Philosophical Self-Knowledge E-Book

Donald Phillip Verene

• Herausgeber: ibidem
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Studies in Historical Philosophy
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 192

Beschreibung

The inscription on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, Gnothi seauton (Know thyself), is taken up by Socrates and pursued as the center of philosophy. Self-knowledge is the theme that endures throughout the history of philosophy. It is a theme that philosophy shares with literature. We know ourselves to be human, but the question remains as to what it means to be human. What we are is a metaphysical and ethical problem. Satire shows us how others see us. Memory, the mother of the Muses, gives us access to see ourselves as we have been, are now, and may be in the future. This work considers the idea of satire through the writings of Aristophanes, Lucian, Erasmus, Rabelais, Swift, Voltaire, and Joyce. It examines the nature of memory in terms of the views of Hesiod, Plato, Aristotle, Camillo, Vico, Hegel, and Joyce. Attention to Joyce in both instances is to Finnegans Wake. The author invites readers to take up the question of self-knowledge, to pursue it further in their own terms and sources.

Leseprobe

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

La filosofia è quella materia con la quale

o senza la quale si resta tale e quale.

Philosophy is that subject with which or

without which things remain just the same.

A maxim

Reading works of literature forces on us

an exercise of fidelity and respect, albeit

within a certain freedom of interpretation.

Umberto Eco, On Literature

Tutto, tutto, tutto è memoria.

Everything, everything, everything is memory.

Giuseppe Ungaretti

In a lecture in São Paulo in 1937

Muse [thea], daughter of Zeus, start where you will—

sing for our time too.

Homer, Odyssey, Book 1

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction: The Idea of Satire and the Rhetoric of Topics

I Satire and Self-Knowledge. A Philosophical Consideration

1. Aristophanes, “The Thinkery”

2. Lucian, “Philosophies for Sale”

3. Desiderius Erasmus, “True Prudence”

4. François Rabelais, “How Panurge Put to a Non-Plus the Englishman Who Argued by Signs”

5. Jonathan Swift, “The Grand Academy of Lagado”

6. Voltaire, “The Best of All Possible Worlds”

7. James Joyce, “by the light of philophosy, (and may she never folsage us!)”

II Memory, Topics, and Self-Knowledge. A Philosophical Retrospect

8. Hesiod, Mnemosyne

9. Plato, The Block of Wax

10. Aristotle, Anamnēsis

11. Giulio Camillo, The Theater

12. Giambattista Vico, Fantasia

13. G. W. F. Hegel, Er-Innerung

14. James Joyce, “mememormee!”

Epilogue

Notes

 

Preface

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates appears outside Athens, walking with his friend, Phaedrus, along the river Ilisus. They come to a place where, it is said that Orithuia, the daughter of the Athenian king Erechtheus, while playing with Nymphs, was carried away by Boreas, the north wind. Phaedrus asks Socrates if he believes the story to be true. Socrates replies that anyone who would look into the truth or falsity of such matters would “have to be far too ingenious and work too hard—mainly because after that he will have to go on and give a rational account of the form of the Hippocentaurs and then of the Chimera; and a whole flood of Gorgons and Pegasuses and other monsters, in large numbers and absurd forms, will overwhelm him.” To engage in such investigation is to pursue questions that, even if answered, make no difference as to how one is to live one’s life.

Socrates continues: “But I have no time for such things; and the reason, my friend, is this. I am still unable, as the Delphic inscription orders, to know myself; and it really seems to me pointless to look into other things before I have understood that. This is why I do not concern myself with them. I accept what is generally believed, and, as I was just saying, I look not into them but into my own self: Am I a beast more complicated and savage than Typhon [a multiform beast with a hundred heads, resembling many different animal species], or am I a tamer, simpler animal with a share in a divine and gentle nature?” Socrates then leaves the question of what he is and moves on to the general theme of the dialogue concerning the relation of oratory to philosophy.

The inscription to which Socrates refers is the precept “Know thyself” (Gnothi seauton), which appears on the pronaos of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, greeting all who enter. This precept is the master key to philosophy. It is attributed to the Seven Sages. Thales is thought most likely to be the author of the precept. Thales, the only philosopher among them, is the figure from whom the history of philosophy begins. The other Sages were lawgivers and rulers.

The remarks that follow are organized as a little book, a philosophical novella, addressed to those who may be inclined to pursue self-knowledge. My aim is to invite readers to think through the issues for themselves. My remarks are no more than those at which I have arrived in my own meditations. Philosophy at first began among the early Greeks as a kind of physics, directing thought toward the explanation of natural events, of what is in the heavens and on earth. Socrates gave philosophy a second beginning when, as Cicero says, he brought philosophy down from the heavens and placed it in cities and homes. For Socrates, not nature but human nature is the proper subject of philosophy.

