought: showing how, given a centre in a definite place, the lines should naturally correspond with due regard to the point of sight and the divergence of the visual rays, so that by this deception a faithful representation of the appearance of buildings might be given in painted scenery, and so that, though all is drawn on a vertical flat facade, some parts may seem to be withdrawing into the background, and others to be standing out in front. (Vitruvius, cited in Fauvel and Gray, eds, 1987:200) The historians of science Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall have suggested that ‘by the time of Ptolemy both the basic problems and the basic methods of optics had been so clearly stated that optics was to be the best-developed physical science of the Middle Ages’ (1964:50). 38 For the dialectical relationships between Pythagorean and Orphic dualism see Sinnige, 1968:50, 55, 57, 60 and Raven, 1966: esp. ch. 2. 39 The image of the ancient Greeks as Augenmenschen and their civilization as a ‘culture of visibilty’ is a commonplace of cultural history. Cf: Precisely as they quantified the universe, the Greeks quantified aesthetics. Their sculpture obeyed mathematical rules; their architecture had the same regulations; their cities were built to plan. Their music rested upon the arithmetic and geometric study of intervals and musical harmonies. Harmonic and symphonic conceptions echoed back from music into their architecture and plasic arts. The Greeks discovered the mathematical laws of beauty exactly as they anticipated the quantitative laws of the cosmos. (Rougier, 1971:12) 40 The Pythagoreans used music as a kind of medicine… They also used dancing. As a musical instrument, they used the lyre, because Pythagoras thought the aulos had 429

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an assertive tone, suited to large gatherings but not to cultivated people. They also used selected passages of Homer and Hesiod to improve the soul. (Iamblichus, v. Pythag. 110) For mousike, see the fine analysis in Giorgio de Santillana, 1961: ch. 4. De Santillana reminds us that armonia (harmonia) does not have its current meaning of ‘a concord of several sounds’, but much more the sense of Logos: ‘the orderly adjustment of parts in a complex fabric, and, in particular, the tuning of a musical instrument’ (De Santillana, 1961:58).The reference to regulating the body’s ‘breathing’ is from Hesse, 1949:30–1. The ideas of inhalation and exhalation applied to the cosmos as a whole, was, of course, a central Pythagorean doctrine. 41 The civilizing role of alphabetic script is explored by Eric A.Havelock, Walter J. Ong, Jack Goody, and others (see Bibliography). For the specific links between writing systems, the magical manipulation of letters and numbers, and proto-mathematics see Goody, in Goody, ed., 1968:16–7; also the analysis in Chapter 2 above. 6 HERACLITUS, LOGOLOGIST: THE REFLEXIVE COSMOS OF HERACLITUS 1

2 3

4

Burnet, 1930:132, 143; Windelband, 1956:57–8; Zeller, 1969. Kahn’s book, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (1979) is a useful place to begin the study of Heraclitus. Also Gigon, 1935; Guthrie, 1962; Hussey, 1972; Kirk, 1962; Marcovich, 1967; Nietzsche, 1962; Vlastos, in Furley and Allen, eds, 1970:413– 29 and Wheelwright, 1974. A reading of Frs 2, 50, 55, 80, 89, 101, 113, 116 forms the pretext for this claim. A rare figure who receives Heraclitus’ praise is Bias of Priene—who always appears in the ancient lists of ‘the Seven Sages’, famous for the misanthropic apophthegm: pleistoi anthropoi kakoi (most men are bad) (DL 1.88). Heraclitus’ own generic polemic may also have been inspired by a rejection of the popular Dionysian cults (e.g. B 15) and the mystical ritual activities of his fellow Greeks (B 5; see also Frs 1, 2, 5, 17, 19, 34, 78, 108). Diogenes relates the apocryphal story of Heraclitus’ rejection of Ephesian political life in order to play dice with children; when the Ephesians look on with astonishment (thaumazein) Heraclitus is led to reply: ‘Why, you rascals, are you amazed? Is it not better to do this than to take part in your political games?’ (DL 9.3; cf. B 5, 14). Heraclitus looked upon his own countrymen with the jaundiced eye of Bias: Most men are bad. Diogenes Laertius writes: ‘[Thales], according to some, appears to have been the first student of astronomy (protos astrologesai); a fact that both Heraclitus and Democritus acknowledge’ (DL 1.23; DK B 38). It is possible that Thales’ astronomy’ or ‘astrology’ in Fr. 38 was linked with an account of mind (nous) or psyche which has been subsequently lost. In Chapter 2 we have seen that Thales theorized the life of nous in human affairs as the exemplary instance of ‘selfanimation’. Heraclitus may well have regarded his own doctrine of the ‘depth psyche’ gathered within and ‘attuned’ to the logos as being prefigured in these Thalean ideas. We should also, however, note the pejorative context of the word ‘astrologesai’ when applied to Homer. In general, Heraclitus’ critical attitude is universal in its sweep: ‘Of all those whose teachings I have heard, no one has gone far enough to learn that the Wise is something apart from all things’ (B 108). Thales may have been one of those rare predecessors insightful or lucky enough to have glimpsed the ‘one sole Wisdom’ of the unity of all things. It is not without interest that later tradition assigned to Thales sayings of a paradoxical, Heraclitean character (‘life and death are the same’) and traces of other gnomic 430

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5 6

7 8 9 10

sayings ascribed to him by later writers are also redolent of Heraclitus’ riddling style: ‘Of all things that are, the most ancient is God, for he is uncreated. The most beautiful is the universe (kosmos), for it is God’s workmanship. The greatest is space, for it holds all things. The swiftest is mind, for it speeds everywhere. The strongest, necessity, for it masters all. The wisest, time, for it brings everything to light’ (DL 1.35); ‘Know thyself (DL 1.88). Was Thales a composer of Heraclitean aphorisms avant la lettre? For Xenophanes’ attack on Hesiod’s theogony and Homer’s theology see Frs 11 and 12. Also Chapter 7 below. Heraclitus the Obscure (ho skoteinos, ‘the Dark’, ‘the Riddler’), reknowned for his dark speech—Suda, ‘Heraclitus’; Cicero, Finibus Bonorum et Malorum. 2.15; Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 1.635–40; Strabo, 14.25 and Aristotle, De Mundo 5 396b20 (in Diels 22 A 3a); Hippolytus, Ref., 6.9.4, 9.8.5–6; and 9.10 referring to ‘Heraclitean darkness’; cf. DL 9.6. ‘Heraclitus is the creator of a new philosophical style tremendously effective in its incisiveness and lapidary power of formulation…the aphorism may indeed have been the form in which he wrote” (Jaeger, 1947:111). Fr. 1, DK 22 B 1; preserved by Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians 7.132; Hippolytus, Ref. 9.9. ‘an…understanding of their own’ (idian phronesin). See Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians (Adv. math. 7.132–3) Compare the phrasing of Xenophanes’ similar reflection on the constitutive incomprehension of mortal knowledge—‘wrapped up in appearances’—before the image of divine truth (Fr. 34). Similar constructions, as we will seen in Chapter 7, occur in Parmenides’ attempt to separate the Ways of Truth and Appearance. Jaeger’s conjectural gloss is accurate: We may assume that Heraclitus’ book, which began with the idea of logos, went on immediately to define the logos more precisely as that which is common to all and as knowledge of the divine law. Only in these terms can we understand his justification for introducing himself as a prophet. The logos according to which everything occurs, though it still remains hidden from mankind, is the divine law itself… This theological aspect makes very clear how profoundly the law of Heraclitus differs from what we mean when we speak of a ‘law of nature’. (1947:116)

11 Kahn translates the most famous Heraclitean aphorism on change (DK B 91) as: ‘One cannot step twice into the same river, nor can one grasp any mortal substance in a stable condition, but it scatters and again gathers; it forms and dissolves, and approaches and departs’ (Kahn, 1979:52). It appears in Plato (Cratylus 402A9– 10) and in Aristotle (Physics 259b9–21; De Caelo 298b29–33). Many Heraclitean scholars have defined Heraclitus’ Logos doctrine as a primitive theory of ‘cosmic’ or ‘natural law’; it is generally accepted, however, that this is a misleading interpretation of the text in question. Fränkel’s formulation of the Logos as cosmic Law is a case in point. Fränkel explains Heraclitus’ text in the following terms: [Heraclitus] is going to analyze things and describe them according to their nature, and thereby establish the logos. Logos is a word belonging to everyday speech: the early philosophers did not concern themselves to develop terms of art. It meant inter alia the content of an expression and the motive or end of an action; if one said that there was no logos in something, it meant that the thing had no sense or no relevance. Logos is also the 431

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reckoning-up that one gives, i,e. the explanation and justification of one’s actions or statements. Since the logos provides explanations, it is first and foremost of a rational nature (‘logical’); second, it is not always on the surface of things, but has to be looked for in and behind the phenomena; if one has the luck to find it, it will reduce seeming confusion to order and bring within one purview what seemed to be widely different. Heraclitus’ logos is the sense and basis of the world; the norm and rule which determines everything, by understanding which we make everything comprehensible. In speaking of this logos at the outset of his book he signifies at once the content of the book and subject which it treats—the cosmic law. (Fränkel, 1975:371) Cf. Guthrie on the logos as ‘both human thought and the governing principle of the universe’, Guthrie, 1962:428; G.S.Kirk speaks of the Heraclitean logos as the ‘proportion’ or ‘measure’ governing the order and structure of the world: ‘a universal law of change’ (1974:298–299); Tredennick refers to logos as the ‘explanation to account systematically for the variation in the perceptible world. The underlying material principle was Fire, into which and out of which everything must pass in its due turn’ (Tredinnick, trans., 1978: xi); and Jaeger: ‘Heraclitus’ divine law is something genuinely normative. It is the highest norm of the cosmic process, and the thing which gives that process its significance and worth’ (1947:116). Giovanni Reale completes this interpretation with his concise definition: It seems almost certain that Heraclitus called his principle logos, which, as many maintain, does not really mean reason and intelligence, but rather a rule according to which all things are accomplished and a law which is found in all things and steers all things and generally includes rationality and intelligence. (1987:53)

12

13 14

15

16 17 18

This interpretation of the Heraclitean word ‘logos’ dates back to the Stoics, who proposed the notion that the Logos was the Rational Principle of the Universe. ‘Eidenai de chre tonpolemon eonta xunon, kai diken esin kai ginomena panta kat esin kai chreomena’; cf. B 89. Cf. the formulation of dike in the ApeironFragment of Anaximander. For further thoughtful reflection see Vlastos, in Furley and Allen, eds, 1970:413–29. Hippolytus, Ref. 9.9.2. It is clear that we invariably distort the meanings of the original text by applying modern metaphysical and epistemological criteria to the operative notions of ‘oneness’, ‘unity’, and ‘commonality’. For reflections on the problem of anachronism see my remarks in the Introduction and Chapter 1 above. In this respect Martin Heidegger’s suggestion that Heraclitus and Parmenides share a common theme has a limited validity. The Logos gathers the world into a unitary order, just as Parmenides’ Being is hen, ‘one’, syneches, ‘holding together in itself, mounon, ‘unique and unifying’, and houlon, ‘complete and fullystanding’. Like the Heraclitean ‘measures’ through which things are manifested and ordered, Being is ‘the permanently manifested power through which shines perpetually the appearance of the one-and-many-sided’ (Heidegger, 1973a: 136). Freeman, 1959:39. Sophocles, Electra 170–80. Accepting that the Greek predicates of omnipresence, commonality, ‘holding forever’, ‘wisdom steering all things’, and so on, are typical epithets of ‘the divine’, applied to the immortal life of the Homeric gods, we have ample textual evidence 432

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for holding that Heraclitus regarded the Logos as divine (Adam, 1908:220–1, 224–5, 231, 233–40; Hussey, 1972:35–6). 19 LS: 476–7. Cf. Gilbert Murray: the most characteristic word in the Greek language is logos. The new Liddell and Scott, severely compressed as it is, takes about 5,500 words to explain its chief meanings. Its history would need a whole book. It seemed to the Greeks to lie at the root of politics, ethics, and religion, of science, and of philosophy; and of course to us who seek to understand the Greeks, it is ‘the word’ more than anything else, more even than the art or the history, that acts as interpreter. (Murray, 1946b: 5) In the terminology of logology, we can call the Indo-European root of legein/ logos an urmetaphor or generative ‘rhizomic’ image system with semantic tendrils permeating every language of this family (consider some of its less well-known relatives: collect, gather, elect, select, cull, colligate, eligible, elegant, lecture, lessons, intellect, intelligence, intelligible, delight, neglect, diligence, recollection, etc.). In Heraclitus’ texts we have a perfect example of the way in which these semantic networks function to articulate a logological space from several overlapping metaphoric foci: (i) gathering, collecting, configuring; (ii) ordering, enumerating, accounting; (iii) articulating, uttering, speaking, narrating; (iv) reasoning, deliberating, propositional thought; (v) establishing (instituting), esteeming, celebrating (the ‘reputational’ cluster). See also: Guthrie, 1962–81: vol. 1, 82ff., 420–4 (Guthrie cites the survey of Hans Boeder on the Logos in Archiv fürBegriffsgeschichte, 1958); Heidegger, 1973a: 120, 124–5, 128–9, 173– 4.and Von Fritz, ‘The Discovery of Incommensurability by Hipassus of Metapontum’, 1970: esp. 392–3, 407–12. 20 A rough sampling of exemplary contexts in which the words logos/legein function in the texts of early tragedy would include: Aeschylus, The Suppliant Maidens: 246, 249, 276, 310, 318, 322, 455, 456, 460, 466, 507, 515, 928, 988; The Persians: 215, 245, 266, 292, 439, 695 (‘I shrink in awe from speaking in your presence’), 695 (‘Make your story brief), 702, 738, 788, 793; Prometheus Bound: 196–99 (Tell the whole story’), 199 (‘Painful is it for me to tell the tale’), 216 (‘argument’), 233 (‘of wretched mortals we take no account’), 262, 313, 379–80 (‘words are the cure of a disordered mind’), 389, 442, 535, 630 (‘speak I must’), 685–6 (‘deceptive words’, cf. 689), 705, 740, 845 (‘returning to the track of my previous tale’), 865, 929, 975 (‘In a word, I hate all the gods’), 1007 (‘I think that in my much speaking I speak in vain’); The Seven Against Thebes: 202 (‘Am I speaking to the deaf?’), 356, 451, 458, 526, 563 (‘His words pierce my heart’), 579 (‘These are the words that passed his lips’), 631–2, 713, 715, 805, 973, 998, 1032. Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannos: 342, 359–60, 525, 583 (‘if you would reason with yourself, as I with myself’), 681, 685 (‘What was the tale (logos)?’), 755 (‘who carried the report (logos) to Thebes?’), 839, 841, 844 (‘irreverence in word (logos) and deed (ergon)’ cf. 884), 944 (‘if I speak falsely, may I die myself), 954 (‘what’s his message?’), 1053, 1066, 1169 (‘I stand upon the dangerous edge of speech’), 1176 (‘it was told that he should slay his father’), 1234; Oedipus at Colonus: 66 (‘the general logos’ (i.e. the collective voice of the people or demos)), 68 (‘great in word and might’), 74 (‘blind man’s words’), 569, 651, 793, 809, 861, 893, 1016, 1150, 1163–4, 1173, 1188; Antigone: 89, 183, 259, 280–2, 316, 403, 499 (‘To me no word of yours is pleasant’), 507, 543, 567, 681–2, 689, 648 (‘Your speech at least was all a plea for her’), 757, 771, 1047, 1173, 1245, 1287; Electra: 1353 (‘don’t interrogate me with more logoi’); cf. Pindar, Nemean 8.20. In the last great tragedian the concern with logoi might 433

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even be called one of the dominant motifs of the plot (Euripides, Supplicants 486–93; Phoenissae 559–60; etc.). 21 This second step was not fully completed until the first century BC, perhaps only in the late first-century works of Dionysius of Halicarnassus (who taught in Rome from around 29 BC). Dionysius may be described as the first critical literary theorist. He wrote an influential book with the title Peri Lexis (On Style) and is a significant figure in the refraining of the classical logos of rhetoric and oratory into the modern logos of ‘literature’ and ‘humanitas’. His translator, Stephen Usher (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 1974: xx), refers to Dionysius’ critical and rhetorical works as the largest body of ancient Greek literary criticism we possess by a single author. I will return to Dionysius in a later volume to explore his significance in the late Hellenistic concern for the ‘decay of oratory’ and the role he played in the logological construction of the concepts of ‘style’ and ‘literature’ during this period. 22 See Aristotle, et al., 1981; Russell and Winterbottom, eds, 1978 and Kennedy, ed., 1989. 23 ‘In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God and the Logos was divine. Everything came to be through him, and without him was not anything made that was made… And the Logos was made flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth’St John 1:1–2, 14. Or in the Latinized version of later European theology: ‘In principio erat Verbum.’ While we have suggested textual and contextual reasons for translating the Heraclitean Logos as ‘divine reason’ or simply (following Diels), ‘The Word’, Adam has singled out two further advantages of this translation: In the first place it suggests to an English reader the historical fact of the continuity of the Logos-doctrine throughout its whole history on Grecian soil from Heraclitus down to Philo, St. John, and Justin Martyr. And, in the second place, I think that the translation ‘Word’ does in point of fact bring out at least one important feature in Heraclitus’ representation of the Logos. He seems to conceive of it as the rational principle, power, or being which speaks to men both from without and from within—the universal Word which for those who have ears to hear is audible both in nature and in their own hearts, the voice, in short, of the divine. ‘Hearken not unto me, but to the Logos, and confess that all things are one’. There is nothing impossible in such a use of the term logos so early as Heraclitus: for thought had already been represented by Homer as the language of the soul (Il., II. 407)…[and] the extant fragments of Heraclitus make it clear, I think, that his Logos is a unity, omnipresent, rational, and divine. (1908:221–2) 24 Cf. the opening lines of Herodotus’ History: ‘What Herodotus the Halicarnassian has learnt by inquiry is here set forth.’ 25 West, 1971:128–9; John Burnet provides an earlier example of this approach to Heraclitus’ text: ‘The Logos is primarily the discourse of Herkleitos himself: though, as he is a prophet, we may call it his “Word”. It can neither mean a discourse addressed to Herkleitos nor yet “reason”’ (1930:133, n.1). Burnet cites Eduard Zeller’s Die Philosophic der Griechen (1892:630, n. 1; English trans. ii, 7, n. 2) for this precedent. 26 Kahn, 1979:102. 27 Adam, 1908:217ff. Cf. Jaeger (1947:112): ‘But even if this logos is primarily the word of Heraclitus himself, it is not merely his word as a man among men, but one that expresses eternal truth and reality and is therefore itself eternal.’ F.M. Cornford writes: 434

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When he tells his readers to listen, not to him, but to the logos, it is obvious that ‘the logos’ means something more than ‘my discourse’: it means rather ‘the truth’ which the discourse expresses—a truth which ‘stands for ever’ as an objective reality, governing everything that happens. (1965:113) 28 Adam, 1908:219–20. Fränkel preserves this theological horizon in his conception of the Heraclitean Logos: Heraclitus’ logos is the sense and basis of the world; the norm and rule which determines everything, by understanding which we make everything comprehensible. In speaking of this logos at the outset of his book he signifies at once the content of the book and the subject which it treats—the cosmic law. (1975:371) 29 Adam, 1908:221. 30 Cassirer summarizes his views on the origins of Greek philosophy in 1961:45ff. The essay was originally published in Dessoir’s Lehrbuch der Philosophic (Berlin: Ullstein, 1925): vol. 1, 7–135, and in the article ‘Logos, Dike, Kosmos in der Entwicklung der griechischen Philosophic’, in Goeteborgs Hoegskolas Arsskrift, XLIII, 1941:1–31. 31 Heidegger, 1973a: 126–40, esp. 127–8, 130–1, 133, 135–6. Two themes are conflated here; these can be called the phonocentric and the grammatical paradigms in representing language. The diremption of Heraclitus’ thought is presented as a displacement of ‘originary thinking’ by a thinking based on the voice or phone and by a conception of language based on written signs (grammata). One model informs the tradition which interprets language as expression (phonetic audiology), the other model informs the tradition which thinks of language in terms of sign systems and codes (grammatical videology). Both understandings, as Jacques Derrida, would later point out rely upon a common presumption of the plentitude and originality of the Logos as presence-what Derrida called logocentrism (1976). 32 B 93 is recorded by Plutarch, De Pythiae oraculis 404d. The key phrase in B 93 reads: Oute legei, oute kruptei, alia semainei (legei—speaks, indicates, reveals; kruptei from kruptesthai—hides, conceals, occludes; semainei—gives a sign, shows by signs, signifies, indicates). This has frequently been interpreted as Heraclitus’ attempt to foreground the non-apophantic, non-declarative functions of language, particularly the language designed to start an individual upon the path of wisdom. It is probably explicable more prosaically as a reflection of the attitude toward the ambivalence of divine communication (the prophetic reading of oracles for example) taken by the intelligentsia in early Greek culture. We should note that Fr. 93 is one of the first appearances of the ‘question of signification’—or language as signifying—in the European tradition (cf. the later texts from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon 1251–5 and Herodotus 8.37.2). The term ‘semantic’ (from sema, sign) and its conjugates derive from the verb which Heraclitus used to articulate his own rare wisdom. The fragment undoubtedly belongs with the other aphorisms on the workings of Logos and logos in human affairs. Even the ambiguity inherent in the word is not a mere deficiency of language, but is an essential and positive factor in its power of expression. For in this ambiguity it is manifested that the limits of language, as of reality itself, are not rigid but fluid. Only in the mobile and multiform word, which seems to be constantly bursting its own limits, does the fullness of the world-forming logos finds its counterpart… It becomes understandable that most of the ‘etymologies’ with which Heraclitus plays embody this 435

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two-fold sense: they join word and thing per antiphrasin rather than by any similarity. ‘The bow is called Life, but its work is death’… Every particular content of language both reveals and conceals the truth of reality; it is at the same time both pure definition and mere indication. In this view of the world, language is like the sybil who, as Heraclitus says, utters unadorned, unlicensed words with raving mouth, but who nevertheless ‘reaches out over a thousand years with her voice, through the (inspiration of the) god’ (Fragment 92). It contains a meaning which is hidden from it, which it can only surmise in image and metaphor. (Cassirer, 1953–7: vol. 1, 120–1) For ‘sema’ in the Homeric epic see Gregory Nagy’s essay ‘Sema and Noesis: the hero’s tomb and the ‘reading’ of symbols in Homer and Hesiod’, in Nagy, Greek Mythology and Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990): 202–22. 33 The ergon I have in mind is a hermeneutics conscious of the risk that ‘those who seek gold dig up a great deal of earth and find little’ (B 22), a salutary warning which must be counterbalanced by the hope that ‘if you do not expect the unexpected you will not discover it, for it is difficult to discover and intractable’ (B 18; cf. 22, 35, 101)—for phusis loves to conceal (kruptesthai) itself as B 123 states (cf. ‘the gods have not revealed to mortals all things from the beginning; but mortals by long seeking discover what is better’, Xenophanes B 18). 34 One example of Heraclitus’ indebtedness to his predecessors concerns their project of drawing up an exhaustive inventory of the structure of the kosmos, which of course would in principle have to include the activity of a creature which engaged in such mapping work, a reflexive account of the possibility of providing a complete logos of the Whole. This reflexive structure has subsequently been named the mapping paradox. Edward Hussey provides a useful account: Fragment 10 shows that the most general description of the ‘unity-in-opposites’ is at the same time an example of the same kind of thing; so that a logos containing Fragment 10 will be referring to itself among other things. In the same way, a logos in the mind of God or man which gives an account of that mind will have to refer to itself. Once this is admitted, we have the familiar ‘map’ paradox: a map of an area which includes the map itself will have, if true in all details, to contain an infinite procession of maps: a map of itself, a map of the map itself, and so on ad infinitum…the only possible way to detach God from the kosmos for Heraclitus, is to think of God’s mind as a perfect map of the kosmos, which is itself in the kosmos but not identical with it. In this way the central problem of Heraclitus’ thought can be seen to issue in the ‘self-mapping’ paradox suggested by Frs. 10 and 15 …This way of seeing the central difficulties of Heraclitus can also help to explain the similarity in tone and approach between Heraclitus and the early Wittgenstein. Alphabetic writing, which pictured speech by arranging characters in an order, and the development at the same time of explicitly formulated general laws, must have helped the growth of the idea that all reality could be represented in language, and conversely that all language not representing reality was false or nonsensical… Heraclitus seems to be using his new consciousness of sentences as formulae for exhibiting reality, suggested by his use of the term logos, to exhibit the structure of things in appropriately constructed language. (Hussey, 1972:59–60) 35 Most commentators refer to the gnomic, aphoristic, metaphoric, and essentially paratactic character of Heraclitus’ style. See Adam, 1908:214–15; Cherniss, 1977: 436

