Mystery and Intelligibility: History of Philosophy as Pursuit of Wisdom 2020047470, 9780813234182, 9780813234199

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mystery  & intelligibility





MYSTERY

& intelligibility History of Philosophy as Pursuit of Wisdom

e d i t e d by

Jeffrey Dirk Wilson

t h e c at h o l i c u n i v e r s i t y o f a m e r i c a p r e s s Washington, D.C.



Copyright © 2021 Te Catholic University of America Press All rights reserved Te paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standards for Information Science—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. ∞ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wilson, Jefrey Dirk, editor. Title: Mystery and intelligibility : history of philosophy as pursuit of wisdom / edited by Jefrey Dirk Wilson. Description: Washington, D.C. : Te Catholic University of America Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifers: LCCN 2020047470 | ISBN 9780813234182 (cloth) | ISBN 9780813234199 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy—History. | Knowledge, Teory of. | Wisdom. Classifcation: LCC B72 .M97 2021 | DDC 109—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047470



THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED to the life and memory of a remarkable priest, scholar, dean, and human being

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Father Kurt J. Pritzl, OP Dean of the School of Philosophy (2000–2011) Te Catholic University of America

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Father Kurt’s love of philosophy and its history was exemplifed in his scholarship and in his promotion of the School of Philosophy’s orientation toward the study of philosophy in and through its history. We hope that the present volume in its various pages encapsulates some of the spirit of Father Kurt.

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Εἰ δ᾽ ἐστὶν ἡ εὐδαιμονία κατ᾽ ἀρετὴν ἐνέργεια, εὔλογον κατὰ τὴν κρατίστην: αὕτη δ᾽ ἂν εἴη τοῦ ἀρίστου. εἴτε δὴ νοῦς τοῦτο εἴτε ἄλο τι, ὃ δὴ κατὰ φύσιν δοκεῖ ἄρχειν καὶ ἡγεῖσθαι καὶ ἔννοιαν ἔχειν περὶ καλῶν καὶ θείων, εἴτε θεῖον ὂν καὶ αὐτὸ εἴτε τῶν ἐν ἡμῖν τὸ θειότατον, ἡ τούτου

ἐνέργεια κατὰ τὴν οἰκείαν ἀρετὴν εἴη ἂν ἡ τελεία εὐδαιμονία. ὅτι δ᾽ ἐστὶ θεωρητική, εἴρηται.

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Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 10.7 1177a12–18.





contents

Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Mystery and Intelligibility  1 J e f f r e y D i r k W ils o n

1. History, Philosophy, and the History of Philosophy  30 T im o th y B . N o o n e

2. A Guide for the Perplexed or How to Present or Pervert the History of Philosophy  55 J o hn Rist

3. Wonder and the Discovery of Being: From Homeric Myth to the Natural Genera of Early Greek Philosophy  82 J e f f r e y D i r k W ils o n

4. Metaphysics and the Origin of Culture  110 D o nald P hillip V e r e n e

5. Flux-Gibberish: For and Against Heraclitus  136 W illiam D e sm o nd

6. Into the Dark: How (Not) to Ask “Why Is Tere Anything at All?”  179 E r ic D . P e r l

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7. What Is Philosophy?  207 P hilipp W. R o s e mann

Bibliography 231 Contributors 245 Index 249

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acknowledgments acknowledgments

Acknowledgments To begin a book in thanksgiving is a lovely thing, and there are many people whom I must thank in diferent ways. First, I want to thank Dr. Bogoljiub Šijaković, editor of Philo­ theos, Dr. Jovana Šijaković, editorial assistant and secretary, and the entire editorial team of Philotheos for gracious permission to republish Dr. Philipp Rosemann’s “What Is Philosophy?” which appeared in Philotheos in 2017. Second, thanks go to Dr. John McCarthy, editor of Te Review of Metaphysics, and Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, associate editor, for gracious permission to republish Dr. William Desmond’s “Flux Gibberish: For and Against Heraclitus” (2017), Dr. Donald Phillip Verene’s “Metaphysics and the Origin of Culture” (2009), and my own “Wonder and the Discovery of Being: From Homeric Myth to the Natural Genera of Early Greek Philosophy” (2017). On a more personal level, I want to thank Dr. John McCarthy in his capacity as dean of the School of Philosophy of Te Catholic University of America for his suggestions which guided me to making a better book than it would have been otherwise. Te conception of this book occurred during walks from the Brookland Metro Station through the campus of Te Catholic University of America as Dr. Trevor Lipscombe, director of the press, and I discussed sundry topics, one of which was an idea for a book—this book, as it turns out. Tus, though “Peripatetic” signifes a particular philosophical school traceable through history, in another sense, the conception of this book was literally peripatetic. Without those strolls to the ofce at the end of our morning commute, this book would not exist. I ofer Dr. Lipscombe ix

acknowled gments

my deep gratitude and appreciation for his encouragement and friendship. I want, next, to thank Abbot Anselm Atkinson, OSB, and the community of Pluscarden Abbey, near Elgin, Scotland, for their generous hospitality during the week that I realized the concept of this book and drafted the introduction. In particular, thanks go to Dom Tomas Cole, OSB, guest master at that time, for his generous spirit and patience, and for freeing me from the usual chores performed by a guest. During that week, I joined the monks for prayer beginning at 4:30 a.m. and then dashed up to my room in the guesthouse to work on this project, and then dashed back to the church, back and forth several times a day—alternating varieties of contemplation. Ms. Ellen Rowe, while an undergraduate at The Catholic University of America, served as my principal research assistant, compiling the bibliography and index. Her precision and conscientious attention to detail were exemplary. Had that work fallen to me, this volume would have been delayed for some months. Timely completion of the book in conjunction with the press’s schedule is due, in no small part, to her, for which I express my thanks and commendation. Mr. Brian Derickson, graduate student at Te Catholic University of America, joined the project along the way and did an excellent job helping with proof-reading, formatting, and other odds and ends that needed quick handling. He has my thanks and appreciation. At Te Catholic University Press, in addition to Dr. Lipscombe, I ofer my gratitude to Mr. John Martino, acquisitions editor, who skillfully guided me through the proposal, approval, and fnal submission processes, and to Ms. Teresa Walker, managing editor, who patiently responded to my numerous queries and, in general, kindly aided me in bringing the manuscript to fnal form. Tanks also to Ms. Susan Needham, copy editor, who charmed still more improvements from us all.

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Finally, I thank my contributors who graciously agreed to have their work included in this volume. At times, they set aside other work to meet a deadline I had proposed. Tey were patient throughout this process, showing good grace even when I pestered them, persistent fellow that I am. Editing this book has deepened me as a philosopher and as a human being. I had the privilege and pleasure of working through the texts of six other thinkers each of whom, with distinction and care, addressed a constellation of philosophical aporiae. What more could I ask? Jefrey Dirk Wilson Love-in-the-Ruins Street, Maryland and School of Philosophy Te Catholic University of America Washington, D.C.

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mystery  & intelligibility

jefrey dirk wilson introduction

introduction

Mystery and Intelligibility jeffrey dirk wilson

Te world exists. We, human beings, can know the world, but we cannot know the world completely. We are limited knowers of a knowable world of unlimited knowability. Tose three sentences sum up the presuppositions that underlie metaphysics and epistemology, at least from Heraclitus to St. Tomas Aquinas. For Heraclitus, there is the logos that underlies all appearances, a logos that can be discerned by humans if only indirectly. Plato understands the logos to exist as eternal Forms, immaterial substances that cause all things. Aristotle understands the logos as forms that exist in and cause particulars: particular things, actions, and circumstances. Plotinus synthesizes Platonic and Aristotelian logos. Te forms exist both eternally and immaterially in the Divine Intellect and, simultaneously, in and as causes of particulars. In the second article of De veritate, Aquinas explains that Plotinian synthesis in Christian terms. Forms are divine ideas in the mind of God that cause and exist in particulars.1 Because God’s being and essence Philipp W. Rosemann was kind enough to give this introduction a careful and incisive reading for which I thank him heartily and from which many improvements were made. 1. Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, editio Leonina, t. 22/1.2 (Rome: Sancta Sabina, 1970), 1, 2, solution.

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are identical, those divine ideas are—in the strongest existential sense of the verb “to be”—essentially God and, as such, are infnite. Because the form of tree is in the tree, the tree is not merely sensible but also intelligible. Because the form of tree is also an infnite divine idea, the knowability of “tree” is inexhaustible. William Desmond speaks of “abiding inexhaustibility.”2 Every natural object is a window into the mind of God. Te rational soul both sees the form of tree within the tree and, therefore, knows the tree, but also looks through the form of tree into the mind of the infnite God. Te world is at once intelligible and beyond intelligibility—this “beyond intelligibility” Philipp W. Rosemann calls “hyper-reality,”3 William Desmond, “an excess of intelligibility.” Eric D. Perl speaks of “the silencing of the mind at the astonishing realization . . . that being is”4—and thus the world is mysterious. Troughout this introduction, I shall lift before the readers’ eyes such dancing resonances amongst the volume’s seven contributors.

Mystery and Wonder “Mystery” is a compromised word in late modernity and postmodernity and does not sit well with philosophers. After all, as I observe in the fnal pages of my own contribution to this volume, we live in a “disenchanted world,” a term coined by Schiller and employed instructively by Max Weber. Desmond points out that it is “univocal logos with which many philosophers are most at home.”5 Today, “mystery” designates a literary genre in which an unsolved crime is to be solved by a detective, a kind of story. As Rosemann observes, stories are inherently polysemous and, thus, all stories are, in a sense, mysterious. When I say “mystery,” I am 2. Page 170. 3. Page 220. 4. Page 175. 5. Page 190.

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pointing at what Rosemann is pointing to when he talks about “irreducible diference” in the world and “the radical heteronomy of human existence,”6 what Desmond points to when he speaks of “saturated equivocity.”7 Our shared pointing may be taken as a Heraclitean gesture toward re-enchantment of the world, a recovery of mystery which, simultaneously, increases the intelligibility of the intelligible. “Mystery” can also simply denote “what is not (yet) understood.” We come closer to the meaning of the word as used here when a person is deemed to be “mysterious,” suggesting that there is more to the person than meets the eye. Te world is mysterious in that there is more to it than meets the eye, that is, more than can be apprehended by sense perception. Te world is also mysterious in that there is more to it than can be apprehended by the human intellect. St. Tomas, at least implicitly, replies to that dictum of Protagoras, “Te human is the measure of all things.”8 With respect to the human’s knowing the world with the speculative intellect, not only does the human not measure the world, but the world measures the human. Because the form of each natural object is a window into the mind of God, every natural object measures the human who apprehends the natural object. With respect to knowing the world, the human is not judge, but rather judged.9 In the human act of knowing, the human is more known than knower. Te world is partly mundus absconditus, enlarging the human’s awareness of both the world’s intelligibility and its mystery. As Desmond notes, “Every search for the true does entail an engagement with the hidden.”10 6. Page 212. 7. Page 144. 8. Protagoras, in Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz, ed. Die Fragmente der Vorso­ kratiker, 9th ed. (Berlin: Weidmannsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1960), 80B1; hereafter referred to as DK 80B1. 9. Aquinas, De veritate, 1, 2, solution. 10. William Desmond, Te Intimate Universal: Te Hidden Porosity among Religion, Art, Philosophy, and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 12.

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Tus, wonder, say both Aristotle and Plato’s Socrates,11 is the beginning of philosophy. In the encounter with the world’s mystery, the human experiences amazement, awe, and even—at least on the account of Plato—shame. In fact, according to Donald Phillip Verene following Vico, “terror” (more than amazement and awe together, but also comprising them) and “shame” are the frst two truly human emotions and, therefore, “are the keys to civil life.”12 Te modern sensibility typically regards shame only in a negative way, because it implies unworthiness. By contrast, the Platonic interlocutors who blush in shame have come closer to truth than they had previously conceived possible. Tere is something analogous to a religious experience in this encounter with mystery, which is why Plato appropriates (from the Greek mystery religions)13 and adapts philosophically theorein, “soulseeing contemplation,” as his highest kind of knowing, which begins in intelligibility but also transcends it. As Rosemann observes, Plato marches his reader along with the interlocutors of Socrates and just when the narrative does not seem capable of inciting greater astonishment, Socrates knocks us to the ground with an unexpected and—to one in pursuit of intelligibility alone—even an unacceptable claim, like that “the Form of the Good” belongs “in a realm ‘beyond being.’ ”14 Tat helps to explain why, as Rosemann discusses, Socrates stands outside Agathon’s house at the beginning of the Symposium, “having ‘turned his mind toward himself,’ ”15 lost in contemplation—or should we say found in contemplation?16 11. Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.2 982b10–21; Plato, Teaetetus 155d. 12. Page 115. 13. Andrea Wilson Nightingale, Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 40. 14. Plato, Republic 509b in Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), 1130; hereafter Cooper, 1130. 15. Page 207. 16. Aristotle accepts both Plato’s adaptive appropriation of theorein and its philosophical analogue to religion when he urges his hearers and readers in the pursuit of

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Trough contemplation the human discovers his unworthiness in relation even to the philosophical divine and, therefore, feels not only awe and amazement but shame as well. Rosemann suggests that the tragedy of Alcibiades of the Symposium is that he recognizes his rightful shame but does not attend to it. “Philosophy,” Rosemann says, “leads a precarious existence that oscillates between immanence and transcendence,” that is, between intelligibility and mystery.17 Te philosopher’s feet are squarely planted in the city with mind turned toward the Forms, or the Unmoved Mover, or simply God. Socrates of the Republic describes the dual foci of the philosopher-kings: “Tey’d look often in each direction, towards the natures of justice, beauty, moderation, and the like, on the one hand, and towards those they’re trying to put into human beings, on the other. And in this way they’d mix and blend the various ways of life in the city.”18 Tus, the philosophic life becomes the most practical, because none but the philosopher can see the true natures in the light of which alone can the true human condition be seen or addressed. Timothy B. Noone is the frst of our authors to remind us of Cicero’s formulation: philosophy is “the knowledge of all things human and divine, involving the knowledge of the underlying causes of all things . . . that allows us to live happily and fruitfully—we would say ‘fourish’—as individuals and as a community.”19 Troughout the chapters of this book run the twin themes of muthos and logos—the stories we tell and the underlying rational order that makes them true—as well as their relation to Cicero’s characterization of philosophy. Rosemann brings our shared discussion of these themes to a sense of completion in the fnal essay of the volume.

happiness to transcend human capacity and through contemplation, insofar as possible, to put on immortality.Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 10 1177b1–1178a8. 17. Page 209. 18. Plato, Rep. 6.501b; Cooper, 1122. 19. Page 37.

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Wonder and Good Ignorance Wonder leads—and again, Plato and Aristotle agree—to good ignorance, Socratic ignorance, that is, the knowledge that I do not know. Knowledge bounds ignorance, and ignorance bounds knowledge. Tat is why the world is not both intelligible in its appearances and unintelligible in its underlying being—which is the view of Locke and of British empiricists in general. For them, what we cannot know is a waste of time. John Locke speaks disparagingly, for example, of the “vast ocean of Being,” investigation of which not only is useless but leads thinkers to “perfect scepticism.”20 For us, as for Plato and Aristotle and the entire classical tradition, it is the “vast ocean of Being” that interests us, not because we think we understand it completely, but rather because we know we cannot. As Socrates of the Republic remarks, “Te fact is that whether someone falls into a small diving pool or into the middle of the biggest ocean, he must swim all the same.” Acknowledging the implicit danger of swimming in the ocean of just those kinds of endless arguments—and these are arguments that lead to quarrels—that Locke wants to avoid, Socrates continues, “We must swim too . . . hoping that a dolphin will pick us up or that we’ll be rescued by some other desperate means.” Socrates bids us dare to swim in the ocean, not because he thinks it will be easy going, but rather to encourage us because he knows the perils. Part of the problem for Locke and others is that they do not understand the true nature of “argument.” When arguing philosophically, as Socrates puts it, they “have a quarrel rather than a conversation.”21 Plato’s Socrates is the master in guiding all who will join him in philosophical conversation about the ocean of being. Tis volume is ofered as a share in that conversation. 20. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser, vol. 1 (New York: Dover Publications, 1959), 31 (I.1.7). 21. Plato, Rep. 453d–454a; Cooper, 1081.

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Acknowledged human ignorance is an object of knowledge. We can know what it is that we do not know. In one sense, the world becomes intelligible to us precisely when we map the limits of human ignorance. Tus understood, intelligibility both leads to mystery and proceeds from it. Without mystery, intelligibility loses both its source and its end, and, thereby, becomes less intelligible all the while. It is not surprising then that Locke was wrong in two ways. First, it is not those who join Socrates of the Republic in swimming in the ocean of Being who end in scepticism, but rather those who follow Locke. For example, Hume argues decisively that human beings can have absolutely no knowledge of anything outside the sound and light show in the theater of the mind. He writes: “Te mind has never any thing present to it but the perceptions, and cannot possibly reach any experience of their connexion with objects. Te supposition of such a connexion is, therefore, without any foundation in reasoning.”22 It is difcult to imagine anything more sceptical than that. For the contributors to this volume, as for the classical tradition of which we are part, bounded ignorance becomes the launch point for philosophy.23

The Loss of Mystery and Intelligibility Already in the late Middle Ages, fault lines began to appear in the classical model. One need only name William of Ockham as icon of intelligibility’s banishment of mystery. He was a harbinger of things to come, of course, but he also culminated one thread of tradition which, perhaps strangely, has its origin in the work of Lanfranc while he was prior of Bec. Doctrinally, Lanfranc looks the paradigm of orthodoxy, but methodologically he did something heterodox for his day: he introduced the thought of Aristotle into theology— specifcally, into the Catholic understanding of Christ’s real pres22. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. with intro. Eric Steinberg (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993), 105 (Section 12, Part 1). 23. Aristotle, Metaph. 1 982b10–21.

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ence in the Eucharist. From the time of St. Augustine, the philosophical content of Christian theology had been largely implicit and Platonic. After the last fowering of ancient philosophy in the West—the names of Augustine, Boethius, and Cassiodorus come to mind—awareness of mystery expanded, and, correspondingly, awareness of intelligibility contracted. Te mid-eleventh-century Eucharistic controversy engaged by Lanfranc and Berengar of Tours is at least as interesting for the terms of the controversy as for its content. From the moment that Lanfranc asserted defnitively that the body of Christ is present in the bread of the Eucharist substantialiter, theology in the Catholic West was forever changed and in ways that had profound implications for philosophy as well. Sir Richard Southern writes that Lanfranc “was displaying an early symptom of the scholastic urge to use the sciences of the trivium and quadrivium to push back the frontiers of mystery and enlarge the area of intelligibility.”24 My own view is that in the work of St. Tomas Aquinas, mystery and intelligibility achieved a certain perfection in their mutually illuminating balance. Rosemann, by contrast, thinks that “Aquinas is already going too far in the direction of intelligibility.”25 Either way, after Aquinas the expansion of intelligibility at the expense of mystery was inexorable. William of Ockham was efect as well as cause. René Descartes and David Hume make convenient icons for the alternatives modernity constructed from the fragments of the classical model. For all their diferences, both begin with “my” consciousness, rational for Descartes, imaginative for Hume. Descartes argues that beginning with “I think therefore I am,” he proves, frst, the existence of God and, second, based on the perfect nature of God, the existence of the world. Hume irrefutably shows that if “I” begin with “my” consciousness, all that “I” 24. Richard W. Southern, Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 45. 25. Philipp Rosemann, Note to author, September 17, 2019.

