The Philosophic Spirit E-Book

Donald Phillip Verene

• Herausgeber: ibidem
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Studies in Historical Philosophy
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 196

Beschreibung

The Philosophic Spirit has persisted as part of the human spirit and human culture for over twenty-five centuries. This book presents examples of this spirit from its beginnings in Greek thought through the modern age. Among these examples are an account of Empedocles jumping into the volcano of Mt. Etna to join the gods, Plato’s quarrel with the poets, St. Anselm’s famous argument for the existence of God, Descartes’s Archimedean proof of his own existence, and Kant’s description of the perfect island of the Understanding. Attention is also given to Cassirer’s concept of symbolic forms and Whitehead’s theory of actual entities. The volume concludes with a discussion, based on the thought of Giambattista Vico, of a way to approach philosophy through a balance between the Ancient and the Moderns.

Leseprobe

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

In memory of my friendship with the philosopher

Ernesto Grassi (1902–1991) and our times in

conversation at the Grassi’s villa in several late

summers on the island of Ischia, near Naples.

And thus it was from the Greeks

that philosophy took its rise.

Diogenes Laertius

Table of Contents

Preface

Note on Interlinear Citations

Introduction: The Inscriptions at Delphi

Part One Beginnings

1 Hesiod’s Muses

2 Thales of Miletus

3 Pythagoras of Samos

4 Empedocles of Agrigentum

Part Two Ancients

5 Socrates’s Method

6 Plato’s Quarrel

7 Aristotle’s Ethics

8 Lucretius’s Poem

Part Three Christians

9 Boethius’s Consolation

10 Anselm’s Argument

11 Cusanus’s Learned Ignorance

12 Bruno’s Infinite Worlds

Part Four Moderns

13 Descartes’s Archimedean Point

14 Hobbes’s Leviathan

15 Vico’s Poetic Wisdom

16 Rousseau’s Promethean Discourse

17 Kant’s Schematism

18 Hegel’s Speculative Sentence

19 Cassirer’s Symbolic Forms

20 Whitehead’s Actual Entities

Epilogue: Ancients and Moderns

Works Cited

Preface

The philosophic spirit is part of the human spirit. Philosophy exists because we are mortal and because it is possible to pursue the rational imagination as a means to comprehend the meaning of our mortality. This pursuit has its beginnings in the ancient quest for self–knowledge, which includes the quest to know how to act as human. We are today in the fortunate position to look back over more than twenty–five centuries of this quest for self–knowledge. It is a way for us to face our own need to acquire self–knowledge and to fill our own need to grasp how to be human. There is nothing in the present as present that will provide self–knowledge. Self–knowledge presupposes memory that places the present in connection to the past. The future is always what emerges from the past.

The history of philosophy is part of the great theater of human memory. The figures of the philosophic spirit appear on its stage and put their ideas into words. And then, like the sequence of speeches in a theater, the moving finger of philosophy writes and, having writ, moves on. Memory holds all that there is. The reader of this small book is invited to enter into the ideas it records. My selection of the figures that hold these ideas is subjective. I do not intend them to be a master list. I intend them to be a philosophical miscellany, an album, taken from the history of philosophy, as the repository of the philosophic spirit.

My approach is that of ars topica, not ars critica—to appreciate what various philosophers have said as starting–points for thought, allowing the ideas they express to speak for themselves. In so doing, my aim is to follow Horace’s advice, in his letter to the Pisos, known as Ars poetica, “either to instruct, or to delight, or to utter words both pleasing and helpful to life” (333–34). Philosophy shares with poetry these three possibilities.

I agree with Cicero, who said, in the Tusculan Disputations: “O philosophy, thou guide of life, o thou explorer of virtue and expeller of vice! Without thee what could have become not only of me but of the life of man altogether? Thou hast given birth to cities, thou hast called scattered human beings into the bond of social life, thou hast united them first of all in joint habitations, next in wedlock, then in the ties of common literature and speech, thou has discovered law, thou hast been the teacher of morality and order: to thee I fly for refuge, from thee I look for aid, to thee I entrust myself, as once in ample measure, so now wholly and entirely. Moreover one day well spent and in accordance with thy lessons is to be preferred to an eternity of error. Whose help then are we to use rather than thine? thou that hast freely granted us peacefulness of life and destroyed the dread of death” (5.2.5).

Philosophia is the transliteration of the Greek φιλοσοφια, which is formed by joining φιλια (philia, friendly love, affection, friendship, Lat. amicitia) with σοφια (sophia, wisdom, Lat. sapientia). Cicero says: “Wisdom [sapientia] is the knowledge [scientia] of things divine and human and acquaintance [cognitio] with the cause of each of them, with the result that wisdom copies what is divine” (Tusc. 4.26.57). Regarding friendship, Cicero says: “For friendship is nothing else than an accord in all things, human and divine, conjoined with mutual goodwill and affection, and I am inclined to think that, with the exception of wisdom, no better thing has been given to man by the immortal gods” (Laelius on Friendship 6.20).