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14–35, 17; Fränkel, 1975:3 78; Freeman, 1959:107–8; Hölscher, in Mourelatos, ed., 1974:229–38; Jaeger, 1947; 111; Kahn, 1979:123ff; Marcovich, 1967:250; and Wheelwright, 1974:12–16. 36 Heraclitus’ reflections on Logos opened up lines of inquiry into the constitutive nature of language that would influence philosophy down to the present time. It was decisive in enabling Plato to formulate the question of the ontological relationship between Being and Logos (in the later theory of Forms), and it was equally influential for the logical speculations of Aristotle, the Stoics, Philo of Alexandria, and the early Christian theologians. In this respect it is Heraclitus rather than the more analytically minded Parmenides who originates the European obsession with the question of language. Unlike Parmenides, whose thought moves directly from logos to ontology, Heraclitus’ path is mediated by reflexive, ‘hermeneutic’ themes (and consequently his vision of the world-order is one that displays the characteristic texture of logos). See Mourelatos, in Lee, Mourelatos, and Rorty, eds, 1973:16–48, 46–7. In recent philosophy, Heraclitus’ ‘hermeneutical’ understanding of human speech as an ‘attunement’ to the Logos of phusis has been a powerful stimulant on contemporary hermeneutic thought. Karl Volkmann-Schluck, himself a student of Heidegger, summarizes the philosophical significance of the hermeneutic-ontological dimension in the following words: There is no human speaking, or interpreting comprehension, without the speaking of language. And language does not endure as language unless it has freed human speaking for itself. Where something existing appears as something existing, where a world clears itself, there language already speaks, there man is already the one who speaks, who speaking, listens to language. This attempt to gain insight into the essence of language consists in joining together several thoughts: that our speaking is a listening to the language we speak, that the nature of language is concealed in the Logos of Heraclitus, that the Logos, the contra-relationship of what is converse, conveys clearness, in which each thing first appears as something present, so that we are able to address it, discuss it and talk it out. (in Ballard and Scott, eds, 1973:121–9, 125) Viewed hermeneutically, our speaking is a comprehending interpretation of what which reveals itself from itself. If everything were to remain in the darkness of absence, there would be nothing to understand and to interpret. But we are indeed everywhere approached by entities in various modes and levels of manifestation and concealment such that we interpret the world in a comprehensible way, i.e., we speak by listening to the language we speak. (in Ballard and Scott, eds, 1973:126) For the Heideggerian problematic of language and interpretation see Joseph K. Kockelmans, ed., On Heidegger and Language (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972). 37 The world order speaks to men as a kind of language they must learn to comprehend. Just as the meaning of what is said is actually ‘given’ in the sounds which the foreigner hears, but cannot understand, so the direct experience of the nature of things will be like the babbling of an unknown tongue for the soul that does not know how to listen. (Kahn, 1979:107) As Robinson observes, interpreting Fr. 56: The paradigm case of a ‘good listener’ to such a language is a child, in the 437

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sense, perhaps, that to the young language is still new—an object of delight and experimentation, a fresh universe in which truths are immediately apparent that are largely missed by that majority of people for whom constant usage has turned language into a thing too commonplace to be deemed in itself revelatory. As Heraclitus puts it elsewhere (Fragment 52): ‘kingly power is in the hands of a child.’ (Robinson, 1987:120) 38 39 40 41

See notes 35 and 36 above. Fränkel, 1975:377. At B 33, 44, 114. Jaeger, 1947:36; and Chapter 1 above. Hippolytus, Ref. 9.9.2; DK B 51. ‘They do not apprehend how being at variance it agrees with itself [literally, how being brought apart it is brought together with itself]: there is a back-stretched connexion, as in the bow and the lyre’ (KR: 193) ‘They do not understand how that which separates unites with itself. It is a harmony of oppositions, as in the case of the bow and the lyre’ (trans. Bywater). Cf. Fr. 8: ‘In opposition there is harmony (agreement); between unlikes, the fairest harmony’. On the cultural context of the Homeric term for ‘back-stretched’/ ‘back-bending’ in Fr. 51, see Fränkel, 1975:367–8. The central phrase of B 51 refers to ‘palintropos harmonic’, which has various senses, among the most prominent, ‘back-bending connection’, ‘back-stretching connection’, ‘backbending structure’, ‘back-turning structure’ (see Hussey, 1972:43, who argues that ‘structure’ best captures the word harmonic, a noun derived from the verb, harmozein, ‘to fit together’—as in Fr. 10: The witnesses to this fragment are divided between palintropos and palintonos. In either of these the prefix palin-must be taken to mean ‘back’, ‘in a contrary direction’; but-tropos represents the notion of turning, and so of a movement which alters, while-tonos represents the notion of stretching or tension and seems to refer to a static situation. Palintropos is the better attested here directly and indirectly, and Parmenides uses the word palintropos with emphasis in a passage (DK 28 B 6) which may well allude to Heraclitus… If palintonos is correct, then the bow and lyre are thought of as not functioning, but at rest and in a state of tension, as indeed they both are when strung. If this is so, then the unity of opposites expresses itself most typically in a static state, an equilibrium in which the opposed forces balance each other. If palintropos is correct, then the bow and the lyre are thought of as in use. Their proper functioning implies the movement in opposite or alternate directions of their complicated structure. This is easy to explain of the bow. To apply it to the lyre, it seems best to take into account the special musical meaning of harmonic, and to take the movements in opposite directions as the alterations in pitch as the melody ascends and descends. If this is right, the unity of opposites expresses itself most typically in alternating movements in opposite directions. (Hussey, 1972:44–5)) We should also note that the word ‘palintropos’ plays a considerable part in the poem on Being of Parmenides—where it is usual to translate it as ‘backwardturning’ (e.g. Fr. 6; see Gallop, 1984:61). Despite this intertextuality Burnet favoured the term palintonos over palintropos (1930:136, n. 4, 164, n. 1, 174, n. 3). And compare: ‘Not only is the universe balanced in its structure and operations at any given time, it is in an everlasting state of balancing itself through time, as seen in the cycle of the seasons, the sun’s annual motion, etc. (In English some sense of the 438

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power of Heraclitus’ adjective (palintropos) is caught if one substitutes for the phrase ‘the balance of nature’ a phrase which subsumes and enriches it, ‘the [self-] balancing of nature’ (Robinson, 1987:116). Robinson thus speaks of the Heraclitean teaching as the doctrine of the interconnectedness of opposites: It is a doctrine expressed with characteristic power and subtlety in a famous fragment: ‘they do not understand how, while differing from, it is in agreement with itself. There is a back-turning connection, like [that] of a bow or lyre’ (fragment 51). The fragment is commonly, and it seems to me rightly, taken cosmologically: the world is a unity, a functioning whole, like the bow or the lyre. The world is forever ‘connected’, ‘turning back’ upon itself in an everlasting process of cyclical change, while losing nothing of its essential nature as the world, just as the bow and the lyre are each ‘connected’ wholes, ‘turned/bent back’ upon themselves to form that state of balanced tension which makes them what they are. (1987:184) 42 LS give: (h)aptesthai, aptein pyr—to kindle, light a fire, set on fire; to fasten, join, cling to, fasten oneself to, take part, set upon, touch, affect, grasp with the senses, to come up to, reach, gain, etc. 43 Wheelwright interprets the appearance of aptetai (from the verb haptesthai, to touch, to kindle) in the second sentence as a fusion of both meanings: attaching oneself to death and lighting oneself up, bursting into flame, producing the following translation: ‘Similarly a living man, when his [human] vision is extinguished in death, flares into flame on achieving the state of death.’ The pun creates at once a question mark and a reminder that there is always another and opposite side to every situation, and that there is always more than meets the eye in anything so essential and ontologically primary as the transition known as death. The mystery of death is not something that can be expressed in straightforward language. (1974:77–8) Hussey has also commented at length on this important fragment (in Schofield and Nussbaum, eds, 1982:54ff.). We should also compare this with Frs 21 (Clement, Stromateis 3.21.1) and 27 (Clement, Stromateis 4.144.3): ‘Even Heraclitus does not call birth death, when he says: Death is those things we see once we are awake; sleep those things (we see) while we are sleeping’, ‘There await people when they die things they neither expect nor (even) imagine’ (trans. Robinson). Robinson goes even further than Wheelwright in his exegesis of Fr. 26: At death (i.e., at the time of separation of soul and body), the soul, which with the loss of physical sight loses contact with this world, establishes immediate contact, without break in the continuity, with the obscure world beyond by means of its own organ of vision (what Plato will later call ‘the eye of the soul’, Republic 7.518C, 519B); in terms of Heraclitus’ own metaphor, the ‘striking up’ (haptesthai) of the light’ (always there but only lit on the occasion it is needed) and the ‘striking up of contact’ (haptesthai) with the next world are one and the same activity, and the soul in question one and the same soul, in ‘separate’ states that are in fact continuous with one another.

(1987:93–4) 44 The Iliad provides a concrete image of the idea of strife as constitutive of difference (13.347–60) in the metaphor of a tensed cord holding two armies in evenly balanced combat: ‘the two gods knotted the cord of strife and war and drew it 439

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tight for both sides.’ Onians provides a detailed exegesis of the passage in Part 2, 1954:310–42 of his book on early Greek culture, emphasizing the idea of ‘limit’ (peiras), which defines the fate of the warriors by simultaneously conjoining and separating them in a life and death struggle. He also notes the way in which the Homeric world-order was projected as a totality held in the immovable bonds of Necessity (Lat. necesse, from necto, nexus, ‘binding’—in such English expressions as ‘it is bound to happen’, ‘he is bound to lose, be killed, etc.’) (332–3). In the last analysis, the fateful bond is death itself, allotted by the god and spun out by fate (for mortality as the weaving of fate, see Onians, 1954: Part 3). 45 The term ‘reflexive mediation’ is chosen to resonate with the Hegelian concept of Mediation; it was Hegel who first interpreted Heraclitus as the discoverer of reality as universal mediation, of ‘truth’ as the unity of opposites (Hegel, 1955:1. 282). Simone Weil suggested that Logos should be translated as Mediation rather than Word, thus retranscribing the famous opening sentences of the St John Gospel: In the beginning was the Mediation, and the Mediation was with God, and the Mediation was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made of it; and without it was not anything made that was made. In it was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shone in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not… That was the true Light, which lighteth every man, come down into the world; it was in the world, and the world was made by it, and the world knew it not. It came towards its own, and its own received it not. But as many as received it, to them it gave the power to become the children of God; them that believed in his name, which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Mediation was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld its glory, like the glory of an only son, alongside his father, in the fullness of grace and truth. (Weil, 1968:142; the whole passage is italicized in the original) 46 Trans. Barnes, 1987. 47 Hegel, 1977a: 29–30; cf. Hegel’s comment that Heraclitus had a ‘beautiful, natural, childlike manner of speaking the truth of the truth’, 1977a: 293. 48 Freud, 1969:7. 49 The Parmenidean ‘unity’ of Being, according to Heidegger, ‘is never empty indifference; it is not sameness in the sense of mere equivalence. Unity is the belonging-together of antagonisms. This is original oneness’ (Heidegger, 1973a: 138). 50 Telos as this occurs in the similar sentence attributed to Alcmaeon of Crotona: ‘Men perish because they cannot join the beginning with the end’ (DK 20). 51 B 59 utilizes a machine—typically described as a ‘carding-wheel’—to advance abstract ethical and ontological notions. The dual motion of this mechanism is now thought to be linked with a fulling process in the preparation of cloth. The commentator Hippolytus relates B 59 to the movement of the screw-press (Kochlias) which travels upwards and in a circle at the same time (Ref. 9.9). See also Hussey, 1972:59 and Kahn, 1979:63, 191–3. 52 Adam, 1908:229. Cf. Nietzsche, on Heraclitus’ form of life: Even if he were seen observing the games of noisy children, what he was thinking was surely what no man had thought on such an occasion. He was thinking of the game of the great world-child Zeus. He did not need human beings, not even those who would benefit from his insights… What he saw, the teaching of law in becoming and of play in necessity, must be seen from now on in all eternity. He raised the curtain on this greatest of all dramas. (1962:65–6) 440

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53 Sophocles was the lawful heir and successor of Heraclitus. He did not, of course, take over the structure of his dogma, but rather his spirit and direction. The stark conflicts of Sophoclean tragedy, admitting no resolution of the conflict except that by the catastrophe the hero shall be compelled to see that conflict and catastrophe have always been inevitable; the stubborn anger of Sophoclean personages, the unyielding hardness of fate and of the gods; the declaration after the play of annihilating forces that, ‘nothing has happened that was not Zeus’— all this shows kinship with Heraclitus. (Fränkel, 1975:397–8) 54 B 113: ‘phronein is common to all’; cf. 2, 17, 64, 113, 116. 55 B 112 and 116. 56 Plutarch, Adversus Coloten 1118c, B 101; KR trans. 57 Plato, Charmides 167A. Sophocles already describes the psyche as the locus of sophronein and sophia and, therefore, the true object of persuasion and cultivation. A paradigm occurs in Philoctetes: ‘You must persuade and cheat the soul of Philoctetes by fair words’ (Philoctetes 55–60). 58 Herakleitos has one thing in common with the religious teachers of his time, and that is his insistence on the idea of the Soul (psyche). To him, as to them, the soul was no longer a feeble ghost or shade, but the most real thing of all, and its most important attribute was thought or wisdom. now we may ask for his secret, the one thing to know which is wisdom. It is that, as the apparent strife of opposites in this world is really due to the opposite tension which holds the world together, so in pure fire, which is the eternal wisdom, all these oppositions disappear in their common ground … For, with all his originality, Herakleitos remains an Ionian. He had learnt indeed the importance of soul, but his fire-soul is as little personal as the breath-soul of Anaximenes… Soul is only immortal in so far as it is part of the everlasting fire which is the life of the world. (Burnet, 1960:59, 62–3) Cf: ‘Wisdom’, or ‘the wise’, is ‘distinct from everything’; yet some men are wise, and the wise God is everything else too. God is the kosmos, but is also beyond or beneath the kosmos. Fire is one of the physical components of the kosmos, but is also the agent or process or mind that controls the changes of such components. Soul is subject to physical transformation, yet it is also the controller and agent of such transformation. In view of the cycle of associations, Heraclitus must have recognized all these problems as one problem, if he recognized them at all. (Hussey, 1972:58) Because of his powerful reformulation of the concept of psyche, I view Heraclitus as an important source of reflexive thought: in his recognition that all questions directed toward nature, society, or God radically implicate the being of the questioner, and in the sense that the comprehensive notion of kosmos attempts to gather together and articulate the mutual dependence of ‘nature’, ‘god’, and ‘soul’. Their radical separation in later thought—the characteristic bifurcations of ‘man and nature’, ‘human and divine’, ‘microcosm and macrocosm’ are not binding divisions, but deconstructible formulae. Our analysis of reflexivity in Peri Phusis facilitates a more coherent interpretation of B 119 (Ethos anthropo daimon or Ethos anthropoi daimon) as a crucial text in the Heraclitean corpus (see below). 441

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59 It is in keeping with this hermeneutic view of perceptual knowledge that the three-part list of B 55 ends with mathesis (which I would translate as ‘informed (i.e. reflexive) experience’: ‘Whatever things (are) objects of sight, hearing (and) learning (mathesis)—these things I hold in high esteem.’ 60 DK 27; cf. 25, 26, 29, 30. 61 On forgetfulness, sleep, and death: B 1, 34, 75, 76, 77, 88, 89. 62 The later Stoic Heracliteans would elaborate these texts as prefiguring both a metaphysical principle of a lost harmony between man and the cosmos and an ethical ideal of homologoumenos zen. 63 Consider the connection between thoughtlessness, the loss of self-control, and evil in Frs 36, 77, and 117. For die psyche to become ‘wet’ is another expression for its oblivion or death (B 33, 77). Drunkenness is perhaps only the most obvious icon of the ‘wet soul’ (a state where a grown man can be led by a child—B 117). Heraclitus may also have associated ‘wetness’ with evil—following the Homeric view of the psyche that wanders after death in the dark (and dank?) pit of Tartarus; and Aristotle reads Heraclitus literally in ascribing to him the idea that the soul is a subtle kind of body or substance which might indeed become saturated, lose consciousness, and die (De Anima 1.5.409a30ff.). 64 DK 22 B 30: kosmon tonde oute tis theon oute anthropon epoiesen, all’en aei kai estin, pur aeizoon, haptomenon metra kai aposbennumenon metra (Clement, Stromateis 5.103.6); cf. B 94. See the similar formulation in Anaxagoras’ Fr. 8: ‘en toi heni kosmoi’ (‘in this one common cosmos’); the imagery of ‘kindling’ (haptomenon) recalls the verb aptetai (or haptetai) in Fr 26, and ‘extinguishing’ or ‘going out’ (aposbennumenon; ‘extinguished’, aposbestheis) is one of Heraclitus’s primary metaphors for the temporal mortification and final death of the soul. Cf. a later instance in Euripides, borrowing from the natural philosophers: ‘the ageless order (kosmos) of undying nature (phusis)’ (Fr. 910, DK 59 A 30). 65 Theophrastus was reiterating Aristotle’s naturalistic understanding of the ‘fire doctrine’ in writing that the kosmos ‘is generated from fire and is ignited again in accordance to certain periods alternating through all eternity’ (DK 22 Al). This was itself recycled by Diogenes Laertius: All things are composed of fire, and into fire they are again resolved…fire is the element (stoicheion), all things are exchanged for fire and come into being by rarefaction and condensation; but of this he gives no clear explanation. All things come into being by conflict of opposites, and the sum of things flows like a stream…all that is is limited and forms one world (kosmos). And it is alternatively born from fire and again resolved into fire in fixed cycles to all eternity, and this is determined by destiny… Change he called a pathway up and down, and this determines the birth of the world. (DL 9.7–8; see also Kahn, 1979:291–3) In essence this remained the framework for all subsequent readings of Heraclitus down to the present century. Yet we should pause before turning Heraclitus into a protophysicist: The fundamental truth about nature is this: the world is an eternal and everchanging modification of fire, its various contents each unified and held together by a dynamic tension of contrarieties. This truth is the account in accordance with which everything happens, and it underlies and explains the whole of nature. (Barnes, 1987:39) Barnes naturally plays down the importance of the Logos doctrine (and the experimental, linguistic reflexivity displayed by Heraclitus’ texts), which I have 442

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argued is fundamental to the interpretation of Heraclitus’ thought, cf. Barnes, 1979:68–71; the same interpretation is repeated in William Jordan’s Ancient Concepts of Philosophy (1990:20–1). To document this Theophrastean reading in detail would require a history of the dominant tradition of Heraclitean studies— including the important work of Kahn, Kirk, Guthrie, Hussey, Vlastos, and others. I refer the interested reader to the bibliographical information. Here we support the interpretation of Werner Jaeger: his fragments do not exhibit a completely developed physics, and it is more than doubtful whether Heraclitus ever felt that his primary achievement lay in improving on the doctrines of his Milesian predecessors. It almost seems that even his choice of fire is to be explained entirely by his dominant idea of the intertransformation of opposites and their constant changes; and it is questionable whether fire is really to be described as the first principle or arche at all. (1947:122) 66 Living on the Ionian seaboard, Heraclitus would have been familiar with the lyric poems of Sappho, who lived and worked in the neighbouring city of Mytilene (fl. 600–590 BC). He may well have read her many lines on the themes of Love and Fire: ‘You came, and I was longing for you; you cooled my heart which was burning with desire’ (in Julian, Letter to Iamblichus, 183); or the well-known lines cited in ‘Longinus” On Sublimity: He seems as fortunate as the gods to me, the man who sits opposite you and listens nearby to your sweet voice and lovely laughter. Truly that sets my heart trembling in my breast. For when I look at you for a moment, then it is no longer possible for me to speak; my tongue has snapped, at once a subtle fire has stolen beneath my flesh, I see nothing with my eyes, my ears hum, sweat pours from me, a trembling seizes me all over, I am greener than grass, and it seems to me that I am little short of dying. (Campbell, trans., 1982:95, 79–81) 67 ‘There is no creation of substance…nor any end in execrable death, but only mixing and exchange of what has been mixed; and the name ‘nature’ (phusis) is applied to them by mankind’; ‘they imagine that what previously did not exist comes into being, or that a thing dies and is utterly destroyed’; ‘From what does not exist it is impossible for anything to come into being; and for Being to perish completely is incapable of fulfilment and unthinkable; for it will always be there.’ (Empedocles, Frs 8, 11, 12). On first appearances the ekpyrosis doctrine seems to vitiate the idea of ‘measure(s)’ and the immortality of Strife; if all finite things are ultimately consumed by fire are we not faced with a one-sided hegemony of Fire itself (a type of fiery entropy)? Is this not to destroy the Justice that is Strife? The answer is that it would be relatively unjust, that is relatively to the existence of our particular universe, which must perish when ‘Fire comes upon and lays hold of all things’. But it would not be so in the absolute sense, because the everlasting existence of our universe is not essential, not part of the plan. It is ‘destroyed’, but this means only that it is taken up into the Whole, the primal Fire, where the law of Change in Measure still holds good and always will, for it is is governed by the unchanged Logos. (Freeman, 1959:127) Cf. Wheelwright, 1974:37–57; and Cherniss: ‘[Heraclitus] for the first time in Western thought declared that reality is not the world that we perceive nor any 443

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part of it but a formula that is at once hidden and manifested by this perceptible process’ (1977:76). 68 See Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, esp. 107ff., 230ff., 248ff., and 442ff. Karl Marx called Prometheus the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar in his Jena doctoral thesis, ‘On the difference between the Democritean and Epicurean philosophy of nature’ in Marx and Engels, 1975. In Greek, of course, the name ‘Prometheus’ literally translates ‘fore-thought’. Perhaps the link between ‘theft’ and appropriation through human thought is the connection between the Promethean myth and Heraclitus’ thought, for the soul extends and deepens its self-knowledge in appropriating the thought of the Logos that governs the cosmos of flux and fiery change. In understanding the source of its own ‘spiritedness’, its own fiery animation, the soul brings itself into harmony with the cosmic fire of the whole universe. 69 Appropriately, in Aeschylus’ Prometheus, Prometheus’ gift constitutes the foundation for all the other human ‘arts’. At Fr. 53, Heraclitus may well have used both the positive and negative meanings of polemos—the creative and destructive moments of change deriving from Prometheus’ saving gift—in saying that War is the Father of all, and King of all, conflict is the living medium of every process of cosmic change, including the changes effecting individual and social existence. See Marx’s Foreword to his doctoral dissertation, ‘On the difference between the Democritean and Epicurean philosophy of nature’, in Marx and Engels, 1975: vol. 1, 31; and Aeschylus, Prometheus 442–61. Plato has Protagoras narrate the Prometheus myth as an allegory on the origins of human civilization: Prometheus took pity on the brutal nature of early humanity and stole both the mechanical arts of Hephaestus (god of ‘technology’) and the ‘arts’ of wisdom (Athene), together with fire which forms their common element. However political wisdom still belonged to Zeus, locked away in the citadel of Olympus. Possessing fire makes human community—symbolized by speech and the City—possible: man, having a share of the divine attributes, was at first the only one of the animals who has any gods, because he alone was of their kindred; and he would raise altars and images of them. He was not long in inventing articulate speech; and he also constructed houses and clothes and shoes and beds, and drew sustenance from the earth. Thus provided, mankind at first lived dispersed, and there were no cities… After a while the desire of selfpreservation gathered them into cities… Zeus feared that the entire race would be exterminated, and so he sent Hermes to them, bearing reverence and justice to be the ordering principles of cities and the bonds of friendship and reconciliation. (Plato, Protagoras 322A-C) Without constraint, justice, and political wisdom, Prometheus’ gift proved to be an ambivalent legacy, stimulating the unique form of hubris which only the human community is subject to—where men assume the role and attributes of the gods. Cf. Protagoras 320C–328D, 321C–D, 322. 70 To the necessary use of fire for cooking is joined the pleasure it gives to the eye and the warmth so comforting to the body. The sight of the flames, from which animals flee, is attractive to man. People gather around a common hearth where they feast and dance; the gentle bonds of habit tend imperceptibly to draw man closer to his own kind. And on this simple hearth burns the sacred fire that provokes in the depths of the heart the first feeling of humanity. (Rousseau, 1986:268–9) Freud’s short paper on the Prometheus myth also has a bearing on our topic. Cf.: 444