Socrates was often to be found near the entrance of the Athenian agora, the marketplace in the center of the city, engaged in his method of elenchus. To fulfill the purpose of philosophy Socrates sought the answer to a single question: What is it to be a human being, an anthrōpos? This question cannot be answered by individual introspection. It can be pursued only through speech with other human beings, because the humanity of a human being exists through interrelationship with other human beings.

Humanity is not individual. It is social. At the basis of society are all those forms of friendship distinctive to human individuals. Also at the basis of society are language and law, poetry and philosophy. These two bases make all else possible. Only human beings pose speculative questions. The life of animals as well as that of gods and divine beings do not involve the formation of speculative questions. Human beings are the only beings that raise the question of the nature of their own being. In pursuing his method of elenchus, Socrates asks questions of those with whom he engages. His questions proceed in the manner of an attorney at law questioning a witness in court. Socrates asks questions, the answers to which he can anticipate. In so doing, Socrates is seeking to learn the answer to a question that motivates all his specific questions, namely: What is it to be human?

When Socrates passes away into death, drinking hemlock on the order of the Athenian court, he leaves his friends with the problem of self-knowledge unresolved. In the Platonic dialogues, when Socrates turns from the elenchus, because his questions have reached a limit, he often relates a story or tale (mythos). The tale is only a possible answer. The tale settles the mind so it can seek a new beginning point from which to think about the subject. Socratic scepticism is at the heart of philosophy. The Socratic question for us takes shape in the form of the history of philosophy. This history is the record of how each philosophy is a topic, a topos, from which thought finds a new beginning.

In his account of Greek philosophy in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel says: “The principle of Socrates is that human beings have to discover and learn [erkennen] from themselves what their vocation and final goal are, and also what the world’s purpose is, what is true in and for itself; they must attain truth by and through themselves.” But this truth is not simply subjective. It is a sense of truth that exists in and for itself because “it is objective, meaning by that not outward objectivity but spiritual universality. This is what is true or, in modern terminology, the unity of the subjective and the objective. This is the universal principle of Socrates.”

The universal principle of Socrates is that all thought is a dialectical movement between the subjective and objective, between self and world standing to each other as opposites. This opposition can be seen in irony and in satire. Satire takes us out of ourselves and lets us see ourselves as others see us. Socratic irony and Socratic ignorance make room for satire to enter and for us to enter into satire.

Memory, in which all of the topics of thought reside, lets us see ourselves as we see ourselves. Memory, in the sense of recollection, provides us with a self. To have a self is to find oneself alive in time. To find oneself in time is to have an autobiography. We apprehend our existence in terms of past, present, and future—in terms of what we were, what we now are, and what we may be. We realize ourselves as having an internal life that can be reached by memory and formed by the imagination in connection with ingenuity. Who we are in our actuality is a tale only we can tell. This tale is all we have to comprehend ourselves as human beings.

This tale is not simply subjective because it can be told only through the meanings that exist in words. These meanings are achieved and developed objectively in the forms of human culture, in such forms as myth, religion, common sense, art, history, and science. The autobiography of any individual is a particular embodiment of what has already taken place in culture. We, as individual selves, and collectively, as culture, are continually in the position of the Muses—of bringing together what has been, what is, and what is to come. Culture is recollective memory writ large.

To be without recollective memory and the order it brings into our existence is to cease to be a self. In such a state the human spirit wanders without purpose, unable to distinguish with any precision among past, present, and future. The self, thus affected, while awake passes into a state that the normal self experiences only in the world of dreams, a world the order of which we cannot grasp and over which we have no control. In the dream we find ourselves in the midst of conditions that we cannot comprehend. We recover our selfhood once we are out of the moment of the dream and what is dreamed becomes part of memory or disappears from our conscious experience.

To have a self requires the ability to apprehend the world dialectically, to move our thought from one side of an opposition to the other. Memory allows us to pose one side of an opposition to its other in the sense that the past can be posed against the future. In so doing, the self is given a present, a middle from which to assess the nature of the opposition. As the oppositions in the world enter memory they become part of the life of the self. From this grasp of oppositions the poetic sense of life originates. The poetic sense of life allows us to perceive similarity in dissimilars. It gives us the power to form metaphors and the power to form hypotheses.

The world with its oppositions is always an other to the self. We find ourselves in the theater of nature, in which all that is there plays a specific role in what is a whole. Finding ourselves thus, we form a theater of human nature in which all the actions of human beings join together in a drama of our own roles. To attempt not to play a role in this Theatrum mundi is to play a role—the role of the outsider—the role of the misanthrope, or that of the hermit, or that of the insider as outsider, the figure who claims to transcend the limits of roles. Memory lets us hold in mind the various roles of human life and provides us with a basis for our own actions and how we may understand them.