The philosophic spirit arises from wonder (thauma). Wonder is produced when in our thought we arrive at an apparent equivalence between contrary meanings (aporia) such that we can see no way out. In Plato’s Theaetetus, Theaetetus tells Socrates that he faces such aporiai when he attempts to think about fundamental questions of existence: “By the gods, Socrates, I am lost in wonder [thauma] when I think of all these things, and sometimes when I regard them it really makes my head swim.” Socrates replies: “For this feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy, and he who said that Iris was the child of Thaumas made a good genealogy” (155c–d). Iris acts as the messenger of heaven and her father’s name is a play on wonder.

Aristotle endorses this view of wonder when he says: “For it is owing to their wonder [thauma] that human beings both now begin and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about the greater matters” (Metaphysics 982b). Thauma is the middle term that joins philia with sophia and thus makes doing philosophy (philosophein) possible. The aporiai that are encountered by attempting to think about the nature of things induce wonder and cause those who encounter them to persist in the love of wisdom.

In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates relates a speech made to him by Diotima, a woman from Mantinea, a village in the Peloponnesus, regarding the connection between Eros (Love) and wisdom. Diotima informs Socrates that Eros is by nature neither immortal or mortal, but is a figure midway between wisdom and ignorance. Diotima says: “In fact, you see, none of the gods loves wisdom or wants to become wise—for they are wise—and no one else who is wise already loves wisdom; on the other hand, no one who is ignorant will love wisdom either or want to become wise. For what’s especially defective about being ignorant is that you are content with yourself, even though you’re neither beautiful and good nor intelligent. If you don’t think you need anything, of course you won’t want what you don’t think you need.”

Socrates realizes that Diotima is describing the nature of the philosopher, who loves wisdom but does not claim to possess wisdom. Socrates asks: “In that case, Diotima, who are the people who love wisdom, if they are neither wise nor ignorant?” Diotima replies: “That’s obvious. A child could tell you. Those who love wisdom fall in between those two extremes” (204a–b). Eros, as Diotima is speaking of him, is an ancient cosmogonic power. Hesiod, in the Theogony, says: “Eros, who is the most beautiful among the immortal gods, the limb–melter—he overpowers the mind and the thoughtful counsel of all the gods and of all the human beings in their breasts” (120–22). Diotima’s characterization of Eros differs from Hesiod’s. Diotima regards Eros as “neither immortal or mortal,” but as occupying a position between gods and humans.

We can connect the sense of philosophy as philia (friendly love or affection), in relation to sophia (wisdom), with Diotima’s comparison of the philosopher with Eros. That philosophy is a kind of philia is an epistemic claim. The philosopher does not claim to possess a particular kind of wisdom but to seek wisdom in the sense of an all–inclusive knowledge of things human and divine. In so doing, the philosopher stands between the human and the divine, as does Eros in Diotima’s account. Diotima’s claim is metaphysical. It speaks to the status of the philosopher’s being. The philosopher’s love of wisdom falls short of possessing wisdom, which is the province of the immortal gods. Yet the philosopher, in pursuing wisdom, is not following the life pursued by those human beings who have no need to seek wisdom itself and are content with knowing whatever they know. They do not realize that this is, in fact, a kind of ignorance. Once the philosopher realizes this sense of ignorance, the philosopher is in the position of Diotima’s Eros—midway between the divine and the purely human.

Two tropes are necessary for the expression of philosophical thought— metaphor and irony. The trope that the philosopher shares with the poets 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 also a sign of genius” (Poetics 1459a). Metapherein is the ability to find similarity in dissimilars through the ingenious power of the imagination (phantasia). This ability is required to put forth archai, beginning points, for thought. The philosopher goes beyond the poet by adding irony to the narrative that the metaphor generates. Irony rests on the distinction between what seems and what is. To be a master of irony is to employ the question to induce dialectical thought—to consider what seemed to be settled on a subject in terms of the possibility of its opposite. Dialectic provides the means to confront aporiai and to continue philosophical thought.

The chapters that follow offer twenty concisely stated examples of the philosophic spirit from the ancient Greeks to Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms and A. N. Whitehead’s speculative cosmology. Philosophy as the love of wisdom can be sought only through contemplation and a sense of what is held in cultural memory. It is one of the pleasures of the mind to enter into this memory and to re–discover what is preserved there that can be re–thought as part of the present. The past, then, illuminates both the present and the future.