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The obscurity of the Prometheus legend, as of other fire-myths, is increased by the fact that primitive man was bound to regard fire as something analogous to the passion of love—or, as we would say, as a symbol of the libido. The warmth that is radiated by fire calls up the same sensation that accompanies a state of sexual excitation, and the shape and movement of a flame suggests a phallus in activity. There can be no doubt about the mythological significance of flame as a phallus… When we ourselves speak of the ‘devouring fire’ of love and of ‘licking’ flames…we have not moved so very far away from the mode of thinking of our primitive ancestors. One of the presuppositions on which we based our account of the myth of the acquisition of fire was, indeed, that to primal man the attempt to quench fire with his own water had the meaning of a pleasurable struggle with another phallus. (Freud, 1966–74: vol. 22, 190) It is difficult to resist the notion that, if the liver is the seat of passion, its significance, symbolically, is the same as that of fire itself… The bird which sates itself on the liver would then have the meaning of a penis… A short step further brings us to the phoenix, the bird which, as often as it is consumed by fire, emerges rejuvenated once more, and which probably bore the significance of a penis revivified after its collapse. (Freud, 1966–74: vol. 22, 190–1) For Freud, the ultimate relation is with the bifunctional penis as both an organ of urination and reproduction, both linked by fire: The antithesis between the two functions might lead us to say that man quenches his own fire with his own water. And primal man, who had to understand the external world by the help of his own bodily sensations and states, would surely not have failed to notice and utilize the analogies pointed out to him by the behaviour of fire. (1966–74: vol. 22, 192–3) 71 Heraclitus’ philosophy of change arose out of personal experiences which were themselves terrifying: heir to the royal family of the priest-kings of Ephesus, he lived in a time of social revolution; there was an upsurge of new democratic forces and to these forces the Greek tribal aristocrats were beginning to yield. Heraclitus witnessed their yielding, and out of the suffering of this social experience was born the idea of the transitoriness of all things; everything is in continual motion and flux… He saw in fire something we experience as a thing and which is yet a process having its own law of motion… Everything, therefore could be seen as a transformation of fire. (Smith, cited by Lasky, 1976:483) 72 Hegel regarded Heraclitus as the first thinker to grasp the reality of Becoming or Universal Change as the Unity of Opposites: ‘Es ist kein Satz des Heraklit, den ich nicht in meine Logik aufgenommen’ (Hegel, 1971: vol. 18, 314–23, esp. 320, History of Philosophy, 1, 279). ‘Process philosophy’ includes the writings of such disparate figures as Hegel, Karl Marx, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, F.A.Lange, C.S.Peirce, Henri Bergson, William James, George Herbert Mead, John Dewey, Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, Teilhard de Chardin, etc. For Nietzsche’s indebtedness to Heraclitus see Hölscher, in Bolgar, ed., 1979:339–48. 73 Hegel, 1955:278–9, 280–1. ‘The One, distinguished from itself, unites with itself, Hegel, cited by Hölscher, in Bolgar, ed., 1979:340. Hegel writes: ‘We can in fact 445

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say of Heraclitus what Socrates said. What remained to us of Heraclitus is excellent, and we may conjecture of what is lost, that it was as excellent’, 1955:297. We need hardly point out, however, that the term Logos does not convert into the term Geist. 74 A strange amalgam of Hegelian and Materialist interpretation can be found in Ferdinand Lassalle’s Die philosophic Herakleitos des Dunkeln von Ephesos, 2 vols., Berlin, 1858. For the impact of ‘process philosophy’ upon contemporary ‘process theology’ see Hans Küng, Does God Exist? (London: Collins, 1980): Section B, 127–88; 721, n. 52, contains a bibliography of American Process Theology. 75 Hegel, 1955:296–7; cf. Hegel, 1977b: 112ff. Cf. Nietzsche: ‘But everything has become: there are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths. Consequently what is needed from now on is historical philosophizing, and with it the virtue of modesty’ (1984: §2; in A Nietzsche Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977): 29–30. Also the summary remark of Hölscher: Nietzsche takes over the Platonic-Socratic interpretation of Heraclitus. But his later deconstruction of the ontology of the Thing and the Concept is already prefigured there. There is no Being! Being is just a creation of the human Will, impressed upon Becoming. In Zarathustra, he will use the Heraclitean metaphor: ‘Euren Willen und cure Werte setztet ihr aum den Strom des Werdens’. (in Bolgar, ed., 1979:342) In Classical antiquity, Heraclitus became the philosopher of change, the theorist of panta rhei (thus Diogenes: ‘All things come into being by conflict of opposites, and the sum of things flows like a stream. Further, all that is is limited and forms one world. And it is alternately born from fire and again resolved into fire in fixed cycles to all eternity, and this is determined by destiny’ (9.8)); but it is certainly anachronistic to read the fragments as an attempt to construct the abstract concept of Becoming or Process (Heraclitus’ sentence says simply ‘The totality of things is an exchange for fire, and fire an exchange for all things’ (B 90)). The historian of philosophy, F.Überweg had already cautioned against this interpretation of Heraclitus: It cannot be said with truth that the primary conception and the startingpoint in the philosophy of Heraclitus was the abstract notion of becoming, as the unity of being and non-being, and that this notion was then only embodied in the concrete form of a physical conception… It is only correct to say that he attaches greater weight to the process of things than his predecessors had done, as would be natural, considering the nature of the element which he regarded as the principle of being. (1887:40) Categories such as ‘being’ and ‘non-being’, however, are also alien to Heraclitus’ discourse, belonging as they do to the work of later philosophers such as Parmenides, Zeno, and Plato: The advance of Parmenides to the conception of Being, first made it possible to extract the conception of Becoming from the Heraclitean notion of the flux of things or the transformation of fire…a mental achievement…first accomplished not by Heraclitus himself, but by Parmenides and Plato, in the critique of his opinions.

(Überweg, 1887:40) The accuracy of Überweg’s point is confirmed when we see Socrates, in Plato’s Theaetetus, constructing the ‘Heraclitean perspective’ in the following terms: 446

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I will explain, and tell you of a high argument, which proclaims that nothing in the world is by itself One, or can rightly be called this or of this kind; but if anything is termed great, it will appear to be also small, if heavy, light, and so forth. There is no one thing, no this, and no such. It is from motion and change, and admixture with each other, that there come to be all those things which we declare to be, speaking incorrectly, for there is no being at all, but only perpetual becoming. The whole succession of philosophers with the exception of Parmenides may be supposed to agree with you in this-Protagoras, Heraclitus, Empedocles, and the rest. (Theaetetus 152D-E) 76 Hegel, 1955:293; ‘absolute unrest’, 287. 77 On the metaphorics of fluidity and flow: Michel Serres, Hermes, 5 vols (Paris: Minuit, 1969–80), trans. in résumé, as Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). Also Serres’ earlier study of the ‘flowing’ atomism of Lucretius, La Naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrèce (Paris: Minuit, 1977) and Jean-Fraçois Lyotard, Economic libidinale (Paris: Editions Minuit, 1974); Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). 7 ELEATIC ONTOLOGY FROM XENOPHANES TO PARMENIDES AND BEYOND 1

DL 9.18–21; Clement Strom. 1.64. Simplicius, Physics, 22.26–8 (DK 21 A 31). The latter has been translated: Theophrastus says of Xenophanes the Colophonian, who was the teacher of Parmenides, that the arche was one or that what is, i.e., the all, was one and neither limited nor unlimited nor in motion nor at rest; and Theophrastus agrees that the record of Xenophanes’ opinion belongs more to another field rather than to the study of nature. (Gerson, trans., 1990:247–8, n. 53)

2

DL 9.18; DK21 A. See Trypanis, 1981:77–8: To a large extent they [Xenophanes’ Silloi] foreshadowed Hellenistic popular philosophy and Roman satire, and they were imitated in the third century BC by Timon of Phlius. The surviving fragments of Xenophanes, although clear and sober, do not provide evidence of any great poetic genius.

3

Cf: (Windelband: The importance of Xenophanes lies not within a metaphysical but a religious-philosophical territory, and his strength does not consist in conceptual thought…but in the powerful and grand thought of Oneness’ (1956:46 n. 1). For doubts about his residence in Elea and authorship of the philosophical poem Peri Physeo see Burnet, 1930:115–16. Plato, Sophist 242C-D (DK 21 A 29) speaks of Xenophanes as ‘one of the Eleatic tribe’, cf. Theaetetus 181A6; Aristotle, Met. 5.986b18, 21–2 claims that Xenophanes was the first of the Eleatics to posit Being as an absolute unity: ‘the first partisan of the One’; Theophrastus, Physical Opinions cited by Simplicius 22.22ff.; 22.26, DK 21 A 31: though it is most unlikely that he had any direct contact with, let alone being the teacher of, Parmenides as Aristotle and Simplicius claim (Jaeger, 1947:38–54, esp. 52–4; KR: 164–5: ‘his connexion with Elea may have been a later invention’; and Burnet, 1930:112–19, esp. 115, 126–7, 129). Jaeger and Burnet even doubt whether we should use the term ‘philosophy’ in 447

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describing Xenophanes’ work: ‘Xenophanes was never a philosopher of the type of Parmenides, least of all an eclectic pseudo-philosopher’, Jaeger, 1947:40, 42, 54, cf. Burnet, 1930:126: ‘he would have smiled if he had known that one day he was to be regarded as a theologian’ (129); also de Vogel, 1963:35, Tredennick, trans, 1978: xii; Windelband, 1956:46–52; J.V.Muir: ‘He was probably not a very original thinker’, in Easterling and Muir, eds, 1985:196; and Fränkel, 1975:325– 7; Reale, 1987:77–8; and Levi, 1985:101–2 (but note Hussey’s recent restatement of the traditional view linking Parmenides’ ontology to Xenophanes’ monistic natural theology, in Everson, ed., 1990:11–38, 28, 38; and Barnes, 1987:93: ‘there are enough surviving fragments to warrant our calling him a philosopher—and indeed to justify our regarding him as one of the early philosophical geniuses of Greece’). Gerson does not hesitate in calling Xenophanes the first natural theologian in early Greek philosophy (1990:17–18): ‘By this I mean that he is the first to attack the theology of the poets and to offer as a substitute a form of theology based upon argument’; this was also Hugh Tredennick’s view ‘his purpose was simply to attack and ridicule the polytheism of his day, and it was in this connexion that he said that the universe is One, and is God’ (Tredennick, trans., 1978: xii). Windelband provides an even more concise account: We can condense his teaching into a sentence: the arche is the Godhead. According to his religious conviction, God is the original ground of all things, and to him are due all attributes which the physicists had ascribed to the cosmic matter. (1956:47) 4

5 6

7 8

9

Edmonds, 1931:182–215. Xenophanes’ fragments in the arrangement favoured by Diels are also translated in Burnet, 1930:116–21. Note the intertextual play on purity and cleanliness in Fr. 1 (katharos). The same motif and critical attitude can be found in Heraclitus’ fragments (e.g. at B 40, 42, 56, 57, 106). See also C.M. Bowra, Problems of Greek Poetry (London, 1953): 1–14. DK B 32; Eustathius, Commentary on the Iliad XI.24. SeeSextusEmpiricus, Adv. math. VII. 48–9, VII. 110; KR: 179–80. The last sentence might also be glossed more sceptically if we stress the phrase ‘appearance is present over everything’—i.e. claimants to knowledge will never be able to grasp the whole truth or where they believe they have achieved this aim they are subject to self-deception. This Xenophanic theme would preoccupy Parmenides and formed one of the central problems for the Platonic Socrates. On Xenophanes’ transcendent theology see Jaeger, 1948:215; Burnet, 1930:119; Gomperz, 1920:158–9. The parallel with Plato’s rejection of Homeric paideia and his unitary conception of the Good should be noted (see Republic 606E-607A). Also Met. 986b24. See the translations by Hussey (1972) and Kathleen Freeman (1959). Note that Xenophanes does not deny embodiment or thought to God— he simply holds open the possibility that divine embodiment will be radically dissimilar from the incarnate condition of human beings (see Vernant, in Feher, ed., 1989:19–47, esp. 21–2. ‘By the thought of his mind.’ The last word is perhaps most crucial—nous, which later became the leading conceptual slogan of the Milesian philosophers in exile, particularly in the writings of Anaxagoras. To this Xenophanes adds the notion of ‘thinking’ or phreni, from which the later Greek word phronesis derives (cf. Karl von Fritz, ‘Nous, Noein, and their derivatives in Pre-socratic philosophy’, Classical Philosophy, 40, 1945:12–34). Contemporary precedents for this determination of God’s praxis as pure Thought exist. An interesting text from Aeschylus’s Suppliant Maidens or Supplicants reads: 448

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From their high-towering hopes he throws mankind to utter destruction; yet he uses no armed violence—everything is achieved by divine powers free from toil. Seated on his holy throne, motionless, he nevertheless transforms his thought into action. (96ff.) Citing the same passage Kirk and Raven observe: That thought or intelligence can affect things outside the thinker, without the agency of limbs, is a development—but a very bold one—of the Homeric idea that a god can accomplish his end merely by implanting, for example, infaturation (Ate) in a mortal. That this was nevertheless a possible idea is shown by its acceptance and expansion by Aeschylus. (KR: 170) 10 ‘Gazing on the whole world, Xenophanes proclaimed that the One is God’ (Aristotle, Met. 986b24; Alexander, Met. 44.5–10). Cf. Jaeger’s observation: ‘It never occurs to Xenophanes that God may be without form altogether’ (Jaeger, 1947:43). For Xenophanes’ role in the development of a philosophical theology see Jaeger, 1947:38– 54 and Gerson, 1990:17–20. Xenophanes’ theology was critically important for Aristotle. In the Rhetoric he attributes to Xenophanes the thought that it was just as impious to say that the gods are born as to say that they die: both presupposed that at some time the gods or God did not exist (Rhetoric 2.23.1399b6). Also Windelband, 1956:47–8; and Gerson, 1990: chs 1, 6, esp. 17–20 and 228ff. 11 Only when the one God is understood in his formless transcendence as the same God for every man will the nature of every man be understood as the same by virtue of the sameness of his relation to the transcendent divinity. Of all the early Greek thinkers, Xenophanes had perhaps the clearest insight into the constitution of a universal idea of man through the experience of universal transcendence. (Voeglin, 1952:69) Cf. Guthrie, 1962–81: vol. 1, 361ff., 376–83 and Windelband, 1956:48–9: ‘He thereby enters into significant opposition to his predecessors. From the concept of the divine arche, there vanished the character of mutability which had played so great a role in the Milesian hylozoism.’ 12 On Xenophanes as a partisan of the One and teacher of Parmenides, see Aristotle, Met. I.5.986b20–25. Aristotle regarded the Eleatic theory of Being as a crude first stab at a genuine causal ontology, something to be put to one side as a historical curiosity (Met. 986b25–34; see also Physics 8.6.259a8ff.; and Plato, Sophist 242D). In the first Book of the Politics, Aristotle uses Xenophanes’ theory to picture the primitive state of mankind dominated by powerful Kings; in such a situation of Rule by the One, the people imagine the gods in human form and project the life of the gods by analogy with their own (Politics I, 1252b). 13 The idea of the path of inquiry in Fr. 18 has been described as ‘perhaps the earliest expression of the theory of intellectual and cultural progress which later became a common-place of Greek thought’ (Cherniss, 1977:39–40). While appreciating Cherniss’ enthusiasm for his discovery of this aspect of Xenophanes’ thought, we should avoid linking it directly with any later conception of epistemic progress; more cautiously, all we can assert is that Xenophanes has grasped the idea of the quest-motive of reflexive inquiry with the idea of truth as a telos. Inquiry is a path of re-search, a recursive process which implicates the searching self as a being ‘on 449

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the way’ to insight (cf. Heraclitus, DK B 41). The German word erfahrung—a term which dates back to Paracelsus (1493–1541) and is usually translated into English as ‘experience’—has an etymological origin which parallels Xenophanes’ image of the path of inquiry. The term derives from ervarn which literally means the process of learning achieved by journeying (er-fahrung). To ‘know’ in this sense assumes the work of travelling, witnessing, and concrete self-experiencing-a journey incorporating both the pleasures and pain of self-experience. Erfahrung integrates the process of cognition and the resultant ‘object’ of cognition as a unitary self-experience. As such this journeying concept of inquiry presupposes reflexive practices that are prior to speculative theoria and to a narrowly defined technical rationality. Erfahrung represents a living unity of perceiving and doing, cognition and active knowing, learning and self-revising experiencing, self and otherness as a generative constellation of seeing, doing, and thinking. In this respect erfahrung is much closer to the Greek sense of praxis (‘knowledge’ emerges through the trials of ‘theoretical praxis’; theory is itself a form of practice). For Xenophanes and Heraclitus, reflexivity has not yet been articulated as pure reflection in the dichotomic opposition of ‘theoria’ and ‘practical knowledge’. 14 Elea was founded in southern Italy as a Phocaean colony around 540–539 BC. Strabo in his Geography records that the Phocaean colonists called the site ‘Hyele’ or ‘Ele’ after the natural spring in that place, but that it was subsequently known as ‘Elea’ (Strabo 6.1.1; cf. Herodotus 1.165). Like its neighbouring mercantile city-states, Crotona, Taranetum, Rhegium, Locri, and Neapolis, it eventually proved to be more successful, influential, and wealthier than its parent state. 15 DL 9.21–3 (DK 28 A 1); Theophrastus, On the Natural Philosophers, cited by Alexander, 31.1ff.; Plato, Parmenides 127A and also cf. Plato Theaetetus 180–1 and 183–4; Sophist 242C–D. 16 On the philosophical motivation of Parmenides’ choice of epic hexameter see Cherniss, 1977:14–35, esp. 18–21: The form of Parmenides’ discourse is therefore an intimate part of its import. With verse he departed from the established form of philosophic expression in order to emphasize his rejection of its content and its method. It was his way of reasoning and his conviction of its constraining force, the express axiom that the laws of thought are the laws of being, that his followers preserved and developed but not his presentation of it as revelation and so not in poetry but in prose treatises. (20–1) See also Cherniss, 1977:80–1 where the choice of epic style is regarded as an implicit attack on the oracular and apophthegmatic style of Heraclitus: the pröem of Parmenides’ book was certainly meant to contrast to the intuitional subjectivism of Heraclitus the universal objectivity that he claims for his own argument. The whole argument is the speech of an unnamed goddess whom he reaches by traveling on a road apart from the path of men through the gates of day and night, which Justice, the ineluctable Law of Being, opens for him; and this goddess warns him to beware of the senses and to judge by logos alone. (1977:80) 17 Parmenides 127A-C; cf. Theaetetus 183E-184A. 18 On the Xenophanes-Parmenides link see Aristotle, Met. 1.5.986b21–2, Alexander, Met. 31. Cf. Nietzsche, 1962: §10, 74–80. 19 The ultimate source of the latter is Martin Heidegger’s destruktion of the 450

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20 21

22 23 24

metaphysical tradition’s ways of construing Being as presence/presencing—which in Derrida’s work becomes ahistoricized as the metaphysics of presence. Heidegger makes Parmenides’ thought auspicious in first determining the nature of presencing as the self-standing unity of Being. Being, einai, aeon is not thought as ‘es gibt’ or ‘It gives’, but as esti gar einai: ‘For Being is’ (1972:7–8). On the grammatical sources of the ‘timeless present’ and ‘presence’ see Derrida, 1976 and 1981; also Gadamer, in Sprung, ed., 1978:52. Nietzsche was one of the first to interpret Parmenides’ metaphysics of absolute presence as a critique of everyday knowledge. Parmenides ‘accomplished the immensely significant first critique of man’s apparatus of knowledge, a critique as yet inadequate but doomed to bear dire consequences’ (1962: §10, esp. 79–80). Use of the epic hexameter in philosophical poetry was common to three of the most important philosophers associated with Italy and Sicily: Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Empedocles. Texts: DK vol. 1, ch. 28; Austin, 1986; Coxon, 1986; Gallop, 1984; KRS: 239– 62, esp. 243, 245, 248–50. According to Kirk and Raven ‘we posses, probably, a higher proportion of the writings of Parmenides than of any other Presocratic philosopher’ (KR: 266). Diels had estimated that we possess about nine-tenths of the Aletheia (the Way of Truth) and about one-tenth of the Doxa (the Way of Seeming) (cited by Burnet, 1930:171, n. 3). Note the sobering observation of Gallop: ‘It should be added that Parmenides’ fragments are, in certain respects, far better preserved than those of other pre-Socratic philosophers. In particular, they exhibit greater coherence of design and structure, thanks especially to the exceptional length and continuity of Fragment 8. But Simplicius, our principal source, lived about a thousand years after Parmenides, and cannot be expected to have inherited a perfect text’ (1984:30, n. 10)—even though he was fortunate enough (up to AD 529) to have had the library of the Academy at his disposal (Burnet, 1930:32–3, 171, n. 3). In the analysis below I have also used and occasionally modified the standard English translations of Mourelatos (1970), Taran (1965), Burnet (1930), and Freeman (1959). Gallop, 1984:28. Coxon, 1986:16, 17. On the quest motif in Parmenides’ poem see Mourelatos, 1970 and Fränkel, 1975:352, n. 10, 11. We accept John Burnet’s assessment of the integrity of the form and its content: the well-known Pröem, in which Parmenides describes his ascent to the home of the goddess who is supposed to speak the remainder of the verses, is a reflexion of the conventional ascents into heaven which were almost as common as descents into hell in the apocalyptic literature of those days, and of which we have later imitations in the myth of Plato’s Phaedrus and in Dante’s Paradiso. But, if it was the influence of such an apocalypse that led Parmenides to write in verse, it will follow that the Pröem is no mere external ornament to his work, but an essential part of it, the part, in fact, which he had most clearly conceived when he began to write. In that case, it is to the Pröem we must look for the key to the whole. (Burnet, 1960:65)

25 Parmenides interprets motion as light and darkness, as an illuminating and a darkening. That is, coming to be is nothing more than a coming to be apparent. Things which seem to come to be already existed, but in darkness. Motion is change, not generation: therefore, from the point of view of being

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it does not exist. All motion or change is convention (nomos), that is, names which men give to things. (Marias, 1967:23) Heidegger (1972:67–8) writes: Aletheia, unconcealment, is named here. It is called well-rounded because it is turned in the pure sphere of the circle in which beginning and end are everywhere the same. In this turning, there is no possibility of twisting, deceit and closure. The meditative man is to experience the untrembling heart of unconcealment. What does the word about the untrembling heart of unconcealment mean? It means unconcealment itself in what is most its own, means the place of stillness which gathers in itself what grants unconcealment to begin with. That is the opening of what is open…in that opening rests possible radiance, that is, the possible presencing of presence itself. Parmenides’ thought, in other words, condenses to the simple truth: hotos estin… einai: that presence presences. The opening grants first of all the possibility of the path to presence, and grants the possible presencing of that presence itself. We must think aletheia, unconcealment, as the opening which first grants Being and thinking and their presencing to and for each other. The quiet heart of the opening is the place of stillness from which alone the possibility of the belonging together of Being and thinking, that is, presence and perceiving, can arise at all. (68) 26 In this context we might note the hypothesis proposed by John Burnet concerning the choice of the epic form. According to Burnet this is an important piece of evidence about the discursive practices of earlier Pythagorean and ‘apocalpytic’ literature. Parmenides’ style can be read as documentary evidence of a conflict and ideological break with the Pythagorean community of Elea during the fifth century, an argumentative conflict that led Parmenides (and his school) to adopt the ‘apocalyptic conventions’ of a quasi-religious culture. Recall that the Pythagorean communities were expressly forbidden to convey their doctrine in either spoken or written forms. But Parmenides committed his thought to the written word. His Pröem can be interpreted as a crucial document of an ideological struggle, a trace of a larger discursive complex in the intellectual communities of the Italian city-states of the period: It is not Parmenides, but the goddess, that expounds the system, and it is for this reason that the beliefs described are said to be those of ‘mortals’. Now a description of the ascent of the soul would be quite incomplete without a picture of the region from which it has escaped. The goddess must reveal the two ways at the parting of which Parmenides stands, and bid him choose the better. That itself is a Pythagorean idea. It was symbolised by the letter Y, and can be traced right down to Christian times. The machinery of the Pröem consists, therefore, of the two well-known apocalyptic devices, the Ascent into Heaven, and the Parting of the Ways, and it follows that, for Parmenides himself, his conversion from Pythagoreanism to Truth was the central thing of his poem, and it is from that point of view that we must try to understand him. It is probable too that, if the Pythagoreans had not been a religious society as well as a scientific school, he would have been content to say what he had to say in prose. As it was, his secession from the 452