The problem for the human self is to keep itself as something that is continually beyond its roles—to be the human being that makes the roles possible. To acquire this standpoint, memory is essential. Recollective memory gives us this ground to be beyond and more than the roles required for life in human society. Who we are is that which we are to ourselves, transcending the roles in which we engage. These roles in which we find ourselves and which enter into our memory are never what we are. But what we are as human beings beyond our roles is the subject of the Socratic question of self-knowledge that unceasingly guides philosophy. The love of wisdom continually causes us to emerge from the narrative of ourselves and face this question. This question, as mentioned above, is asked only by human beings. It is unknown to animals and irrelevant for the immortal gods.

It is commonly thought that at the center of philosophy is the love of wisdom in the sense of the love of reason and that reason is the distinctive faculty of human beings. Reason requires an object to which it is applied. Memory supplies reason with its object. Memory holds in mind that which comes to us through perception, to which we may then apply reason. When reason takes itself as an object, reason takes the shape of logic. Logic is a systematic ordering of what is originally in language and language is the receptacle of all the meanings that can be. Language is the medium of memory and imagination. It is where we can find the first expression of what can be subjected to reason. Reason is an extension of memory, allowing the mind not only to recollect but further, to understand and to speculate on what is recollected. The fact that all words have histories, expressible as etymologies, makes language the original theater of memory. As the theater of memory, language gives us access to the theater of the world and our actions in it.

In the two parts, the two studies, that follow, I have selected some figures from the history of literature and the history of philosophy. My selections are made on the basis of personal preference. I intend the selections to be a miscellany that the reader can approach in terms of the reader’s own interest. In regard to satire, I have chosen works that are directed to philosophy, moving from the ancients to the moderns. In regard to memory, I have taken this same direction.

My list in Part I begins from Aristophanes’s attack on Socrates and Lucian’s satirical commentary on nearly all the ancient Schools of philosophy, moving to the Renaissance satires of Erasmus and Rabelais, to the eighteenth-century portrayals of theories of knowledge and metaphysics of Swift and Voltaire to James Joyce’s inclusion of philosophy in his great “joke” of Finnegans Wake. My aim in Part II is to sample what philosophy, in some of its history, provides for understanding memory. My list is framed by two poets—by Hesiod and by Joyce. It moves from Hesiod, who introduces the idea of memory, to the two greatest of the ancient Greek philosophers who come to us after Socrates—Plato and Aristotle—to the little-known figure of Renaissance thought, Giulio Camillo, creator of a theater of memory, to Giambattista Vico, as the chief figure of what has been called the “Counter-Enlightenment,” to the Idealism of Hegel, author of the Phenomenology of Spirit. I then return to Joyce’s literary masterpiece, Finnegans Wake, in which we enter memory as a great circle of images and words that take thought back upon itself. The two Joyces remind us that ideas of philosophical significance can be found outside the bounds of what are traditionally seen as works of philosophy.

I thank very much my two of the three Graces, Molly Black Verene and Thora Ilin Bayer, for their assistance in preparing the manuscript.

Introduction:The Idea of Satire and the Rhetoric of Topics

Philosophy is a form of literature, a way of putting thought into words. Leon, tyrant of Phlius, asked Pythagoras what skill, what wisdom (sophia) he possessed. Pythagoras replied that he possessed no sophia, but that he was a philosophos. In so saying, Pythagoras coined a new term, joining philia (friendship, friendly love) with sophia. Leon asked Pythagoras to say what kind of person is a philosophos. Pythagoras compared philosophoi to the spectators at the Great Games at Olympia. The spectators came only to see and to comprehend what occurred at the Games. They were unlike those who came to compete or to use the occasion to engage in transactions of buying and selling. Philosophers, for Pythagoras, are spectators occupied with observing the workings of nature. They are lovers of wisdom. Only the gods are wise.

In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates redefines the purpose of philosophy. Socrates says: “Those who rightly philosophize are practicing to die [hoi orthōs philosophountes apothnēskein meletōsi]” (67e3-4). Socrates transposes the role of the philosopher from spectator of nature to actor of human nature. The philosopher imitates the gods by means of contemplation (theoria). The philosopher imitates the god, but is not a god because the philosopher is mortal. Only the gods are immortal. The love of wisdom pursued by those who are philosophers causes them to express their thought in words and defines the way they approach the oppositions that inhere in human existence.