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can prove is that “my” consciousness exists. As I have already noted, for Hume, the objects of “my” consciousness have no other reference point than that of “my” consciousness. With respect to establishing the extra-mental reality of the world, all that Kant— for all his genius—manages to advance from Hume’s claim is that something must exist outside “my” consciousness in order to cause objects in “my” consciousness, but he acknowledges that the natures of extra-mental realities that cause my mental phenomena can never be established. For Kant, it is not only God whose status is “as if,” but the whole of the world.26 Descartes rejects the construction of an epistemology based upon a metaphysics based upon indemonstrable frst principles as a glorious palace built upon sand.27 He famously replaces metaphysics with epistemology, insisting that anything called knowledge be founded upon “clear and distinct ideas.”28 So confdent of his method is Descartes that he holds that humans “can render ourselves masters and possessors of nature.”29 For Descartes, humans are unlimited knowers of a world of limited knowability. Everything is intelligible or, at least, potentially intelligible because there is a limit to what can be known. Any remaining mystery is merely something which the unlimited human knower has simply not gotten to as yet. Hume concurs with Descartes’s demolition of metaphysics, but then proceeds to demolish epistemology as well. We, humans, have only “clear and distinct sentiments.”30 Our ideas are clear and distinct only in mathematics, and mathematical objects 26. Human life is conducted on the supposition that the world exists, even if proof of existence, at least of the natures of things, is impossible. Tus, we live “as if ” the world exists. 27. René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, ed. David Weissman (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 7 (Discourse, Part 1). 28. Descartes, Discourse, 22 (Discourse, Part 4). 29. Descartes, Discourse, 38 (Discourse, Part 6). 30. David Hume, Of the Standard of Taste and Other Essays, ed. John W. Lenz (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1965) 13.

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do not exist in nature; anyway, mathematics derives from our impressions in the frst place.31 Hume’s empiricism leaves us with neither truth nor certainty, but only probability.32 Te intelligibility of an extra-mental world is merely wishful thinking, a kind of metaphysical teddy bear to console us against the possibility that life is meaningless.33 As for mystery, that is, at best, only a sort of vagueness, and at worst, mere superstition whether popular or elitist. For Hume, then, there is neither intelligibility, nor mystery; there is only a long sequence of mental impressions conjoined with greater or lesser probability: the human is a limited knower of an unknowable world, if there is an extra-mental world at all. After this survey of the classical model and two principal modern alternatives to it, the time has come to make a claim foundational to the essays in this volume: intelligibility and mystery are possible only as long as they are tethered to each other. Either will self-destruct if enlarged to the exclusion of the other. In an unexpected way, Hume is a friend to this claim because he decisively shows that Descartes’s attempt to eliminate mystery results in the destruction of intelligibility as well. Te diference between Hume and the contributors to this book is that he is happy with the result, and we are not. At the same time, it is not enough to attempt a facile recovery of the classical model. We are not interested in being “neo” anything. Hume constructs a wicket gate 31. Hume, First Enquiry, 20 (Section 4, Part 1). 32. Hume, First Enquiry, 37–39 (Section 6). To be fair to Descartes, he acknowledges that probability must be our guide in daily life, but grants this point only at the very end of the Meditations. Descartes, Meditations, 6. After such a long and labored argument for his clear and distinct ideas, his acknowledgment of probability reads like a concession, perhaps a concession from which Hume took inspiration. Descartes, Discourse, 96–97 (Meditations 6). Of course, Descartes goes on to fnish his argument for the existence of the world based upon the existence of God, but Hume dispatches that argument as well: “To have recourse to the veracity of the supreme Being in order to prove the veracity of our senses, is surely making a very unexpected circuit. If his veracity were at all concerned in this matter, our senses would be entirely infallible; because it is not possible that he can ever deceive.” David Hume, First Enquiry, 105 (Section 12, Part 1). 33. Hume, First Enquiry, 48 and 102 (Section 7, Part 1 and Section 12, Part 1).

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through which every philosopher must go in seeking to recover a world at once intelligible and mysterious. Tere are sloughs and mountains aplenty and myriads of distractions before that recovery can be claimed or, perhaps, even rightly begun.

History of Philosophy as Philosophical Method All the contributors to this volume are practitioners of history of philosophy as philosophical method. As Aristotle tells us, every investigation must have its method. Te discovery of mystery and intelligibility in the world is bound up with history of philosophy as philosophical method. Te state of afairs in academic philosophy today is that history of philosophy as philosophical method is vigorously disputed. Te two largest schools of academic philosophy are analytic and continental, in each of which are practitioners of history of philosophy as philosophical method. Tere is a smaller number of philosophers who self-identify as neither analytic, nor continental, but whose school is history of philosophy as philosophical method. While Noone’s chapter provides an exposition of this method, a few words of defnition are appropriate here. History of philosophy as philosophical method is the engaged reading of the philosophical canon, and from that engaged reading new philosophical insights emerge. Tis method presupposes a community of philosophers committed to a philosophical way of life, a community open to the transformative power of the texts that they read. My use of the word “history” is larger than the narrow and exclusive understanding of history as a discipline invented in the nineteenth century. History, in this broader sense, is the enterprise invented by Herodotus and Tucydides and by those earlier Hebrew historiographers who gave us the books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles. Within the analytic school, battle has been joined by advocates

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and opponents of history of philosophy as philosophical method. A welcome addition to the debate is John Marenbon’s article “Why We Need a Real History of Philosophy,”34 where he argues for the legitimacy of history of philosophy within the analytic school. A review here of his argument will show both principles common to us and to him as well as our diferences with his general stance. Marenbon advocates engagement with the primary texts of philosophy as wholes in their historical context. Tis engagement must be informed by the best philological insights. It is not enough to provide “an account of the positions and arguments in a text. . . . Scholars need to add a further set of distinctively historical aptitudes: the ability to explore cause and efect in human afairs, to see the place of detail (here detailed arguments) within a wider picture, to see patterns and discontinuities.”35 Method, however, says Marenbon, is not enough; history of philosophy also requires breadth and depth in the knowledge of the philosophical canon. Everyone cannot know everything, but everyone should have a sense of the comprehensive scope of the philosophical enterprise and how one’s own work contributes to the whole.36 Tus, history of philosophy begins with the premise of texts as wholes working toward the end of the philosophical enterprise as a whole. Marenbon comes to the brink of announcing philosophy as necessarily communitarian, but he does not cross that brink. Te communitarian nature of philosophy, however, is an emphasis of Noone’s chapter in this volume. Marenbon argues against the view that such study is merely instrumental; he argues instead for the view that is actually philosophical per se.37 As welcome as his contribution is, he does not go far enough. 34. John Marenbon, “Why We Need a Real History of Philosophy,” Proceedings of the British Academy 214 (2018): 36–50. 35. Marenbon, “Real History,” 39–40. 36. Marenbon, “Real History,” 42–44. 37. Marenbon, “Real History,” 36–38.

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A broad swath of those practicing history of philosophy as philosophical method begin with the premise that engagement with the great texts of the western philosophical tradition is transformative of persons and communities. Tat premise is as old as the texts of Plato, who explicitly wrote the Republic to replace the Iliad and Odyssey as the formative texts of Greek culture. In the Republic, Socrates engages the texts of Homer and those of most of the philosophical authors known to him, from Tales to Parmenides, and—perhaps more surprisingly—the performative texts of Greek mystery religions.38 I contend that not only did Plato write his books with the intention that they replace Homer, but Plato himself had already been transformed by his engagement with texts and especially by reading texts together in ways that the authors had not intended to be read together; those of Heraclitus and Parmenides come quickly to mind. Aristotle had a like transformative experience and wrote with a like intention. Perhaps no one in the history of philosophy has given us as important a synthesis of apparently disparate texts than Plotinus. He, all in the name of Plato, allowed the dialectical interplay of Platonic and Aristotelian texts to inspire one of the most enduring and infuential movements of philosophy. Philosophical texts transform their readers. Not only are those scholars wrong who claim history of philosophy has only instrumental value, but they have things exactly backwards. Tose who give themselves to history of philosophy— in the way that Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus did—know that not only do those great texts change us, but they also use us. As we give ourselves to those texts, we become instrumental to them. Each of us becomes the pen wielded by the text to write the next page of philosophy. Tis is all to the good because those texts have more to say than we do. Transformed, the philosopher has more 38. Here, I use the word “text” to embrace oral as well as written canons, since the book was for the Greeks a largely ffth-century B.C. phenomenon.

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to say than he or she knew or could know without those texts. Humility before the text, as John Rist urges us to remember, is a necessary pre-condition to such transformation—necessary, but of course never sufcient.39 I have called this aspect of history of philosophy as philosophical method “Christian textualism.”40 It is certainly not exclusively Christian, because it was practiced, as I have said, by the pagan Greeks before and contemporaneous with the early centuries of Christianity. I call it “Christian” in the sense that St. Augustine discovered in the incarnation of Jesus Christ the resolution of how the intelligible becomes material.41 Within the lexis of every text, there is a logos that animates it. As the historian of philosophy—at his or her best—gives him- or herself to the text, seeking to penetrate the fesh of language, there is the possibility of that philosophical madness described by Socrates in the Phaedrus (245b–250a) when the inner logos of the text takes control of the reader. Te reader becomes a philosopher in a new way, out of his or her own mind, wielded by the text’s inner logos that fnally releases the reader who is spent in exhaustion. Historical and philological knowledge, as well as breadth and depth in the philosophical tradition, which Marenbon rightly asserts are essential and ancillary to history of philosophy as philosophical method, still 39. Page 72. 40. Jefrey Dirk Wilson, “A Consideration of Roland Barthes’s Te Pleasure of the Text: From an Erotics to an Agapics of Reading,” International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 56/4, Issue 224 (December 2016): 469–86; especially 482–86. 41. “And what was the manner of his coming, if not this: ‘Te word was made fesh and lived among us’ [ John 1:14]? When we speak, the word which we hold in our mind becomes a sound in order that what we have in our mind may pass through the ears of fesh into the listener’s mind: this is called speech. Our thought, however, is not converted into the same sound, but remains intact in its own home, sufering no diminution from its change as it takes on the form of a word in order to make its way into the ears. In the same way the word of God became fesh in order to live in us but was unchanged.” Augustine of Hippo, On Christian Teaching, trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 13–14 (I.xiii 12.26). Intelligible logos becomes material lexis without ceasing to exist or being diminished in its intelligible reality. See also Confessions VII. ix 13–14.

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constitute only a kind of philosophical a priori. Tey contribute signifcantly to the conditions that make possible the philosophical moment, but they cannot cause or explain such a moment. Tere are such philosophers who lost their minds in the divine madness in both the continental and analytic schools; there are other such philosophers who identify with neither school but regard history of philosophy as a third school. Te reason for this third school is that much of both the analytic and continental schools—allowing that neither has any defnitive unity—operates in a realm at least as old as the works of David Hume in which he discredits the idea of any underlying logos in the world. Since Hume, the metaphysical claim that any underlying logos exists and that humans can access it has been amongst philosophers largely intellectually disreputable. But then madmen are always disreputable. Perl explores the realm of philosophical mysticism, for which Plato’s philosophical madness is a founding principle. Without suggesting that all of the contributors perfectly concur with all the principles enunciated by Noone and Rist, still their contributions constitute together a discourse on our method. I have already alluded to Metaphysics 1 982b10–21, where Aristotle says that philosophy is born in wonder which leads to ignorance which, in turn, leads to the pursuit of knowledge for no utilitarian purpose. Tat seminal passage is addressed, explicitly and implicitly, throughout the essays of this volume. Most interesting are the varied expositions of that touchstone as the authors set up dialectical interactions with other philosophers: Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Plato, Plotinus, Proclus, Augustine, Aquinas, Vico, Hegel, Nietzsche, Cassirer, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. History of philosophy as philosophical method has clear precedent in those works of Aristotle wherein he uncovers his own philosophical insights by rehearsing the thoughts of his predecessors and then by comparing and contrasting them with one another and with his own insights. Like Bach working from someone

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else’s tune, Aristotle composes his own philosophical fugue. Plato’s method is more playful, but through the mockery and caricatures of past thinkers Plato’s Socrates leads his interlocutors to think thoughts previously unconceived. In a rare moment of humility, Aristotle expresses the hope that in some ways he has done better than his predecessors and, in the rest, at least not worse.42 Tat is our hope as well. From philosophical refection on the history of philosophy, new paths emerge, wending their ways through Hume’s wicket gate, forward to philosophy that recovers wonder, the best kind of ignorance, all in the pursuit of wisdom.

Our Communitarian Pursuit of Wisdom Here is a curious thing: though philosophy after Descartes is part of the history of philosophy, often modern philosophy treats the history of philosophy as if it were a diferent discipline than philosophy itself. Perhaps this tendency (or is it a commitment?) arises from the modern disdain for tradition. Tough it is Rousseau who claims to be a solitary walker, he is following the path Descartes had already trod. Perhaps “history” is only another name for tradition, and tradition only another name for community: they are modes of the same reality. Noone observes that Descartes does not tell the truth, for he picks the pockets of precisely the schoolmen he explicitly disdains.43 Te claims of Descartes and Rousseau stand in sharp contrast with the communities of philosophers that characterize the history of philosophy from the early Greeks through the schoolmen. Aristotle observes that though the philosopher be the most self-sufcient of humans, still the work of soul-seeing contemplation is done better in the company 42. Aristotle, Metaph. 13.1 1076a15–16. 43. Page 44.

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of others.44 Again, it is Noone who tells us that because of the “communitarian aspect to the acquisition and perfection of philosophical knowledge,”45 philosophy and history of philosophy converge. Tis volume is ofered as an instance of that convergence. Still, so radical is the divergence between philosophy and history of philosophy deemed, that some universities have diferent departments for the two disciplines. Noone explores the forgetfulness and loss which result from such dichotomization. Tereby, some moderns think they have discovered something new when they have only repeated an old discovery, and on Noone’s account, often a less vigorous repetition. He also points out that this forgetfulness is a function of the modern rejection of the communitarian character of classical philosophy. But does not Aristotle himself give warrant for the separation of history of philosophy from philosophy proper when, in the Poetics, he says that poetry and art, in general, are akin to philosophy because both deal with universals while history deals only with particulars?46 Indeed, how does one square that assertion with Aristotle’s own surveys and analyses of his predecessors and contemporaries? Noone ofers distinctions that permit an answer. Tere are the res gestae, which are “past events . . . the entirety of the human past.” Te res gestae are, indeed, the particulars of history—for example, that Aristotle lived 384–322 B.C. and taught that forms are in the things themselves. Tere are also “memoria,” “the surviving record of such past historical events,” and “narra­ tio,” “interpretation or relation of such events.” Because memoria and narratio are “plastic,” they are available for the consideration of universals. Noone points out that these two plastic forms of history may or may not be true to the original res gestae. Te remembering and the subsequent account of the remembering are 44. Aristotle, Eth. Nic. 10 1077a133–35. 45. Page 43. 46. Aristotle, Poetics 9 1051a36–b6.

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themselves particular res gestae. What Heraclitus and Parmenides actually said are res gestae. What Plato and Aristotle recall of those accounts is memoria, and how they explain those accounts is nar­ ratio. Tus, memoria as record of the past and narratio as account of the past are available for the consideration of universals, but me­ moria and narratio as events themselves are particulars. One has only to think of the Heraclitean fragments and the account given them by Socrates of the Teaetetus. Aristotle, with the fragments before him and the teaching of Plato fresh in his mind, seems at times slightly uncertain which to credit as the real voice of Heraclitus.47 Such was the literary genius of Plato that his narratio makes us doubt the text we have before our very eyes. Tere is a dynamic interaction between the particularity of the res gestae, on the one hand, and the universality of memoria and narratio, on the other. John Rist’s chapter on method is largely a via negativa. While Noone sets forth a systematic understanding of history of philosophy as philosophical method, Rist takes the battle to the enemy. He hammers those who claim the mantle of philosophy while rejecting its history as being itself philosophy. Resonant with distinctions made in Plato’s Sophist, Rist calls “sophists” those who seem to be philosophers, but who are not. Rist’s rhetoric is adamant, anticipating arguments, but in the end brooking no opposition. At the same time, he insists that the philosopher’s posture in relation to the great philosophers of the perennial tradition must be that of humility. Although Rist never quite states the point, implicit throughout his chapter is the claim that in order to be humble before the tradition that fows from Plato and Aristotle, one must be defant to one’s contemporaries. Tus, both humble and defant John Rist surely is. Te essays of Noone and Rosemann bookend the volume. Temes introduced by Noone are reprised and elaborated by 47. Aristotle, Metaph. 4.3 1005b24–26; 11.5 1062a31–33.

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Rosemann. For example, Rosemann’s dialectic of narrative and logos sets Nietzsche and Wittgenstein on opposite sides of the divide between univocal immanence and the narrative of transcendence. Nietzsche detested the scientifc conceptualization of life and ofers a new counter-religious narrative that seeks to reenchant the world but succumbs fnally to madness. Te French post-modernists hold that it is the mad Nietzsche, having vanquished intelligibility, who best epitomizes philosophy. Rosemann points out Wittgenstein’s extreme contrast; his philosophy, while seeking perfect univocity, does acknowledge the realm of mystery. Of that realm, however, he famously says at the end of the Tracta­ tus, “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”48 Wittgensteinian philosophy, however, can only be descriptive, never prescriptive; it is philosophy that has lost its power for the ethical and political. In the deepest possible irony, the perfectly univocal immanence of Wittgensteinian philosophy and its rejection of the realm of mystery as part of philosophy’s domain loses all purchase in the city where the philosopher stands, failing to meet Cicero’s criterion of bespeaking human fourishing. Echoing Desmond’s metaphysics of the between, Rosemann understands the philosopher as situated between immanent and transcendent, capable to speak of either because committed to both. Are Noone’s “narratio” and Rosemann’s “narrative” the same? Rosemann means more literally a “story” in the way that the Od­ yssey or even Te Hound of the Baskervilles is a story. Tey tell us something that science cannot. Noone’s narratio is a larger category, which surely includes Rosemann’s narrative but accepts other accounts that are not story-like and that Rosemann would not include. For example, Aristotle’s various accounts of his predecessors are narrationes, but not narratives. Still, the insights of Noone and Rosemann are mutually illuminating, and Rosemann’s narrative 48. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge Classics, 1961), 89.

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at the end of the volume fttingly responds to Noone’s narratio at the beginning. Tere is symmetry between the frst two chapters on method and the fnal two on mystery and intelligibility. Tat two scholars of Neoplatonic philosophy and philosophers in that tradition, Rist and Perl, should each give us a chapter on the via negativa is ftting. Perl’s essay prepares the reader for Rosemann’s in much the way that Rist’s chapter follows naturally from Noone’s. Rosemann asks what philosophy is. Perl asks a preliminary question, formulated frst in modernity by Leibniz: Why there is anything at all? Perl guides us through the thought of Plotinus, Proclus, and Aquinas, showing “how it [the question] forces the inquiring spirit, on strictly rational grounds, to abandon itself into the darkness and silence of philosophical mysticism.”49 Rarely is painstakingly detailed scholarship also breathtaking, but so it is with Perl’s prose. In a word, Perl maps the outline of unknowable mystery from which all intelligibility fows. Meaning is possible precisely and only because intelligibility does not exhaust itself. Te central three essays discuss the Aristotelian themes of wonder, ignorance, and the pursuit of wisdom. Tey are both exemplary of the method set forth in the frst two chapters and prolegomena to the fnal two essays on intelligibility and mystery. William Desmond expands our knowledge of good ignorance (knowing that I do not know, in contrast to bad ignorance of not knowing that I do not know). Regarding good ignorance, he sees agreement between Aristotle and Hegel, and perhaps amongst many philosophers. Our wonder arises at some state of indeterminacy—an apparent state of equivocity—which, leading to the pursuit of knowledge, concludes in univocal determination, but, in turn, prepares us for a new collision with indeterminacy. Tere emerges a dialectical leap-frogging of wonder-ignorance-pursuit of knowledge-knowledge-wonder-ignorance-pursuit of knowl49. Page 181.