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school was also a heresy, and had, like all heresies, to be justified in the language of religion. (Burnet, 1960:66; see also Burnet, 1930:171) Burnet’s translation of the poem can be found in Burnet: 1930, 172–8. A variation on this theme is proposed in David Gallop’s commentary on the poem: For a mere mortal to argue from his own speech and thought to a unique and changeless reality would be not only insufficient to prove his thesis, but blatantly at odds with it. But an immortal may argue from hers, precisely because she speaks from a superhuman perspective. Unlike a human speaker or thinker, she may claim without instant self-contradiction to be speaking and thinking of a birthless and deathless reality. Her speech and thought about it are perpetuated in Parmenides’ verses: she continues to dwell upon it for all time, whether anyone heeds her words or not. Thus, her authority not only underwrites the deliverance of a mortal poet’s reason; it also raises those deliverances to the only level on which they could possibly make sense. (1984:28) 27 See notes 16, 20, and 26 above. On the question of the unity of form and content in Parmenides’ philosophy see in particular: Nietzsche, 1962:69–70; Heidegger, 1973a: 96; Ortega Y Gasset, 1967:79–81. Also Burnet, 1930:171; Bréhier, 1963:55; Sinnige, 1968:40; Reinhard in Mourelatos, ed., 1974:283–311; and Cherniss, 1977:18–21. 28 Mourelatos, 1970:269–76; see also Austin, 1986: ch. 1; M.Furth, ‘Elements of Eleatic ontology’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 6, 1968:111–32; Kahn, 1973; Owen, 1986:3–26; Cornford, 1939:28–30. 29 For the importance of understanding the social, cultural, and intellectual contexts of Parmenides’ text—or what Ortega Y Gasset calls the subsoil and soil of thinking, see Ortega Y Gasset, 1967: ch. 8. Ortega delineates the immediate intertextual space of Parmenides’ work in a ‘convolution’ of the following movements: the Dionysian mysteries, Orphism, protogeography and protohistory, Ionian physics represented by Thales, arithmetic, Pythagorean ethics and Pythagorean mysticism, the political form of ‘tyranny’ associated with Periander, and, finally, written traditions of legislation c. 600 BC. On the difficulties of reconstructing such adversarial contexts see our comments in Chapter 1 above. 30 The stylistic and thematic affinity between Witggenstein’s early work and Parmenides’ text has not been missed by commentators; for example, the bare enunciations of the Tractatus concerning the limits of World and Language are strikingly reminiscent of Parmenides on the ‘fettered’, ‘delimited’ belonging-to-gether of Thought and Being—as is a common vision of the unity of ‘World’ in both thinkers: Dass die Welt meine Welt ist, das zeigt sich darin, dass die Grenzen der Sprache (der Spracbe, die allein ich verstehe) die Grenzen meiner Welt bedeuten’ (‘The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world’, 1971:5.62) and ‘Die Anschauung der Welt sub specie aeterni ist ihre Anschauung als—begrenztes—Ganzes. Das Gefühl der Welt als begrenztes Ganzes ist das Mystische’ (‘To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole—a limited whole. Feeling the world as a limited— whole it is this that is mystical’, 1971:6.45). Parmenides work On Nature, like the Tractatus, is concerned with the rational conditions of intelligibility, while recognizing that these conditions (Being for Parmenides, Logical Form for the Tractarian Wittgenstein) cannot themselves be ‘objects’ of reference: the ground of intelligibility cannot itself be propositionally stated. Both texts ‘solve’ this paradox with an appeal 453

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31 32 33 34 35 36

to ‘showing’: the Way of Being and Truth is shown, not stated. Their texts qua texts—that is, as partial, prepositional attempts to formulate the essence of the Whole, die Grenzen der Sprache or the Limits of Being—are necessarily faulted projects. The very principles which these texts espouse reflexively negate their stated objectives (as non-sense in the service of sense). While creating as many problems as it ‘resolves’, the doctrine of ‘showing’ does serve to remind us of the peculiar textual status of Parmenides’ philosophical poem, particularly of its ironic, or if one prefers, its intrinsically reflexive characteristics. The text cannot be approached literally as a sequence of propositions without destroying its unique rhetorical organization. Like the Tractates, its aporetic consequences resemble a ladder (or Path in Parmenides’ text) toward that most strange and yet unavoidable topic, the unity of Being. Once the reader has understood the uniquely iconic function of its images and metaphors— particularly the continuous use of negative predication—the text’s own selfdeconstruction can be activated. Its ultimate aim was not, after all, to construct a philosophical ‘theory’, but rather to institute a conversion of the soul toward a vision of the Whole—to move the soul to what the early Greeks called ‘wisdom’. Kahn, in Sprung, ed., 1978:32. For comparable readings see: Guthrie, 1962–81: vol. 1; Owen, 1960:84–102; Furley, in Lee, Mourelatos, and Rorty, eds, 1973:1–15; Furth, in Mourelatos, ed., 1974:241–70. Also Furley, 1989:27–37, 38–6. For these translations from Empedocles see Lambridis, 1976:28–30. For further speculation on the paradoxical attributes of Parmenides’ Sphere see De Santillana, 1961:95–6, 98–9. Physics 186a20–35 and 191b30–5. Nietzsche would later say that Parmenides’ ontology ‘rests on the assumption that we have an organ of knowledge which reaches into the essence of things and is independent of experience’ (1962: §11, 82). For Parmenides as the victim of a category mistake rooted in confusing the ‘is’ of predication and the ‘is’ of existence: the predicate being belongs to thought itself; that I think of something and that this, which I think, is (in my thought), are identical assertions; non-be-ing— that which is not—can not be thought, can, so to speak, not be reached since every thing, when it is thought, exists as thought; no thought can be nonexistent or without being, for there is nothing to which the predicate being does not belong, or which exists outside of the sphere of being. In this argumentation Parmenides mistakes the distinction between the subjective being of thought and an objective realm of being to which thought is directed, by directing his attention only to the fact that both are subjects of the predicate being. (Überweg, 1887:55)

37 Kahn, 1973 and Kahn, in Sprung, ed., 1978:31–4. 38 For a reading of Parmenides’ ontology as a via mystica, see Fränkel, 1975:365– 70 and West, 1971:220–1. Heidegger presents his revisionary translation of lines 1–6 from Fragment 8 in 1973a: 96. Nietzsche had already adopted a ‘philological’ critique of Parmenides’ sphere of Being: For esse basically means ‘to breathe’. And if man uses it of all things other than himself as well, he projects his conviction that he himself breathes and lives by means of a metaphor, i.e., a non-logical process, upon all other things. He comprehends their existence as a ‘breathing’ by analogy with his own.

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(1962: §11, 84) 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

OCD: 782. Coxon, 1986:37. Nietzsche, 1962:84. Schneider, 1931:455–6. DL 9.24; Plutarch, Pericles 26–8; Reale, 1987:97–100; see also Frischer, 1982:24. See Simplicius, Physics 103, 109, 111. On Zeno’s book as the work of a young man, see Plato, Parmenides 128D-E: It was in such a spirit of controversy that I wrote it when I was young, and when it was written some one stole it, so that I could not even consider whether it should be published or not. So, Socrates, you are not aware of this and you think that the cause of its composition was not the controversial spirit of a young man, but the ambition of an old one.

46 On Zeno as a dialectical troubleshooter for a Parmenidean world-view see Plato, Parmenides 127B, 128E, Sophist 216A, and Phaedrus 261C-D. As the inventor of dialectical argument, DL 9.25 and Sextus Empiricus, Adv. math. 7.7. 47 Indeed many commentators see nothing more than word-games in Zeno’s paradoxes: Zeno was not profound: he was clever. Some profundities did fall from his pen; but so, too, did some trifling fallacies. And that is what we should expect from an eristic disputant. If we meet a deep argument, we may rejoice; if we are dazzled by a superficial glitter, we are not bound to search for a nugget of philosophical gold. Fair metal and base, in roughly equal proportions, make the Zenonian alloy. (Barnes, 1979: vol. 1, 236–7) Vlastos refers to Zeno as a ‘trickster’ (Vlastos, in Furley and Allen, eds, 1975:179– 80). Burnet is more judicious: The method of Zeno was…to take one of his adversaries’ fundamental postulates and deduce from it two contradictory conclusions. This is what Aristotle meant by calling him the inventor of dialectic, which is just the art of arguing, not from true premises, but from premises admitted by the other side. The theory of Parmenides had led to conclusions which contradicted the evidence of the senses, and Zeno’s object was not to bring fresh proofs of the theory itself, but simply to show that his opponents’ view led to contradictions of a precisely similar nature. (1930:313–14) 48 It is also a family relative of the Stadium paradox; see Aristotle, Physics 239b5– 240a18. For the Fragments of Zeno’s work see Burnet, 1930:315–20; cf. Lee, 1967. A good discussion of Zeno’s place within Eleatic metaphysics can be found in Sinnige, 1968:85–118. 49 See Simplicius, Physics on the equivocal concept of the ‘now’ and its role in generating aporetic problems (955, 1ff.): For this reason it is necessary that there be time between nows that are standing apart. For time has something exceptional [about it] in comparison with other coninuous things, [namely] that all of it is continuous and it is not detached from itself as line is from line, and surface from surface when they are in different bodies. Accordingly, what is between any limits of time is time. All time is divisible, because time is continuous, and every continuous thing is divisible. 455

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(957, 1 15ff.) On the cultural limitations of Zeno’s paradoxes and their organic relationship to the videological world of discrete magnitudes: ‘against the Pythagorean numbermetaphysics they are valid, but…once we abandon the Pythagorean view of space as made up of a series of discrete points their applicability ceases’ (Farrington, 1936:65); These difficulties simply prove in the last instance the impossibility of thinking exclusively of continuous spatial and temporal quantities as analyzed into discrete parts,—of thinking of the infinity of the perceptive process. Upon this ground the difficulties of Zeno could find no conclusive solution until the very real and difficult problems resting on them were considered from the point of view of the infinitesimal calculus. (Windelband, 1956:66–7) Henri Bergson makes the same point in developing his own theory of durational continuity: As a result of an illusion deeply rooted in our mind, and because we cannot prevent ourselves from considering analysis as the equivalent of intuition, we begin by distinguishing along the whole extent of the movement a certain number of possible stoppages or points, which we make…parts of the movement. Faced with our impotence to reconstruct the movement with these points, we insert other points, believing that we can in this way get nearer to the essential mobility in the movement. Then, as this mobility still escapes us, we substitute for a fixed and finite number of points an ‘indefinitely increasing’ number… Finally, we say that movement is composed of points… [Yet] It is movement that we must accustom ourselves to look upon as simplest and clearest, immobility being only the extreme limit of the slowing down of movement, a limit reached only, perhaps, in thought and never realized in nature. What we have done is to seek for the meaning of the poem in the form of the letters of which it is composed. (Bergson, 1955) Cf. M.Capek: ‘it is unfortunate that the term “continuity” in the mathematical sense in fact means infinite divisibility, that is, discontinuity infinitely repeatedthe very opposite of continuity in the dynamical sense’ (The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1961), cited by Yourgrau, 1991:31. Simplicius preserved Aristotle’s analogous solution in the following text: One must consider this now, in which a moving thing occupies something equal to itself, as existing only potentially, just as the point in a line. For if [the now] had actually been taken everywhere in the time, the time would be divided into partless things and would be composed of these, and there will be an actually infinite number of things. Zeno’s argument set the puzzle in motion on the basis of time being composed of nows, since if at all events this should not be granted him, it is not true that what is moving locally is always in something equal [to itself]. (Physics, 1012, 1 14ff.) 50 DL 8.57; Hegel, 1955: vol. 1. 261–78; Burnet, 1930:313–14, 320; Reale, 1987:96; Sinnige, 1968:109–10. 51 On a more positive note, in regard to Zenonian dialectic, its influence went well beyond the Eleatic 456

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school. It deeply affected the Sophists, the Socratic method itself, the Megarics, and in general contributed in a not indifferent way to the formation of the various types of argumentation and to the birth of logic. The demonstration which is called ad absurdum is in essence a discovery of Zeno. (Reale, 1987:96) 52 On the philosophical importance of the paradoxes of infinity see J.A.Benardete, Infinity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964); Koyré, 1971:9–35; Kretzmann, ed., 1982; Rosza, 1976; Salmon, 1970; Sinnige, 1968; Sondheimer and Rogerson, 1981; Sweeney, 1972. 8 PLURALISTS: EMPEDOCLES, ANAXAGORAS, AND THE BEGINNINGS OF GREEK ATOMISM 1

We follow Wilhelm Windelband who interpreted these figures as sharing a commitment toward reconciliation, addressing problems posed by the conflicting ontological vision of the Eleatics and the Heraclitean cosmology of Change (Windelband, 1956:71–100). One advantage of this hermeneutical scheme-which dates back at least to Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura 1.830–920—is that it disconnects the doctrines of ancient Atomism from the Sophistic debates of the Greek enlightenment and links them with the great problematics of Presocratic thought. Atomism as a speculative ontology is then seen as a direct consequence of the attempt to ‘domesticate’ and ‘normalize’ the ideological conflicts of early fifthcentury speculation. In contesting the Eleatic unity of Being there may have been only three distinctive conceptual moves: The world may be composed of beings that present a finite number of original qualitative differences; or there may be an infinite number of qualitative differences; or, third, the world may be composed of beings, numerically infinite, which are qualitatively identical. If pluralism fails, it will not be until after the three forms have been elaborated and examined. (Clark, in Ferm, ed., 1950:70–81, 76) For our purposes the three ideal-typical variations of the pluralist ontology are best represented by the figures of Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Democritus. From the logological perspective these ‘solutions’ are generative possibilities of the initial language of ‘the One and the Many’ instituted by Presocratic inquiry. Hugh Tredennick speaks of Atomism as the outcome of a controversy between the Pythagorean and Eleatic schools (Tredennick, trans., 1978: xviii); John Burnet (1960:70–1) also formulates this conflict of mid-fifth-century philosophical discourse as the point of contact between the pluralism of Empedocles and Anaxagoras: firstly…there is in reality no such thing as coming into being and ceasing to be. That has been settled by Parmenides. But, secondly, it is obvious that the things in this world do come into being and cease to be. That is proved by the evidence of the senses. The only way in which these two things can be reconciled is by regarding what is commonly called coming into being as mixture, and ceasing to be as separation. From this it follows, in the first place, that the real must be such as to admit of mixture, or, in other words, that there must be different kinds of real; and, in the second place, that there must be a cause of mixture and separation. 457

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2 3

The reference to Kirk and Raven is to the first edition of their collection of Presocratic texts (1971). They introduce the turn toward pluralism and atomism under the heading ‘The post-Parmenidean systems’ (KR: 319ff.). See also Harold Cherniss’ approach in his important essay ‘The characteristics and effects of Presocratic philosophy’, 1977:62–88, esp. 82–8. See Wright, ed., 1981; cf. also KR: 320–61 and Furley, 1987. Empedocles as a physician or ‘physician-philosopher’ (DL 8.51–8, 60–1, 63–7; at 8.77 Diogenes refers to an extant Discourse on Medicine running to 600 lines); as the inventor of rhetoric (DL 8.57–8; Sextus Empiricus, Adv. math., 7.6); as a poet (Aristotle, Poetics 1447b17–20; Met. 984all; Aristotle, Fr. 70=DL 8.57; Cicero, De Oratore 1.217); as politician and civil engineer (DL 8.64–6); on the Periphuseos ascribed to Xenophanes, KR: 166–7. ‘Besides his other activities, Empedocles was something of a physician, though there is more than a touch of the quack about him’ (Heiberg, 1922:16). Windelband: In his vocation of physician and priest, and with the paraphernalia of a magician, he then travelled about through Sicily and Magna Graecia… In this religious role he taught the doctrine of transmigration and of an apparently purer intuition of God, like that of the Apollo cult. (1956:79) In the exordium of the Katharmoi Empedocles depicts himself as a fallen God (‘And I am now one of these, a fugitive from god and a wanderer’), who is received as a divine person throughout Sicily: ‘Whenever I enter a thriving town I am revered by men and women. They follow me in their thousands, asking where lies the path to gain: some want prophecies, others for diseases of every sort request to hear a healing word’, B 112 and B 115.3–14 (fallen daimones), the passage is cited by DL 8.62; DL 8.59 (magician), 8.61 (seer); cf. the Muse reference in B 131 and B 3 and the gods in B 3; also compare these fragments with Pindar, Olympian II; Hippolytus comments that in such passages Empedocles uses the word ‘god’ (theos) for the One-Whole and its unity ‘in which he was born before he was torn away by Strife and was born among these many things that are in the cosmic ordering of Strife’ (Ref. 7.29). The Roman atomist Lucretius describes Empedocles’ philosophy in the following terms: ‘the poems of his divine mind utter a loud voice and declare illustrious discoveries, so that he seems hardly to be born of mortal stock’ (De Rerum Natura 1.731–3). Trypanis observes that the genre of the philosophical-poem developed by Empedocles and Xenophanes most probably ‘inspired Lucretius in his attempt to win the world over to Epicureanism through the medium of verse’ (1981:78). For Acragas (Akragas) and the ‘enlightened tyranny’ of Theron: Herodotus 6.4; Pindar Olympian Ode II 93; Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 1.715–34. Background to the Sicilian city-states during the sixth century can be found in Woodhead, 1962, esp. chs 2, 3. Diodorus Siculus describes the vast wealth of the Acragantines which flowed from the capture of prisoners after Gelon’s defeat of the Carthaginians in 480 BC (11.25ff.). The foundations of the mid-fifth-century city, its underground conduits and public buildings were based on the slave labour of these prisoners of war. See also the entry ‘Acragas’ in OCD: (2nd edn) 6: After expelling Thrasydaeus, Theron’s son, Acragas had a limited democratic government, in which Empedocles, its most famous citizen, took part in his generation. Acragantine sixth-and fifth-century prosperity is attested by a remarkable series of temples, the remains of which are among the most impressive any Greek city can offer.

4

In this respect it is emblematic that the German Romantic poet Hölderlin saw in 458

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Empedocles a potent symbol of the tragedy of the human condition, expressed in his posthumous work The Death of Empedocles (1798–1800). More than any other of the Presocratics Empedocles is demonstrably influenced by his predecessors; Anaximander, Xenophanes, the Pythagoreans, Parmenides, all left their mark upon him, and even his view of the soul may possibly have owed something to the view of Heraclitus. The fact that, as we saw, Homer himself provided the model for the catalogue of opposites in Frs. 122 and 123 is of course of no significance: the stylistic influence of Homer on Greek hexameter and elegiac verse was so strong that it would be more suprising if Empedocles did not reflect it. (KR: 360–1) Cf. Cornford: His work is a whole, in which religion, poetry, and philosophy are indissolubly united. His imagination is constructive, gathering elements from every available quarter—Hesiodic and Ionian cosmogony, Parmenidean rationalism, Orphic mysticism, poetic legend, the experience of a physician, a poet’s sensuous response to the sights and sounds of nature, and the fears and hopes of a spirit exiled from heaven for ‘a brief span of life that is no life’—but building all these elements together into a unitary vision of the life of the world and the destiny of the human soul, bound, like the microcosm, upon the wheel of birth and death. (1965:121–2) Cornford also emphasizes the importance of Empedocles as a transitional intellectual: ‘although a contemporary of Pericles, Euripides and Sophocles’, he seems to belong to another world. His spiritual affinities are rather with Epimenides, Pherecydes, Onomacritus, Pythagoras; and yet he has the complexity and inquietude of one who stands between an age of decadence and a renaissance, the spiritual ambitions and mysticism of medieval man combined with modern man’s curiosity and intellectual daring. (1965:123–4)

5

6

Cornford’s portrait suggests a reappraisal of Empedocles’ intellectual activities and theorizing (cf. Osborne, 1987, 23–32). It is known that this notion of the psyche somehow being ‘all things’ had a great influence on Aristotle’s theory of the soul, see De Anima 404b11–15; and also Theophrastus’ theory of the active senses, especially the ‘outgoing’ sense of sight, De sensu 7. 9; DK31 A 86. It is of some importance that Empedocles did not chose to personify the force of unity by the Greek word eros, but by the term Philia, a word which has strong connotations of friendship and communality (e.g. Fr. 17 in Simplicius, Physics 158.1; cf. Aristotle, Met. 1.4.984b32). Hippolytus in his commentary notes: Love is a certain peace and unanimity and affection which prefers the world to be one, perfect and restored, but Strife is always dispersing the one and chopping it up and making many instead of one. Therefore Strife is cause of all creation and he says it is ‘oulomenon’, that is destructive; for it is Strife’s concern that this creation should stand firm through all ages; and destructive Strife is creator and maker of the coming-to-be of the created things, but Love of their leading-out from the world and transformation and restoration to the one. About these Empedocles says that they are two 459

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immortals and uncreated and that they never had an origin of their coming to birth. (Ref. 7.29) 7 8

Jaeger, 1947:137, 142; KR: 326. With some revisions (like Aristotle’s addition of aether to make a fifth), it [Empedocles’ doctrine of the four roots/elements] was the basis of much of Greek science and of medieval interpretations of nature…in an applied form it dominated much of the thinking in chemistry, soil theory, practical agriculture, and physical theory well into the eighteenth century. (Glacken, 1967:9–10)

9

10 11 12

13 14

15 16

Diogenes’ dating derived from the List of Archons by Demetrius of Phaleron—a fourth-century politician and scholar much influenced by Theophrastus. However either Demetrius or Diogenes copied the name ‘Callias’ wrongly. It has been amended to read ‘in the archonship of Calliades’, that is in 480 BC (see KR: 363). Plutarch, Pericles 4.4. Diodorus Siculus speaks of ‘the sophist Anaxagoras, who was Pericles’ teacher,’ being accused of impiety, an accusation that also involved Pericles (12.39.2). See Schofield, 1980; Vlastos, 1950. Plato, Apology 26D. Cf. the speculations of Friedrich Engels on the significance of the evolution of the human hand with its opposable thumb and fingers for the evolution of intelligence, industry, and technology. According to Engels, ‘human history’ begins with the self-development of mankind as homo faber—‘labour created man himself’; ‘the hand is not only the organ of labour, it is also the product of labour’; ‘First labour, after it and then with it, speech—these were the two most essential stimuli under the influence of which the brain of the ape gradually changed into that of man’; ‘the animal merely uses external nature, and brings about changes in it simply by his presence; man by his changes makes nature serve his ends, masters it. This is the final, essential distinction between man and other animals, and once again it is labour that brings about this distinction’ (see Engels, ‘The part played by labour in the transition from ape to Man’ (1876) in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in Two Volumes (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1962): 80–92; see also Alfred North Whitehead’s compromise: ‘It is a moot point whether the human hand created the human brain, or the brain created the hand. Certainly the connection is intimate and reciprocal’ (Whitehead, 1932:78). In other words homo faber and homo sapiens are reciprocal powers in human evolution. Cohen and Drabkin, eds, 1948:93, n. 3. Simplicius Physics 460, 6–22. ‘His [Anaxagoras’] doctrine of matter as consisting of an infinite number of qualitatively different “seeds” was a kind of half-way house to the culmination of this pluralist physics in the atomism of Leucippus and Democritus’ (Guthrie, 1962–81: vol. 1 6; 2.325–6). See also Cherniss, 1977:83–6; Sinnige, 1968:119– 37; Vlastos, in Furley and Allen, eds, 1975:323–53; Schofield, 1980:107–21. Cf. Aëtius 1.3.5; DK 59A 46. How Mind imparted the first rotatory movement is by no means obvious; it may be that even Anaxagoras himself had no clear mental picture of the process. It appears, however, that the area affected was at first small but is still steadily increasing. The speed of the revolution is immense, and thereore its effect on the original mixture is very powerful. The immediate consequence is progressive separation…once the original motion has been 460

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imparted, purely mechanical factors begin to operate and the agency of Mind itself becomes less direct. (KR: 374–5) Cf. Paul Tannery, Pour l’histoire de la, Science Hellène (Paris, 1930): 290ff; Vlastos, in Allen and Furley, eds, 1975:323–53. 17 Cornford, 1923:124–5, trans. modified. 18 ‘Mind, like everything else, is corporeal, and owes its power partly to its fineness, partly to the fact that it alone, though present in the mixture, yet remains unmixed’ and Mind, like matter, is corporeal and owes its power over matter to its fineness and purity. Matter itself, so far from being pure, is originally at least an infinitely divisible mixture of every form of substance that the world is ultimately to contain. (KR: 374, 375) Cf. DL 2.6; Aristotle, De Anima 3.4.429a19–20 and Met. 12.10.1075b8–9. But cf. Windelband: ‘It is the ‘lightest’, the most mobile, the only matter that moves itself. It represents the logos, both in the macrocosm and in the microcosm. As regards the form and movement of the cosmic process, it has all the functions of the Heraclitean fire’ (1956:82) and Reale: ‘Anaxagoras did not possess the concept of immateriality…the speculative interest of the Presocratics did not embrace the two categories of matter and spirit and introduction of these categories as hermeneutic canons belongs to an incorrect understanding of the thought of these philosophers’ (1987:115). 19 Hegel, 1955:1.320, 329; cf. 340. Cf. Nietzsche, 1962: §19, 112–17. 20 Fragment B 2 suggests that Leucippus had intuited that behind appearances lay a ‘hidden order’ of reality (cf. DK 22 B 54). This is perhaps where the Anaxagorean thought of Intelligence’s initial act as pure arbitrary ‘will’ is domesticated into the idea of a causal ground. Nietzsche makes this important distinction between the ultimate contingency of Anaxagorean ‘atomism’ and the law-governed worldorder of Classical Atomism: Thinking in the style of Anaxagoras…suggests that the order and efficiency of things are but the direct result of blind mechanical movement. And only in order to produce such movement, in order to get past the dead inertia of chaos somehow, at some point in time, Anaxagoras assumed a free undetermined nous, dependent on itself alone. (1962: §19, 117) Hence the status of the primal beginning cannot be described in either causal or teleological terms. 21 DL 9.34–49; DK 68 A; Simplicius (In De Caelo 242.18, DK 67 A 14). Windelband describes the loss of the Democritean corpus between the third and fifth century AD as ‘the most lamentable that has happened to the original documents of ancient philosophy’ (1956:158). 22 Note the contrast in attitude between Plato and Aristotle on the ‘Democritean question’. Unlike Plato, Aristotle wrote a comprehensive treatise, now lost, with the title, On Democritus; he also comments on his writings throughout his major treatises (e.g. Met. 985bff., De Anima 404a–405a; Physics 188b; On Generation and Corruption 325a2ff., etc.). Cf. Aristoxenus in his Historical Notes affirms that Plato wished to burn all the writings of Democritus that he could collect, but that Amyclas and Clinias the Pythagoreans prevented him, saying that there was no advantage in 461

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doing so, for already the books were widely circulated. And there is clear evidence for this in the fact that Plato, who mentions almost all the early philosophers, never once alludes to Democritus, not even where it would be necessary to controvert him, obviously because he knew that he would have to match himself against the prince of philosophers. (DL 9.40) 23 Simplicius’ gloss on Aristotle’s lost work On Democritus; in KRS: 426. 24 ‘The modern concept of causality was in principle established in the writings of Leucippus and Democritus. These founders of pure natural science achieved almost complete separation of the law of causality from the principle of retribution by consistently eliminating all theological elements from their interpretation of nature and by strictly rejecting causes which are simultaneously ends’ (Kelsen, 1946:245); cf. Sambursky, 1963: ch. 5.; Windelband: The unifying principle of Atomism…is the complete development of the concept of mechanical necessity in nature’ (1956:160). Also of interest in this context is Richard Sorabji’s essay ‘The Greek origins of the idea of chemical combination: can two bodies be in the same place’, in Cleary and Shartin, eds, 1989:35–63. 25 The atoms are not mathematically indivisible like the Pythagorean monads, but they are physically indivisible because there is no empty space in them. Theoretically, then, there is no reason why an atom should not be as large as a world. Such an atom would be much the same thing as the Sphere of Parmenides, were it not for the empty space outside it and the plurality of worlds. As a matter of fact, however, all atoms are invisible. That does not mean, of course, that they are all the same size; for there is room for an infinite variety of sizes below the limit of the minimum visible. (Burnet, 1960:96–7) 26 KR: 418–19. See DK 68 A 37. 27 De Rerum Natura 2.105–31; cf. Peters, 1967:29.