Satire is the master trope of irony expanded into a narrative portraying a state of affairs that is the reverse of what was expected. Satire is a form of ethical thought in that it explores the distinction between is and ought. It contrasts what theoretical reason tells us ought to be in matters of human conduct with what we can readily see actually is. Satire differs from ethics in that it presents the difference of is and ought by means of a sense of humor that recognizes the presence of folly in all that is human. Satire at its best is comedy done as a form of instruction. It shares with poetry Horace’s principles: to instruct, delight, and move. Through satire we see that a state of affairs that meets with our approval, if regarded more closely, may just as well be the opposite. Because of this constant possibility of folly we should not take ourselves seriously. We must discover how to live in this world with folly as a constant companion, always there in our thoughts and actions.

The other master trope that governs the human spirit is metaphor. Aristotle says: “The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is a sign of genius” (Poetics 1459a). Metaphor provides thought with its beginnings. Metaphor is a form of ingenuity or wit (Latin, ingenium) and is the power to see similarity in dissimilars. Unless we can see such similarity we cannot begin to think. Ingenuity allows us to put the world together through the image. The imagination brings forth from memory what is originally acquired through perception. Once a perception is stored in memory as an image it can be brought forth by the imagination as if it were once again a perception—something vivid and present before the mind. The power of reason allows us to make what is recalled the subject of a question.

Metaphor unifies. Irony dissembles. Each requires the other. If human life is nothing more than a series of satirical scenes, it is a process that signifies nothing. Satire that is more than simple comedy always calls out for thought to seek a new beginning, a new poetry, a new affirmation of the human. Eloquence requires both master tropes—metaphor and irony. Each is in need of the presence of the other. Their interaction gives the self distance from the object.

Satire, satura, is the only literary form claimed by the Romans, although there are traces of it in Greek comedy. Satura is literally a dish of various ingredients, a medley. Satire as a literary form can combine prose with verse, and personal opinion with public opinion. It is a medley of thoughts with the aim both to entertain and to improve society by exposing faults and frauds in human activity. It shows us that often what we think we are is not what we are. From a philosophical point of view there are two types of satire—one is satire directed to aspects of the human condition generally; another is satire that has direct connection to philosophy that, at least in part, takes philosophy as its subject.

An author of satire, however, need not take philosophy as the object of satire. Philosophy can be employed as the means of satire. An example of this sense of satire is in the second book of Horace’s Satires, “A Discourse of Plain Living” (influenced by Lucilius), in which the philosophic doctrine of “the mean” is applied to daily living, eating, and drinking (2.2). Aristotle’s famous term—hemesotēs—in the Nicomachean Ethics, regards virtue as a middle between excess and deficiency. Horace’s “The Follies of Humankind” takes up the doctrine of the Stoics, that all except the wise are mad.

Reference to philosophy can also be found in the Satires of Juvenal. In satirizing all that can and does go wrong in the world, Juvenal says: “On the other hand, here’s a consolation that even an ordinary person can offer—someone who’s not read the Cynics, or the doctrines of the Stoics (the same as the Cynics except for their shirts), who’s not admired Epicurus, happy with the plants in his tiny garden?” (13.120-24). To cope with the ills of the world, one need not study the theories of the Cynics or Stoics. One can simply follow the example of Epicurus and withdraw to the pleasures of the garden.

Two further examples of this first type are Petronius, Satyricon and Cervantes, The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha. Petronius flourished in the times of Claudius (41-54 A.D.) and Nero (54-68 A.D.). The Satyricon is famous for its description of an extravagant dinner. It also attacks bad taste in literature and the hollow aspects of society. There is a key passage contrasting former ages with the present. “In former ages virtue was still loved for her own sake, the noble arts flourished, and there were the keenest struggles among humankind to prevent anything being long undiscovered which might benefit posterity. . . . But we are besotted with wine and whores and cannot rise to understand even the arts that we developed; we slander the past, and learn and teach nothing but vices. Where is dialectic now, or astronomy? Where is the exquisite way of wisdom? Who has ever been to a temple and promised an offering should he attain to eloquence, or drink of the waters of philosophy?” (88). This lack of culture, Petronius says, is due to the love of money taking over all human affairs.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1574-1616), of Madrid, lived at the time of Shakespeare. Cervantes published Don Quixote in two parts, between 1605 and 1615. The work may originally have been intended as a moral fable, as an attack on the ill effects that romances of chivalry had on their readers, but as it expanded during its writing, it became a romance that might be regarded as a forerunner of the modern novel. In the Prologue Cervantes says that his work will not be like other books, that: “are so crammed with maxims from Aristotle, Plato and the whole herd of philosophers that they amaze their readers, who consider the authors to be well-read, erudite and eloquent. . . . There won’t be any of this in my book, because I haven’t anything to put in the margins or any notes for the end, still less do I know what authors I have followed in my text so as to list them at the beginning, as others do.”