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edge, etc. “Wonder,” says Verene, “is the basis of dialectic,” the process in which the bounding of ignorance makes the world intelligible. Desmond, in his analysis of apparent Heraclitean contradiction, points to a second kind of wonder, however, and a kind of ignorance that “exceeds all determination; . . . exceeds also the idea of the indeterminate.” Rosemann will call our attention to the claim of Socrates of the Republic that the Form of the Good is beyond Being. Perl reminds us of the One of Plotinus. Even Aristotle, who has been accused of not conceiving there to be anything beyond the intelligible, says of his Unmoved Mover that God is either perfect thinking perfectly all the time “or something better.” Without elaboration there or elsewhere, he says simply of the “something better,” “And he has it thus exceedingly.”50 Aristotle knew that when he had reached the limit of intelligibility, he could only point in the direction of what was exceedingly better. At that limit, he acknowledges his ignorance of an unknowable reality. Intelligibility and mystery touch. In the context of this good ignorance, this open-ended ignorance, Desmond speaks of our “infnite astonishment” at the source of “an abiding inexhaustibility.”51 Both Rosemann and Desmond conclude the necessity of philosophy arriving at consideration of the divine even as Cicero did, and thus muthos beyond logos is necessary for logos to be complete—mystery that makes intelligibility more intelligible. Perl, for his part, shows how the realms of both sensibility and intelligibility are but scaffolding by which to launch into a superintelligible realm, beyond being, beyond speaking or knowing, and yet surely the source from which the intelligible and sensible most truly proceed. Perhaps, however, the supposed determinacy of knowledge is actually a conceit. “We engage in metaphysics,” Verene writes, “out of our weakness, our inability fully to know. Tere is always more before the mind than there is in it. Te really real (to ontos on) is 50. Aristotle, Metaph. 12.7 1072b24–26. My translation. 51. Page 170.

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always just beyond the mind’s grasp, causing the passion of wonder and continuing to generate our propensity toward metaphysics.”52 Verene’s insight is reminiscent of Plotinus and Aquinas: the infnite is hidden within the fnite. While determinacy can capture the fnite, the infnite onto which the fnite is a window can never be comprehended in a determinate way. But Desmond, “companioning” Heraclitus, is ahead of us: “And Heraclitus’s obscurity? We might now see this as due not to a dearth of intelligibility but rather to an excess of intelligibility, excess hyperbolic to determinate and self-determining intelligibility. Tere is a light that blinds us; there is a night that arouses perplexity that is more ultimate than the certainties of the determinate day. Heraclitus invites into that night and into that light.”53 Every intelligible carries within it the mystery that makes the intelligible intelligible. Plotinus may have been the frst to see that we need both Plato and Aristotle to have a full account of logos. For Plato, the logoi are entirely transcendent, and he needs many muthoi to make them intellectually accessible. Even Plotinus—whose narratio is that he is only explaining Plato—is not convinced. Tere is a problem inherent in Aristotle’s account as well. His logoi are entirely immanent, but immanent of what? Not of mental universals, because mental universals derive from forms in things. Plotinus sees that the logoi are indeed immanent, but he also sees—to use Desmond’s term— that “there is an overload of signifcance.”54 Immanent logoi are dripping with transcendence that comes from outside the things themselves. In such a realization, we might be struck dumb, but we might also stutter, stammer, gibber-jabber—in other words, speak Desmond’s fux-gibberish, precisely because penetrating the ever-rolling river of life before us is the logos of that-which-is, the really real. William Desmond concludes his essay with an idyllic scene 52. Pages 118–19. 53. Page 175. 54. Page 174.

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of a child speaking Heraclitean fux-gibberish in the three-way encounter of child, parent, world. Te parent speaks to the child, perhaps handing the child a ball, and the child speaks back. Te parent speaks words; the child speaks babble. I recall a conversation prior to a major interview in which one of the interviewers, knowing that I was a new grandfather and wanting to put me at ease, asked me about my two-month-old granddaughter. I told him she was terrifc and that I had talked with her just the day before. He looked puzzled and asked me what she had said. I replied, “abbadabbajabbawabba.” “Babbling,” observes Desmond, “is on the way to wording, gibberish on the way to logos.”55 What does one say to Socrates of the Republic when he announces that the Form of the Good is beyond Being? “Ah-ah-ah-ah,” gasping while seeking to catch up with soul-seeing a world drenched with meaning. What Desmond says of the child, Verene, following Vico, says of the whole of human culture: “Vico’s frst men—otherwise without fear, except as an animal instinct in response to specifc threat of danger—suddenly experience terror (spavento) as an inner passion, a sensation that shakes their very existence. In imitation of the sound of thunder they cry out pa, which they double as pape! Tey now respond to the sky as an alter-body, a being beyond themselves, diferent in kind.”56 In Desmond’s terms, they were speaking Heraclitean fux-gibberish on the way to wording. Tunder scared the be-jeebers out of them. Vico—in his pre-Darwinian narratio—explains how the descendants of Noah went from being one-eyed cavemen to citizens in a civitas.57 For all that Plato’s Socrates rails against Heraclitus, like the Ephesian riddler Socrates is a devotee of Delphic riddles. “Know thyself!” Here following Cassirer, Verene sees “Socrates as the discoverer 55. Page 178. 56. Pages 114–15. 57. Page 114.

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of self-knowledge as the product of contemplation.”58 Socrates discovers who and what the human being is, not through selfrefection, but rather by looking beyond his neighbors toward a transcendent reality of which, according to Cassirer, this human being is a symbol. In so doing, Socrates achieved in rational categories what the mythmakers achieved in imaginative categories. “Myths,” says Verene, “are the keepers of the master images out of which human culture is developed.”59 Tough terror and shame were the frst emotions, before long, soul-seeing wonder caused humans to laugh. Verene presents a metaphysics of mirth and explains, in efect, why Desmond is most truly a philosopher when he makes us laugh out loud. For wonder not only produces fear and shame, but also soon gives way to the sheerest and most intense delight. In every reading of A Christ­ mas Carol, I laugh—companioning Dickens, as he intends—in wonder as Bob Cratchitt laughs in wonder at the marvel of Mrs. Cratchitt’s Christmas pudding, which says far more about Bob Cratchitt than about the pudding. Tat is humble wonder, but then all wonder begins in humility. Verene starts with Socratic irony, which is often funniest when Plato wants Socrates to make an important and not altogether obvious point. To follow, Verene presents Bertolt Brecht teaching us to laugh with Hegel. About that, one could not do better than to quote Le guide Michelin, “Ça vaut le voyage.”

Contemplation and Re-enchanting the World I began this introduction with a narratio of how the enchanted world became disenchanted by the forces of modernity, philosophy among them. In the spirit of Vico, corso e ricorso, this has 58. Page 112. 59. Page 113.

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all happened before. In my essay, I give an account of the disenchantment of the mythological world by those thinkers who are often deemed the frst philosophers in their transition from the imaginative genera of myth to the natural genera of Tales, Xenophanes, and others. I then argue that Plato and Aristotle re-enchant the world through the discovery or invention of metaphysics. Like Verene, I subscribe to Vico’s account of the transformation of Homeric imaginative genera to the rational genera of classical Greek philosophy and, further, to Lévi-Strauss’s assertion that “the human has always thought equally well,” but that what changes is what humans think with.60 What I noticed, however, is that many early Greek thinkers use neither imaginative genera nor rational genera; rather, to think they use something else, namely natural genera. I emphasize a point Verene also makes, that Zeus was not merely the god of the sky, Zeus was—at least in the earliest stratum of Homeric myth—the sky itself. Tere was no diferentiation between the natural phenomenon of the sky and the divinity. To recast this in Desmond’s terms, Zeus as sky and sky as Zeus was an indeterminate reality: they were not merely co-extensive, they were identical. To live in the Homeric world was to never quite know where one stood. If it rained too much or not at all, one had to calculate how to deal with an apparently displeased deity. Xenophanes tells us that the rainbow is not a goddess, named Iris, rather merely a colored cloud.61 In that fragment, we see the explicit move from the imaginative genera of Homeric mythology to the natural genera of the materialist early Greek philosophers. Tere is more to the story, of course, and I do my best to tell it, but the salient point to note here is that after Xenophanes and his contemporaries, not only are natural objects merely natural objects, but gods are also merely gods. When the indeterminate becomes entirely determinate, wonder at the 60. Page 82. 61. DK 21B32.

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universe is lost. Tere is nothing to be done about a drought but sufer it. Tere is nothing to fear from the gods, who neither are nature nor control it. Practices of people on the ground probably changed little to begin with, but for those singing for their suppers as bards in the courts of petty kings—of which Xenophanes, at least, was one—the world had become a more pedestrian place. Intelligibility had been bought at the expense of mystery. Both Plato and Aristotle criticize this levelling and, in response, create the rational categories of thought which re-establish a mysterious indeterminacy as essential to the intelligibility of the determinate. Teir narrationes about F/forms difer, but for all the differences there is something elusive about F/form in both accounts. Perhaps with Xenophanes in mind, Plato has Socrates say, “Te man who made Iris the child of Taumas [Wonder] was no bad genealogist.”62 I also note the parallel between Homer and Aristotle in understanding an underlying cause of natural phenomena: “For Homer, that underlying reality was a divinity; for Aristotle, substance.”63 To David Hume, the one proposed underlying reality is just as fctitious as the other. Hume is much closer to Xenophanes (the rainbow is just a cloud), but Hume’s loss of wonder is still a further degree removed, because he is sure of the rainbow only as an event in the theater of his mind. Te frst chapter, Noone’s discourse on our method, the history of philosophy, is followed frst by Rist’s apophatic account of philosophy and then by three exemplars of our method. Verene challenges Descartes’s method of refection and critique as well as Kant’s systematic development of Descartes’s method. When Vico “coins the term ‘barbarism of refection,’ ” as Verene reminds us, he may be saying of Descartes’s method—in which certainty is substituted for truth—that it returns moderns inevitably to the state of one-eyed cavemen.64 With Verene, we arrive at the 62. Plato Tt. 155d; Cooper, 173. 63. Page 97. 64. Page 127.

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conclusion that history of philosophy is unavoidably metaphysical because the soul-seeing of contemplation of the speculative intellect is, defnitionally, the apprehension of reality not only beyond the capacity of sense perception, but also beyond—with regard to Descartes—the human intellect’s power to refect upon itself. One does reasonably ask how the soul-seeing of contemplation works, that is, how can a human apprehend something that does not exist materially and is not to be found in the human mind? Te claim here is that what exists immaterially is more real than what exists materially. But can we know the existing immaterial reality? Part of Verene’s answer is that “metaphysics is musical in the sense that music is never to be heard only once. A piece of music or a song exists through repetition. It can be heard over and over again, each time in a slightly diferent sense. A metaphysic, once stated, is read and reread, argued out, refned and interpreted, often over centuries.”65 Also, it is repetition that makes immaterial reality recognizable. Hume would say that we are noticing resemblance of things in a certain contiguity of time and space and because of repeating sequences. What Hume does not and cannot account for is why the characteristics that resemble each other are recognizable to us at all. If each thing is just a bundle of accidental qualities, how is it that we can distinguish the accidents? Tis is a point where Aquinas makes a major improvement on Aristotle’s position on accidents. If I can recognize an accidental quality, it too must have a logos.66 Tis is Heraclitus again: in the everrolling stream of life, we keep on smashing into logoi like rocks in a river rapid, over and over again. Hitting our heads against the rocks, we realize with Perl—following Plotinus—that even “being is conditioned and, therefore, not absolutely frst.”67 Before such a realization is any response but silence—Wittgensteinian or other65. Page 123. 66. Tomas Aquinas, De ente et essentia, editio Leonina, vol. 43 (Rome: Editori di San Tommaso, 1976), 6; hereafter Aquinas, De ente 6. 67. Page 206.

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wise—appropriate? Te silence of wonder gives way to Desmond’s gibberish on the way to wording. Tis volume is an ofering of such silence on the way to wording. Timothy Noone introduces the performative quality of philosophy, which requires the acquisition of various technai. It is a lovely thing to read this observation from a philosopher so committed to the logos of logic. Tere is interplay between Noone the philosopher and Noone the musician. Philosophy, by which I mean metaphysics, must be musical, because the world apprehended in soul-seeing is musical and—as Verene reminds us—is meant to be eternally repeated.68 One recalls the frequency with which ancient Greek philosophers recur to the image of dance to describe the workings of the world, in both city and cosmos. One has to learn not only the steps of each dance, but also how the steps go with the music made by others. In other words, philosophy must be history of philosophy because it is only in the history of philosophy that we can learn either the music or the dance steps. Solitary walkers do not dance. “Te truly novel,” says Verene, “is oblivion, in that it is never repeated and thus cannot be remembered.”69 It is not only that without history of philosophy, philosophy ceases to be philosophy; it ceases to be at all. An unlooked-for ally in this view is Wittgenstein, as I point out in my own chapter.70 He writes: “If, e.g., we call our investigations ‘philosophy,’ this title, on the one hand, seems appropriate, on the other hand it certainly has misled people. (One might say that the subject we are dealing with is one of the heirs of the subject which used to be called ‘philosophy’.)”71 Wittgenstein makes clear that his use of the word “philosophy” is homonymous. Further, his work exists only because it is remembered. His heir of philosophy, 68. Page 123. 69. Page 124. 70. Page 96. 71. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Preliminary Studies for the “Philosophical Investigations:” Generally known as Te Blue and Brown Books (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), 28.

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as remembered, has become part of the philosophical canon. Plato had this point absolutely right at the beginning: philosophy is not possible without recollection. For all the insistence of his Socrates that recollection was the soul-seeing of eternal and immaterial Forms, that same Socrates constantly recollects his predecessors. Philosophy was born in its history. In that sense, as Noone has put it, “philosophy is never discovered for the frst time.”72 From its performative character, Noone also proposes, as earlier noted, the essentially “communitarian aspect” of the philosophical enterprise. Understood this way, history of philosophy is community, and our contributors address the importance of performance and community in philosophy comprised in the philosophical way of life. Aristotle tells us that life without friendship is not worth living,73 for “the friendship of good men is good, being augmented by their companionship.”74 Te contemplative reader may discern in the essays of this volume the lineaments of friendship in the echoing dance of each other’s thoughts and writing. 72. Timothy B. Noone, e-mail message to author, April 25, 2019. 73. Aristotle Eth. Nic. 9.11 1171a21–b28. 74. Aristotle Eth. Nic. 9.12 1172a10–11.

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one

History, Philosophy, and the History of Philosophy timothy b. noone

Te authors of this book, and many of those we hope will read it, conceive of ourselves as working in an enterprise not too often recognized as valuable in the wider philosophical community, namely, engaging in philosophical refection and analysis in and through the study of the history of philosophy. A few words of clarifcation upon this point would be in order. What we have in mind as we give ourselves over to research, teaching, and publication is that the history of philosophy provides us with incomparably important materials for philosophical refection and hence that the materials we study from the past, in addition to whatever value they may possess regarding the advancement of historical knowledge on particular subjects, are philosophically valuable. The central question that arises from such an outlook is whether the history of philosophy really is something of value to and worthwhile for the pursuit of philosophy, or is it largely a Te frst version of this chapter was presented as the inaugural lecture for the Father Kurt Pritzl, O.P., Chair of Philosophy at the School of Philosophy at Te Catholic University of America, April 21, 2017.

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philosophical aside, something of value for the garnering of historical, but not philosophical, knowledge? To put the same question somewhat more pointedly: what good is knowledge of the history of philosophy for someone seeking philosophical knowledge? To answer this question, I propose proceeding in three stages: frst, we shall address the kind of learning history is and identify its salient characteristics; second, we must examine the nature of philosophy and articulate the kind of discipline it is; third, and most importantly, we shall turn to the compound notion of the history of philosophy, exploring how the history of philosophy fts into or relates to philosophy, if indeed it does. Although the stages of our inquiry are now clear, the thesis for which I shall argue is not yet. Tat thesis may be stated quite briefy: the history of philosophy is not superfuous to the study and practice of philosophy but essential and necessary. Te essential character of the relation between philosophy and its history is evident not only in the education and intellectual development of philosophers during their formation but even in the practice of philosophical inquiry. As we shall presently see, the thesis being argued for is a controversial one, even among those who take a serious interest in the history of philosophy; indeed, it is the minority report among contemporary practitioners of the history of philosophy and is opposed even by our friend and colleague in the broad sense, Jorge Gracia of the University of Buffalo, who makes a case for the opposite claim in his excellent book entitled Philosophy and Its History, arguing rather that the history of philosophy, though useful to philosophy, is not necessary for it.1

History Let us start with the concept of history, a concept often articulated and delineated by practitioners of the historical craft in connec1. Jorge J. E. Gracia, Philosophy and Its History: Issues in Philosophical Historiography (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 107.

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tion with developing historical methodologies and techniques. Our interest in comparison with theirs, however, is much more pedestrian, even touristic; historians might, in fact, well think our observations are too broad and simple for their own purposes. Be that as it may, the place for us to begin is with commonplace English expressions found in everyday and academic life, such as “history tells us,” or “history shows,” or “history teaches us,” etc. What is meant here by “history”? We must acknowledge that, taken out of a particular context, such expressions are polysemous; their meaning in a particular case of utterance is determined by context. But taken in general, prescinding from special contexts, these expressions call to mind by the term “history” at least three possible objects to which they can and regularly do refer: the actual events of the past, what I shall call subsequently the res gestae; the surviving historical record of such past events, which I shall label the memoria; and, drawing upon the memoria, the account, interpretation or relation of such events as given by present-day or past historians, what I shall henceforth call the narratio. Before we make more detailed observations, let us see what properties “history” in these three senses have and how the objects they denote are, generally speaking, related. Te spheres of history picked out by the diferent senses are, at least to some extent and perhaps surprisingly, dynamic. Te res gestae are, of course, immobile and fxed; barring strange views regarding God, causality, and time, such as those associated with the Augustinian theologian Gregory of Rimini (ca. 1350), we may take it that not even God can bring it about that Caesar did not cross the Rubicon in 44 B.C.2 Memoria and narratio, however, are plas2. For the complexities of Gregory’s actual position see William Courtenay, “John of Mirecourt and Gregory of Rimini on Whether God Can Undo the Past: Brawardine and Buckingham,” Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 40 ( January–December 1973), 147–74 at 157–62. Further, for a brief overview of his thought, see Jack Zupko, “Gregory of Rimini,” in A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages, ed. Jorge J. E. Gracia and Timothy B. Noone (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 283–90.