462

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The bibliography is divided into three sections:

1 — General reference works 2 — Texts and materials on the Presocratic thinkers 3 — General bibliography 1 GENERAL REFERENCE WORKS Cambridge History of Classical Literature, ed. P.E.Easterling and B.M.W.Knox, Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, ed. A.H.Armstrong (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967). The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, ed. G.A.Kennedy, Volume 1, Classical Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. N.G.L.Hammond and H.H.Scullard, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). Oxford History of the Classical World, ed. John Boardman, Jasper Griffin, and Oswyn Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Oxford History of Greece and the Hellenistic World, ed. John Boardman, Jasper Griffin, and Oswyn Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Armstrong, A.H., ed., The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967). Bakewell, C.M., Source Book in Ancient Philosophy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1907). Beare, J.I., Greek Theories of Elementary Cognition from Alcmaeon to Aristotle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1906). Bréhier, E., Etudes de Philosophic Antique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955). Copleston, F., A History of Western Philosophy, 9 vols (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1946–75). Dumitriu, A., History of Logic, 3 vols (Tunbridge Wells: Abacus Press, 1977). Edwards, P., ed., The Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Volumes 1–8 (New York and London: Collier Macmillan, 1967). Everson, S., ed., Epistemology: Companions to Ancient Thought, Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Everson, S., ed., Psychology: Companions to Ancient Thought, Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 463

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Everson, S., ed., Language, Companions to Ancient Thought, Volume 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Finley, M.I., ed., The Legacy of Greece (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). Flew, A., An Introduction to Western Philosophy: Ideas and Arguments from Plato to Popper, 3rd revised edn (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989). Harvey, P., ed., The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). Jacoby, F., Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker (Leiden, 1923–58). Levi, P., The Pelican History of Greek Literature (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985). Long, A.A. and Sedley, D.N., The Hellenistic Philosophers, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Oates, W.J., ed., The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers: The Complete Extant Writings of Epicurus, Epictetus, Lucretius and Marcus Aurelius (New York: The Modern Library, 1957). O’Connor, D.J., A Critical History of Western Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1985). Peters, F.E., Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon (New York and London: New York University Press, 1967). Reale, G., Storia della filosofia antica, 5 vols (Milano: Vita e Pensiero, Pubblicazioni della Università Cattolica, 1979–80). Russell, B., History of Western Philosophy (and its Connections with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, 2nd edn (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1961). Russell, B., Wisdom of the West, ed. P.Foulkes (London: Bloomsbury Books, 1989). Russell, D.A. and Winterbottom, M., eds, Ancient Literary Criticism: The Principal Texts in New Translations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). Shand, J., Philosophy and Philosophers: An Introduction to Western Philosophy (London: UCL Press, 1993). Smith, T.V., ed., From Thales to Plato (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956). Taton, R., ed., Histoire Generate des Sciences, 4 vols (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957–64), English trans., General History of the Sciences (London: Thames and Hudson, 1963–4).

2 TEXTS AND MATERIALS ON THE PRESOCRATIC THINKERS I have used the following standard texts on the Presocratics and Presocratic philosophy: Hermann Diels, ed., Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker 11th edn (Zurich: Weidmann, 1964; Hermann Diels and Walter Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 1952 edn (Dublin/Zurich: Weidmann); Volume 1 (1966); Volume 2 (1966); Volume 3 (1964). Hermann Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker was first published in 1903 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1903) and later republished and edited by Walter Kranz (Berlin: Weidmann, 1934–7 onwards); it is the Diels-Kranz text that is usually referred to as the key source work on early Greek philosophy (as ‘Diels-Kranz’ or simply ‘DK’); Diels and Kranz differentiate the extant fragments of the Presocratic philosophers into an A-series of indirect glosses or paraphrases and a B-series of what are currently believed to be direct quotations from the philosophers’ texts (as in DK B 28). Thus the letter ‘B’ indexes what scholars regard as a genuine fragment from the ancient author in question. Diels-Kranz replaced the earlier German collections of works by the ancient Greek authors (such as F.W.A.Mullach’s Fragmenta philosophorum Graecorum, 3 vols (Paris, 1860–81) and H.Ritter and L.Preller’s Historia Philosophiae Graecae-romane ex Fontium Locis Contexta (1838), 7th edn., Gotha 1888). Hermann Diels also published an important 464

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collection of Greek doxographical materials, Doxographi Graeci (Berlin, 1879), 3rd edn. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1958). This volume includes the fragments of Theophrastus’ Physical Opinions. Kathleen Freeman’s important work of translation can be found in her Ancilla to the Pre-socratic Philosophers (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1948, 1959); this is a selective compilation of translated texts from Diels-Kranz. See also her work The PreSocratic Philosophers: A Companion to Diels (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946). For a useful translation of writings from the older Sophists and contemporaries of Socrates see Rosamond Kent Sprague, ed., The Older Sophists (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1972). John Burnet’s Early Greek Philosophy (1892), 4th edn (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1930) is still a useful introduction to the earliest Greek thinkers. Also: Adamson, R., The Development of Greek Philosophy (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1908). Barnes, J., The Presocratic Philosophers, 2 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979). Burnet, J., Greek Philosophy: Thales to Plato (New York and London: Macmillan/St Martins Press, 1960). Cherniss, H., Aristotle’s Criticism of Presocratic Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1935). Cherniss, H., The Riddle of the Early Academy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1945). Cherniss, H., ‘The characteristics and effects of Presocratic philosophy ’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 12, 1951:319–5; reprinted in H.Cherniss, Selected Papers (Leiden: E.J.Brill, 1977): 62–88. Cornford, F.M., Greek Religious Thought: From Homer to the Age of Alexander (London and Toronto: J.M.Dent, 1923). de Vogel, C.J., Greek Philosophy: A Collection of Texts, Volume 1 (Leiden: E.J.Brill, 1963). de Vogel, C.J., Theoria: Studies over de Griekse Wijsbegeerte (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1967). de Vogel, C.J., Philosophia: Part 1: Studies in Greek Philosophy (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1970). Dodds, E.R., The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951). Erdmann, J.E., A History of Philosophy, Volume 1: Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, Volume 2: Modern Philosophy, Volume 3: Modern Philosophy Since Hegel, trans. W.S.Hough (London: Swan Sonnenschein and Co., 1899). Fränkel, H., Dichtung und Philosophic desFrühen Griechentums (Munich: Beck, 1969). Fränkel, H., Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1975). Frede, F., Essays in Ancient Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). Frère, J., Les Grecs et Le Désir de L’Être: Des Préplatoniciens à Aristotle (Paris: Société d’Edition, ‘Les Belles Lettres’, 1981). Gigon, O., Studien Zur Antiken Philosophic (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1972): 1–7, Guthrie, W.K.C., A History of Greek Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962–81), Volume 1: The Earliest Presocratics and the Pythagoreans (1962); Volume 2: The Presocratic Tradition from Parmenides to Democritus (1965); Volume 3: The Fifth-century Enlightenment (1969); Volume 4: Plato the Man and His Dialogues: Early Period (1975); Volume 5: The Later Plato and the Academy (1978); Volume 6: Aristotle: An Encounter (1981). 465

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Hamlyn, D.W., The Pelican History of Western Philosophy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989). Hussey, E., The Presocratics (London: Duckworth, 1972). Irwin, T., Classical Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Kahn, C.H., The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Kirk, G.S. and Raven, J.E., eds, The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). Kirk, G.S., Raven, J.E. and Schofield, M. The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Mansfeld, J., ed., Die Vorsokratiker (Griechisch/Deutsch) (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam Jun., 1987). Mansfeld, J. and de Rijk, L.M., eds, Kephalaion: Studies in Greek Philosophy and its Continuation Offered to Professor C.J.de Vogel (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1975). Mourelatos, A.P.D., The Route of Parmenides (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1970). Mourelatos, A.P.D., ed., The Presocratics (New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1974). Onians, R.B., The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954). Reale, G., A History of Ancient Philosophy: Volume 1: From the Origins to Socrates (New York: State University of New York Press, 1987). Robinson, J.M., An Introduction to Early Greek Philosophy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968). Shand, J., Philosophy and Philosophers: An Introduction to Western Philosophy (London: UCL Press, 1993): 1–20. Snell, B., The Discovery of the Mind: the Greek Origins of European Thought (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953). Überweg, F., History of Philosophy: From Thales to the Present, 2 vols (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1887). von Fritz, K., Grundprobleme der Geschichte der antiken Wissenschaften (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1971). Wedberg, A., A History of Philosophy: Volume 1: Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). West, M.L., Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). West, M., ‘Early Greek philosophy’, in J.Boardman, et al, eds, The Oxford History of Greece and the Hellenistic World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 126–41. Wheelwright, P., The Presocratics (New York: Odyssey Press, 1966). Windelband, W., A History of Philosophy: With Especial Reference to the Formation and Development of its Problems and Conceptions (1893) (New York: Macmillan, 1901). Windelband, W., History of Ancient Philosophy (1899) (New York: Dover Publications, 1956). Zeller, E., Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy, 13th edn (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969). For more recent approaches to the Presocratic thinkers, informed by contemporary linguistic and analytic techniques of interpretation: Barnes, J., The Presocratic Philosophers, 2 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982). Barnes, J., Early Greek Philosophy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987). Furley, D.J. and Allen, R.E., eds, Studies in Presocratic Philosophy, Volume 1 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970). 466

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Kirk, G.S., Raven, J.E. and Schofield, M., The Presocratic Philosophers, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Lee, E.N., Mourelatos, A.P.D. and Rorty, R.M., eds, Exegesis and Argument: Studies in Greek Philosophy Presented to Gregory Vlastos (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1973). Mourelatos, A.P.D., ed., The Presocratics: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1974). Osborne, C., Rethinking Early Greek Philosophy: Hippolytus of Rome and the Presocratics (London: Duckworth, 1987). Owen, G.E.L., ‘Eleatic questions’, Classical Quarterly, 10, 1960:84–102, reprinted in D.J.Furley and R.E.Allen, eds, Studies in Presocratic Philosophy: Volume 2: The Eleatics and Pluralists (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975): 48–81. Owen, G.E.L., Logic, Science and Dialectic: Collected Papers in Greek Philosophy (London: Duckworth, 1986). Owens, J., A History of Ancient Western Philosophy (New York: Appleton-CenturyCrofts, 1959). Schofield, M. and Nussbaum, M.C., eds, Language and Logos: Studies in Ancient Greek Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

Individual figures in Presocratic thought For critical guides to individual figures in Presocratic thought, the following texts provide useful beginnings:

Anaxagoras Cleve, F.M., The Giants of Pre-Sophistic Greek Philosophy: An Attempt to Reconstruct Their Thoughts, 2 vols, 2nd edn (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969). Cleve, F.M., The Philosophy of Anaxagoras (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973). Furth, M., ‘A “philosophical hero”? Anaxagoras and the Eleatics’, in R.W.Sharpies, ed., Modern Thinkers and Ancient Thinkers: The Stanley Victor Keeling Memorial Lectures at University College London, 1981–1991 (London: UCL Press, 1993). Schofield, M., An Essay on Anaxagoras (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Vlastos, G., ‘The physical theory of Anaxagoras’, Philosophical Review, 59, 1950: 31–57, reprinted in D.J.Furley and R.E.Allen, eds, Studies in Presocratic Philosophy, Volume 2 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979): 323–53.

Anaximander Kahn, C.H., Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1960). Kirk, G.S., ‘Some problems in Anaximander’, Classical Quarterly, 5, 1955:21–38. Seligman, P., The Apeiron of Anaximander (London: Athlone Press, 1962). Vlastos, G., ‘Equality and justice in early Greek cosmologies’, Classical Philology, 42, 1957:156–78, reprinted in D.J.Furley and R.E.Allen, eds, Studies in Presocratic Philosophy, Volume 1 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970):56–91.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anaximenes Collinson, D., Fifty Major Philosophers: A Reference Guide (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987):6–8. Coxon, A.H., ‘Anaximenes’, in Oxford Classical Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970):62. Hyland, D.A., The Origins of Philosophy: Its Rise in Myth and the Pre-Socratics (New York: G.P.Putnam’s Sons, 1973):ch. 2, esp. 122–4. Reale, G., ‘Anaximenes’, in A History of Ancient Philosophy: Volume 1: From the Origins to Socrates (New York: State University of New York Press, 1987):45–7.

Empedocles Bignone, E.; Empedocle (Turin, 1916). Bollack, J., Empédocle, 4 vols (Paris, 1965–69). Lambridis, H., Empedocles (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1976). O’Brien, D., Empedocles’ Cosmic Cycle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). O’Brien, D., Pour interpréter Empédocle (Paris-Leiden, 1981). Wright, M.R., Empedocles—the Extant Fragments (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981).

Heraclitus Diels, H., Herakleitos von Ephesos (Berlin: Wiedmann, 1909). Gigon, O.A., Ursprung der griechischen Philosophic (Basel: Schwabe, 1958). Heidegger, M. and Fink, E., Heraclitus Seminar, trans. C.H.Seibert (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993). Heraclitus of Ephesus, The Fragments of the Work of Heraclitus of Epheses ‘On Nature’, trans. G.T.W.Patrick and Heracliti Ephesii Reliquiae, trans. I.Bywater (Introduction and Bibliography by L.A.Richards) (Chicago: Argonaut, 1969). Kahn, C.H., The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Kirk, G.S., Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962). Marcovich, M., Heraclitus: The Greek Text with a Short Commentary (Merida: Los Andes University Press, 1967a). Marcovich, M., Herakleitos (Stuttgart: Alfred Druckenmüller Verlag, 1967b). Ramnoux, C., Héraclite ou l’homme entre les choses et les mots (Paris, 1959). Ramnoux, C., Etudes Présocratiques (Paris, 1970). Vlastos, G., ‘On Heraclitus’, American Journal of Philology, 76, 1955:337–68, reprinted in Furley and Allen, eds, 1970:413–29.

Leucippus and Democriuts Bailey, C., The Greek Atomists and Epicurus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926). Cole, A.T., Democritus and the Sources of Greek Anthropology (Cleveland, 1967). Furley, D.J., Two Studies in the Greek Atomists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967). Furley, D., The Greek Cosmologists: Volume 1: The Formation of the Atomic Theory and its Earliest Critics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 468

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496

NAME INDEX

Adam, James 10, 252–3 Aelius Aristides 106 Aeschylus 35, 43, 44, 45, 66, 121, 136, 142, 145–6, 152, 161–3, 303, 307 Aëtius 154, 164, 175, 177, 180, 195, 196, 272, 291, 370 Agathemerus 137 Alcmaeon of Croton 190, 195, Alcman 144 Alexander of Aphrodisias 102, 191, 200, 202, 203, 300, 337, 372, 374, 383–4 Alexander, Samuel 280 Amos 235 Anaxagoras (of Clazomenae) 50, 62, 67, 78, 145, 181, 186, 187, 188, 195, 247, 293, 315, 323, 353, 360, 365–7, 367, 368, 369–71, 372, 373–7, 378, 385, 386 Anaximander 33, 44, 48, 66, 67–8, 69, 70, 75, 78, 79, 94, 111, 112, 114, 118, 127, 131, 136–7, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143–4, 144–55, 156, 159, 161–3, 164, 165–6, 166–71, 172, 173, 175, 176, 179, 182, 184, 187, 235, 244, 246, 276, 293, 308, 314, 326, 336, 362, 379, 380 Anaximenes 75, 78, 79, 99, 112, 113–14, 118, 131, 146, 163, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175–9, 181, 182, 184, 185–8, 235, 314, 338, 365, 371, 374, 379 Anderson, Perry 16 Andrewes, Antony 2–3, 8–9 Anscombe, G.E.M. 12 Apollodorus 136, 172 Apollonius of Perga 227 Appian 145 Archelaus 365, 366 Archilochus 82, 114, 238, 239, 240 Archimedes 210, 211, 227 Archytas 190, 195, 196, 211, 224

Aristarchus of Samos 227, 228 Aristophanes 90, 181–2, 302 Aristotle 29, 32–7, 38–9, 42, 46, 48, 49, 50, 53–4, 59, 65, 84, 86, 89, 91, 93, 94, 95, 99, 101, 130, 137, 139– 40, 143, 144, 147–8, 150, 151, 154, 155–6, 164, 166, 167–8, 173, 174, 176, 179, 187–8, 189, 190, 195, 196, 197, 199, 201–8, 213, 220, 221, 222, 227, 228, 231–2, 233, 240, 247, 249, 256, 257, 263, 269, 270, 271, 275–6, 283, 296, 299, 300, 312, 321, 324–5, 325, 327–8, 333, 334, 337, 339–40, 346–8, 350–1, 352, 355, 356, 359, 360, 363–5, 367–8, 368–9, 371, 372, 374, 375, 376, 377, 378, 381, 382, 383, 386, 387, 391 Auerbach, Erich 9 Augustine (St Augustine, Augustine of Hippo) 174, 216, 271 Austin, J.L. 12 Ayer, A.J. 384 Bachelard, Gaston 211 Bacon, Francis 228, 388 Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 39 Barnes, Jonathan 13, 59 Bennett, Jonathan 12 Benveniste, Emile 59–60 Bergson, Henri 280, 284, 348 Bernal, J.D. 14 Bias of Priene 78, 111 Bloch, Marc 19 Bloom, Allan 8 Boyle, Robert 388 Bradley, F.H. 280 Braudel, Fernand 23–4 Bréhier, Emile 192 Bruno, Giordano 169 Burckhard, Jacob 7, 9

497

NAME INDEX

Burnet, John 10, 78, 80, 137, 164, 179, 181, 191, 192, 218, 285, 299, 342, 348, 381 Burnyeat, M.F. 13 Burkert, Walter 11, 191, 192 Cassirer, Ernst 8, 253–4 Castoriadis, Cornelius 23 Chartier, Roger 19 Cherniss, Harold F. 11, 30, 31, 37, 91, 179, 203, 298, 392 Chilon of Sparta 78 Cicero 182, 198 Clement of Alexandria 263, 273, 274, 291, 292, 306 Cleobulus of Lindus 78 Collingwood, R.G. 8, 9 Comte, Auguste 5 Copernicus, Nicolaus 228 Copleston, Frederick 28 Cornford, Francis M. 10, 11, 28, 191, 199, 209, Cottrell, L. 120 Coulanges, Fustel de 18 Cousin, Victor 7 Coxon, A.H. 301, 303, 306, 313, 326 Croesus 111 Cyrus 111, 172, 285 Darius 83 De Certeau, Michel 19de De Santillana, Giorgio 12, 118, 141, 164–5 Democritus of Abdera 50, 62, 143, 148, 166, 176, 181, 195, 196, 245, 270, 297, 324, 353, 363, 369, 375, 376, 377, 378, 379, 380, 381, 382, 383, 384, 385, 386, 387, 388, 389, 390–1 Descartes, René 58–9, 183, 271, 334, 375, 389 Detienne, M. 191, 193, 279 Deutero-Isaiah 235 Dewey, John 281 Diels, Hermann 10 Diels, Hermann and Kranz, Walter 10– 11, 139 Dilthey, Wilhelm 7, 8 Diodorus Siculus 78, 87, 129, 191, 198, 289, 341 Diogenes Laertius 47, 86, 89, 111, 136, 137, 138, 172, 182, 190, 191, 193, 196, 198, 202, 205, 214, 215, 216, 219–20, 235, 272, 285, 296, 338,

341, 355, 356, 365, 366, 367, 369, 378, 379, 387 Diogenes of Apollonia 99, 142, 179– 80, 181, 182, 184, 186, 338, 352, 422–3n1 Diophantus 210, 227 Duby, Georges 19 Durkheim, Emile 15 Ecphantus 195 Einstein, Albert 169 Elias, Norbert 19, 160 Eliot, T.S. 276, 278 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 41–2 Empedocles 32, 47, 48, 63, 139, 147, 184, 194, 275, 279, 323, 325–6, 353, 354, 355, 356, 357–9, 360, 361, 362, 363, 364, 365, 368, 370, 371, 374, 385 Engels, Friedrich 16, 169, 281 Epicharmus of Syracuse 247 Epicurus 130, 148, 154, 168–9, 383, 387, 390, 392 Epimenides 289 Eratosthenes 137, 195 Euclid 119, 210, 227, 319–20, 325 Eudemus 86, 190 Eudoxos 204, 211, 227 Eudoxos of Cnidus 119 Euripides 35, 43, 44, 365 Farrington, Benjamin 14, 112, 137 Ferguson, John 192, 193 Feyerabend, Paul 22 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 7 Foucault, Michel 19–20, 21 Frame D. 311 Fränkel, Hermann 11, 29, 30, 42, 47, 303 Frege, Gottlob 328 Freeman, Kathleen 11, 299 Freud, Sigmund 15, 236, 265 Friedländer, Paul 9 Furley, D.J. 13 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 9, 18 Galen 334, 368, 390 Galileo, Galilei 58, 228, 388 Gallop, David 298, 301, 303–4, 306 Gassendi, Pierre 388, 389 Glacken, G.C. 58 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 6 Gomperz, Theodor 9 Gorgias 349 Gramsci, Antonio 131–2

498

NAME INDEX

Granet, Marcel 59 Grayleff, Felix 9 Grote, George 10 Guthrie, W.K.C. 11, 75 Harrison, Jane 10 Harrison, Tony 43 Hartshorne, Charles 281 Havelock, Eric 32 Hazard, Paul 8 Hecataeus of Miletus 84, 137, 235, 238, 239, 240, 250 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 6–7, 8, 9, 37, 51, 72, 92, 94, 101–2, 146, 170, 186, 265, 277, 280, 281–3, 328, 333, 377 Heidegger, Martin 9, 18–19, 64–5, 69– 71, 148, 149–50, 154, 254–6, 265, 299, 311, 314, 330–2, Heraclides of Pontus 190 Heraclitus 32, 44, 47, 48, 49, 50, 56, 60, 63, 64–5, 66, 68, 69, 70, 75, 78, 112, 121, 146, 148, 163, 164, 174, 176, 181, 182, 183, 184–5, 186–7, 188, 194, 201, 215, 234–6, 237, 238–40, 241, 242, 243, 244–7, 248, 249, 250, 251–3, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258–61, 263, 264, 265–8, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274–5, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280–3, 285, 289, 297, 303, 306, 309, 315, 323, 331, 338, 342, 344, 353, 357, 361, 369, 371, 389, 391 Herder, Johann Gottfried 6, 9 Hermodorus 234, 237 Herodotus 8, 29, 83, 84, 86, 87, 89, 90, 105, 106, 111, 119, 138, 190, 198, 216, 236, Hesiod 33, 42, 47, 48, 50, 93, 97, 140, 143, 153, 231, 238, 240, 246, 266, 289, 290, 301, 302, 361 Highet, Gilbert 10 Hipparchus 195, 210, 227 Hippasus of Metapontum 223 Hippocrates 34, 84, 118, 133, 138, 187, 195, Hippocrates of Chios 119, 228 Hippolytus (of Rome) 87, 136, 137, 164, 180, 182, 193, 197–8, 206, 207, 272, 291, 355, 356, 358, 359, 367, 374, 383 Hipponax 82 Hobbes, Thomas 388 Höelderlin, Friedrich 6, 9 Hoelscher, Uvo 9