We can learn to do philosophy by imitation (mimēsis) of examples. Aristotle says: “Imitation is natural to human beings, from childhood, one of the advantages over the lower animals being this, that human beings are the most imitative creatures in the world, and learn at first by imitation. And it is also natural for all to delight in works of imitation” (Poetics 1448b). Part of the definition of what is human is the ability to imitate. If then we find ourselves befriending wisdom, we can look to the examples offered us by those who have gone before us, and begin to think philosophically by imitating them.

I leave it to my readers to pursue the philosophic spirit in the wide range of recent philosophy—should they wish to do so. I agree with Frederick Copleston’s concluding sentences in the seventh volume of A History of Philosophy: “There is no very good reason to suppose that we shall ever reach universal and lasting agreement even about the scope of philosophy. But if fundamental disagreements spring from the very nature of human beings themselves, we can hardly expect anything else but a dialectical movement, a recurrence of certain fundamental tendencies and attitudes in different historical shapes. This is what we have had hitherto, in spite of well–intentioned efforts to bring the process to a close. And it can hardly be called undue pessimism if one expects the continuation of the process in the future.”

I thank Molly Black Verene for typing my handwritten manuscript and for her editorial skills. I thank Thora Ilin Bayer for acting as a first reader of the text and for valuable suggestions concerning various points of interpretation.

Note on Interlinear Citations

Plato Complete Works. Edited by John M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997. Cited by the standard “Stephanus numbers.” The Republic of Plato. Translated by Alan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1991. Cited by the standard “Stephanus numbers.”

AristotleThe Complete Works: Revised Oxford Translation. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Cited by the standard notation to Bekker’s edition of the Greek text.Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Cited by the standard notation to Bekker’s edition of the Greek text.

Classics References to works of Greek and Latin classical literature are to volumes of the Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, using standard forms of citation, with wording of quotations occasionally modified.

Diogenes Laertius Lives of Eminent Philosophers. 2 vols. Translated by R. D. Hicks. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Cited by book and passage numbers.

Introduction: The Inscriptions at Delphi

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Phaedrus and Socrates are walking along the banks of the Ilisus River. They come to a spot where, it is said, Boreas, the north wind, carried off Orithuia, daughter of Erechtheus, the Athenian king, while she was playing with Nymphs. Phaedrus asks Socrates if he believes this legend to be true. Socrates replies that he refrains from becoming involved in such considerations and that anyone who does so will become engaged in an endless task, “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.”

Socrates says to do so would take a great deal of time. “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 ridiculous 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 fabulous 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?” (229d–230a).

The inscription to which Socrates refers is the precept that appears on the pronaos of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi—Gnothi seauton (Know thyself). The entrant to the temple encounters this instruction, along with a second—Mēden agan (Nothing overmuch). Taken together, these two precepts, along with a third, offer a complete guide to human life. The first indicates the object to which thought should be directed. The second indicates the principle that should govern action—sōphrosunē, self–control, moderation.

Rarely cited is a third inscription, the single letter epsilon, or Ε. Is this inscription intended as a precept, to accompany the other two, and to stand alone as such? Or, is it the beginning of a word or phrase, the completion of which is lost, or was never made? There is no way to know what was intended. These inscriptions were said to be the work of the Seven Sages and were included in a list of maxims that comprised moral education and that were circulated to a number of Greek cities. The composition of the Seven Sages is given in various ways by various authorities. In the Protagoras, Plato lists “Thales of Miletus, Pittacus of Mytilene, Bias of Priene, our own Solon, Cleobulus of Lindus, Myson of Chen, and the seventh in the list, Chilon of Sparta” (343a). The list given in other accounts includes Periander, the tyrant of Corinth, who would replace Myson of Chen, in Plato’s list. Myson was not a tyrant but was said to be the son of a tyrant. Thales is the only philosopher. The others are largely known for their political activity and for the laws they decreed.

The most famous attempt at treating the meaning of the Delphic epsilon is Plutarch’s “The E at Delphi” that appears in his Moralia. Plutarch advances seven possible explanations of the Greek letter. Of its general status, Plutarch writes: “For the likelihood is that it was not by chance nor, as it were, by lot that this was the only letter that came to occupy first place with the god [Apollo] and attained the rank of a sacred offering and something worth seeing; but it is likely that those who, in the beginning, sought after knowledge of the god either discovered some peculiar and unusual potency in it or else used it as a token with reference to some other of the matters of the highest concern, and thus adopted it” (385A).