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tic. For one thing, the memoria is subject to increase and decrease; it can be increased by archaelogical digs, discoveries of “lost” manuscripts (or, more often, the discovery of hitherto unacknowledged copies of known works), and so forth. But the memoria can be decreased by acts of war (Constantinople, 1204 and 1453; Leuven, 1914 and 1940; and Muenster, 1944–1945), fres (Alexandria, unknown date; Al Sa’eh Library, Tripoli, 2014), foods (Florence, 1966), earthquakes (Lisbon, 1755), and engineering errors connected to the extensions of subways (Cologne, 2009), among other things. To the extent that narrationes are dependent upon memoriae, they too are dynamic, changing at least in part in their comprehensiveness accordingly as the evidence available grows or shrinks. Yet both memoria and narratio have a further element to contribute: productions of memoria or (re-)presentations thereof as well as narrationes are themselves res gestae, the deeds done that are the primary subjects of inquiry for future historians. The res gestae require, moreover, some additional elaboration. When I speak of “past events,” I mean that term to be quite broad in scope, embracing not only past physical acts, but acts of thought, whether expressed verbally or not, speech acts—the entirety of the human past if you will. Tis means that the res gestae actually includes a whole host of things not liable to be, or perhaps not able to be, recorded and registered in the memoria. Te rapidity of the heartbeat of Duns Scotus as he placed the last scrap of parchment into his personal copy of the Ordinatio, or for that matter my own blood pressure at the outset of the present lecture, is part of the res gestae, but there are, to my knowledge, no recorded elements associated with them. Hence, the frst gap that should strike us is that history in the sense of the res gestae may not be available at all, or not available in a reasonably complete fashion, in the memoria. Te selection or even deliberate elimination of parts of the res gestae from the form or the content of what is preserved in the memoria may, of course, owe its origin to some-

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thing other than technological limitations or the accidents of circumstance. When I worked, while a graduate student, as an ofcer for the now defunct U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, my own inspection of former President Gerald Ford, an entirely chance event not following protocol or proper security procedures, was to my utter amazement subsequently introduced into the annals of the Service under the suspicious title “PFI-TOR welcomes President Ford: Inspector Noone does the Honors” precisely in order to construe, for internal political purposes, the whole event as something planned and expected. Such distortions, often deliberate but sometimes unintended, are an inevitable feature of the memoria and require careful analysis and safeguards on the part of historians. What interests us foremost are the narrationes and their particular character within the scope of the history of philosophy, but even the memoria requires a few more remarks. Te repository of primary source records, usually manuscripts, preserve whatever is available to contemporary scholars of pre-modern philosophy. Tese manuscripts are often multiple copies of the same work or perhaps the same set of lecture courses. Tese copies need to be sifted through and the text they contain edited to prove useful even to most other scholars; such editing usually involves careful consideration of the reading presented by the diferent witnesses, and editing also requires that the editor supply the text with punctuation and pertinent sources. Te product of such labors is a critical edition, but nearly as important nowadays, because of the decline of the knowledge of ancient languages, is the translation of such an edition into a modern language such as English, inasmuch as that is how many, perhaps most, philosophers will access the texts. Among the works, then, that historians of philosophy produce are such critical editions and translations, and these must be accounted as part of the increase to the memoria, though the introductions to such editions may well be concerned with doctri-

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nal or historical matters surrounding the text and thus constitute narrationes. Perhaps some examples of the phenomena of a single publication comprising both memoria and narratio might be helpful. Latin medievalists are heavily indebted to the labors of Simone Van Riet, who managed to get eight of the volumes of the Avicenna Latinus series into print prior to her death in 1993. One of the most important of the volumes in the series is the frst of the three volumes containing Avicenna’s Liber de philosophia prima, which appeared in succession in the years 1977, 1980, and 1983. Te frst two volumes contain the critical edition of the Latin translation of the original Arabic text of Avicenna, while the third has a most remarkable set of indices which permit a reader to look up words either in Latin or in Arabic and thus to compare the original and the translation. But the frst volume, apart from ofering the frst four books of Avicenna’s text in Latin translation, also has Gerard Verbeke’s one hundred and twenty-two page study of Avicenna’s metaphysical teachings. Te frst volume is, in our terms, composite: the bulk of the volume is a contribution to the memoria, but Verbeke’s study of Avicenna’s metaphysics is a narratio. A similar example appeared more recently, though this case involves a translation rather than a critical edition. Richard Taylor’s and TérèseAnne Druart’s edition of Averroes’s Long Commentary on the “De anima” of Aristotle involves a translation, of course, of Averroes’s work, but one that is quite impressive: because the original Arabic survives in fragments as well as in Hebrew translation, the editors have been able to reconstruct, in places, the original Arabic, which is largely non-extant, by noticing the pattern of Latin words used in translation at the points whereat the Arabic is available. Te result is a translation that gives more information than the Latin text of which it is the translation, which is the only complete version of the commentary known. But, in addition, the work has a lengthy doctrinal introduction that gives an overview of Averroes’s

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philosophical psychology in light of the general principles of his philosophy. Te translation of the volume belongs, clearly enough, to the memoria, but the introduction is, in efect, a narratio. One of the reasons that I have bothered to clarify these three dimensions of history is in order not simply to tabulate the range of activities in which historians of philosophy engage, but also to correct what I deem a mistake in the analysis of Gracia. He distinguishes, without using the terminology I do, only between history in the sense of the res gestae and narrationes; but that leaves him with a problem when he notices there is a gap between the actual historical occurrences and what, in principle, a historian may reconstruct from surviving records. To cope with this problem, he allows what I consider to be a potentially pernicious terminological latitude; the historian, he tells us, really deals not with the historical author (understanding by this the author as an entity pertaining to the res gestae), but with the “pseudo-historical” author (i.e., the author as available to us through the memoria).3 Now the very sound of this is odd, for in the history of philosophy we really do have to deal with some authors who, for whatever reason, have posed as other persons or have been misidentifed by earlier historians with another known historical person—Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Pseudo-Scotus come to mind—and hence we need the “pseudo” prefx for very diferent purposes. But also the terminological license makes the reader, especially the neophyte, think that there is some kind of falsity or groundless claim inherent in the objects of historical inquiry. If we make the threefold distinction of the senses involved in the term “history” that I have proposed, we may dispense with any appeal to “pseudo” authors in Gracia’s sense; all we know about the past depends upon the surviving memoria, and that is no more inherently fallacious or problematic than observing that all we know about a present-day crime is what the surviving evidence indicates. 3. Gracia, Philosophy and Its History, 200–201.

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Philosophy If we follow the sage advice of Cicero, himself a considerable historian of philosophy as well as a source of information about ancient Greek philosophical teaching, philosophy is well described as the knowledge of all things human and divine, involving the knowledge of the underlying causes of all things.4 Yet never far from Cicero’s mind is the practical as well as the theoretical value of philosophy: philosophy is the knowledge that allows us to live happily and fruitfully—we would say “fourish”—as individuals and as a community; that is the chief reason why Cicero insists that knowledge of philosophy be found in the ideal orator whom he constructs in his De oratore: such a person will speak well on all subjects but with a depth of wisdom not to be found in the commonplace speaker.5 To teach, please, and persuade along the lines suggested by Cicero became, in the hands of St. Augustine in his De doctrina Christiana, the ideal for the Christian sage and, indirectly, the ideal for the medieval theologian. It is curious to note that Cicero allows only one other subject besides philosophy and its study to be labeled a magistra vitae in his writings, and that is history.6 But, as Gracia points out, we seem to be confronted with a dilemma when trying to relate philosophy, understood as universal knowledge of all things, to history: either philosophy is entirely concerned with what is present to all and ever present, but then the views of past philosophers are largely, if not wholesalely, irrelevant; or philosophy is mainly or wholly constituted by its historical unfolding, but then there can be no perennial questions and answers—rather instead merely historically conditioned and conditional attempts to answer historically contingent questions. 4. Cicero, De fnibus II, 1.1. 5. Cicero, De oratore I, 4–6. 6. Cicero, De oratore II, 9.

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Some historians of philosophy gladly embrace the latter alternative, claiming the job of the historian of philosophy is merely descriptive, not normative or evaluative. Te frst horn of this dilemma Gracia calls “incompatibilism,” and its basic claim is that the history of philosophy is as irrelevant to the practice of philosophy as the history of astronomy is to the research of contemporary astronomy or the history of chemistry to current research in chemistry. Arguments for this position can be readily produced: frst, the observation that the propositions formulated in the history of philosophy are concerned with particulars of time and place expressed in the past tense, whereas knowing who advanced what view of a given philosophical issue is of no concern for those treating a philosophical problem; and second, the independence of philosophical from historical discourse—the former is not concerned with historical evidence, but the features of things and our experiences, in marked contrast to the focus of the latter. As Gracia notes, moreover, this attitude toward the study of philosophy’s history is one associated with positivism and its allied movements in twentieth-century philosophy, though it is also found in early modern rationalists such as Descartes as well as many contemporary philosophers in analytic circles and even in strands of neo-Thomist traditions. 7 Some among the lastmentioned would seem to be proud of their ignorance of much of philosophical history (always exempting certain favorites in that history, of course), striking an attitude reminiscent of Tertullian’s remarks about Athens and Jerusalem: what, pray tell, has history to do with philosophy? Te second horn of the dilemma posed, which Gracia labels “historicist,” has equally plausible claims on our attention. Quite 7. Gracia, Philosophy and Its History, 123–29; the example of a neo-Tomist cited by Gracia is Henry B. Veatch, whose Aristotle: A Contemporary Appreciation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974), 3, expresses disdain for the history of philosophy as contrasted with philosophy.

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obviously, philosophical discussions, however current they may be, are part of the res gestae as soon as they are conducted and cannot be intelligibly divorced from their immediate context, that is to say, writings or conversations belonging to the recent history of philosophy. Indeed, anyone who has attended a general philosophical conference in the last thirty years well knows this phenomenon: one enters a large room in some city’s hotel flled with a number of persons working on some problem in contemporary philosophy, but unless one has read the most recent articles on, say, Jones’s reply to Smith’s reformulation of the Gettier problem, whereby Jones has made it out, in terminology all of his/her own invention of course, that Gettier’s barn example only defeats certain versions of reliabilism and evidentialism, he or she cannot hope to follow the paper being presented, let alone its subsequent discussion. Te problem here is not merely one of technical terminology—philosophy cannot, any more than any other discipline, reasonably be expected to get along without it—but rather that the recent history of philosophy, to wit, the Jones-Smith dialogue, is entirely germane and essential to following the present discussion. Te historicist seems justifed, accordingly, in arguing that no such discussion can be held, in principle, without referring to historical sources, even though they were produced last week. Te discussion is, at one level original, assuming that Jones’s terminological inventions are without precedent in the relevant literature. But the context of the paper, embedded as it is in the recent historical unfolding of the Gettier problem, means that, in its own way, the paper is as much a part of a tradition, and hence a historical process, as Tomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae is part and parcel of thirteenth-century inquiries in philosophy and theology. Gracia thinks such observations, though certainly true, actually do not advance the case of the historicist very far, for the claims about present-day discussions of the sort described would warrant only the study of the most recent portions of the history

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of philosophy, and such a limited approach to philosophical history is not what most historicists are interested in supporting.8 To show how the position of the historicists may be advanced further, Gracia cites the contemporary philosopher Charles Taylor, who wants to argue that philosophy is ineluctably tied to its history inasmuch as contemporary thought always presents a problem whose terms can be called into question only in and through an understanding of their historical origins and the history of philosophy more generally.9 Tough, as we shall presently see, Gracia fnds this more refned and broader version of the historicists’ position also wanting, our own inquiry will return in some ways to their views, for perhaps their diagnosis of philosophy’s situation indicates something essential about philosophy after all. Arguments for historicists’ positions are to some extent tied to conceptions of philosophy emphasizing dialectic, dialogue, or cultural context for the articulation of, or unfolding of, the history of philosophy. All three of these are considered by Gracia as grounds for the historicists’ approach to philosophical history but are rejected because, frst, the concept of dialectic in such a context is itself committed to certain metaphysical positions, that is, Hegelian ones, that cannot be considered normative a priori for philosophical history as a whole; second, the concept of dialogue that is invoked is fundamentally fawed, because bilateral exchange, a pre-condition of genuine dialogue, is not possible when one party cannot reply; and, third, cultural context, though acknowledged as important for properly historical investigations, would seem to entail a relativism inconsistent with the discovery and articulation of philosophical truth.10 8. Gracia, Philosophy and Its History, 111. 9. Gracia, Philosophy and Its History, 112; he cites Charles Taylor, “Philosophy and Its History,” in Philosophy in History: Essays in the Historiography of Philosophy, ed. Richard Rorty, J. R. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 21. 10. Gracia, Philosophy and Its History, 151–68.

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What Gracia ends up maintaining is a view of the relationship between philosophy and history grounded in what he terms a modifed culturalist position, one that views history as useful to philosophy, but not merely pragmatically useful: Te justifcation and value of the history of philosophy, then, rests primarily on the cultural dimensions of the philosophical enterprise, which are revealed in the relative and particular character of some philosophical propositions and in the cultural nature of language. Of course, the pragmatic justifcations given earlier also underline the value of the study of the history of philosophy. Tere is no question that the study of the history of philosophy can serve as a practicum for the art of reasoning, as a source of philosophical information and truth, and may help us see areas where we may have gone wrong. And we must accept too that the history of philosophy can serve as inspiration to philosophers as well as add persuasive support to philosophical arguments and views. . . . But it is ultimately in the need to transcend cultural provincialism and to understand the terms we use in discourse that we fnd the indisputable grounds of the importance of the history of philosophy for philosophy.11

Once again Gracia afrms the outstanding utility of the history of philosophy for philosophy, but, given the need to transcend “provincialism” and the vicissitudes of philosophical discourse at any one time and place, this means that philosophers must select elements of philosophy’s history upon which to focus their attention, since “their aim is not the complete reconstruction of the philosophical past, but the advancement of philosophy.”12 In light of what he says elsewhere, moreover, that “reconstruction of the philosophical past” must be done by historians of philosophy who take a properly philosophical approach, as contrasted with a historical approach, to philosophy’s history. Consequently, even philosophers who are, so to say, pure philosophers or ones entirely contemporary in their concerns stand in need of the support 11. Gracia, Philosophy and Its History, 170. 12. Gracia, Philosophy and Its History, 170.

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of another set of philosophers who make their primary object of study philosophy’s past, albeit the latter’s work is not to be understood as philosophy properly speaking, though it does serve philosophical purposes. Why can we not make do with this picture of philosophy and its relationship to history? Tere is certainly a role within it for the history of philosophy, a role that makes such history an important part of the philosophical enterprise in some sense, though not an absolutely necessary one. Furthermore, this outlook eschews any form of cultural and historical relativism and keeps philosophy focused upon the perennial questions that are, in any sound view of the matter, the substance of what philosophy is all about. My answer to the question just posed is that the nature of philosophy both as a praxis and as a technē requires that the history of philosophy be much more intimate to, indeed constitutive of, philosophy than Gracia’s portrayal allows. Philosophy is, in a certain sense, a performance, a practice or a praxis, in much the same way that musical and dramatic performances constitute a praxis.13 Furthermore, as historians of philosophy have often remarked, pre-modern philosophy usually expresses its self-understanding in terms of a parallel with or extension of its own account of the arts and crafts, in Greek technai. Whether we wish to think of philosophy’s product as a performance or as external works, such as philosophical poems, treatises, commentaries, classroom dispu13. In the use of “praxis” and “practice,” I am deploying the terminology found in Alasdair MacInytre’s work After Virtue: A Study in Moral Teory: “By a ‘practice’ I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially defnitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. . . . Bricklaying is not a practice; architecture is. Planting turnips is not a practice; farming is. So are the enquiries of physics, chemistry, and biology, and so is the work of the historian, and so are painting and music.” Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Teory (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 187.

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tations, or written dialogues, we are committed to saying that philosophy has built into its very notion the learning of techniques, procedures, and expressions that can only be done and learned in and through entering into a certain training (paideia) through which the technē that is philosophy is mastered and the goods constitutive of it are realized. Such a mastery of the art of philosophy is naturally expressed in and productive of outstanding performances and their literary and historical products, if any, but it cannot be acquired, if this view of philosophy’s nature is even approximately correct, simply by isolated study and thought on the part of individuals. Tere is an irreducibly social or communitarian aspect to the acquisition and perfection of philosophical knowledge, a communitarian aspect that encompasses not only our present-day fellow philosophers but the philosophers of the past. We see this readily enough, for example, in the tight association of philosophers centering around the historical Socrates; they were conscious, and their historical spokespersons, Plato and Xenophon, make us conscious, that learning philosophy had to be done by spending time with Socrates and witnessing his conversations. In other words, learning philosophy means studying with a master of the art. We may see the point being made here easily enough if we consider momentarily the well-known example of Aristotle’s writings: in the case of all of his major philosophical works, witness the Nicomachean Ethics, the Politics, the Physics, the De anima, and the Metaphysics, he begins with reviewing the outlook of his predecessors. Stating his own philosophical positions, which are quite distinctive and diferent from those found in the historical fgures he treats, Aristotle fnds to be impossible without couching them in terms relevant to his predecessors and near-contemporaries. Te analogy with the arts is quite pertinent and strong in this regard: imagine trying to learn and practice carpentry, music, or painting, locked up in your own room and not bothering with the

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efort, discipline, and practice gained through association with a master carpenter, musician, or painter. Originality is, to be sure, achievable in certain regards, but it is expressible and intelligible only in reference to the standard practices of the art. Te art, moreover, is entirely communitarian in nature and, to the extent it endures through time, traditional in the ancient sense; its standards and canons of excellence are nothing other than the builtup wisdom of predecessors, subject to change and modifcation in various ways but not able to be wholly replaced without loss of the thing that is the art. Like all analogies my own is, of course, defective, even if also instructive. Certain philosophers, especially modern ones, would be inclined to deny their dependence upon predecessors or earlier ideas, at least in any positive vein. Teirs, it would seem, is an outstanding genius that simply begins with their own novel ideas. We might think in this connection of Descartes, who would insist upon this point, or perhaps Rousseau. Yet careful consideration of such cases, through an exercise in the history of philosophy, yields up a conclusion opposed to their claims. To take the more egregious case mentioned, Descartes’s major works borrow generously from earlier philosophers, though without explicit acknowledgment for the most part. As Gilson showed more than a century ago,14 very little in the Discours or the Meditationes is not indebted to a whole range of authors, mainly Scholastic ones, though, more remotely, Arabic and ancient ones also; Descartes’s originality, which is quite real, consists in his manner of organizing and deploying these materials toward the distinctive goals he has in mind15 rather than in the invention of the arguments and princi14. Étienne Gilson, Liberté chez Descartes et la théologie (Paris: F. Alcan, 1913). 15. René Descartes, Discours de la méthode, intro. and notes, Étienne Gilson (Paris: Libraire philosophique, J. Vrin, 1999), part 6, 61–62: “Qu’au lieu de cette philosophie spéculative, qu’on enseigne dans les écoles, on en peut trouver une pratique, par laquelle connaissant la force et les actions du feu, de l’eau, de l’air, des astres, des cieux et de tous les autres corps qui nous environnent, aussi distinctement que nous connaissons

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ples involved. Te aims of such utter originality may be quite high, but the humble origins are quite evident to someone willing to do some careful historical investigation. So where does that leave us with respect to the dilemma posed by Gracia? What I am counterproposing is a trilemma. Yes, we can think of philosophy as an abstract form of knowledge, formulated in propositions and prescinding from historical expressions and context, but that is like saying that music is just a series of mathematical relations and formulae; no actual musician would learn to play music that way, though admittedly I did know a pianist who would in his more obnoxious moments pretend this was the case by yelling out cardinal numbers for notes and even chord patterns. Yes, we can think of philosophy as just its historical manifestations and socially concrete settings, but that is to pretend that the perennial issues that philosophers deal with just incidentally recur and have nothing essentially to do with each other. Or we can think of it in the third manner I have suggested: as analogous to a craft that, on the one hand, has its own canons of excellence that are of overarching importance, but on the other hand is always in the world in its historical manifestations and particularity. If we take this third approach, the history of philosophy is essential to understanding philosophy much as the historical ways of doing the arts are part of what it means to learn the art. Tis third approach need not entail cultural or theoretical relativism any more than learning music in a given historical situation entails that the same type of chord progression with the same musical form cannot be reproduced by another musician in another culture a hundred years or more later.

les divers métiers de nos artisans, nous les pourrions employer en même façon à tous les usages auxquels ils sont propres, et ainsi nous rendre comme maîtres et possesseurs de la nature.”