Homer 8, 34, 35, 42, 43, 45, 48, 84, 89–90, 93, 119, 148, 153, 158, 159, 178, 231, 246, 260, 267, 288, 301, 303, 384 Hooke, Robert 388 Hosea 235 Hume, David 334, 390 Husserl, Edmund 9, 72, 271, 281, 329, 415n12 Hussey, Edward 13 Huxley, G.L. 137 Huyghens, Christian 388 Iamblichus 55, 190, 191–2, 193, 194, 198, 201, 203–4, 217, 218, 220, 225, 226, 238, 356 Irwin, Terence 13 Isaiah 235 Isocrates 130, 145, 191 Jaeger, Werner 9, 57, 179, 301, 356 James, William 281 Jaspers, Karl 18, 415n12 Jesus Christ 265 Josephus 90 Kahn, Charles H. 13, 251, 317–18, 328–30 Kant, Immanuel 6, 9, 58, 101–2, 169, 212, 289, 295 Kelsen, Hans 121–2, 303, 416n18 Kepler, Johannes 210, 228 Kerferd, G.B. 37, 78 Kirk, G.S. 12, 49, 50, 81, 86, 95, 112, 177, 286, 328, 353 Koyré, Alexandre 8 Kristeller, Paul Oskar 8 Kuhn, Thomas S. 141 Lawson-Tancred, Hugh 13 Lefkowitz, M.R. 37 Leibniz, G.W. 336 Leonardo da Vinci 110 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 6 Leucippus 50, 166, 176, 181, 195, 297, 353, 363, 369, 377, 378–9, 380, 381, 383, 386, 387 Lévi-Bruhl, Lucien 15 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 15 Lindberg, D.C. 2, 32 Lloyd, G.E.R. 12, 13 Lloyd-Jones, Hugh 49 Locke, John 383 Lovejoy, Arthur 8 Luce, J.V. 36, 102 499

NAME INDEX

Lucretius 58, 154, 356, 370, 372, 381, 384, 389, 391, 392 Lukács, Georg 281 Lysias 34–5 Lysis 190 McDiarmid, J. 37 McLeish, J. 103 Mann, Michael 16 Mannheim, Karl 281 Marx, Karl 7, 16, 281, 408n22 Mauss, Marcel 15 Mead, George Herbert 280 Melissus 245, 285, 295, 296, 336, 337, 338–40 Merton, Robert K. 210 Mewes, H. 10 Mimnermus 114 Moritz, L.A. 8, 12, 14, 22 Mourelatos, A.P.D. 301 Murray, Gilbert 5, 9, 10 Murray, Oswyn 122 Naveh, Joseph 108 Needham, Joseph 124–5 Neugebauer, Otto 11 Newton, Isaac 169, 228, 375, 389 Nicholas of Cusa 169 Nietzsche, Friedrich 5, 7, 9, 10, 15, 18, 19, 20, 40, 93, 94, 170, 265, 280, 282, 286, 321, 328, 334, 375, 377 Nussbaum, Martha 13 Oliva, Pavel 14 Osborne, C. 355 Owen, G.E.L. 13 Pappus 210 Parmenides 47, 50, 62, 63, 65, 70, 127, 139, 146–7, 153, 194, 230, 235, 244, 245, 256, 285, 286, 294–5, 296, 297, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 304–12, 313, 314, 315, 316– 18, 319, 320, 322, 323, 324, 325–6, 327, 328, 329, 331, 332, 333, 336, 337, 338, 339, 340, 341, 342, 349, 350, 351, 355–6, 357, 358, 359, 363, 369, 371, 374, 378–9, 380, 381, 385, 389 Peirce, Charles Sanders 323 Periander of Corinth 78, 93 Pericles 336, 366 Peters, F.E. 47, 49, 177, 178 Pherecydes of Syros 247 Philo Judaeus (Philo of Alexandria) 58

Philolaus 190, 195, 196–7, 200, 219 Phocus of Samos 87 Pindar 34, 43, 44, 50, 140–1, 143, 144, 158, 162, 278, 302, Pittacus of Mitylene 77–8 Plato 6, 8, 32, 34, 35, 42–3, 48–51, 54–8, 59, 62, 64, 65, 68, 78, 86, 88, 89, 130, 143, 144, 150, 151, 153, 184, 186, 187, 189, 190, 191, 194, 195, 196, 202, 204, 209, 211, 213, 218, 220, 221, 223, 226, 228, 230, 236, 240, 247, 249, 256, 265, 270, 271, 286, 288, 295, 296, 299, 300, 301, 305, 312, 313, 317, 318, 321, 322, 323, 326, 329, 330, 333, 334, 341, 344, 348, 349, 353, 359, 361, 367, 372, 373–4, 376, 377, 380, 382, 387 Pliny 86, 87 Plotinus 32, 35, 190, 300, 306 Plutarch 78, 164, 181, 211, 296 Polybius 194 Polycrates 189, 193 Popper, Karl R. 75, 280, 421n42 Porphyry 190, 191, 280, 356 Posidonius 334 Proclus Diadochus 87, 88, 89, 209, 223, 228, 320 Protagoras 145, 334, 338, 380, 384 Ptolemy 227, 228 Pyrrho 334 Pythagoras of Samos 47, 55, 78, 87, 188, 189–92, 233, and throughout chapter 5, 235, 238, 240, 289, 355, 356, 357, Raven, J.E. 13, 50, 86, 95, 177, 286, 328, 353 Reale, Giovanni 12, 28, 75 Rees, B.R. 8, 12 Ricoeur, Paul 37 Rist J.M. 12 Robbins, R.H. 28 Robinson, T.M. 244, 271 Rohde, Erwin 15, 191 Rorty, Richard 281 Ross, W.D. 11 Rostovtzeff, M. 103 Ryle, Gilbert 12 Sambursky, Samuel 11 Sarton, George 11–12 Sartre, Jean-Paul 41 Saussure, Ferdinand de 15 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm von 7 500

NAME INDEX

Schiller, F.C.S. 281 Schiller, Friedrich 6, 9 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 6 Schluchter, W. 40 Schmitt, Karl 9 Schofield, Malcolm 13 Schopenhauer, Arthur 7, 265 Sellars, Wilfred S. Sextus Empiricus 272, 292, 300, 357, 365, 367, 390 Shakespeare, William 41–2 Simmel, Georg 115–16, 409–10n33 Simplicius 86, 136, 139, 140, 142, 180, 182, 190, 224, 293, 300, 305, 309, 313, 334, 340, 341–2, 343, 346, 369, 371, 382, 391 Socrates 50, 62, 65, 130, 145, 151, 181, 196, 248, 268, 285, 295, 296, 334, 341, 348, 349, 351, 365, 366, 367, 376, 377, 380 Solmsen, Friedrich 11 Solon of Athens 29, 75, 270, 289 Sophocles 35, 42, 43, 44, 45, 148–9, 152–3, 245, 270 Spengler, Oswald 20 Speusippus 204 Strawson, Peter F. 12

137, 139, 140, 154–5, 173, 174, 179, 180, 184, 190, 195, 196, 296, 300, 381, 382, 383, 386, 415– 16n16 Thomson, George 14, 114 ThucydidesS, 105–6, 198 Thrasybulus 112, 115

Taran, L. 298, 322, 323 Taylor, A.E. 11 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre 281 Tertullian 7 Thales 33, 75, 78, 79, 110, 118–19, 119, 131, 136, 137, 142, 146, 154, 164, 172, 175, 178, 179, 184, 185– 6, 187, 211, 235, 239, 240, 289, 294, 314, 379 Theodorus of Cyrene 223 Theognis 50 Theophrastus 33–4, 35, 47, 86, 130,

Xenocrates 204 Xenophanes of Colophon 32, 34, 66, 67, 78, 82, 127, 164, 194, 216, 218, 235, 236, 238, 239, 240, 246, 247, 253, 256, 285, 286, 287, 288–91, 292, 293, 295, 296, 297, 300, 301, 313, 320, 323, 324, 325, 335, 355, 356, 363, 374

Veatch, Henry 9 Vernant, J.-P. 279 Vlastos, Gregory 11, 31–2, 179, 187 Von Fritz, K. 205, 223 Weber, Max 5, 9, 16–17, 18–19, 40, 107, 126, 410n34 Weil, Simone 227 West, M.L. 250–1 Whitehead, Alfred North 161, 281 Wicksteed, Philip H. 147–8 Wieland, Christoph 6 Wili, Walter 187 Williams, Raymond 23 Winckelmann, Johan Joachim 5–6 Windelband, Wilhelm 36, 235, 298, 299 Winspear, A.D. 14 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1, 12, 317, 318

Zeller, Eduard 102, 235, 250–1, 298, 299 Zeno of Elea 65, 285, 296, 299, 339, 340, 341, 342, 343, 344, 349, 350, 351, 352, 378, 380, 384

501

SUBJECT INDEX

Abdera 105, 378, 379 absolute being (Parmenides) 244, 285, 295, 296–300, 301–12; as infinite (in Melissus) 336–40; as uncreated, eternal, motionless, whole 307–12, 313–15, 315–17, 320–3; and throughout chapter 7 absolute consciousness 301 Absolute, the, as ‘object’ of reason 297–300, 301 abstract: 144, 198–9, 416n21; concepts and money 113–18, 232–3, 409– 10n33; propositions 142–55, 174, 177, 198–208, 233, 334–5, 416n21 abstraction: in Anaxagoras 368; in Anaximander 142, 143–55; in Anaximenes 177–80; Aristotle on 144 and passim, 203; in Empedocles’ work 356; and money economy 112–18, 232–33; Pythagoras on 232–33 and throughout chapter 5; as social relation 114–15, 233 Academy, the 35; and Aristotle 190; Platonic 38, 87, 130, 220 Acragas (Akragas) 354 active intellect (Aristotle): 99; as metaphor 99; as Presocratic model of mind/soul 99–102; as universal Mind 372–5; as unmoved mover 53, 376; see Nous adrasteia 136, 152, 417n27; see also aitia, ananke Aegean maritime economy 79–82; Cretan-Minoan hegemony 107, 134; Mycenaean domination 107; see also Phoenicia aesthetic (aisthesis): analysis 230–1; discourse 39; experience 231;

judgement; logic 49, 231; origins of philosophy 39 and passim aesthetics 231, 249–50 Agamemnon 144–5, 152 age of prose 173, 235 agonistic spirit (of ancient Greek culture) 39–0; in philosophy 236–40 air, aer: cosmology 181; as element in Anaximenes 146, 172, 175–6, 183– 4, 185, 375–6; and throughout chapter 4, 371 aither (or aether) 182, 185–8, 210, 371, 375–6; see also air, fire, pneuma aitia 29, 32–3, 37–8, 141–2, 143–4, 145, 150–3; guilt/transgression 152– 3; moral and juridical meanings 151, 152–3; and the self 152–3; see cause, dike, injustice, themis Aletheia, alethic (truth, truthlike) 2, 43, 66, 220; Heidegger’s analysis 69–71, 149–50, 299, 330–1; in Parmenides’ ontology 301, 302, 303, 330–1; see truth Alexander the Great 109, 115 Alexandria 105, 130 algebra 210; occluded in ancient Greek mathematics 210–14 allegory 48–51, 258–9 alphabetization 107–8, 110–12, 229, 232–3; and democratization 120–1; of Greek culture 120–1, 158–61 alphabets: proto-Canaanite/Hebraic 90, 107–8, 408n25; Greek 89–90, 108; Minoan-Cretan 108; Phoenician 89– 90, 107–9, 109–12, 119–21, 408n25; Latin 110, 121 alternation: of Love and Strife in Empedocles 184, 355, 356, 357, 359–61, 361–2; of one and many 357–9, 361–2

502

SUBJECT INDEX

analytic attitude: social origins of 119– 21, 123, 133 anamnesis, recollection 55–6, 217–19; in Plato 218–19; see Plato ananke (‘necessity’) 121–2; in Aeschylus 152–3, 161–2; in Anaximander 139–40, 156–7, 157–63, 166, 362; in Atomism 379, 387–8, 391–2; in Empedocles 361–2; in Parmenides 307–12, 316–17 anthropomorphism 163, 166, 174–5, 236, 334, 375; Xenophanes’ critique of Homeric 239, 286, 287, 288–91, 292 apeiron: in Anaximander 65, 66, 138, 141–2, 184, 293, 314, 326; Anaximenes’ critique of 174–5, 176; as ‘element of things’ 139–40, 154–5; in Homer 153; grammatical structure of 153–4; as ground of all being 415n12, 418–19n29; as‘the encompassing’ 142, 415n12; as ‘indeterminate matrix’ 139–40, 145– 6, 153, 154, 415n12; as ‘infinite’ 139–0, 141, 156, 167, 326, 418– 9n29; negative predicates of 153–4, 156, 415n12, 418–19n29; Parmenides’ critique of 308–12, 313– 14, 326; paralogical character 153–4, 156; as sacred/divine 153, 155–6, 415n12, 418–19n29; as steering 153, 155–6; as ‘unbounded’ 138, 141, 153; as unlimited 138, 139, 153; Apeiron-fragment 139–40, 141–55, 161, 170; and throughout chapter 3 aphorism/aphoristic style: 241, 242–50, 256–67, 286; see also Heraclitus, iconicism, paradox apodeixis 227; see also axiomatization Apollo 262, 301 Apollonian 7, 229, 249; and Dionysian 7, 15, 229–30, 237, 240, 361–2 aporia, aporetic: in speculative ontology 153–5, 317, 319, 326–7, 352–3, 419n30; in Atomic epistemology 390–1; in Parmenides’ ontology 315–16, 317, 317ff., 326–32; in Platonic dialectic 204, 344; in Pythagorean number theory 342–3; in thinking the infinite 343–8; in thinking the Whole 154–5; in Zeno’s paradoxes 340, 341–8; see also Apeiron, the Whole

appearance(s) 65, 93–4, 150, 297, 309– 12, 322–3 appearance and being 64–5, 93, 146–7, 149–50, 297–300, 304–5, 306, 307– 8, 309–12, 322–3, 367 appearance and reality 65, 93–4, 305, 309, 322–3, 367–72, 390–1 appearances-of-Being 149–50, 297–8, 322 appearances as phainomena 150, 322– 3, 367–72 Arab: language 212–13; numerals/ mathematics 103, 211–14 archaeology 143; see arche Archaic age, the 29, 42–5, 46, 55, 62, 75–6, 144, 151, 354, 380 Archaic Greece 29, 37; crisis of 73–4; late 235 arche (pl. archai): in Anaxagoras 145, 293, 372–7; in Anaximander 65, 69, 138–40, 141, 142–55 and throughout chapter 3, 244; in Anaximenes 174–6, 181–2; in Archaic Greek 142–6; in Aristotle 29, 35–8, 92–3, 143–4, 145, 415–16n16; as being 146; as beginning (origin or starting point) 36–7, 74, 141–2, 143, 176; as birth or generation 143; as divine (to theion) 33–7, 95–8, 143, 155–6, 173, 176, 182, 313, 338– 9; as element 143–4, 177, 355, 358–9; as first cause 36, 93–4, 140, 143, 182; as foundation or ground 143–4; as god 36, 51–3, 86, 95–6, 143, 291–3, 313; in Homer 144–5; as material 140, 167–8, 337–8, 363–5, 375–7, 378; as matrix 145, 146; as number 199–200, 200–8; meanings of the term 93–5, 142–3, 415–16n16; in Parmenides 297–300; in Plato 144, 145; as political metaphor 144–5; as principle (first principle) 36, 74, 86, 92–3, 142, 144, 175–6, 381–2; in Pythagoras and Pythagoreans 69, 201–8; as source of all being and motion 140, 145–6; in Thales 85–6, 92–4, and throughout chapter 2, 138; as underlying substance 142, 143–4 arete (excellence, virtue, goodness) 148–9, 288, 289–90, 360–1 aristocracy: in the Greek world 158; crisis of 158–9 arithmetic 209–14; and geometry as allegories of power 209–10; see geometry, Pythagoreans

503

SUBJECT INDEX

Artemis 241 articulation of articulations 263–5, 266–7; see Heraclitus, logos, logological investigations Assyria 103, 108–9, 120 astrology: Babylonian 86, 92, 123 astronomy: Babylonian 86–7, 88–9, 123, 125; early Greek 85–7, 88–9, 90, 176; atheism 95–6, 406n11 Athens: archaic 81, 117; class structure of; conservative culture of 81; democratic 105, 110, 194, 341, 366; during Bronze Age; economic life 113, 117; fifth-century hegemony 83, 108–9, 354 athletes (criticized by Xenophanes) 82, 189 Atomism, atomist: ancient Greek 50, 65, 181, 188, 323, 338, 363, 368, 376, 377, 388, 391–2; of Democritus 50, 376, 377, 380, 383–4; Epicurean 168–9, 391; of Leucippus 50, 377, 378–9, 380, 381, 383, 386; as a metaphysical framework 386–8, 388–92; modern 388–92; prefigured by Anaxagoras 369–72, 376–7; Pythagorean ‘number atomism’ 210– 14 and throughout chapter 5, 352–3 atoms: 269, 376, 378; and eternal motion 385; configurations of 378– 9, 380–1, 382, 385, 388, 389; and void 378, 380, 381–2, 383–5, 389; ‘whirl’ 376, 381, 382, 389 Aufklärung 5–6 axiology (axiological) 161 axiomatization 209; cultural conditions of 209–14, 222–3, 224, 227, 320, 325, 350 Aztec civilization 128 Babylon: relations with Ionia 86–7; see Mesopotamia Babylonian: mathematics and astronomy 86–7, 111, 116, 211; religion 86; social structure 120, 123–4 Baghdad 105 Basra 105 beauty, kallos 41–2 Beautiful, the (to kalon): Aristotle on 49, 59; in itself 52–3; in Plato 52–3; equivalent to the Good 51, 53

becoming: 184–5, 188, 236, 241, 273, 280–3, 315, 389; and throughout chapter 6; see Heraclitus Being: ‘being’ as equivocal term 339–40; being and the verb ‘to be’ 326–32; Being in Presocratic thought 64–5, 66– 74, 92–4, 146–7, 240–1; throughout chapter 7; Being qua Being 146, 241, 296–300, 307–12, 313–315, 321–3, 340; being-in-itself (‘Being is being’) 315–17, 321–2; being (elements of) 175, 355, 358–9, 369–72; Being, to einai, esse 296–300, 305–6, 306, 307– 12; being (existence) 92–3, 335; throughout chapter 7; being as hypokeimenon 94–5, 359, 364–5; being as infinite 336–40; being not a genus 315–32, esp. 315–16, 317–18, 321–3; Being and Not-being (to me on) 146–7, 296–300, 306–7, 308, 309–12, 320–23; Being as ousia 65, 93, 338, 389; being and predication 315–17, 318, 320–3, 327–8, 328–32; being as Sphere 146–7, 307–12, 309–12, 321– 2; being as substance 92–4; Being and Thought 294, 297, 300–12, 330–2; being as to on 92–3, 146, 300–12; Being and Unity 146, 296–8, 307–8, 320–2; beings as modes of Being 149– 50, 240–1, 321; Being/being (the ontological difference in Heidegger) 64–5, 69–71, 150–1, 254–5, 265, 314, 322–3, 324, 415n12; Being of beings (in Heidegger) 69, 70–1, 254–6; beingin-the-world 141 Bible, the 90 binary oppositions 263–7; matrix of 264–5; see opposites Black Sea (colonies) 79, 106, 109, 111 body and matter 215–16; body and mind 215 Bologna 105 bow and lyre 258–9, 261–2 bracketing: in Heraclitus 266–7; in Parmenides 319–26 brain: and consciousness 219; in Alcmaeon 195–6; in Philolaus 219 bureaucracy 102; ancient Egyptian 123–4, 125, 133–4; ancient Mesopotamian 125–6, 133–4 bureaucratization of life 103–4, 125–30 Byblos (in ancient Phoenicia) 89; Byblos alphabet 109

504

SUBJECT INDEX

Canaan 89; see Phoenicia capital: accumulation 116; ‘ancient capital’ 115–18; as money 112–13, 116; fetishism; origins 115–18 capitalism: ‘ancient capitalism’ 112–13, 116, 127; mercantile 113–18, 132 and throughout chapter 2 Caria 81, 89; conflict with the Dorian ‘Greeks’ 106 Carthage 107–9; see Phoenicia causal explanation 143–4, 179–80 cause(s), causation: and arche 20, 143– 4, 151–3; Aristotle on 29, 92–3, 143–4, 150–3, 179–80, 203–4, 363– 5; Democritus on 143, 363, 387–8, 389; efficient 48, 151, 374; Empedocles on 363–5; formal 147, 150–1, 200–8; fourfold in Aristotelian science 37–8, 143, 150– 3, 363–5; final 147, 151, 387; in science 151–3, 386–8; in explanations 150, 176–7; Ideas (Forms) as 204; Leucippus on 363, 377, 379; material 92–3, 94–5, 140, 143, 151, 168, 175–6, 177, 364, 375–7, 378, 386–8; in philosophy 143–4; as principles 93, 143, 363–5; in First Philosophy 33–4, 92–3, 140, 143–4, 363–5 change: Heraclitean doctrine of 244, 275–9; as kinesis 327ff.; Milessus’ criticisms of 340; Parmenides’ critique 315–32, 338 and throughout chapter 7; ‘river’ of universal change 244, 259, 277, 278–9, 280–3; Zeno’s arguments against 340, see becoming, Parmenides, pluralism chaos 56; in Hesiod 49; in Presocratic philosophy 67 China/ancient Chinese civilization 103, 124–5, 127–8 Chios (in Ionia) 90, 91, 105 chora, in Plato’s Timaeus 49, 56 ciphers (in Jaspers) 323, 415n12; see icon city (polis): agrarian character of ancient city; division of labour in the city 84 civilization(s) 102, passim; civilizing process 160–3, 231–2 classical: philosophy 2, 296–7;

philology 10–11; reflexivity Introduction and throughout Clazomenae 78, 105, 111, 365 Cnidos 119 coinage 114–18; see also exchange, money Cologne 105 colonization (ancient Greek) 78–9, 80– 2, 111 Colophon 78, 105, 111, 285, 286 commodification 112–13; and alienable property 113–14; commodity form 113–18 concrete 141, 176, 198; and analytic 101–2, 141–2, 198–9; universal 101, 146, 204, 287–8; condensation and rarefaction 175, 176, 179–80, 183–4, 186, 188, 338, 374; see Anaximenes configurational: analysis 78; paradigm 23–4, 114–15, 242–3, 263–4; theories (of culture) 17–27, 131–2; see logological investigations conflict 114, 263–5 consciousness and Being 229–330 contemplative ethos (of Classical Greece) 123–30; see theoria contextual(ism) 30–1 Cordoba 105 Corinth 105, 108; as commercial city 113, 117 cosmic cycles 175–6, 357–9, 361–2; process 163–6; transformations 236, 357, 360–2; see vortex cosmogony: in Anaximander’s Peri Phusis 138, 146–7, 161, 163–6; in Anaximenes’ Peri Phusis 175–80; Pythagorean number cosmogony 200–1, 201–8 cosmological theorizing 166–71; see cosmology cosmology 61–2, 85–6, 90–1, throughout chapter 2; Anaximander’s 155–63, 163–6; social construction of 132–5 and throughout chapters 2–4; see Ionian philosophy, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Thales cosmos, kosmos 3, 41–5; see kosmos critical rationalism 82, whole of chapter 2 critique: in Heraclitus 236–40; in Xenophanes 236, 239, 285–6, 287, 288–91; of knowledge/critique of society 289–91

505

SUBJECT INDEX

Croton (or Crotona) 105, 190, 191, 192, 193, 195 culture 3–4, 24–7; of critical discourse 82, 174, 236–40, 285; high culture 5–7 Cynic, Cynics, cynical, cynicism 130, 390 dark age 109 decad 199–200, 204–5 deconstruction 153–4, 257–8, 266–7, 276 and passim; of Parmenides’ poem on Being 300–12, 315, 316– 32; of the pluralists 353; Xenophanes ‘deconstruction’ of Homeric tradition 287–91, 292–3; Zeno’s elenchos 342–8; see Apeiron, Xenophanes definition, formal 223, 224, 320 Delian League 133 Delphi 262 demiurge: in Plato 51–9, 202, 372, 376, 388 demonstration (apodeixis) 227; see axiomatization dialectic(s): Hegelian 170, 280–3; Heraclitean 241, 263–7, 280–3; Marxist 114–15, 281; Platonic 68, 248, 344 dialectical: image 264–5; perspective 36–9, 257–8, 350–1 and throughout chapter 7; reasoning/argument 68, 341–2, 343, 349–51; thinking 68, 264–7, 343–8; see also dialectics, iconicism dialectical form of life: in Plato 344; in Socrates 248, 344; in Zeno 341–8 dialogue 30–1, 37–8, 41, 280, 323–4, 325; see reflexive discourse dialogue form (in reflexive investigations) 22–3, 31, 280–3, 323–6; see also logological investigations difference: in Aristotle 321; in Empedocles 358–9; in Heraclitus 263–7, and throughout chapter 6; in Parmenides 297, 300–12, 313–32, 323, and throughout chapter 7; in Plato 321; in Xenophanes 287, 288– 91; in Zeno 341–8 differentiation 99–100; cosmic 165–5, 166, 187–8 dike (justice) 42, 47, 60; in Anaximander’s cosmology 68, 141–