Apollo is the most Greek of all gods. With the Muses as his retinue, he is associated with the higher developments of civilization. In regard to ritual, especially ceremonies of purification, his oracles are the supreme authority. Delphi was the chief of his oracular shrines. It was to the Pythian at Delphi that Chaerephon, the friend of Socrates, went with his question of whether anyone was more wise than Socrates, as Socrates reports in the Apology (21a). Among the gods it was Apollo who most governed divination. Of Plutarch’s seven interpretations of the E, the seventh is the most plausible. This interpretation holds that the E “is an address and salutation to the god, complete in itself, which by being spoken, brings who utters it to thoughts of the god’s power.” The E stands in a dialogical relation to anyone who is to enter the temple. Thus: “The god addresses each one of us as we approach him here with the words ‘Know thyself,’ as a form of welcome, which certainly is in no wise of less import than ‘Hail’; and we in turn reply to him ‘Thou art,’ as rendering unto him a form of address which is truthful, free from deception, and the only one befitting him only, the assertion of Being” (392A).

“Thou art” as an assertion of Being makes the distinction between the ever–lasting permanence of the divine order and the contingent and ever–changing condition of human existence. Wisdom is to know and acknowledge the difference. E is placed beside Gnothi seauton to remind us of this difference. Thus: “We ought, as we pay Him reverence, to greet Him and to address Him with the words, ‘Thou art’; or even, I vow, as did some of the men of old, ‘Thou are One [ei hen]’” (393B). The two inscriptions express both an antithesis and an accord. Thus: “The one is an utterance addressed in awe and reverence to the god as existent through all eternity, the other is a reminder to mortal man of his own nature and the weaknesses that beset him” (394C). In this account the other precept, Mēden agan, is not mentioned. It is assumed as a way of acting toward the god and as a way of acting toward ourselves.

The significance of E as “Thou art” is endorsed by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in his famous oration, De hominis dignitate [On the Dignity of Man] (1486), one of the key works of Renaissance philosophy. Pico says that the Delphic inscriptions are one of the things that compelled him to the study of philosophy. He regards “Nothing overmuch” as the standard for moral philosophy and “Know thyself” as including the pursuit of the investigation of all nature, as well as human nature. Pico concludes: “When we are finally lighted in this knowledge by natural philosophy, and nearest to God are uttering the theological greeting, ei, that is, ‘Thou art,’ we shall likewise in bliss be addressing the true Apollo on intimate terms.”1

Pico’s conception of the dignity of man is carried forward by the Spanish Humanist Juan Luis Vives in his Fabula de homine (A Fable about Man) (c. 1518). Vives says that “man is himself a fable and a play [homo ipse ludus ac fabula est].”2 Vives’s fable describes a banquet for the celebration of Juno’s birthday at which Jupiter improvises an amphitheater in which he brings forth man on the stage as an archmime for the pleasure and enlightenment of the immortals who are the guests at the event. As Jupiter’s mime, man appears and shows how human beings can be all things. “He would change himself so as to appear under the mask of a plant, acting a simple life without any power of sensation. Soon after, he withdrew and returned on the stage as a moral satirist, brought into the shapes of a thousand wild beasts. . . . After doing this, he was out of sight for a short time; then the curtain was drawn back and he returned a man, prudent, just, faithful, human, kindly, and friendly.”3

Having been a plant, an animal, and a human, this actor reappears as having a divine nature. “The gods were not expecting to see him in more shapes when, behold, he was remade into one of their own race, surpassing the nature of man and relying entirely upon a very wise mind.”4 Then, to the delight of Jupiter, he impersonated Jupiter himself. Finally, “The whole man lay bare, showing the immortal gods his nature akin to theirs.”5 The gods were so impressed, that “he was received by them with respect and invited to the front seats. He sat in their company and watched the games which proceeded without interruption.”6

The fact that human beings by their power of mind can make their own world through inventions, cities, customs, and ability with language makes them unique. “This one thing [mind], which is found in no other animal but man, shows his relationship to the gods. Of little good would all these inventions have been if there had not been added, as the treasury of all things and for the safekeeping of these divine riches, a memory, the storehouse of all that we have enumerated.”7 The human being unites the anima, the breath of life, the vital principle that is the soul, with the animus, the rational principle of its life.

The human spirit takes shape in culture. There are as many versions of what is human as there are cultures. Each culture has its origin in a form of mythopoeic thought. This thought supplies the culture with the archetypal images that become the basis of the ideas that comprise its inherent wisdom. Henri Frankfort and H. A. Frankfort, in “The Emancipation of Thought from Myth,” distinguish the world of mythopoeic thought such as that found in the cultures of the ancient Near East from the thought found in the works of the early Greek philosophers. They observe that “in the systems of the Greeks, the human mind recognizes its own. It may take back what it created or change or develop it.”8 This sense of thought is closed to the mythologies out of which pre–Socratic philosophy arises.

The Frankforts’s account calls attention to Plato’s comment in the Timaeus