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The History of Philosophy In the proposed perspective, the history of philosophy has a clear enough role; in learning its history, young philosophers are learning the very substance of their subject. Tat would certainly explain why philosophy, considered in the main over the last two and half millennia, has kept an abiding interest in its history in a manner that other disciplines such as modern physics, chemistry, and astronomy largely have not. Again, an exception among contemporary disciplines here would be history, which regularly returns to master practitioners to have its younger students learn both the strengths and the weaknesses of their approaches. Gracia’s book has a remarkably comprehensive account of the range of approaches taken by those studying the history of philosophy, listing among the philosophical approaches to the history of philosophy the nostalgic, the romantic, the scholarly, and the doxographical, in addition to historical and polemical approaches. His account of these approaches is quite useful and propaideutic to his own presentation of what he deems to be a proper approach: one focusing on the formulation, development, and solutions to a philosophical problem or issue. Naturally, his example is the metaphysical problem of individuation, a problem that he has studied for more than forty years.16 Indeed, his presentation of the philosophical approach to philosophical history picks out just its essential characteristics: narra­ tiones, to use our terminology, written in a philosophical history of philosophy should concentrate on articulating philosophers’ arguments and ideas, necessarily evaluating them for validity and soundness, pointing out where key premises are questionable, and exploring implications for them that go beyond the explicit wording of philosophical texts. Here Gracia is quite critical, right16. Gracia, Philosophy and Its History, 223–337.

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ly so in my judgment, of those who see philosophical historians as merely describing historical expressions of philosophy. In fact, I could add a further example to his own of the phenomenon of properly philosophical evaluation that enters into the primary objects of the historians of philosophy: quite often, in deciding which reading to take from several witnesses to a philosophical text, an editor must rest the decision on the philosophical grounds of what makes the arguments advanced in the text work, for each of the witnesses serves up a reading that makes grammatical sense and hence could be taken in principle. Evaluation enters, then, into the very documentation of the memoria for philosophical history in the form of critical editions. For my purposes, however, what would be more suitable than presenting a model approach to philosophical history would be to give some examples of how the study of the history of philosophy has had a positive impact on the practice of contemporary philosophy, while its neglect has had the opposite efect. I shall then conclude with some general remarks about how philosophy conceived as a praxis infuences how we think about the history of philosophy. When I took my frst philosophy course more than forty years ago, the other students in the class and I were put through a book entitled Philosophical Problems and Arguments: An Introduction (originally published in 1968; ours was the second edition, published in 1974), by James W. Cornman and Keith Lehrer, both respected analytic philosophers of epistemology. Te book in retrospect is curious; that alone shows the positive infuence of the history of philosophy upon philosophy. Te book starts out with a solid 30 pages of formal logic: the inferential rules of sentential logic with truth tables in footnotes, if I recall, and fairly simple arguments to symbolize and “critique,” that is, to determine which do and which do not follow the rules of formal logic. Tereafter, each of the problems of philosophy is treated in turn: the exis-

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tence of God, knowledge and skepticism, free will, the mind-body problem, and the problem of justifying an ethical standard. In each of these cases, students were expected to analyze extremely short excerpts from historical fgures, such as Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, and Kant, or contemporary philosophers by applying the rules of the formal logic learnt and were encouraged to fnd something problematic in the texts. No philosophical text longer than three paragraphs was anywhere to be found. While this was perhaps not the worst possible introduction to philosophy, it is certainly not one I would recommend. What is heartening is that no one today would consider giving the history of philosophy such short shrift, even in an introductory textbook. Take the frst problem we studied: the existence of God. Even the most analytically inclined contemporary treatment of such a problem would probably consider not only Alvin Plantinga’s work, but several interpretations of St. Anselm’s arguments (in light of the work of Charles Hartshorne), a number of versions of St. Tomas’s proofs, and, in a better volume, some version of the sort of modal argument one fnds in the writings of Duns Scotus or Leibniz. Such a “historically oriented” approach would have been frowned upon thirty or forty years ago, but the historically uninformed or underinformed approach is now itself recognized as unprofessional, which, indeed, it was. But the point is the “was.” Philosophy’s history has furthermore gotten quite a bit of “press” from the work of well-known late-twentieth-century philosophers who regularly have drawn upon historical sources for the formulation of their own views. Charles Taylor’s work is an example already introduced, but Alasdair MacIntyre’s writings have created, I think it fair to say, a whole revival of contemporary interest in the history of traditional ethical thinking precisely as a resource for doing moral philosophy in the contemporary setting. In the philosophy of religion and moral philosophy we fnd positive infuences, quite general in scope, of the study of the his-

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tory of philosophy upon contemporary philosophy. I dare say such infuence is salutary in the long run, even if the partisans of certain philosophical approaches fnd it discomfting to be asked to address issues that they formerly neglected and believed to be well neglected. To state clearly, however, the way one nowadays must, the moral principles diferentiating deontological, utilitarian, virtue ethics, and natural law approaches to moral decision-making cannot be fairly thought to be a step backwards, though once again I believe most professional philosophers of the 1960s and 1970s, such as, for example, the late James Cornman (d. 1978) would be genuinely surprised to see the profession move in the way it has. Te “pressure” for the change is coming directly or indirectly from the study of the history of philosophy. But I promised, you will recall, some negative examples; these, I am afraid, are rather abundant. To keep matters clear and straightforward, let us take some notorious examples from the history of formal logic. When Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead produced the frst edition of their Principia Mathematica in 1910, they put forth, among many other things, seventeen rules for what they called the propositional logic. Tey seemed to be of the opinion that such rules in the form laid out in their system and shown to be self-consistent were either work being done for the frst time or, at most, work anticipated only in part by the logicians and mathematicians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nothing could be further from the truth: in his Summa Logicae, written no later than 1325, William of Ockham, the great Franciscan philosopher, produced a quite similar set of rules, showing how they were related, albeit in Latin and not in symbols. Now I am not of the opinion that nothing is to be gained by symbolization, nor am I trying to claim that the aims of Ockham, who was the strictest of Aristotelian logicians, and those of Russell and Whitehead coincided—Ockham would have had very little sympathy with their eforts to reduce math-

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ematics to logic—but one must admit that the fact that human beings twice had to invent the rules of what we now call sentential logic because the frst achievement was forgotten is a human embarrassment, not to mention an object lesson in neglecting the history of philosophy.17 Unfortunately, the history of formal logic is rather rich in forgetfulness. Take poor C. I. Lewis—the famous American logician, not the English writer C. S. Lewis—whose work in modal logic is considered the foundation for all subsequent modern modal logic. His series of logical systems, S1 through S5, are wonderful examples of carefully developed logical principles, capable of yielding powerful results in mathematics, science, and philosophy. Unfortunately, they are also reiterative. Walter Burley and John Buridan had what we call S4 and S5 described by no later than 1350, though Burley’s version of S5 goes back to 1327.18 Once again, Lewis’s eforts were no doubt worthwhile; the pity is that he had to do it at all, for no one could get through Cambridge or Oxford universities in the late fourteenth century without knowing the very rules of inference he articulated for what, in all probability, he thought was the frst time. To take another example of formal logic, in his Dialectica, Abelard calls into question the reliability of modus ponens, trying to distinguish strict from material implication in just the way that C. I. Lewis needed to do in developing his modal systems. Unlike Burley and Lewis later on, Abelard thought that a natural deduction system should avoid modalizing inference; so he toyed with the questions that logicians in the wake of Lewis would be discussing around 1950: namely, what are the implications of having 17. For an overview, see Philotheus Boehner, Medieval Logic: An Outline of Its De­ velopment from 1250 to c. 1400 (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1952), 52–75; Ivan Boh, “Consequences,” in Te Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 300–314. 18. Simo Knuutila, Modalities in Medieval Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1993), 162–75.

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an impossibility in a set of propositions and does an impossible claim entail anything or nothing? Tis kind of thinking, directly related to the development of the so-called free logic, is now discussed in terms of the principle of “explosion,” a principle that Abelard mentions, though rejects, in the Dialectica, a work available in 1119 at the latest.19 But enough of such examples. Te history of philosophy must be done and done well for the integrity and progress of the discipline; forgetfulness in this case clearly means a loss, and if my hypothesis about the nature of philosophy is correct, necessarily so. What I am calling into question here is the whole tendency to separate philosophy and its history, to consider matters in such a way that a term like “systematic” picks out what is just “philosophy” and a term such as “history” (or more often “historical” or, more disdainfully, “antiquarian”) is reserved for a less than properly philosophical enterprise called the history of philosophy, a distinct discipline, however useful it may be in limited respects to “philosophers.” In a word, some philosophers must, for the sake of the health and well-being of philosophy, be concerned with the study of the memoria of philosophical history, producing critical editions and translations, and the publication of secondary studies (narrationes), whereby philosophers of the present may come to understand the relevant res gestae, the philosophical distinctions and arguments that were made in the past so as to consider their philosophical importance. I conclude with a point that Gilson makes in connection with philosophical history that reinforces the notion that philosophy is both a praxis and a technē. When we start to study philosophy, we are lucky if there is anywhere in the world a master of philosophy at the time we live. Judging our own contemporaries is doubtless a difcult task, but would any of us venture the claim that there is, 19. See Christopher Martin, “Something Amazing about the Peripatetic of Pallet: Abaelard’s Development of Boethius’ Account of Conditional Propositions,” Argumen­ tation 1 (1987), 419–36.

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among living philosophers, a mind to compare to that of Tomas Aquinas, Descartes, or Duns Scotus, to mention nothing of Plato or Aristotle? If we are to encounter a masterful philosophical mind, then, we likely have no choice but to study the surviving writings of such philosophical masters. Yet even the study of philosophical problems would yield an equivalent conclusion, for, quite often, a philosophical problem has lost its focus or its most plausible solutions in the course of the history of philosophy. If we begin simply with what contemporary philosophers would say about intellectual knowledge, for example, we would start with propositions as the primary units, but that is a very questionable philosophical approach; only the careful study of philosophy’s history can correct the strong propensity to take the philosophical issues of the present as “the” philosophical issues. Indeed, it is precisely this tendency that leads persons to ask me and other historians of philosophy: “Do you have any materials in what you study that could help us with our questions?” Notice that behind such questions there is no serious interest in asking whether our questions are the right questions. Te history of philosophy done in such a manner is bound to be anachronistic and distorted, taking historical materials and forcing them into the Procrustean bed of contemporary questions and their answers. But taking the current outlook of philosophy as our sole guide to philosophical history also means that, if we allow the contemporary scene to direct our investigations, the history of philosophy cannot teach its own lessons to contemporary philosophers, for we have inured ourselves against the possibility of taking seriously any philosophers prior to the very recent past. Some objections to what I have said should be considered, if only in a preliminary fashion. If we took seriously the present proposal, the history of philosophy would be as important as, perhaps more important than, the study of contemporary issues in philosophy. Tat seems odd. Furthermore, if we took this business

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seriously, we would have to do massive amounts of work just to be philosophically well informed. To this second point, I would add a further refnement in support of the contention. Ten years ago or so, I did not even know much about philosophy in the Scholastic tradition after about 1550. Now, as we know thanks to the research of Jacob Schmutz and his website “Scholasticon,” it turns out that there are more than twenty-two hundred authors fourishing in the period from 1500 until 1800, writing mainly in Latin, continuing the Scholastic manner of philosophizing, and occasionally replying to or critiquing the more well-known modern philosophy found in Descartes and his successors.20 Does all of this not seem a bit intimidating? Te answer to this last question is “Yes!” But to reply to the frst and second criticisms at once: we must remember that philosophy is inherently a communitarian enterprise. Not all of us have to be historians of philosophy, though all of us should read at least the major fgures in the history of philosophy in order to gain a genuinely philosophical education. Te present proposal does not entail that we all make the history of philosophy our specialization; it just means that we recognize that those who do are working in philosophy as well. Yes, taking the history of philosophy seriously does mean a great deal of work, but as our researches in that history have so far disclosed, the work is worth it and pays of in philosophical, and not merely historical, benefts. Is it possible there is a hitherto unknown great philosopher among the twenty-two hundred documented ones in Schmutz’s collection of authors? Of course! Tat just means we literally do not know all that can be known about philosophy’s history and probably never will. Certainly, our ignorance does not allow us to be dismissive of the philosophical value of the material Schmutz has identifed without ever having studied it. 20. Te website may be found at the following address: https://scholasticon.msh-lse .fr/index_fr.php (accessed April 21, 2020).

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Philosophy and history are intimately connected though distinct disciplines. Philosophy cannot be studied without inquiry into its history, for that history, however well or poorly known, sets in part at least the very standards for the discipline of philosophy as a whole. Philosophy, on this score, cannot dispense with its history any more than any other of the activities that I have called a praxis can: history in these cases articulates the modes of inquiry and attempted answers to the questioning and seeking that are part of the art of philosophy itself. Our fndings here also have some ramifcations for the study of history, even if, as I noted at the outset, our points are broadly stated. First, historians would be well advised to pay heed to the threefold distinction of res gestae, memoria, and narratio that I have outlined above. Confusions about historical disagreements could often be sorted out simply by keeping in mind the distinction and realizing what exactly a given historian is discussing: the events of the past, the record for such events, or the interpretations of previous historians published in historical works. Second, historians of philosophy may beneft most from some of these fndings, for they should ask themselves not simply what a given author may have to say to an issue still under discussion in the contemporary philosophical scene and whether that author’s views align or misalign with contemporary approaches to the issue, but, more importantly, whether contemporary philosophers have misframed the philosophical issue itself or presumed too narrow a range of possible solutions. Te past can be, in this respect, remarkably current.

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A Guide for the Perplexed or How to Present or Pervert the History of Philosophy john rist

General Considerations Te title of this essay might suggest that I belong in the philosophical camp of those who believe in some version of the philoso­ phia perennis. My modest version would suppose that Western thought began in pre-Socratic Greece, continued via Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Epicurus, Plotinus and the Neoplatonists, various early Christian thinkers, especially Augustine, passing then in something of a straight line via Boethius and Pseudo-Dionysius into medieval times. In the fourteenth century, however, there was a break: there we can identify the origin of those radical changes of direction which over time have become canonized as forming that specifcally Western mind set which most of our contemporaries are happy to accept uncritically, while those who do not are confronted and polluted with it as with the air they breathe.

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Within the broad sweep of historical thought I have outlined, Augustine occupies a special position; for better or worse he it was who primarily summed up and passed on much (but far from all) ancient philosophy, thus becoming—as he knew and even feared would be the case, as his Reconsiderations (Retractationes) indicates—the principal philosophical point of reference for the next thousand years or more. Here, then, is a partial explanation of his unique infuence: he himself read some Aristotle, Plato and Plotinus in translation, as well as Cicero, Seneca, Varro, and a wide selection of classical Latin poets and historians plus a host of largely Latin Christian authors, not least signifcantly the heterodox biblical exegete Tyconius. Many of his successors, by contrast—at least in the earlier centuries—read some Augustine and not much more apart from the Scriptures, though the reading list began to expand rapidly from the twelfth century on. Although I see the river of philosophy fowing from Tales to Scotus and beyond, I would certainly not deny that in its course it bypassed many possible alternative routes and lost its way from time to time. What matters is that there is an overall continuity, more or less. But with the Renaissance, the Reformation and the “new science” of Bacon and Descartes plus the new moralitysubstitutes of Machiavelli and Hobbes, we enter into the philosophical and cultural world of “modernity,” later of post-modernity/ post-modernism. Tat is our world, flled with fashionable assumptions which it is one of the basic duties of the contemporary philosopher to challenge, while the role of the sophist (or at least of one very infuential group of sophists) is to try to persuade us that this is not only our way but the only way forward. It would not be entirely misleading to dub pre-modern times the age of religion, the modern and successive periods the age of secular ideology.

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Fragments and Elusive Texts Tere are philosophical and sophistic ways of teaching the history of philosophy but, that distinction as yet aside, other difculties abound in handling earlier times which afect study of the modern and post-modern world comparatively little. One is the problem posed by philosophical fragments: a serious difculty for students of ancient philosophy. Another, especially urgent for the medieval period, is that large numbers of texts are extant either only in manuscript or in printed editions of less than admirable quality. Turning frst to fragments, we must set the problem in its wider context. Few non-professionals know how limited—despite the eforts of scholars since the Renaissance—is our knowledge of the literature of classical antiquity. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides between them wrote more than two hundred plays; we have fewer than ffty of them. New Testament exegetes discussing rare or unique words in the Pauline Epistles rarely remind us that we have probably lost ninety percent of Hellenistic prose literature, hence that too much comment on unique words or senses of words tends to look academically dodgy (or inspired by sectarianism). Some authors (such as Bacchylides, Menander, and Herodas) have been recovered—partially—within the past hundred and ffty years from the Egyptian desert. Augustine’s surviving writings are more extensive than all of what remains of classical Greek literature put together, but we only possess fewer than six hundred of the probably eight thousand sermons he preached. Fortunately, however, our limited philosophical holdings from antiquity are supplemented by large numbers of fragments of lost authors cited by those still extant. But these introduce substantial problems of their own. In the frst place, it has been very legitimately asked, “What is a fragment?,” the point being that some apparent “fragments” may be paraphrases or partial paraphrases cited (as for example in Philo, used uncritically as a source for

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Stoicism in von Arnim’s still standard collection) not only (or not so much) to tell us what the cited source says, but rather what he was wrong to say or more or less to have said. Given the gladiatorial aspect of much ancient philosophy (“Rubbish a philosopher, win a crown”), that should put us on our guard against one of the difculties involved in teaching it: citations designed (or at least causing) our attention to be drawn not to the intention of the original author but to a misleading simulacrum thereof. Tus we should remember the implications of the fact that we do not possess the complete text of any Stoic who lived before Christ, although we (and I) regularly distinguish the difering views of Zeno and Chrysippus, the latter of whom we treat as the primary exponent of Stoicism—as already in the third century did Origen; but he possessed far more of Chrysippus’s writings, the loss of which is probably the most serious of all the loses of philosophical texts from antiquity. Many ancients thought that Chrysippus, not Aristotle, was the most able logician of their times. As for us, we may attribute texts to him which there is no particular reason to suppose are from his stylus (or that of his secretary). Even if we think we are on frmer ground when we seem to be given (perhaps by Plutarch) the text of a predecessor at length and in apparently exact form, we may suspect changes to have been introduced not necessarily for philosophical but rather for literary or rhetorical purposes—or sometimes for downright misrepresentation. I remember a lecture by the late John Whittaker in which he examined citations by Plutarch and others of a text which we do possess in its entirety, namely Plato’s Republic.1 Tat would obviously constitute a test-case for Plutarch’s accuracy—and it gives us pause. On a number of occasions—some philosophically signifcant, others apparently merely rhetorical—Plutarch adds or 1. John Whittaker, “Te Value of Indirect Tradition in the Established of Greek Philosophical Texts or the Art of Misquotation,” in Editing Greek and Latin Texts, ed. J. N. Grant (New York: AMS Press, 1989), 63–95.