2, 156–7, 157–63; in Heraclitus 235; in Hesiod 141; in Homer 158– 9; origin of the idea of natural law 121–2, 141, 144, 158–63, 166, 416n18; in Parmenides 302–3, 304– 5, 307–8, 311–12; in Pindar 158, 159; of Zeus 47–8 discourse: 4; analysis 141–55; dominant 235, 236–7; formation 4–5, 20–3, 35–6, 103–4, 141–55, 174, 212–4, 353; reflexive 72–4, 79–80, 236–40; theoretical 34–6; see philosophy, reflection, reflexivity, theoria discursive matrix 31–2 divine law: in Anaximander 141–2, 144, 416n18; in Heraclitus’ Logos doctrine 49, 235; in Plato 49–51; in Presocratic thought 49–50, 60–5; according to Socrates 51; in Sophocles’ Antigone; see also God, kosmos, logos Dorian Greeks (‘Dorians’) 80, 105–6 doxa 80, 88–9, 90–1, 100–1, 213, 285, 290, 309–10, 326–7, 341–2 doxography, doxographers 97, 99, 138, 177, 355 dualism: in Anaxagoras 376–7; digitalization of nature 227–8, 350– 1 and throughout chapters 7 and 8; metaphysical 352–3; Pythagorean 204–5, 206–8, 229–30, 352–3; duality 195–6, 376–7; see opposites dyad 197–8, 204–6 earth: Gaia, Ur-erde 143, 153, 185; as arche: 49, 143; circular motion 197, 200; circular rotation 163, 195; counter-earth 197, 199–200; cylindrical 138, 163–1; floating 97– 8, 119; spherical 138, 163, 195; unlimited or boundless 49, 153 Egypt: Pythagoras and 87–8, 189; Thales’visit to 87, 88, 110–11 Egyptian: civilization 81, 87–9, 103, 120, 134–5; hieroglyphics 120, 124, 126; origins of geometry, mathematics, philosophy 87–9; ‘practical geometry’ 88–9, 92, 116, 123–4, 125, 135; and Phoenicia 108, 109; thanatonic religion 135 Elea 105, 109, 285, 296, 378 Eleatics (Eleatic philosophers) 65,

506

SUBJECT INDEX

284ff., 285, 341–9, 352–3, 368, 380, 385, 392 element(s) (ta stoikheta) 143–4, 154–5, 415n16; opposing 157, 162–3, 165– 6, 355, 358–9, 360–1, 369–72; see arche, opposites elements, the four Presocratic 146, 175–6, 183, 185, 210, 276–7, 355, 358–9, 360–1 enlightenment, the Greek 141, 236, 296, 349–50, 366, 380, 388 Ephesus 78, 80, 85, 90, 105, 111, 234, 237, 280 epic form/tradition 90, 133, 153, 185, 231, 287, 303, 310–12 episteme 60–1, 72–3, 227, 230, 290–1, 357, 360 epistemic: claim 174; criteria 72–4; see also universality epoch of the Logos 59–61 and passim epochal history 18–19 equivalence relations 114–18, 127; see money eros 278–9, 301, 310, 361–2 essence: Aristotle on ousia 93–4, 151, 389; Plato on 151, 389 essence and existence 93, 151, 244, 312–13 ethics: ancient Greek 224–5, 226 ethos 46 Euclidean geometry 119, 209, 223, 227, 319–20, 350 Europe: the ideological construction of 103 European culture/civilization: Introduction, and passim, esp. 103ff.; theorizing 280 evolution: Anaximander’s anticipation of evolutionary ideas 164–5; in Empedocles 362 evolutionary theory 164 exchange: and abstraction 113 and passim; and existence in Heraclitus 265–7; monetary 112–13; as philosophical model 112; principle of 112; relation(s); and social change 114–15, 127 exchange value (and use value): in Aristotle’s economic thought; in ancient economies 112–18; in Athenian economy; in Marxist theory 114–15, 409n32; see also money, technology of reflection

explanation 176, 179–80, 248–50 final cause 37, 148; rejected by Democritus 386, 387–8; see causation finite and infinite: in Anaximenes’ philosophy 174; Aristotle’s critical analysis 167–8; in Melissus 336 fire: in Anaximenes 182, 185; Aristotle on 359; in Democritus’ theory of the soul 386–7; Empedocles 359; in Heraclitus’ cosmology 146, 183, 235, 246, 259, 266, 275, 276–9; Prometheus’ theft of 161–2, 277 first philosophy 32, 34, 38–9 Florence 105 form (eidos): abstract 200, 232–3; aesthetic 200; ideal 200; perfect 200; Platonic 202, 213, 233, 313, 322, 389; pure 233; static 210; visual 210–11; see videology form and being 200 form and essence 210, 233 form and matter 204, 363–5 form and substance 204 fossils: in Presocratic philosophy 164– 5, 291 four causes 37–8, 151–3, 363–5 freedom: in Greek thought 102–3 freedom of speech: in ancient Ionia 81–2; and speculative thought 80–1, 102; see also cosmology, Ionia, philosophy games (Olympic): criticized by Xenophanes 288, 289–91 genealogical: history 19, 131–2; method(s) 2–4, 19–20; as selfanalysis 30 geography (physical geography founded by Anaximander) 137–8 geometrical imagination 209–14; see also geometry, videology geometry (geometria): Anaximandrian 138; object of 87, 125; origins of 87–9; universal nature of early Greek 87 German Idealism 6–7 gifts: exchange in ancient Greece 410n34; and the origin of money 410n34 God: Aristotle on 32–6, 145, 221; as aitia 33; as arche 33, 145–6; in Anaximander 418–19n29; in Anaximenes 182; in Diogenes of

507

SUBJECT INDEX

Apollonia 182; in Empedocles 362, 363; Heraclitus on 235, 242–3, 246–7; Plato on 51–9, 221; selfreflexive 293; Socrates on 51–2; Thales on 86, 95–8; unmoved mover (Aristotle) 53–4, 293, 372, 376; Xenophanes’ concept of 82, 285, 286, 289–91, 292–3 goddess of truth 301–12 gods: Heraclitus’ critique of 236–40; in Hesiod 140; Homeric 93; Thales’ critique of 95–8, 294; Xenophanes’ critique of 82, 239, 286, 287, 288– 91, 292 gold: in Heraclitus’ theory of exchange 112, 265–6; see also commodity, exchange value, money Good, the idea of (in Plato) 54–9, 153, 221, 361 grammar: in logological investigations 51–2, 54–5; in philosophy 209–14, 315–32, 326–32 grammatical mistakes 327–32, 334–5, 349–50 Greece: as an aesthetic ideal 5–7; ancient; archaic 2–3, 29; classical 288–91, 354 Greek: alphabet; culture—Xenophanes critique of 288–91; grammar 316– 32; philosophy 2–3, 8–9, 390–1; and throughout volume 3 Halicarnassus (in ancient Caria) 89, 108 (h)armonie/(h)armonia 47, 200; in Heraclitus 260–1, 263–7; mathematical 200–8; see Pythagoreans Hebrew confederation/traditions 109, 110 heliocentrism 197, 200, 224 Hellenic culture 2–3, 288–91 Hellenic paradigm 5–7, 8–10 Hellenism 6–7, 290–1 hermeneutical consciousness 259–60 Hermes 214 Hiram of Tyre 90 (h)istoria (Ionian ‘inquiry’) 139, 195, 238, 291–2, 294–5, 324–5, 413– 14n4 history of ideas 8–10 history of philosophy 10–11,

throughout Introduction and subsequent chapters Hittites 108–9 Homeric culture 89–90, 93, 114, 135, 229, 231; Heraclitus’ critique of 236–40; Xenophanes’ critique of 239, 286, 287, 288, 289–91 Homeric Hymns 33 homoeomeries (in Anaxagoras) 369–72 horizon of Being 92, 240–1, 415n12; see also cosmology, Being, the Whole hubris 152–3, 162–3, 270, 279, 304 hule (or hyle) 204, 363–5; see matter hylomorphism 49, 168, 214 hylözoism: in Thales 95–8, 102, 144, 277 hypokeimenon 94–5, 167–8, 359, 364– 5 icon 50, 61; concrete universal 101–2, 257–67; deconstructive nature 153– 4; and metaphor 62, 93, 97, 142, 182–4, 184–8, 242–3, 243–50, 257, 258, 276–9, 285, 306, 311–12, 329–32; and predication 319–26, 326, 327, 328–32, 323–6 iconicism (of Presocratic thought) 61–2, 72–4, 93–4, 97–8, 146; in Anaximenes’ text 182–4, 185–8; Anaximenes’ criticism of 172–4; in Anaximander’s cosmological thought 142–55, 153–5, 165–6; in Empedocles 184; in Heraclitus 184, 240–1, 242–50, 256–67; in Parmenides’ ontological poem 300– 12, 314–15, 319–32; in Thalean praxis 98–102, 184; in Xenophanes’ philosophical poetry 287–8, 292, 294–5 iconic logic 319–32; and predicative logic 324–6; and reflexivity 319–20, 322–3; see reflexivity ignorance: and self-knowledge 259–60, 290–2; in Heraclitus 159–60, 267– 75, 273–4; struggle against 273–5; unacknowledged 274; in Xenophanes 290, 291–3, 294–5 imagined community 2, 5–6, 289–91 imaginary institution 23, 119, 289 immortality of the soul: in Pythagoras 216–18, 219 Inca civilization 128

508

SUBJECT INDEX

Indo-European language 59–60, 127, 330–1; Indo-European people 127 Indian mathematics 103, 212 individualism: ancient 114–18, 133 individualization 115–16; see money, social differentiation infinite: air 174, 175–6, 182; ‘seeds’ in Anaxagoras cosmology 368–72; worlds 165–6, 167, 168–9, 383, 394; see Anaximander, Anaximenes, kosmos infinity: actual and potential 347–8; Aristotle’s analysis 167–8, 346–8; in Melissus’ cosmology 336, 337–40; in Zeno 343–8; see Apeiron, aporia infinite continuum 343–8 infinite regress 167, 344–8 infinite universe (Melissus) 336, 339– 40 infinite worlds (in Atomism) 383, 384, 389, 391, 392 information technologies: 103 injustice: in Anaximander’s cosmogony 139–40, 141–2, 155–6, 156–63 institution(s): social 132–5; of reflexivity 22–3, 26–7, 122–30, 130–2 institutionalization 132–5 institutional practices 25–7, and throughout intellect 290–1, 312–13, 357, 373–7 intellectualism 119 intellectuals: 119; Gramscian theory of 120–1; marginal 125–30, 286–7; movement 129–32; organic/ traditional 120–1; topic of comparative sociology of knowledge 126–30 intelligible world 198–9, 271 intertextuality 257–8, 259–60, 264–7 Ionia 40, 57; birthplace of Homer 89– 90; in the seventh and sixth century 78–82, 89–90, 235–6 Ionian league 81, 133 Ionians 41, 71 and passim; as engineers and technologists 78; colonial adventures 109–10; as philosopherscientists 78; as reflexive theorists 99–100 Ionian: cosmology 37, 45, 75 and passim; discovery of the cosmos 61– 5, chapter 2; naturalism 388; philosophy 37; ‘risk culture’ 125;

speculative theorizing 71–1, 80–1, 87–9, 125–6; technological achievements 78, 90, 113–14; as a trading civilization 78–81; urban economy 105–7 Italy/Italian city states 83, 103, 106, 109, 354; and the Eleatic school 285, 296, 354, and passim; and Pythagorean culture 189–90, 197, 238–9, 296, 354–5; see Eleatics, Pythagoreans judicial metaphors 121–2, 311–12; see ananke, dike kinds, natural 148, 383, 389; see also nature, phusis knowledge: 294–5; absolute 294–5, 295; and being 315–17, 318, 319– 32; and belief 301–12; of essence 312–13; as experience (Erfahrung) 295; as justified true belief 305; perceptual 312–13; Plato on 313; as revelation/disclosure 300–12; scientific 386–8; transcendental 313 kosmos: ancient meanings of the term 45–8; archaic conceptions of 41–5, 65–74; in Aristotle 45–51; as ‘beauty’, throughout chapter 1; as ‘being’ 65–71, 72; in Heraclitus 275–80; in Hesiod 42, 140; history of the term 41–59; in the Iliad 45–6, 402n4; in Ionian cosmology 75–6, 85–6, throughout chapter 2; as living organism 51–2, 56–7; in the Odyssey 45–6, 402n4; Homeric 42; as living 96–8; as logos 199–200; as ‘physical universe’ 85–6, 121–2, 140; and Nous 372–7; and psyche 177–80; in Plato 49–50, 51–9, 373– 4; polysemic term 41–2; in Pythagorean thought 193, 198–9, 200–8, 315; and the soul 50–1, 91, 95–6; as a text 259–60; Thales’ discovery of 92; as ‘whole’ or ‘horizon of Being’ 65–74, 92–3, 153–5, 240–1; see also cosmology, the Whole labour, manual and intellectual 102–3, 119, 125–6 language: as articulation 319–20; and ‘being’ 315, 316–17, 319–20; 509

SUBJECT INDEX

complexity of 327–32; and the ‘copula’ 315–16, 319, 327–8; and logos 319, 327ff.; and negative predication 319–20; and predication 315, 316, 317–18, 319, 326–7; subject and object structure 315–16, 318, 319; tenseless 316; see logos law: and the walls of the polis 47, 261; Athenian 159–60; city 159–60; divine 158–61; human 160–1; and order 47, 50, 59, 158–63, 261, 403n12, 416n18; origins 160–1; rule of 161, passim laws of nature 141, 160–1, 176, 386, 387–8, 416n18; see Atomism, nature, physical science library: Alexandrian 130, 412n47; private libraries 130; as reflexive institution/technology 130 life: ancient concepts of 183; as fire 275–9; as psyche 182–3; see also Anaximenes, fire, Thales, psyche, life-world 228, 334, 392 light 275–9, 301–12; see fire limit (peiras) 195; and limitlessness 69, 195–6, 206–7; see Pythagoreans literacy 119–20, 123–30 literary 89–90, 103–4, 287 logic: Aristotelian 249, 299; Aristotle’s creation 299, 324–5, 350–1; dialectical 249; formal 299, 325; iconic 319–26, 324–5; as logos 248– 50, 325; modern 350–1; origin of 249; and Parmenides 318, 319, 320–32, 333–5; symbolic 350; transcendental 317–18, 324–5, 326 logical identity 299 logical turn in Greek thought 249–50, 317–18 logocentrism: deconstruction of (Derrida) 404n18; and patriarchy; in Western philosophy 63–4; in Western thought 404n18; and Western reason 72; throughout the text logological: analysis 2–3, 25–7, 31–2, 131–2; form of life 129 and throughout the work; matrix 129, 174, 212–13, 259–60; methodology 141–2, 258; self-reflexive (logos on logos) 242, 257, 258–67, 319–26 Logological Investigations, Volumes 1 and 2:1–2, 28, 37, 40, 44, 46, 48,

89, 142, 178, 183, 229, 231, 289, 400n32; Volume 4 349 logos 3, 25–7; in Anaximenes 175–6; celebration of 3, 61; common 186, 237; divine 49–50, 56; and kosmos 41, 49, 50, 51–9, 65–7, 70–1, 72; as ground of all discourse 64, 72, 259; in Heraclitus 163, 185, 235–6, 237; as ordering law of phusis 64, 93–4, 141, 162–3, 235; and predication 315–18; in Pythagorean cosmology 198–9, 200, 200–8, 223–6; as rational speech or reason 61–5, 72– 4, 129–30; see also Heraclitus, Plato, Pythagoreans, Thales Logos (in Heraclitus) 237–8, 248–50, 250–6; analysis of the term ‘logos’ 243–7, 248–50, 259–60; asleep to 242, 243, 273–5; as common or universal 240, 242–3; as ‘cosmic law’ 244, 251–2; as discourse 313; as divine horizon 238, 240, 242–3, 246–7; eternal 242–3, 244; failure to comprehend 238–9, 242–3; gathering or configurating 242–3, 245; hidden 234, 240, 260–1; as ethos 238; governing/steering 242–3, 247; as invisible 242–3; as measure 245–6; and nous 238, 269–75; private understanding of 243; and the psyche or soul 243, 267–75; and reflexivity 263–7; as revealing all things 242; source of intelligibility 259, 267, 271; as truth or true being 238; and understanding 271–5; as a unity 245, 270–1, 272–3; and wisdom 238, 270–5; and Zeus 240, 244, 273 Logos, the (in Christian theology) 250, 402n6 Lyceum 30, 35–6, 37, 130, 149, 154, 220, 276, 336; see Aristotle Lydia 81, 86, 87–8; invention of money 107, 115, 116; and Ionian city-states 106–7, 111–12, 116 lyric poetry 81, 133, 240 lyrical reflexivity 133, 240 magic: absence of magic in early Greek culture 88–9, 133; in Empedocles’ philosophy 354–5; as obstacle to theorizing 89, 125–6, 134–5

510

SUBJECT INDEX

magic and science 88–90, 113–14, 125– 30, 386–8 magnet(ism) 95, 96, 119; see Thales manifestation (ontological) 65–71, 149–50; essence of manifestation 244, 323–4; see aletheia, phusis maps 137; see Anaximander Marxism 169 Marxist perspective 114–18 market(s): see commodification, exchange material causes 37, 94–5, 140, 175–6, 363–4, 375–7, 378 material monism 94–5, 174, 175, 352, 375–7 mathematical knowledge/language 222 and of chapter 5 mathematics 49, 119, 196–7; Arabic 211–14; Indian 212; see Pythagoreans mathematization 201–8, 214, 222–9 matrix (generative framework of discourse) 174, 300–12; see discourse formation matter (hule): as evil (Plato) 230; in Aristotle 204–8, 214, 363–5 matter and form: Aristotle on 148, 204, 214, 230 May an civilization 128 mechanical explanation: in Anaximenes 173–4, 176; in Presocratics 113–14, 118; in Democritus 379–80, 385–8; in Greek philosophy 122–3; in Western culture 388–92 mechanism: in Anaxagoras 377; in Anaximenes’ Peri Phusis 173–4, 176, 178–9, 424–5n17; in ancient science 118–19, 137–8, 211–12, 386–8; in Atomism 377, 385, 386– 7; in Western thought 122–30, 211– 14, 388–92 mediation 264–5; see logos medicine 118, 132, 138; medical guilds 133; Pythagorean 195–6, 218–19; see Hippocrates medieval philosophy 169 Megara 105 Mesopotamia 81, 86–7, 103, 160; Hammurabic law codes 160; and Phoenicia 108 metaphysics: Aristotle on 33–7, 147, 166–9, 173, 350–1; grammar of 173; Greek origins of Western 3,

147–55, 285, 296; Heidegger on 149–50, 254–6; Parmenides contributions to 296, 319–32, 333– 5; Platonic 350–1 metempsychosis 214–19, 230; in Empedocles 355, 361–2; see psyche Milesian origins of philosophy 30, 73, 256, 285, 309, 352, 380 Milesians 30, 69, 73, 75–6 and throughout chapter 2; polemics in Milesian philosophy 171–4 Miletus 75–82, 90, 104, 105, 108, 117, 378; city of philosophy 79, 137, 141; as colonial power 106–7; critical geographical position 78–82, 110; cultural experimentation 110– 12; entrepôt 79–80, 82, 138; manufacturing economy 79–80, 110–12; ‘metropolis of Asia’ 79, 89, 138; origins 78–9; and the slave trade trade 85, 106, 107–8; and imperialism 78–82, 106; urbanization and civil engineering 110–11, 118–19 mimesis: in Aristotle 173; as copying 52, 247; Heraclitus’ metacritique 240; as imitation 52–3, 54–5; as representation 54; and literal discourse 173–4, 240; Xenophanes’ metacritique 288–91 mind: Anaxagoras on 293, 373–7; in Hegel 377; as nous 98–102, 313, 368, 372–7, 386; in Xenophanes 289–91, 293, 294–5 Minoan civilization 134 modern age 171 modernity 3–4; Greek origins of 5–7, 78, 332–5 Mohenjo-Daro 103 Moira (‘Fate’) 162 moist (to hugron) see Thales monad(s) 197–8, 204–6; see the One money: in the ancient world 84, 112– 13, 113–17; as generalized medium of exchange 115, 132, 233; as medium of reflexivity 112–18; and mercantile capitalism 113, 132; monetarization 135 money economy 82–5, 112–17; and the growth of the polis system 116–17, 135 money-form 84–5, 132; and abstract thought 112–13, 232–3; cultural

511

SUBJECT INDEX

functions of 112–18; and mathematization 232–3; as technology of reflection 112–13, 232–3; see also exchange, mathematization, Pythagoreans, universal monism 94–5 monologue 325; see dialogue, iconic logic moral law 158–63 motion (kinesis): Aristotle on 95; criterion of living beings 97; at a distance 97; eternal; local; magnetic 97–8; Zeno’s paradoxes of 341–8 Muses, the 143, 231–2, 301, 310, 357 music: 199; number as music of the cosmos 199–200, 225; music of the spheres 200–1, 225–6; basis of the mathematical curriculum 200–1; mousike 229, 231–2 musical instruments 201 muthos 240 Mycenaean civilization 80 mythic world view 5, 142, 185 mythopoiesis 40 and passim, 142 ‘Mythos to Logos’ 5, 25–6, 37–8, 240 naturalism: ancient naturalism/ physicalism 173–4, 291, 365–7, 367–72, 379–80; see Anaxagoras, Anaximenes, Xenophanes natural knowledge 289, 291 natural philosophy (ancient physics) 146–7, 151, 167–8, 168–9, 171–4, 174–5, 291, 365–7, 388–9 natural theology 34, 36, 286, 291–3, 294, 414n8 natura 147–8 nature (phusis): Anaxagoras on 367– 72; Anaximander on 137, 147–55, passim; Aristotle on 29, 143–4, 147; being of 96–8; Heidegger on; Presocratic doctrines of 60, 140–55; human 287, 288–91; Simplicius on 139–40; Thales on 92–8, 101–2; as reflexive (see throughout chapters 6 and 7); Xenophanes on 291 Neoplatonism 190; Christian 191, 214, 300, 377 Neopythagoreanism 190, 191, 210, 213 night 302–3; night and day 302–4, 310–11

nomos 42, 48, 151–3, 158, 166, 258, 261; see dike non-being 69–71, 146–7, 297, 298, 302, 312–13, 317, 378, 380; see Parmenides non-existence 297–300, 312 nous/noesis: in Anaximenes 181 and throughout chapter 4; in Anaxagoras 34, 67, 186, 247, 286, 293, 314, 365, 366–7, 368, 371, 372–7, 385, 395; in Aristotle 56, 312, 374; in Empedocles 356–7, 363; in Heraclitus 238–9; as Mind 186, 286; in Parmenides 326–32; in Plato 56, 312, 313; in Pythagorean psychology 214–16; in Thales 98– 102, 239; in Xenophanes 293, 294 number 189, 198–9; asarche 199–200; atomism 203, 352–3; as ousiae or substances 202–3, 223–4 number ontology 197–208, 223–4, 225; see also Pythagoreans objectivism 173 objectivity 173–4, 386–8 Odysseus 82 Odyssey (Homer) 82 Okeanos 93, 185, 302 One, the (to hen, in Presocratic thought) 63–5, 74, 85–6, 153, 245– 7; eternal 297; as infinite in Melissus’ ontology 337–40; in Parmenides 297, 297–300, 320–3, 323–32, 353; in Pythagorean cosmology 201–8; timeless/tenseless 297; in Xenophanes’ natural theology 292–3, 294; in Zeno 342–3 One and the Many 65, 67–9, 69–71; in Anaximenes 177–8; in Atomism 388–9; dialectic of 68, 74; in Diogenes of Apollonia’s cosmology 99; in Empedocles 361–2; in Heraclitus 246–7 and throughout chapter 6; in Parmenides 320–32 and throughout chapter 7; political origins 122; in Thales’ cosmology 92–4; in Zeno 340 One in the Many 93–4, 177, 185–8, 297, 321–2 ontic/ontological 65, 66–7 ontological difference 69, 150 ontology: ancient 66–74, 285, 291–3; foundations of 296–300, 317–18; 512