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subtracts material from what we have every reason to believe is the correct version. And the problem is far from limited to Plutarch. Denis O’Brien has demonstrated how it was more or less standard procedure among Neoplatonists in late antiquity to “correct” citations from the pre-Socratics and Plato in order to present them as in agreement with key features of post-plotinian philosophy.2 Tat is far from the end of the list of difculties with fragments, but it gives some sense of the favor of the problem, though it would be irrationally pessimistic to suppose that intelligent use of them does not bring substantial results. And when we turn from antiquity to the Middle Ages, the basic difculties are different, but often in efect equally challenging. Many texts do not exist in viable printed editions, and while the medievalist generally needs only to be a palaeographer, not also a textual critic, he would have plenty of palaeographical work to do if, for example, he was asked (as I was and declined) to write a history of medieval Augustinianism. If he is not wary, he may resemble the man who, having lost his wallet on a dark street, looks for it under a lamp post where there is more light. Tere is a further difculty even with the printed texts we have, especially but not exclusively when we are trying to understand medieval interpretations of Augustine, their guiding light to so much philosophy and theology from previous eras. It is often hard to know in adequate detail which of his works were known in their entirety (and by whom), which in forilegia, and which not at all. It is often said that Gregory of Rimini had a wider knowledge of Augustine than most medieval thinkers. But one cannot be sure whether that means he had a wider knowledge of the Augustinian corpus as a whole or merely whether his reading was diferently focussed. 2. For a summary see the illuminating account presented by Denis O’Brien, “Apologia pro vita sua,” in Agonistes: Essays in Honour of Denis O’Brien, ed. J. Dillon and M. Dixsaut (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2005), ix–xli.

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All in all, when we turn especially to the teaching of pre-modern philosophy, we need to remember that these problems form the background to any discussion of philosophical versus sophistic/ ideological renderings of the thought of those times. How they are handled may mark one of the diferences between honest and dishonest readings of the relevant texts.

Representing and Misrepresenting the Dead White Male Philosophy is a subject like no other. If you study the history of physics, that does not make you a physicist. If you study Shakespeare, that does not make you a playwright, though it may help you become a philosopher if you ask what Shakespeare so impressively wants to tell us and whether what he writes makes some kind of sense. If you study philosophy, you are not doing cultural anthropology or sociology, as we shall see—though these disciplines may help you become a better philosopher. Rather, as a philosopher you are trying to discover basic truths (if any and however truth itself may properly be explained) about the world and about yourself. Of course, philosophy might be a pseudo discipline: perhaps it is really only bad physics or bad psychology or a set of tricks by which you can persuade people, for example, that there are—or are not—moral truths. I propose to give it the beneft of the doubt, my hypothesis being that something we call philosophy—somehow concerned with certain basic truths about man, the world and possibly God—is (or can be) a serious discipline, calling us, with Socrates, to believe that the unexamined life is subhuman. As with all disciplines, even those of comparatively recent provenience like sociology, philosophy has a history. And that history might be of particular importance: it might help us understand how to do philosophy now, or why we are now asking the wrong

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questions and therefore doomed never to fnd answers to them— which will keep philosophers on the payroll of universities at least for some time yet, until the apparent ruse is discovered—or how we once knew things of philosophical importance which we have now lost sight of. Above all we might learn, say from reading Platonic dialogues, how to distinguish thoughtful refection from ideology or bullshit or bureaucratic gobbledygook. Or to see both whether what clever people think makes sense (we call that activity—roughly—formal or informal logic) and which of the many schemata that make sense seems best to represent the world we inhabit. Plato, always the master in teaching us how to do philosophy, knows the diference between philosophers, eristics (smartAleks—nowadays often called public intellectuals—who like to dazzle with the mental equivalent of fancy footwork), and sophists (people who handle philosophical tools skilfully but have interests other than the search for truth: money, position, sexual conquests, or just the kind of fame easily achieved by the charismatic teaching of those half-truths which delight students [and others] looking for a quick fx to serious or less serious difculties in their own lives or in society). Yet to counter that, you do not have to be a bore: Socrates may have been a gadfy, but even those most irritated by him hardly found him dull. If you want to be a sophist, there are plenty of ways of using the history of philosophy to achieve your aim. Tat is also true if you want to look like a philosopher while knowing almost no philosophy at all, as Jim Hankinson has nicely indicated in his Blufers Guide to Philosophy.3 Be that as it may, let us look at some of the more obvious techniques available to sophists, recognizing from the outset that to be a successful sophist you need a lot of chutzpah, even arrogance; also that knowledge, as distinct from 3. Jim Hankinson, Te Blufer’s Guide to Philosophy (Oxfordshire: Acheron Press 2007).

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cleverness, can be a disadvantage, though the more skilled practitioners can misuse it to enhanced efect. Great and less great thinkers in the past ask very specific questions—even if their formulation of them is muddled—and their pupils, as ours, will normally think that philosophy is what my philosophy teacher does. Tat might lead us to suppose that the philosophical approach to the history of philosophy would be very concerned to discover what precise questions each particular philosopher was trying to answer: whether to clarify, to resolve, or to dismiss as pseudo problems. Hence the frst move the sophistic teacher might make is to assume (or pretend to suppose) that the target philosopher is asking the same questions as his modern (or some later) interpreter. He may justify that approach by arguing that the questions he asks are the right questions, and therefore that he is being “generous” in supposing that the past master is doing the right thing; hence that we can—after all—“cooperate” with him. But is it the right thing? As noted, we tend to think that what our teacher did is what philosophy is about. But he may have asked the wrong questions. Why would he do that? Because he supposes, even in good faith, that he is working on what his teacher worked on, and correcting the errors he made, thus often “correcting” his teacher by accepting the probably mistaken framework within which that teacher worked: as Kant accepted Hume’s account of what is given in perception. In such situations, to correct an error may lead to assumptions about the right answer which, if pursued, will only make matters worse. Perhaps our teachers got it wrong; and their teachers got it wrong; and so on back to Adam, who may have asked: “Why did God mislead me about the tree of knowledge?” Not the best question to start with. Philosophers have the nasty habit of forming “schools,” ofcially or unofcially: in recent times those interviewing candidates for academic positions in philosophy may sometimes notice that

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several brilliant young philosophers on their short lists know all about the problems posed by following lines of enquiry opened up by (for example) Donald Davidson—and little else, either of philosophy or otherwise. Tere may be others with a similar acquaintance with Tomas Aquinas: pose a standard question and you will get the standard reply. Trow the ball and it will be caught and returned. And there is a variant on the “schools” approach: sometimes the schools do not even exist—this is especially true in ancient philosophy where the ancient doxographers found it easy to construct schools as a mode of exposition; thus a school of Cynicism going back to Antisthenes, pupil of Socrates, is not unknown. But they can also be constructed by some bad philology in more recent times. It has often been assumed (especially perhaps in the heyday of classical philology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) that if philosopher A is later than philosopher B, and ofers similar ideas, then A “must” have read B. Tat ignores several brute facts, such as that books were not very widely circulated in the ancient world. Tus Simplicius, writing a commentary on Aristotle’s Physics for professionals, assumes that his readers will not have a relevant text of Parmenides at hand, so he quotes lengthily from Parmenides’s poem—luckily for us, since we thus acquire an otherwise lost chunk of Parmenides. Unfortunately, however—and apart from the difficulties caused by the limitations of ancient postal services and the impact of that on the circulation of scholarly knowledge—the bad philology in question may also neglect one or all of three further facts. Te frst is that there is such a thing as an intellectual climate. Many have heard tell of “To be or not to be?” without knowing that Shakespeare wrote it. Secondly, it is not impossible that clever people, working at the edge of current thought, might just come up with similar proposals in complete or partial ignorance of the progress of one another’s work. Tink of Leibniz and Newton on

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the calculus—or less grandly on how irritating it can be if, having worked on some apparently original idea and then tried to publish it, you fnd that two or three others have hit on the same question—and probably a similar solution. Te third efect of over-optimistic philology (again useful in providing misleading accounts of ancient thought—however well- or ill-motivated) is the construction of “dustbin” fgures. Te requisite moves are as follows: fnd a fragment attributed to a particular thinker; then fnd another (perhaps later) fragment which looks rather like the named fragment, then another which looks like the unnamed second one. You can go down this road for as long or as short a time as you wish, and in the end—surprise, surprise—by a process of improper additions, you have constructed a “dustbin” philosopher. Te trick was played several times with Posidonius of Apamea (thus generating several versions, all equally implausible which have now been more or less annihilated); a more recent victim has been Porphyry. Scholars—in this context as in others—are often unwilling to admit that they do not know things: in this case, what to do with unidentifable fragments. Tis failing is more philosophically important than it looks, and I shall return to it. Tus far a few problems about what to do with unidentifed ideas; but there is a related difculty with identifable ones, and again it leads to the “discovery” of schools. We used to hear quite a lot about the School of Alexandria, composed of people like Philo, Clement, Origen, and Plotinus, though it is improbable that Plotinus (who certainly also lived in Alexandria) had ever heard of Philo, let alone read his voluminous works. By Plotinus’s time even Jews wanted to forget about him, leaving only Christians to read him as an Old Testament exegete. Let us now step back a little. Perhaps the kind of “generosity” which assumes that earlier thinkers are asking the “right” questions will not bring the results it hopes for. Hence if, for example,

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in Plato’s Sophist we are encouraged to read a poor man’s version of what is better spelled out by Quine, the bright student will wonder why he need do more than read Quine. If the teacher is some sort of ideologist,4 that might seem a satisfactory result, not least if it helps to promote a deeper sophistic programme: that of encouraging a contempt for the past. For if those dead white males achieved little more than poor man’s versions of what our contemporaries have done so much better, they can indeed be treated like fgures in the history of science: interesting, perhaps, but by way of cultural archaeology, the discovery of a few new details in the extending history of human error. Te sophist who takes the misleadingly “generous” approach to his predecessors must be aware of two charges that might be brought against him: that he is deliberately teaching error, and that by so doing that he is treating his students unjustly. Tese charges would seem particularly pressing if in the course of his generosity he has made a further dangerous move. For in pontifcating about the old guys, he will almost certainly fnd something which seems ridiculous and might suggest that the old guy is a bit of a fat-earther. So he tells his students to leave that sort of material out; generosity, he suggests, consists of neglecting obvious errors. But philosophically—rather than sophistically—that practice needs to be adopted with care: the problem about the apparently “ridiculous” passages in past thinkers may be that these passages, even if indirectly, may conceal something which challenges contemporary assumptions. Studying the past is rather like travelling in an alien (but not entirely alien) land. Hence if we think hard about the challenges “ridiculous” ideas present, we may have to recognize that only in deference to mere convention have we 4. I use the term “ideologist” for secularists who believe what they want to believe with a religious-like fervor but with minimal concern for the truth of what they uphold. For such people ideology always trumps truth.

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labelled them “ridiculous”; they might not be quite so stupid after all. Indeed, even if they are ultimately wrong-headed, they may be wrong-headed answers to questions which are far from wrong-headed, but which, as sophists, we have forgotten, or if remembering, have wanted not to know what the dead white male wants us to know about them. Tus, in suppressing “ridiculous” material, our sophist must beware not to lay himself open to charges that he is treating his students unjustly: that is, by depriving them of apparent ideas which they have every right to know but which the sophist feels he has every right to suppress. Such are perhaps arguments about the existence of God (which might be more difcult to refute than the student has conventionally learned to assume) or perhaps something in our present climate even more pertinent: that there are very real faults in the liberal democratic paradigms of society. For although in many of our contemporary universities large sections of the “arts” faculties are purveying little more than propaganda in favor of liberal egalitarianism and homogenization, it should— some of us still believe—be an important part of the university’s remit to encourage students to scrutinize closely all material fed to them by ideologists and propagandists. Te sophist must protect himself against charges of injustice, and he has many tricks in his bag to achieve that: he can claim that the early philosopher—or even, as in current cases, the contemporary philosopher—is racist or homophobic or Islamophobic or transphobic or guilty of some otherwise phobic practice which makes him fit only for four-letter denunciation as no worthy member of the university community—even of the human race. With the help of such emotion-arousing if mindless language, a sophist can go far toward ensuring that his own fimsy presuppositions are not exposed as the claptrap they frequently are. A contemporary Socrates may not (yet) be given hemlock—though death threats are not unknown and may increase in number—but

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he can certainly be “no-platformed” (especially in the more prestigious institutions).5 And his vulnerable pupil (unless courageous, even apparently rash) is in even worse shape: I was once strongly reminded that teaching philosophy with emphasis on its history can be mind-and-moral-improving when one of my female (atheist) students, confronted by a notorious public intellectual, also female, who had just pronounced that women’s present option of doing philosophy at an advanced level was due to the availability of abortion, commented sweetly that she had heard that claim before, but she had never heard a good moral argument in favor of abortion: perhaps the public intellectual could give her one. But the public intellectual (herself a tragic case of philosopher turned sophist) could not, choosing rather to fy into a blind rage: a bit like Trasymachus, but not as smart or as far-seeing. If false generosity does not do the trick of perverting an older philosopher by distracting attention from his real concerns, cultural archaeology (spiced with insolence) is another card to play. Here the technique is certainly to try to answer the questions the old guy has asked, but to patronize: fascinating what these funny old people thought about: quite clever really; worth studying as a hobby; much better than collecting match-box tops. In making such suggestions about the sophist’s behavior I am not, of course, going back on anything I said before: philosophically it really does matter to try (even if certainty cannot always be assured) to discover why—and in answer to what—a particular claim has been made, however ridiculous it may seem. We can assume that if thinkers of the calibre of Plato and Aristotle seem occasionally to say strange things, it is not because they were stupid. Most smart undergraduates can fnd some mistake in the work of the greatest 5. “No-platforming” is the precluding of persons from being invited to speak because of their views.

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of their predecessors; for the sophist that is great news, for the would-be philosopher it is irrelevant. A common cause of the “stupidity” (apart from the questions some predecessor may have posed, as already noticed) is that the philosopher in question may lack some extra-philosophical fact now available to us. For him the apparently “foolish” answer may seem the only possibility on the table. In the history of philosophy we must assume that lack of knowledge of extra-philosophical facts implies that some problems then (as now) much debated were not yet, if ever, susceptible of a correct answer. One of the best examples of this is the ignorance in most previous eras (until 1829) of the role of the female in human conception. Given that ignorance, all sorts of “foolish” claims could easily be made—and were made. Tat need not provoke condescension: we would not condescend to Newton because he was not Einstein. Condescension should give place to trying to understand the question asked rather than the “impossible” answer given. Even now the question may remain unanswered, or perhaps the answer has been forgotten, After “generosity,” condescension, and variants on the construction of schools and “dustbin” philosophers, our sophist can try the “one-head-one-theory” approach to older, even major, thinkers. In doing so, he is opting for a more reputable, if still misguided, move, one that he shares with countless serious thinkers down the ages—and the tradition is in some quarters very much alive. Hence, since this approach certainly seems more reputable, it would be advisable to explain why it arose and why it is nevertheless often undesirable. Put in its most ludicrous form, the sophist can develop the theme that the claims of various philosophers remain basically the same throughout their lives. Put that way, however, it is indeed absurd: apply it, for example, to Kant or Wittgenstein. And nearer to home, think about your own lives. Suppose you are now about twenty-fve years old and ask yourself whether you expect to hold exactly the same views as you do now

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when you reach the age of seventy. I suppose some philosophers, oddly, do pass that test; Hume certainly comes quite close to doing so (perhaps he spent too much time playing backgammon), but many do not. Among those many I can start with the lower levels, such as myself, and pass on not only to Kant and Wittgenstein but to Plato, Augustine, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. Te fame of some thinkers may rest on a single or small number of books written within a comparatively brief period of time (Plotinus would be an example), so we should expect in those cases rather little change, only occasional diferences of emphasis from time to time. But many philosophers continued to write for decades—Plato for some ffty years—and it would be surprising in such cases if, while detecting continuity, we also found identity of “doctrine.” As for me: when I was in my ffties I was asked to contribute to a volume entitled Philosophers Who Believe, a series of essays by thinkers who had become Christian or returned to Christianity in some form during their adult life.6 Te editor’s aim was to show students—who, he found, had often picked up the assumption that “nowadays” to be a philosopher one had to be at least an agnostic—that this is not necessarily the case even in the post-Christian West. When asked to write in this collection, I tried to recall my own views, especially on a number of religious, moral, and political topics, when I was an undergraduate. I then wrote to some of those who knew me in those days and asked them what they remembered of my views, with the intention of confrming or disconfrming my own half-recalled beliefs. Hence, I managed to excavate a series of strongly held opinions which I then held but which I now judge ridiculous if not pathetic. So, my next step was to try to recall some of the arguments I would have accepted in forming such bizarre opinions. When most of 6. Kelly James Clark, ed., Philosophers Who Believe (Downers Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity Press, 1970), 83–104.

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the arguments seemed as bad as the views they supported, I toyed with the question of whether I was the same person as I was then, deciding, however, in the afrmative: as John Henry Newman is reputed to have said, “Ten years later I found myself in another place.” Both personally and historically, uncritically to follow the one-head-one-theory thesis (hence knowing what—in the singular—Plato or Aristotle or Augustine or Kant or . . . supposed) is highly risky if your aim is to understand the history of philosophy; indeed, you may fnd yourself presenting some thinker with composite theories which at no time of his life he ever held. If, on the other hand, you want to practice as a sophist—then as now the “compensation” is usually better—one-head theories are a godsend; you can play of an early and a later work of the same author, and—to plaudits—reveal triumphantly that he was totally confused. I should add that in the case of the Greeks, this procedure is peculiarly misguided, since the discovery of many of what we now consider basic philosophical options proceeded at breakneck speed. Before Plato no one had any sort of clear idea about the possible existence of immaterial substances; by the time of his death the claim had become—whether accepted or rejected—part of the regular furniture of the philosopher’s shop. Tere is also a parallel to the one-head theory that the sophist can develop: not only can he satirize (and thus sanitize) an earlier thinker by playing of his claims at diferent times of his life against each other, he can indulge in an analogous sophism when discussing the recognizable infuence of one philosopher on another. Tis move can be especially attractive to people who want to defend exaggerated versions of the philosophia perennis—and it has a revealing similarity to fundamentalist accounts of the history of the Christian (especially of the Catholic) Church.7 Hence, 7. I treat some of these accounts in What Is Truth? From the Academy to the Vatican (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 201–32.

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though less prevalent than it used to be, it is still visible, not least among writers on medieval philosophy. Te basic axiom is to neglect the diference between potentiality and actuality (and use of that axiom is not limited to philosophy: it can efectively be deployed in the history of literature and of theology). Although there are many versions in circulation, perhaps the most infuential has been the treatment of the “after-life” of Aristotle. So let us glance at how to misinterpret the infuence of the man from Stagyra whose work forms a substantial part of the common background for Aquinas and Scotus, as for Avicenna, Averroes, and Maimonides. Te motivation for mistreating Aristotle varies: sometimes it is just muddy thinking; sometimes it is intended to render the medievals more palatable to contemporary secularists by depriving them of as much of their “Aristotelianized” religious framework as possible, thus deforming them in presenting them as overimpressed by Hume and Kant—or supposing them to have themselves deformed Aristotle to make him more acceptable to various religious prejudices. As an undergraduate I heard in a lecture by an eminent professor of ancient philosophy that Aquinas, Averroes, and Maimonides had thus deformed Aristotle’s account of the “productive intellect” of De anima 3.5. for “sectarian” reasons— which we now know to be untrue. Te “medieval” Aristotle whom such religious thinkers found useful had already been “deformed” (that is, substantially neoplatonized) by the Greek commentators of late antiquity who passed him on to the Arabs, thence to Aquinas and the rest. But what has all this to do with the claim that mistakes (for example, about the medieval Aristotle) are examples of neglect of the distinction between potentiality and actuality? Te argument runs as follows: there is no doubt that Aquinas’s “version” of Aristotelianism (especially given the neoplatonizing presentation of him as a providentialist open to the theory that the universe was

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constructed ex nihilo) is a possible development of Aristotelian positions; thus one can present Aquinas as developing “Aristotle” to where the “Stagyrite” would have gone had he lived into Christian times. However implausible that claim might be, what matters at the theoretical level is that, although we can argue that Aquinas’s ideas are based on an extended Aristotelianism, such an extension is neither the only one possible nor the one that would be necessarily acceptable to Aristotle himself. Treating Aristotle as the “inevitable” ancestor of the form of Aristotelianism which not only Aquinas but Averroes, Maimonides, or Duns Scotus professed, is not unconnected with yet another false move which the sophist can make and the philosopher hope to avoid. Defying Plato’s insistence in the Teaetetus that a hundred pieces of wood do not (could not ipso facto) make a wagon, we can dissolve a philosopher into his sources rather than carefully observing how he turns them to his own account. Tus Aquinas becomes a composite of the Bible, Aristotle, Augustine, and Pseudo-Dionysius (for starters), whereas in fact he (inevitably) misinterpreted much of Aristotle (supposing, for example, that his ethics could be entirely reconciled with Augustine’s theories of grace), meanwhile misunderstanding parts of Augustine himself not least because he accepted something only too like the one-man-one-doctrine explanation of the works of a man who explicitly tells us that if we read his works in chronological order we shall understand the development of his thought. At this point, of course, I need a caveat. If I adopt a one-man-one-doctrine approach I may do good philosophy even if I fail to do well as a historian of philosophy and, wittingly or not, misread my predecessors. Finally, I return to a psychological point passed over lightly. Augustine thinks that humility consists in recognizing that we are dependent and that we are fallible, whether morally or intellectually. Perhaps surprisingly, it is often easier to recognize the former

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failure than the latter. Hence it has often been a mark of fawed accounts of the history of philosophy—whether or not ideologically promoted—to assume that “I (we) as interpreter do not, or cannot, make mistakes.” In antiquity Christian philosophers, especially Origen and Augustine, recognized the phenomenon. Augustine’s account of Porphyry is perhaps the best example. Rightly or wrongly, Augustine thought that the Platonists (broadly defned) got much of the metaphysics right, above all in their understanding that there is a world of immaterial substances which embraces God, angels, and human souls. But they could not grasp the moral implications of the “two worlds”: the problem, that is, of how we get from the empirical world to the world of “the father,” to use Plotinus’s term (Ennead 5.1.1).8 Hence, unwilling to admit that they had hit an intellectual brick wall, that they did not know how to proceed, they resorted to superstition (or what Augustine took to be superstition) in the form of “theurgy,” a pagan sacramentalism devoid of historical context and therefore a product of the fantasizing imagination. How do examples of this sort—and there are many in contemporary debates, though superstition is not usually the loser’s resort—afect the way we present the history of philosophy? A problem in understanding past thought may be “solved”—given an unwillingness to admit failure, hence resort to some unfashionable thought-experiment perhaps involving the introduction of some theological or metaphysical option—by redefning it so that we appear to have resolved it but in fact have knocked down only a substituted straw man. According to T. J. D. Chappell, in Knowing What to Do, the majority of contemporary (post-Kantian) moral philosophers indulge themselves in this way.9 In these cases, when we interpret more recent dead white males, the philosophical ob8. Plotinus, Opera [Works], ed. P. Henry and H.-R. Schwyzer, editio minor, revised, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), Ennead 5.1.1; hereafter Plotinus, 5.1.1. 9. T. J. D. Chappell, Knowing What to Do (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

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jection to our proceedings is not only against the instrument— that is, the redefning of the subject-matter to get over the brick wall—but against blithely carrying on because “we” must be right. When that happens, we are dealing no longer with a deliberate distortion of an older fgure—say Bentham, or Mill, or Kant—but with the refusal to admit that difculties in their position are not resolvable, hence merely ofering some shabby defense of what the hero-philosopher claims. Perhaps the most egregious example of this occurs when utilitarian calculators refuse to admit that they cannot convincingly list goods in order of preference—least of all if the measure is supposed to be pleasure (as they call happiness)—and thus any hope of doing the felicifc calculations which their system demands is removed. Let that serve as an introduction to the art of misreading—as of reading—the history of philosophy.

Can Philosophy Be Taught? We have glanced at ofenses which sophistic teachers of philosophy commit against their students. Perhaps they have a way to obtain absolution, basing themselves on the principle that no one knows what philosophy is, and hence my suggestion that they are sophistic is mere pontifcating, since I know no more about what philosophy is (and a fortiori what its history is) than they do. Tat sounds like a question examined by Socrates: if we do not know what virtue is, how can we know whether it can be taught? If we do not know what philosophy is, how do I know what is the right or the wrong way to teach it? Earlier on I identifed one way in which some of us appear to learn what philosophy is. We start by coming to a philosophy department thinking that we shall learn about the “big questions”: Why is there a world? Why am I here? What am I anyway? Do I have any reason to bother about anyone else? And so on. I go

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to my frst classes and there may be options: a general survey of Western thought from Tales to Trump; an introduction to formal or informal logic; something which might be summed up as “Doing Philosophy” in which the student is introduced to a set of philosophical problems. Te frst option can be informative or deadening: informative if it enables the student to get some idea why one idea appeared on the philosophical scene before another; deadening if justifying a conclusion analogous to the notorious comment attributed to Gilbert Ryle that “In France everyone can talk about philosophy but there aren’t any philosophers.” (One thing philosophy certainly is not is knowing the names of a bunch of philosophers.) Te second option may help the student think more clearly or it may more deadeningly encourage him—especially if it turns out that he is good at logic—to think (pace Aristotle) that philosophy just is logic. Te third option may begin to immerse the student in serious “philosophical” questions, but these will have been selected by the instructor—and since depending on what the instructor thinks or assumes to be important will encourage the judgment that philosophy is what my teachers spend their time on. Tat objection is also relevant to the other options. Te instructor himself may believe that logic just is philosophy and may have a quasi-divine mission to correct any misguided notions surviving in the student’s mind from his “pre-philosophical” days that over-emphasis must also encourage reductionism. Or worse— with respect to the frst option—he may assume, as noted earlier, that past thinkers are primitive; real philosophical work is what we are doing now and is to be identifed as our present concerns. Te history of philosophy really is little diferent from the history of science. If the student comes away from his initial exposure to a philosophy department with the idea that all problems are contemporary problems, I would argue that he has been seriously misled.

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To show that, I must explain what I think philosophy is—if it is to be thought of as a serious subject—and why I was right to insist against the “sophist” that its history must be of a special signifcance precisely because it does not limit itself to what are presented as urgent contemporary problems. But there are wider difculties to be resolved before sorting out these more limited ones. I touched on the most basic of them in my remarks about humility, noticing that it is often incumbent on a philosopher to admit that he has failed and must somehow or other start again, rather than to look for tendentious ways to mislead his listeners into believing that he has—after all—not got himself into the mess he seems to be in. Te frst necessity—albeit perhaps the least important—is to recognize that there is nothing logically absurd about the claim that there may be intellectual problems theoretically resolvable but beyond the capacity of the human mind. Origen and Augustine gave warnings of that kind, believing that Revelation is sometimes necessary if progress is to continue beyond a certain apparent dead end; more recently a secular suggestion on the same lines has been mooted by Nagel in the introduction to his View from Nowhere.10 Te problem is not limited to our inability to come to grips with certain intellectual realities; perhaps there are other realities with which we can come to grips, but only by methodologies often not currently supposed philosophical. Tat is not unrelated to my claim that, though there may be a wider understanding of the term “philosophy,” its institutional version is usually reductionist, as can be seen in the instances pointed out, for example, by Chappell—and which is indeed self-evident. For institutional philosophy purports to provide a mirror to the world, some supposing that this is to be done by presenting our “knowledge” as a set of true propositions. Tat, however, is not what the world is, 10. Tomas Nagel, View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

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but merely a way of referring to various aspects of it. And even if non-propositional knowledge is accepted, a richer reality may be recognized but not understood: as when I say (with Augustine) that in truth I am a mystery to myself. But are there other routes by which we can come closer to the world than those provided by “philosophy” seen only as generating a set of true propositions? Or by which we can at least approach the “world” in new and informative ways? We should think about what we learn but cannot “capture” verbally when we look at Leonardo’s Last Supper, listen to Beethoven’s Archduke or watch Aristotle’s favorite Oedipus or Shakespeare’s King Lear. For such experiences raise a question which no philosopher should fudge: if the arts, broadly understood, enrich our lives, those who construct or perform them must, to a degree at least, be, in Sokolowski’s phrase, “agents of truth.”11 Yet this “truth” is inexpressible—and some philosophers, often Platonists of some sort, have called our attention to further inexpressible truths more strictly within their own understanding of philosophy itself. Tus Plotinus, trying to convey some understanding of the One, the frst principle of his universe, comments: “If you have seen it, you know what I mean.”12 Tat amounts to an appeal to a direct experience of realities which philosophy tries to talk about. When he wrote the Republic Plato hardly expected us to know (rather than know about) the Form of the Good simply by reading his book, though we can chatter about it when we have read it. As he pointed out in the Meno and the Teaetetus—though there his examples are more commonplace—all such “knowledge”—whether “exotic” or commonplace—is frst-hand and in some sense incommunicable. I can hand on what he calls “true opinion,” but the “knowledge” is my own. Tat does not prevent others, in some 11. Robert Sokolowski, Phenomenology of the Human Person (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 12. Plotinus, 1.6.7. My translation.

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cases, from converting their true opinions into knowledge. Even so, my frst-hand knowledge, whether of the Form of the Good or of the road from Athens to Larissa, is not yours but mine. Some will say that Plotinus’s claim about the One, or Plato’s about the Good, and others of similar sort, are mere imaginings: fake experiences which our minds can generate. Perhaps, but if I am always mistaken about the nature of a frst-hand experience I enjoy or dread, I would have to conclude that I have not only eliminated the high-fown metaphysical stuf but also some of the most common and valued experiences in my everyday life. For what set of propositions can explain what I feel about my family and my friends, or about drinking a glass of good beer or watching a soccer game (well or ill played), though of course I can talk about my feelings in these circumstances too. And note that the experience of watching a badly played soccer game tells us that such experiences of the real world are not limited to the pleasurable or desirable. I would fnd it impossible to describe my feelings if my friend was being tortured, though I could readily philosophize about them in an analysis of diferent sorts of pleasures and pains. The scientistic notion that all knowledge is propositional which governs so much institutional philosophy defes the most obvious human experiences; if such philosophy gives knowledge, that knowledge by itself has little to do with wisdom. Remember another dead white (presumably) male, Heraclitus: much learning does not induce insight.13 Refecting on the dogma that all knowledge is propositional, we have to conclude either that we are examining a deeply impoverished sense of “knowledge” or that (as often happens) the utterances of philosophers are far enough from common sense as to be hardly (as the saying goes) distinct from the precocious arguments of smart and insolent teenagers stretching their wings. 13. DK 22B40.

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If we now return to our student entering his frst philosophy classes, how can I introduce him to the necessity of distinguishing sophistic from philosophical teaching? I have, in fact, already introduced the most basic answer to that question. He must keep a very sharp eye out—whether at his “systematic” instruction or at his introductions to the history of philosophy, but primarily at the latter—for possible attempts to read the present into the past and thus to destroy much of the value of the past. When he learns more about the history of philosophy, he will come to understand why this is such a serious problem, but he should take note of it long before understanding why and how it has come to pass. I raised the matter of the student’s dilemma because I wanted to know whether we are claiming to know how to teach philosophy and its history without knowing what it is. Some of the examples already examined, however, give us a clue as to the right answer, and (as Socrates might put it) it seems we have been assuming it all along. Philosophy is the unprejudiced and determined study of all attempts (for us, normally within the Western tradition, since we have too short lives, in most cases, to go beyond that in any more than elementary and usually simplistic fashion) to understand the nature of our experiences of the world and of the world itself as presented by our experiences. In other words, as the term philosophy roughly indicates, it is a love of truth which drives us to try to understand, not various sets of facts about the world, but what the world is, if possible why it is, and what we are ourselves. Te last is perhaps the most basic requirement; if we try in good faith to fnd out what we are, we shall be able to approach what is other than ourselves, not in the spirit of trying to bend it to our will but to discover what it is, even what it would be if we had never thought about it. In other words, again, to recognize that we are not the world, nor creators of the world, but rather parts of the world, like it or not. Unlike gender-ideologists, we are not people

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who believe that what we want (or have been induced to think we want) is the case. In scrutinizing the world, we must neither reduce it to what we experience of it—still less to what we think we know about it—nor forget that there is every reason to suppose that we have forgotten much that we once knew, and that our contemporary scientifc and scientistic age is especially liable to encourage such forgetfulness. But our experiences, as distinct from the thoughts about them which we pick up from the reductionist world around us, are always there to remind us that philosophy is an approach to the world which encourages us not only to seek the truth but to be humble about our ability to retain it once possessed. It is, therefore, not merely a search but a mentality: concerned to love and pursue the truth but willing also to recognize that any society which helps form the individual will also deform him in specifc ways. And that while our society is especially liable to deform us into a contempt for the wisdom of the past, a study of the history of philosophy is an excellent way to learn that being thus inoculated against wisdom is irrational (not to say immoral). We all experience philosophy diferently, but if we engage honestly in a set of truth-seeking activities, there is no reason not to describe our various proceedings as philosophical. Te history of philosophy is thus a philosophical activity without which we cannot avoid thinking reductively. In many cases the individual who learns from it is in a better position to be a philosopher than those who start by supposing that it is easier now to be wise than it was in the past. Tat is exactly what the sophistic teacher of philosophy wants his students not to be able to understand. But if study of the history of philosophy is philosophical simply because it is truth-seeking, must we not conclude that all truth-seeking activities are philosophical—assuming as we have that the arts, literature, and music are truth seeking, as they are if inspiring rather than merely arousing? In one sense there is no

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reason to deny that, but the approach of conventionally “nonphilosophical” subjects to truth is normally indirect. A playwright does not have to propose the “right” solution to the philosophical dilemma he is presenting: Sophocles does not have to tell us whether Antigone is right to place family loyalty and the decrees of the gods above those of the state. Of course, there is no need to deny that the playwright may believe he knows the moral solution to the dilemma he stages, but he need not present his solution directly; he can leave the audience—as even more obliquely do artists or composers—to draw their own conclusions. He asks philosophical questions without ofering philosophical answers— unless he is also writing as a philosopher or—undesirably—as an ideologist or propagandist. Not that propaganda is vicious as such; it becomes so only if it proceeds beyond the rhetorical presentation of a point of view to lying and deceiving about its advantages and the alleged weaknesses of its rivals. Thus whereas all other humane activities promote truthseeking indirectly, the history of philosophy—being preliminary as well as part of philosophy itself—does something diferent: it helps us philosophize by directly telling us—if we allow it—what able philosophers of the past—for all their mistakes and inevitable ignorances—have tried to teach us about the “big” questions— not to speak of other questions less big but still challenging and sometimes surprisingly important after all. We can only conclude therefore that since we know and always have known—albeit non-propositionally—what philosophy is and what is its history, there is no reason to deny that there will be some who can teach it honestly. Te only moral prerequisite will be that they too know enough about what it is to be honest; that is, to be able and willing, as the oracle at Delphi put it, to know themselves: yes, as lovers of truth, but fallibly and dependently.

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three

Wonder and the Discovery of Being From Homeric Myth to the Natural Genera of Early Greek Philosophy jeffrey dirk wilson

Myth and philosophy are two different ways of knowing the same world. Claude Lévi-Strauss observed that human beings have always thought equally well; what is always changing is what humans think with. To the proposed contrast of “primitive” and “scientifc” thought in which the quality of mind changes and the materials at hand remain the same, Lévi-Strauss asserts that that is exactly the wrong way round. “Te diference,” he writes, “lies not in the quality of the intellectual process, but in the nature of the things to which it is applied.” He gives the example of Tis chapter is based upon a paper presented to the Metaphysical Society of America (MSA) at its annual conference on March 18, 2016 in Annapolis, Maryland. I am grateful for the interventions from attendees, especially Professors Daniel O. Dahlstrom and William Desmond, whose comments and questions stimulated me to expand my original thesis. A second version was published in Te Review of Metaphysics 70 (March 2017): 411–33.

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the stone ax and the steel ax. Human logical capacity remains the same in the creation of each. What difers are the materials available to work with. From the example of the two diferent kinds of ax, made equally well from the materials available, he proposes an analogue in two diferent kinds of human knowing the world: “In the same way we may be able to show that the same logical processes are put to use in myth as in science, and that man has always been thinking equally well; the improvement lies, not in an alleged progress of man’s conscience, but in the discovery of new things to which it may apply its unchangeable abilities.”1 Tose “unchangeable abilities” imply that human nature is immutable. Lévi-Strauss contrasts the so-called “primitive” with the “scientifc.” I want to alter the terms of comparison, contrasting—in the frst instance—the mythological and the philosophical, but assuming the same underlying premise that humans have always thought equally well with respect to their inherent capacity to know the world. Just as physical materials are what change from the stone ax to the steel ax, so what changes over time in knowing the world are the mental materials—to begin with, from the myths of Homer to the universal ideas of classical philosophers. Homer knew the category of being, but he thought being in mythological terms expressed through universal images (Vico’s imaginative genera).2 Classical Greek philosophers (e.g., Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle) thought being through universal ideas (abstract genera).3 The shift, in Lévi-Strauss’s terms, is from 1. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Te Structural Study of Myth,” Te Journal of American Folklore 68, no. 270 (1955): 444. 2. “Te frst men, the children, as it were, of the human race, not being able to form intelligible class concepts of things, had a natural need to create poetic characters; that is imaginative class concepts or universals, to which, as to certain models or ideal portraits, to reduce all the particular species which resembled them.” Giambattista Vico, Te New Science, trans. Tomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), §209. 3. Vico distinguishes between “intelligible class concepts,” what I call “universal ideas (abstract genera),” and “imaginative class concepts,” the “universal images” of mythology.

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thinking with images to thinking with ideas. Tat shift begins to take place in early Greek philosophy as the transformation of the mythological way of knowing the world, characteristic of Homer, into an incipiently philosophical way of knowing the world through natural genera, wherein the realm of nature is distinguished from the realm of the divine. Tese natural genera are no longer mythological but also not yet abstract; rather they are on the way from one to the other, a third and transitional way to think being.4 In this essay, I shall consider the transition from imaginative to natural genera in the thought of Tales and Xenophanes and how that transition is understood by Plato and Aristotle as they make their own move to rational genera. While analyzing the transition from imaginative to natural and then, fnally, to rational genera, I shall note the fate of wonder along the way.

On Aristotle’s Reading of His Predecessors and Contemporaries Tere is a sense in which all this essay aims to accomplish is to elaborate a few distinctions made by Aristotle in Metaphysics 1.5 Before turning to Aristotle’s text, it is important to make clear how I read Aristotle’s account of his predecessors (and contemporaries). My own position is that Aristotle reads a text respecting not only its announced intentions but also its implicit meaning. Aristotle wants to know not only what a text says it says, but what it actually does say. Another way of putting this is that Aristotle “Imaginative genera are images that signify categories without forming an abstract concept separate from the image.” Jefrey Dirk Wilson, “Vico’s Metaphysics of Poetic Wisdom.” Clio 41: 344–45. 4. I thank Professor Matthias Vorwerk for his suggestions on my developing my basic argument. 5. Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.1–10 980a21–993a25, in Aristotle, Te Complete Works of Aristotle: Te Revised Oxford Translation, 2 vols., ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2:1552–69; hereafter, Barnes 2:1552–69.