SUBJECT INDEX

medieval 169; Parmenides’ 285, 293–4, 296, 300–10, 312; Platonic 318 ontotheology 312; see the Whole opposites: in Alcmaeon 195–6; in Aristotle 196, 247, 363–5; asymmetrical 162–3; binary 157, 165–6; dialectical 157; in Empedocles 184, 355–6, 357–61, 362, 363–5; in Heraclitus 239, 244, 261, 263–7; governed by dike (justice) 157–63; Parmenides’ criticism 309–10; Pythagorean table of 195, 206–8; source of change and transformations 165–6; strife of 165, 355–6; unequal; unity of opposites in Empedocles 362, 363; unity of opposites in Heraclitus 260–1, 263–7; table of opposites in Heraclitus, 263–5 optics 228–9 ordinary language 320, 324–6 organic analogy 51 original and copies 247; see mimesis Orphic cosmology 185, 201, 220, 297, 354–5 Orphic mysteries/religion 217–18, 229, 237, 311, 355 Orphism 237, 310 ‘overcoming metaphysics’ (Heidegger) 150 Oxford 105 paideia 236 Pan-Hellenism 111, 133, 289–91 paradigm shift in Presocratic thought 141 paradox: in Anaximander’s Apeiron doctrine 153–4, 166–7; in Heraclitus’ thought 241, 242–3, 244–50, 256–67; in Zeno 341–8; see contradiction, icon, elenchus, aporia Paris 105 particularity 97–8; see universal(s) Pergamon (Pergamum) 105 Peri Phusis (‘On Nature’): Anaxagoras’ 366; Anaximander’s 137, 138, 139, 161, 172, 235, 336, 414n7; Anaximenes’ 174, 235; Diogenes of Apollonia’s 142; Empedocles’ 139, 354, 357; Heraclitus’ 234–5, 236, 242–3, 250–1, 257–67, 280;

Melissus’ 336; Parmenides’ 139, 296, 300–12; Xenophanes’ 286 Periclean Age 160, 367 Periclean Athens 160–1, 366 Persia 82–3, 85, 86, 106, 115; destruction of Miletus 83, 105, 118– 19, 234; threat to Athens and the West 83, 111–12; Wars 83, 90, 236, 285 person: legal contexts 152–3 phainesthai 42, 45, 70, 149–50 phainomenai 42, 70–1, 150 phenomenological character of Presocratic thought 67–71 Philia 74; see also philosophy, theoria philosopher-kings 190, 191, 225–6 philosopher-poets 290, and throughout chapter 7 philosophia 29–30, 54–5, 56, 65–71, 73–4, 95, 192; Pythagorean origins 194, 198, 220; and the three lives 219–21; see Pythagoreans philosophia perennis as revolutionary discourse 74 philosophical: abstraction 141, 142, 143–55; inquiry 236, 291–2; movement 130–2; poem 63; schools 129–32, 133, 192; sites 129–30; theology 34, 414n8 philosophy: Aristotelian 173–4; Pythagorean 26; as technique of selfinquiry 215; as therapy 217–18; transcendental 73–4; as a way of life 66–7, 217–18; see also theoria philosophy of consciousness 186–8 Phocaea 81, 105, 109; see Ionia Phoenicia 87–8, 107–9 Phoenician: alphabet 89–90, 107–8, 119–21; civilization 81, 87, 90; colonial ventures 107; decline 408n22; élites 108–9; entrepreneurial -speculative spirit 107–8; mercantile trade and commerce 85, 107–8, 89–90, 132; technology 90, 107; this-worldly world-view 107; use of coined money 107 phonetic alphabet 120–1, 124, 133, 232–3; see alphabet, writing phusikoi (or phusiologoi) 75–6 and throughout chapter 2 phusis (in Presocratic thought) 29, 43– 5, 59–60, 67, 147–51; as birth,

513

SUBJECT INDEX

growth, development, bringing-forth 29, 69–70, 94, 147–8; discovery of 75, 78, throughout chapter 2; as dwelling 148–9; in Anaximander’s cosmology 141–2, 142–55; as essence of manifestation 67–71; explanations of 29; as genesis 147– 8; as manifestation 149–50; as nature or the physical world 61–2, 75, 139–40; laws of 68–9, 141–2, 143–4, 160–1, 176; philosophy of 78; as sacred life 97–8, 98–102; as social origins 148–9; as substance 148–9 physicalism: in Anaximenes 175–6; in Leucippus and Democritus 381–8 physics/physical science 99–100, 102, 141, 146–7, 151–3; Anaxagorean 365–7; Anaximenean 173–4, 175–6; Aristotelian 167–8; Atomic 386–8; Epicurean 168–9 pluralism (pluralist metaphysics) 297, 338, 352, 353, 391, and throughout chapter 8; see atomism plurality 321–3, 327–8, 340, 343–8 and throughout chapter 8; of worlds 380, 389 pneuma 172, 175, 179–80, 185–8 pneumatology 172, 186; and throughout chapter 4 poetry in Parmenides 297, 300–10, 310, 311–12 poiesis 40; Homeric 66 polemic 236–40, 341–3; see critique, Heraclitus polemos (in Heraclitus) 236–40, 257, 259, 278–9 polis (city-state) 3, 26–7, 46–7, 52, 102–3; democratic 120–1, 132, 158–9; economic preconditions 116–18; games 289–90; and the literary revolution 159–63; and logos 261; as source of cosmological imagery 122, 144–55; steering the 144–5; transcendental conception of 74; truthful 74; and wisdom 290–1 post-Parmenidean systems 353; see pluralism practical wisdom (phronesis) 267–8 praxis 90; see semiopraxis presence: and re-presentation; in Presocratic thought 69–71, 150, 315–32; in Western metaphysics

150–1, 298–300, 307–8, 308–12, 316, 330–1 Presence (Präsenz) 70–1, 150, 316, 331 Presocratic philosophy Introduction, 28–31 and passim Presocratic reflexivity 2–3, 39–40, 122– 3, 129–30, 250–6, 256–67, 373–7 Presocratic inquiry (istoria) 139, 195, 238, 291–2, 388, 414n4 Presocratics 39–40, 61–5, 379, and passim presuppositions (deep rules) 174, 213, 300–12, 312–32; and reflexive speech 323–6; see also iconicism, logological investigations, matrix priesthood 102, 120; absent in Greece 133; in ancient Egypt 123–4 problem, problematics 24–5, 30–1, 352–3; Anaximander’s problematic 142–55, 413–14n4; of the Atomists 386–92 and throughout chapter 8; dialogic 30; Melissus’ 336–7; Parmenides’ 146–7, 323–32; Thales’ problematic context 92–8, 142; Zeno’s problematic context 341–3; see also context, dialogue, logological investigations problematic situation/context 31–2, 142–55 process philosophy 241, 265–7, 275–9, 280–3 Prometheus 152, 161–2 prose style of Anaximenes 172–4, 235 protophysics: in Anaximenes 186–8 and throughout chapter 4; see quantity, physical science psyche 44, 48, 50, 55–6, 178; in Anaximenes’ cosmology 176, 177– 80; as breath-soul 183–4; in Heraclitus 267–75, 324; immaterial 215; immortal 215, 216–18; and intellect 357; and the kosmos 267– 75, 363; and logos 268–75, 312–13; as material process 386–8, 389; and music 200–1; principle of life and motion 95–6, 182, 183; Pythagorean view of 214–19; reflexive nature 98– 9, 184–8, 241, 267–75, 357, 363; structure of the psyche 214–16, 271–3; and the sacred logos 64–5, 357; see also kosmos pure reason 300–10, 311–312, 313, 315–32 514

SUBJECT INDEX

pure reflection 313, 320, and passim pure reflexivity 320 Pythagorean: asceticism 191, 193; prohibitions 193–4, 210–11, 426n9; cosmology 52, 57, 178, 187, 309; communities 29, 47, 50, 56, 133, 191–2, 238; form of life 189–90, 191 and throughout chapter 5, 238; influence on Platonism 191, 192, 226–9; initiation ceremonies 191–2, 305; logos 198; mathematics 197– 208, 209–14, 222–3, 223, 285, 326; number metaphysics 198–9, 200, 201–8, 223–6, 297, 342, 344, 345, 352, 381; Order or brotherhood 189–90, 268, 354; ideology 190–1, 192–3, 226–9; politics 190, 192–4, 219; teaching practices 201; vegetarianism 217, 427–8n25; vision or world-view 221–9, 229–33, 354– 5 Pythagoreans 26, 48, 49, 59, 65, 69, 87–8, 193, 194–7, 275; Aristotle on 190, 191, 200–4, 204–8, 219; later 194–7 quadrivium 196–7, 200–1; see Archytas, Philolaus quantity/quantitative (to poson) 175, 179, 186–7, 209, 209–14, 425n20 question(s) 93–4, 95–8, 139, 174; questioning and dialogue 325 question-frame 93–8, 99–100, 139–40, 146, 168, 174, 323 quotation (citation or embedded texts) 139–40, 177–8; see Presocratics and chapter 1 radical reflexivity 70–1, 184–8; see reflexivity rainbow, explained naturalistically by Xenophanes 246, 288 ratio 248–50; see logos rational part of the soul 249; throughout chapter 6 rational inquiry 173–4, 291; reconstruction 12–13, 336 rationalism 40, 171–4, 178–9 rationality/rational speech 65–74, 171– 4 rationalization: in the ancient Ionian economy 81–5; of experience 40, 155; of life-spheres 40; and

modernity/modern European society 126–7; obstacles to 124–30; and reason 40; and science 126–7, 386–8 Reality, absolute (Being) 66–7, 285, 309–10, 313–14, 316–17, 320, 339– 40, 357 reason 38; absolute 314; 315–17, 320; belief 301, 320; commonsense or mundane 320, 324–6, 341–3, 343– 8; community of 72–3, 74; critical 72–4, 97–8, 288–91, 342–3; as faculty 249, 290–1; as form of life 72–4, 290–1; and unreason 290–1; see also philosophy, theoria reasons 38, 67, 97–8 reasoning 92–8, esp. 97–8 reference 154; paradox of ontological 166–7, 323–6, 419n30; see also iconicism, Parmenides referential function of language 154–5 reflective intelligence 123, 237, 238–9; obstacles to 274–5 reflexive attitude 123, 323–6, passim reflexive cosmos 263–7; see logos reflexive discourse/language 257–67, 320–3, 323–6, 331–2; see iconicism reflexiveness 123, 238, 241 reflexivity: in Anaxagoras 373–7; in Anaximenes’ cosmology 184–8; ancient Greek 2–3, 69–70, 71–4, 184–5, 185–8, 350–1; centrality of 187–8; culture of 289–91; defined; distinguished from reflection and learning 238–9; in Heraclitus 238, 241, 256–67, and throughout chapter 6; linguistic preconditions 212; literary/linguistic 119–21, 256– 67, passim, 287–8, 350; logical 341– 2, 343–8, 349–50, 350–1; in Parmenides 319–26 and/passim; speculative 220–1, 257, 350–1; Thalean 98–102; tradition of 188; Xenophanic 287, 288–91; in Zeno 341–8; see also kosmos, psyche, soul reflexivities 212, 324–5 relations (reflexive) 264 rhetoric and argument 144–55, 315ff., 319–20, 320–32 rhetorics of reflection/reflexivity 29–30, 33–4, 42, 145–55, 160–3, 215–16, 216–19, 229, 312–13, 316–17, Rhodes 105, 106, 354

515

SUBJECT INDEX

rhythm: in ancient cosmology 59–60; in Pythagorean philosophy 47 rhyzomata (‘roots’): configuration of 359; criticized by Anaxagoras 368– 9, 369–72; in Empedocles 355, 356, 358–9, 363–5; governed by logos 359; see element right order 59–60 Roman: empire 103, 105, 144; hegemony 145 Romantic myths of ancient Greece 5–7 Samos 78, 80, 85, 105, 111, 118, 189, 233, 336 Sardis (in ancient Persia) 86, 136, 172 sceptical attitude 291–2, 367–8, 379 scepticism (skepticism): ancient 351, 377, 380; modern Sceptics 334, 390 science: of existence (Being) 62; of nature 75, 141, 173–4, 386–8; see phusis; of wisdom 62, 65–74, 94–5; see philosophia scientific prose 173–4 scribal caste(s) 123–4, 135 scribal literacy 123, passim scribes: Egyptian 124–6; Sumerian 125–6 Scythian culture 81 self: and discourse 159–62, 355; reflexive 215, 268, 269–70, 270–5, 282–3 self-consciousness 159–60, 268–75; self-formation 160, 258, 268–75; self-investigation 268, 283; selfreflection 102, 229, 241; selfknowledge 259–61, 268–75 self-knowledge: in Aristotle 221; in Heraclitus 241, 268–75; obstacles to 273–5; in Plato 220–1; in Socrates 221; in Thales 98–102 self-reference 323–6 self-reflexivity: 98–102, 221, 229, 255– 6, 268–71, 355, 373–7 self-transformation 295 selfhood: history of 25–7; social construction of the self 26–7 semiopraxis 3–4, 258, passim sensation(s) 383–4 sense-perception (aisthesis) 356–7 senses: the 356, 384; limits of throughout chapters 6 and 7, 356–7, 358–9, 365, 379, 383–4; primary

and secondary qualities 383–4, 389– 90 seven sages (of ancient Greece) 75–6, 110 Sicily 194, 360; Empedocles in 354; Plato’s visits to 194; Xenophanes links to 285 Sidon (in ancient Phoenicia) 89, 108 slave trade 85, 107–8 slavery: ancient debt slavery 115 social change 114–18 social classes 102, 113–15 social differentiation 79–80, 102–3, 112–13 social institutions 132–5 sociology: of culture 13, 127; Durkheimian 13–14; generic 14; of knowledge 13–14, 123–30; of mathematics 428–9n36; throughout chapter 5; Marxist 13–14; of philosophy 13–17; Weberian 13, 16–17 Solomon 90 sophia: 65–74, 95, 220–1, 238, 240, 269–71, 272–5, 290, 428n31; see knowledge, philosophy, sophronein, wisdom, the Whole sophists/sophist movement 130, 145, 261, 286, 333, 341, 349, 351, 366, 367, 392 sophistical argument/treatises 341, 343–8 sophronos/sophronein 268, 269–71, 272; obstacles to 273–5 soul: in Anaxagoras; in Anaximenes 174, 177, 178–9, 183; in Aristotle 96, 186; Aristotle on; in Empedocles; in Heraclitus 251–2, 268–75; in Plato; in Socrates; in Thales’ world-view 95–8, 98–102; transmigration of (in Pythagorean thought) 216–19; see psyche, world soul soul/body dualism 215–16 Sparta 117, 137 Spartan: agrarian economy 117; constitution; culture, in the sixth century BC 117, 354; helotry 117; military 117–18; traditionalism 117 specular attitude 220–1, 312–13 speculation 80, 88–9, 110, 123–7, 125– 30; speculative ontology 220–1, 350–1, 415n12 and throughout

516

SUBJECT INDEX

chapters 7 and 8; see theory, theoretical knowledge, videology Sphere (of Being): in Atomism 50, 194– 5; in Empedocles 325–6, 358, 359– 61; in Heraclitus 50; in Melissus 336–7; in Parmenides 50, 194, 306, 309–12, 316–17, 320–2, 349; Pythagorean conception 194 spherical heaven (Aristotle) 63–4 Spirit (Geist) 6–7 stasis 47 state: bureacrats 134; control 133–4 Stoics 58, 130, 251, 351, 391 Strife (Neikos) in Empedocles 355, 358, 359–61 Strife and Friendship (Neikos and Philia) 355, 356, 357, 358–61, 361– 2, 385; Aristotle on 360–1 substance: hypokeimenon 93, 94, 338, 359, 364–5; as matter (hule) 93, 94, 143–4, 364; as ontological matrix 94, 153–4, 359; as ousia 93, 338, 364, 389; source of all multiplicity and differentiation 99–100, 143–4; as topic of First Philosophy (Ousiology) 143–4; see also arche, aitia, ontology Sumer 103 Susa 103 syllogistic reasoning 299 symholpoiesis: in logological investigations 212; see iconic logic Syracuse 105, 291, 354 techne (tekhne) 118–19 technique/technology of reflection 105, 110–12, 119–21, 209–14 technological imagination 114–18; and the money form 115–16, 132, 232– 3, 410n34 technology: ancient 112–18, 424–5n17; mechanical 112, 113–14, 122–3, 137–8; negative attitude toward 22– 12; technopoiesis 37, 112–13, 122–30 teleological: argument 148–9; discourse 149, 151, 376–7, 387, 417n26; explanation 149, 181, 365; metaphysics 140, 151–3; rejected by Anaximenes 181 and throughout chapter 4; rejected by Atomists 386– 8, 388–92; see Aristotle, Lyceum, Theophrastus

teleology 151, 181, 365, 376, 385–7, 387 Thebes (in Boeotia) 105, 117, 152; Pythagorean school in 194 themis 42, 47, 48, 60, 121–2, 151, 158, 159, 161–2, 166, 269–70, 302, 304; see aitia, dike, nomos themises 158–9 theology (ontotheology): Aristotelian 34–5, 36; Homeric 34; mythological 36; Parmenides 312, 315–32; Xenophanes’ 291–3 theoretical: accounts; attitude 3, 91–4, 123–4; experience; life 2–3; knowledge 38–9, 90–1, 315–32; objects 37–8, 316; reflection 316ff.; see reflection, reflexivity theoria/theorein: 29, 34; bios theoretikos as contemplative ideal 38, 50, 55, 123, 198, 220–1, 313; disinterestedness 90–1, 220; and philosophical attitude 50–1, 91, 96– 8, 123, 220, 316–17; visual paradigm 312–13; as a way of life 29, 51, 55–6, 60–1, 66–7, 72, 91, 305, 310–12; see also videology things (ta pragmata, ta onto) 312 thinking (to noein) 326–32 thinking and being 300–12, 326 thinking and logos 185, 300–12, 313 Thoth (Theuth): Egyptian God 88; inventor of writing and astronomy 88; patron of scribes 88; in the Phaedrus 88 thumos 214, 215–16, 301, 302 time in Anaximander’s cosmogony 160–3 Toledo 105 tragedy: ancient Greek 161–2, 162–3, 247, 267, 417–8n28 transcendence 101, 125–6, 153–5, 179, 310–12, 391, 415n12; of God 291– 3, 294, 304–5, 331–2, 335 transcendental arguments 317–19, 324–6 Trojan War 106 Troy 105 truth: absolute 315–17, 318–19, 335; as aletheia 65–74, 220, 300–12, 329–32; claims 324–6, 328–30; correspondence theory of 324–5, 332; existential 73–4, 328–30, 332; and illusion 356–7; and perception 517

SUBJECT INDEX

356–7; as telos 324–5, 326; and truths 319; ultimate 301, 315–17; value 329–30, 351; see aletheia, the Whole Truth: throughout chapter 1, esp. 65–74, throughout chapter 2, esp. 101–2, 220–1, 307–12, 330–2; see also universal(s), the Whole tyrant, Greek tyrants 85, 115, 132, 194, 237, 354 tyranny 115, 237; in Sicily 354–5 Tyre (in ancient Phoenicia) 89, 108 unity 63, 67–71, 74, 93, 101–2, 146–7, 245–6; God as absolute unity 292– 3, 294–5 unity of Being 63–5, 73–4, 92–4, 146– 7, 230, 245, 285, 296–300, 306–12, 320–3, 325–6, 334–5, 349–50, 380; see ontology unity and being 65; ‘One-in-the-Many’ 69–71, 122, 307–8 unity and form 101–2 unity in difference 69–71, 101, 146–7, 174, 185–8, 241; see logos unity of opposites 239, 244, 245, 260– 1, 263–7; see Heraclitus universal(s): in Aristotle (to katholou) 92; in Hegel 92; in Plato (see Forms); in Thalean praxis 87–9, 93– 4, 97–8 universal: appraisal criteria 73–4, 88–9; generalization 175, 178, 179, 181; speech 96–8, 101–2, 174 universalism 73, 92, 93 universality (of Presocratic thought) 71–4, 87–9, 101–2, 414n7 universals and particulars 71–2, 97–8 unlimited (to apeiron): in Anaximander 65, 138 and passim; in Aristotle 213–14; Pythagorean theory of limit and unlimited 69, 195–6, 206–7, 352, 355 unmoved mover 53–4, 58–9, 372, 374, 376 Ur 103 urbanism 79; and development of reflexivity 79–82; material and cultural power 104; social transformations 103–4; see also Ionia, Miletus urbanization 102–3, 112–13 and passim

use-value and exchange value: see exchange Utopian thought 125 utopianism 125; of early philosophy 128, 191–2, 193, 224–6 value(s) 46; complex 129, 289–91; judgements; see also arete, kosmos Venice 104, 105 verisimilitude, vraisemblance 173 videology (classical) 53–9, 133, 149; defined 56, 58–9, 221–9, 417n25; in Parmenides’ ontology 300–12; Pythagorean origins 209–14, 221–9 videological: aesthetics 230–1, 429n39; culture 1–2, 41, 48–51, 54–9, 70–1, 123, 223–9, 402n6; form of life 221–9, 428n33, 428–9n36 visual metaphors 46 visuality (ancient Greek) 46–7, 51, 54– 9, 61–5, 209–14, 223–9, 302–12, 312–13, 429n39 void (to kenon) 337, 338, 378; in ancient Atomism 378, 380, 381–2; Greek antipathy toward 339, 368 vortex: cosmic vortex in Anaxagoras 247, 315, 368, 373–7; in Anaximander 157, 293; in Atomism 378–9, 383, 385; vortex physics 375–6, 385 war/warfare 259; in the ancient world 132 war/peace 259; as cosmological image 263–5, 267, 278–9 water (hudor, in Thales) 85–6, 92–4, 138, 146; iconic symbol of animation and life 97–8; polysemy of the term 94–5 Way of Being/Truth 286, 294–5, 300– 12, 315, 316–17, 336, 350–1 Way of Seeming/Appearance 294, 300, 301, 305, 309–10, 316–17, 322, 326–7, 350–1 Western: culture/civilization 4; history of 2–4, 5–7; myths of 5–7, 8–10; philosophy 171, 296; reason/ rationalism 28–31, 40, 290–1; science; see philosophy, science Whole, the: 28–51, 65–74 and passim; in Anaxagoras 372–7; in Anaximander 146–7; in Anaximenes 184, 185–8; in Heraclitus 146; 518

SUBJECT INDEX

paradox in naming 153–5, 166–7, 419n30; in Parmenides 306–12, 315–17, 320–23, 330–2; in Plato 51–3, 220; in the Presocratics 60–5, 66–7, 93–4, 141–2, and passim; presupposed by all other discourses and sciences 64–5; reflexive nature 71–4, 154–5, 241, 270–1, 280–3, 323–6; separation from 324–5, 356– 7; singular topic of ancient philosophy 64–5, 66, 73–4, 94–5, 184, 220; speech about 149–50, 304–5, 319–26, 329–32 415n12; transcendence 291–3, 294–5, 304–5, 312, 335, 391; universality of 72–4, 95, 98–9, 127; in Xenophanes 289– 91 wholeness, desire for in philosophy 51, 52, 61, 64–5, 68, 95–6, 220–1, 237– 8, 323–4, 357; see also philosophy, science of wisdom, theoria will-to-knowledge 303–4 will-to-truth: throughout chapter 1, esp. 65–74; and chapter 7, esp. 300– 12 wisdom: and the bios theoretikos 74, 220–1, 222; as the aim of philosophy 53, 73–4, 220–1; as the aim of First philosophy 220, 428n31; as final good 74, 220–1; and justice 303–4; and learning 238–9, 240; as practical wisdom, phronesis 240, 267–8, 272–3; prior to praxis 119–220, 290–1; pursuit of 271–5, 290–1, 301, 303–5; sophia, the science of wisdom 53, 65, 74, 238, 240, 269–71, 271–5 wonder (thaumazein) 91, 151; and speculation 91–2, 110, 350–1 world(s): creation of 99–100, 146–7, 156–7, 163–6, 418–9n29; external/

internal; multiple 99–100, 146–7, 157–8, 165–6, 383, 384, 392; possible 99, 383–4; shared; social; symbolic (see semiopraxis); transformation of 99–102, 146, 163–6, 418–9n29; two-world metaphysics 204, 213–14, 227–8, 333–5; see kosmos World-soul 183–4, 372 writing: alphabetic 84–5, 89–90; and the ancient slave trade 85; as archiécriture (Derrida); as art/technique 37; complexity of 119–20, 135; cuneiform 120, 135; as dominant image 232–3; bureaucratic scripts 103; Cypriot syllabary; early Greek 120–1, 133, 232–3; Egyptian hieroglyphics 120, 124, 126; Hittite script 120; Linear A and Linear B 108; materials; Mycenaean use of; Minoan; origins of; and early Greek philosophy 72–3, 133, 232–3; Phoenician origins of the alphabet 85, 89–90, 107–8, 109–12, 119–21, 408–9n25; and rationalization of law 121–2, 159–63; as technology 37, 72–3, 90, 103, 110–12, 135; see technopoiesis Xerxes 83, 152 Zeitgeist 6–7 Zeno’s paradoxes 343–8 Zeus 47–8, 66, 93, 140, 152–3, 156, 240, 246, 359, 385; justice of 278– 9, 389; ordering all things 247, 277, 278–9; patriarchal order of 158–9; subject to the law of necessity 161– 2; wisdom of 247, 273 Zweckrationalität (purposive-rational action, Weber) 16

519