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reads a text in terms of what it must mean if what it says is to obtain as an adequate explanatory account. My reading stands in sharp contrast to that of Harold Cherniss: Aristotle’s belief that all previous theories were stammering attempts to express his own aids him in interpreting those theories out of all resemblance to their original form. He is openly frank about his method of setting down the “inner meaning” of Presocratic doctrines even when such a procedure necessitates the “articulation” of implications of which the original author was unaware and results in a system exactly contrary to that which the original text sets forth.6

I agree with Cherniss that Aristotle elaborates “implications of which the original author was unaware,” or perhaps more accurately, of which the original author may not have been aware. I disagree with the second half of his conclusion, namely that Aristotle’s interpretation “results in a system exactly contrary to that which the original text sets forth.” Cherniss holds that Aristotle deliberately manipulated the arguments of other thinkers in order 6. Harold Cherniss, Aristotle’s Criticism of Presocratic Philosophy (Baltimore, Md.: Te Johns Hopkins Press, 1935), xii. I also note that I eschew the term “Presocratic,” frst, because some who fall under that title are neither historically nor philosophically prior to Socrates (Democritus is the most obvious example). Second, and more important, the term gives too much signifcance to Socrates. It is doubtful that the name “Socrates” would have so much traction had Plato not made him the hero of his dialogues. If we had only the accounts of Xenophon, Antisthenes, Aeschines, Phaedo, Eucleides, Aristippus, and Aristophanes (see Charles H. Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: Te Philosophical Use of a Literary Form [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], 1–2), Socrates would not be the premier icon of philosophy. Socrates the icon is a Platonic invention. I use instead the less imperfect term, “early Greek philosophy,” which has precedent, for example, Te Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy, cited below. Te general argument against my position is that “Presocratic” is merely a term of art. Cherniss gives a concise statement of this view: the term, “Presocratic philosophy . . . is used in the purely conventional sense in which Aristotle already understood ‘the ancients,’ namely as including all those thinkers who had not come under the Socratic infuence even though chronologically not earlier than Socrates.” Cherniss, Aristotle’s Criticism of Preso­ cratic Philosophy, xiv. Perhaps my realist commitments reveal themselves when I suggest that a term ought not only merely denominate a state of being, but actually refect it as accurately as possible.

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to create “interlocutors in the artifcial debates which he sets up to lead ‘inevitably’ to his own solutions.”7 I do not assert that Aristotle is always correct in his reading of his predecessors, rather only that his motive is diferent to that enunciated by Cherniss and which serves as the driving motif for his book, Aristotle’s Criticism of Presocratic Philosophy. On my account, in Aristotle’s dialectical engagement with other thinkers, he seeks to analyze the metaphysical and logical mechanics of their arguments and, indeed, to discover the necessary implications of those arguments. In Metaphysics 1, Aristotle distinguishes three stages of philosophy: that of mythology, that of what we call early Greek philosophy,8 and that of philosophy proper—the work in which Plato and Aristotle were engaged. Tose frst two stages are philosophy in a qualifed sense, but Aristotle does still count mythologizers and early Greek thinkers as practitioners of philosophy in a way that he does not esteem some of his contemporaries, namely dialecticians and sophists.9 What mythology, early philosophy, and philosophy proper have in common is that they seek knowledge of principles and causes. Tis knowledge, he says, is wisdom, the love of which constitutes the philosophical enterprise.10 One of Aristotle’s most lyrical and famous passages both describes the enterprise and provides the criteria for it. Philosophy begins in wonder which leads to an awareness of ignorance which leads to the pursuit of knowledge without “any utilitarian end.” Te mythlovers see the world in terms of wonders and, thus, are philosophers though in a qualifed sense.11 Tey are also philoso7. Cherniss, Aristotle’s Criticism of Presocratic Philosophy, xii. 8. E.g., Tales. Aristotle, Metaph. 1.3 983b19–20. 9. Aristotle, Metaph. 4.2 1004b17–26. 10. Aristotle, Metaph. 1.1–2 982a1–5. 11. “Tat it [philosophy] is not a science of production is clear even from the history of the earliest philosophers. For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at frst began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difculties, then advanced little by little and stated difculties about the greater matters, e.g. about the phenomena of the moon and those of the sun and stars, and about the genesis of the

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phers because they seek knowledge of frst principles and causes, “for they made Ocean[us] and Tethys the parents of creation.”12 Tough Aristotle is reluctant in the Metaphysics to say very much positive about Plato in any unambiguous way, it is clear Aristotle saw that philosophy became substantially greater in Plato’s synthesis of his predecessors. Platonic philosophy was philosophy in the unqualifed sense of seeking knowledge of principles and causes. Aristotle, then, recognizes three stages of philosophy: myth, nature, abstraction.

The Loss of Wonder in Early Greek Philosophy It is interesting to note that Aristotle explicitly identifes wonder with the mythological enterprise and with his own work of philosophy in the unqualifed sense, but he does not comment upon the relationship of wonder to the intervening stage of philosophy, those who understand the world in purely naturalistic terms. I universe. And a man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant (whence even the lover of myth (philomythos) is in a sense a lover of wisdom (philosophos), for myth is composed of wonders); therefore since they philosophized in order to escape from ignorance, evidently they were pursuing science in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end.” Aristotle, Metaph. 1.2 982b10–21; Barnes 2:1554. Frede holds a view in diametric opposition to that advanced here: “He [Aristotle] is unwilling to recognize Tales’ supposed predecessors [whom Frede does not quite defne, but presumably Homer, Hesiod and perhaps others] as philosophers.” Michael Frede, “Aristotle’s Account of the Origins of Philosophy,” in Te Oxford Handbook of Presocratic Philosophy, ed. Patricia Curd and Daniel W. Graham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 518. He is only repeating a point he made just the page before. Frede, “Aristotle’s Account,” 516–17. Tis ignores the explicit statement of Aristotle, quoted here, that the mythlover is a philosopher in a qualifed sense, as well as what Aristotle says in Metaph. 12.8 1074b1–13, which shall be briefy discussed below. 12. Aristotle, Metaph. 1.3 983b30–31; Barnes 2:1556. Aristotle further elaborates the notion that the mythmakers were engaged in the same enterprise as philosophers in Metaphysics 12.8 in the conclusion of his discussion of the actualities which move the heavenly spheres: “Our forefathers in the most remote ages have handed down to us their posterity a tradition, in the form of a myth, that these substances are gods and the divine encloses the whole of nature.” Aristotle, Metaph. 12.8 1074b1–4; Barnes 2:1698.

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shall suggest that implicit in Aristotle’s critique of at least some early Greek thinkers is the reduction of the world in the work of demythologization such that the sense of wonder is diminished or even lost altogether. In that regard, I turn now to give special consideration to two of those whom Aristotle calls the frst philosophers—Tales and Xenophanes. Each has a respective share, in general, in the work of demythologization and, second and specifcally, in demythologizing Homer’s Oceanus myth and in the rendering of that myth’s truth in naturalistic terms.13 For Tales, my treatment depends on Aristotle’s account, but, in the case of Xenophanes, his anti-mythological motive is explicit in his extant fragments.14 Before considering the two early philosophers on the transition from imaginative to naturalistic genera, it will be helpful to examine briefy the Oceanus myth in Homer. Homer speaks of Oceanus and Tethys on numerous occasions (e.g., Iliad 3.3; 14.201, 246, 302; 18.489, 607–8; Odyssey 11.13, 639).15 Perhaps the clearest cosmological representation of Oceanus comes at the end of Homer’s account of the new shield of Achil13. J. H. Lesher, characterizing what he calls Xenophanes’s “demythologized descriptions” and specifcally about B32, writes, “Te quintessential natural marvel, the rainbow, should be described and understood not in terms of its traditional name and attendant mythic signifcance, but rather as ‘a cloud, purple, red, and greenish-yellow to behold.’ ” J. H. Lesher, “Early Interest in Knowledge,” in Te Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy, ed. A. A. Long (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 231. 14. “Tese two thinkers [Xenophanes and Heraclitus] are the ones whose surviving fragments contain the harshest direct criticisms of Homer and Hesiod that survive from early Greece. Hence they are not simply acknowledging the pedagogical privilege widely accorded to early epic poets—let alone praising it. Instead, they are denouncing the fact that so many Greeks have simply taken over erroneous views from the ancient poets without examining them critically or thinking for themselves.” Glenn W. Most, “Te Poetics of Early Greek Philosophy,” in Te Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy, ed. A. A. Long (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 337. See Xenophanes in Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz, ed. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 9th ed. (Berlin: Weidmannsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1960), 21B11 and 12; hereafter referred to as DK 21B11 and 12. 15. George M. A. Hanfmann, “Oceanus (mythological),” in Te Oxford Classical Dic­ tionary, ed. N. G. L. Hammond and H. H. Scullard, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 744–45.

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les, made by Hephaestus: “Ten, running round the shield-rim, triple-ply,/ he pictured all the might of Oceanus stream.”16 Tat the round17 shield depicts the cosmos is explicit: “He pictured on it earth, heaven, and sea, unwearied sun, moon waxing, all the stars / that heaven bears for garland.”18 Oceanus runs outside the dome of the sky.19 Te sun, moon, and stars are all inside the circle of Oceanus, which is unending, without beginning or end; it is continuous. Tus, Oceanus is the imaginative genus of which all the rivers and streams of the world are imaginative species. Note that Oceanus alone (i.e., without Tethys) appears in Homer’s cosmological accounts.20 For that reason, I shall reference Oceanus solely from this point. It was Aristotle who frst described the transition from mythological to natural as movement from the imaginative genus toward the philosophy of abstractions that he practiced and taught. In the following analysis, I shall use the distinctions of frst and second intentions: frst intentions are concepts of things and second intentions, concepts of concepts. “Dog” is a frst intention; “species” a second. In Homer, Oceanus was the primordial river encircling and enlivening the world. About Tales, the icon of philosophy, Burnet, in a moment of understatement, writes, “Of Tales himself we know a great deal less than we should like to 16. Homer, Il. 18.607–8; Homer, Iliad, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1974), 454; hereafter Fitzgerald, 454. Te whole account is Il. 18.462–617. 17. “Te shield made for Achilles is obviously thought of as round.” G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofeld, Te Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 11; hereafter KRS 11. 18. Homer, Il. 18.483–85; Fitzgerald, 450. 19. “Homer appears to mean Achilles’ shield to be circular and puts Ὠκεανός at its outmost rim (Il. xviii, 607f.).” Richard Broxton Onians, Te Origins of European Tought: About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 249 n7. Te position of Messrs. Kirk, Raven, and Schofeld is that Homeric Oceanus only encircles the fat earth. KRS 11. Te refutation of their position is reserved for another occasion. 20. Matthias Vorwerk, note to the author, July 17, 2007.

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know.”21 If the close of the Homeric corpus can be dated between 750 and 680 B.C. and if Tales predicted an eclipse in 585 B.C., then a century or perhaps a century and a half separate them.22 Aristotle analyzing the reported teachings of Tales with respect to the Homeric Oceanus and Tethys, asserts: Of the frst philosophers, most thought the principles which were of the nature of matter were the only principles of all things; . . . . Yet they do not all agree as to the number and the nature of these principles. Tales, the founder of this school of philosophy, says the principle 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 his 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. Some think that the ancients who lived long before the present generation, and frst framed accounts of the gods, had a similar view of nature; for they made Oceanus and Tethys the parents of creation. . . . It may perhaps be uncertain whether this opinion about nature is primitive and ancient, but Tales at any rate is said to have declared himself thus about the frst cause.23

On Aristotle’s account, the move from Homer to Tales is from Oceanus, god of the primordial river, to mere water as frst principle and cause. Tere are two ways to present this material, historically and philosophically, and Aristotle does both. As a matter of historical development, there was the mythological account of Oceanus and Tethys, who were “the parents of creation.” Ten 21. John Burnet, Greek Philosophy: Tales to Plato (London: MacMillan and Company, 1953), 18. 22. “Tales predicted an eclipse that took place in 585 B.C. He was presumably not active, therefore, much earlier than the beginning of the sixth century.” KRS 76. 23. Aristotle, Metaph. 1.3 983b6–8 and 983b19–984a2; Barnes 2.1555–56 = Tales DK 11A12.

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there was Tales, who claims “the earth rests on water.” Aristotle distinguishes here between the age of philosophy (“the present generation”), inaugurated by Tales, and the age of the mythmakers, those who explained natural phenomena in terms of the gods. It is Aristotle who brings philosophical analysis to bear, abstracting from both Homeric myth and Tales’s naturalistic explanation, to fnd the commonality between them: both were explaining the frst cause. Oceanus and water are both concretes, but “frst cause” is a concept. In one way, Homer and Tales are alike in that they describe the world in concrete material terms. It is Aristotle who explains the world in terms of abstracted concepts, principle and cause. In another way, Tales and Aristotle are alike because they both stand on this side of the rupture of demythologization. Te naturalistic explanation is a transition. As Tales is like Homer, he is unlike Aristotle. As Tales is like Aristotle, he is unlike Homer. According to Aristotle, the discontinuity from mythology to philosophy is that philosophers have a better mode of discourse, explaining the world in its own terms rather than in terms of something else (i.e., a divine being). Aristotle sees the commonalty between himself and early Greek philosophers beginning with Tales, but he also recognizes that there is little abstraction in early Greek philosophy, because they understand the world in material terms only and thus analyze the world with respect to concrete natural objects. What Homer, Tales, and Aristotle all have in common is that they are seeking the same thing, namely a frst principle and cause. Te mythmakers explained the frst cause as “Oceanus and Tethys the parents of creation,” whereas the frst philosopher explained the frst cause as water. Aristotle, philosopher in the unqualifed sense, is interested in principles and causes, whereas Tales sought to explain the world in terms of a natural phenomenon, namely water, rather than in terms of the mythological being, Oceanus. Te movement is clear from mythological beings accord-

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ing to Homer to natural phenomenon according to Tales and to principles and causes according to Aristotle. As Vico observes, it is difcult for us think in mythological terms.24 Te difculty arises in part because it is key to mythological depiction that there is no distinction in the classifcation of the world between natural phenomenon and divinity. In Homer, the sky is Zeus in the strongest possible tautological sense of the verb “to be,” and here, Oceanus is the primordial river encircling the earth. In this respect, Tales’s move—at least in the accounts we have of his teaching—begins to demythologize the world. Tat is a foundational rupture. Te world of Tales and his successors is recognizable to us. His is a naturalistic account. Te move from Homer to early philosophy is from myth of Oceanus to the frst intention of a natural genus, water; the move from the early philosophers to philosophy in an unqualifed sense is subtler—from a frst intention, namely “water,” to a second intention, namely “principle and cause.” Tere existed some moment in history, before natural phenomena were understood naturalistically, when the expression of natural phenomena as divine was metaphysical and not metaphorical. In the case of Tales, that claim remains inferential. In a fragment of Xenophanes, however, it is explicit. Xenophanes, a travelling bard who straddled the sixth and ffth centuries B.C.,25 24. “But the nature of our civilized minds is so detached from the senses, even in the vulgar, by abstractions corresponding to all the abstract terms our languages abound in, and so refned by the art of writing, and as it were spiritualized by the use of numbers, because even the vulgar know how to count and reckon, that it is naturally beyond our power to form the vast image of this mistress called ‘Sympathetic Nature.’ It is equally beyond our power to enter into the vast imagination of those frst men, whose minds were not in the least abstract, refned or spiritualized, because they were entirely immersed in the senses, bufeted by the passions, buried in the body. Tat is why we said above that we can scarcely understand, still less imagine, how those frst men thought who founded gentile humanity.” Vico, New Science §378. 25. He lived about 580–470 B.C. Jonathan Barnes, “Te Divine Philosophy of Xenophanes,” in Te Presocratic Philosophers: Tales to Zeno, vol. 1 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 82. See DK 21B8 and 45 for Xenophanes’s own account of his long life, spent travelling. DK 21B8 and B45. His frst fragment (21B1) depicts a symposium.

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explains that what had been thought to be divine is actually a natural being. Tis is Xenophanes 21B32, which I shall examine before considering a fragment that can be read in relation to the Oceanus myth. I privilege 21B32 because in that fragment Xenophanes makes explicit the work of rendering the mythological account into naturalistic terms and in a way which suggests a methodology rather than a mere casual insight. Xenophanes opines in B32: “And she whom they call Iris, this too is by nature (pephyke) a cloud, purple, red and greenish-yellow to behold (idesthai).”26 In Homer, Iris was the goddess who is the rainbow.27 Xenophanes says that what is called the goddess Iris in mythological accounts is in fact a thing of nature.28 Tus, in this distinction between divinity and nature Xenophanes makes a decisive move away from Homeric ontology.29 As support for the claim that Xenophanes is, in fact, refecting on Homeric—more generally mythological claims—this fragment has the added advantage of being found in a scholium on Iliad 11.27,30 where Homer likens the serpentdesigns on a cuirass given to Agamemnon to “rainbows that Lord Zeus will pose on cloud as presages to men.”31 Te placement It is generally accepted that he was a travelling bard. Barnes, “Divine Philosophy,” 82. J. H. Lesher, Xenophanes of Colophon. Fragments: A Text and Translation with Commen­ tary (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 3. 26. Xenophanes, DK 21B32; Lesher, Xenophanes, 36–37. 27. Lesher, Xenophanes, 139. 28. “It is plain that by talking of ‘what men call’ Iris . . . Xenophanes implies that there is nothing divine about those phenomena: rainbows have a purely natural explanation; divine interference is an unnecessary hypothesis. For all that, Xenophanes is no atheist.” Barnes, “Divine Philosophy,” 96. 29. “Fragment 32 ofers a naturalistic account of a phenomenon commonly regarded either as a deity or a sign sent by a deity.” Lesher, Xenophanes, 139. Lesher calls attention to the similarity in Anaxagoras, DK B19. Lesher, Xenophanes, 140. Messrs. Kirk, Raven, and Schofeld comment, “It is possible enough that his motive for giving physical explanations of the heavenly bodies was to disprove the popular conception of them as gods. Tis is certainly implied by the phrase ‘what men call Iris.’ ” KRS 174. 30. Lesher, Xenophanes, 139. 31. Homer, Il. 11.27–28; Fitzgerald 252. Fagles renders the lines, “Shimmering bright as rainbows arched on the clouds by Cronus’ son, a sign to mortal men.” Homer, Iliad,

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of the scholium suggests that an ancient author understood this word of Xenophanes as a comment on Homer. What had been considered as a being both at once divine and something hanging in the sky was now to be understood as a natural being only. Te rainbow is something by nature; pephyke indicates the sorting of the phenomenon into a natural genus.32 Mourelatos points out that “this too (kai touto)” “indicates that the reductivist explanation was ofered more than once by Xenophanes.”33 In other words, this move is methodological and not merely occasional. Te sorting of divine and natural beings is a frst intention abstraction, an intermediate stage in the move from the realm of Homer’s imaginative genera to that of philosophy’s abstract genera. Tis conclusion is further re-enforced by Lesher’s analysis of the fnal word of the fragment, idesthai. He observes, Homer “frequently” uses “thauma idesthai” and “always in line-fnal position.” He writes: Te term thauma refers to objects or persons possessing an extraordinary appearance, usually a god or an object belonging to a god (for instance, the shield of Hephaestus, Iliad 18.549). When, therefore, Xenophanes speaks of the rainbow as a νέφος . . . χλωρὸν ἰδέσθαι, his audience—raised on the songs of Homer and Hesiod—would hear both what he said and what he did not say the rainbow was.34

Te rainbow, according to Xenophanes, was not a divine wonder. It was a greenish cloud and not the goddess Iris. Xenophanes trans. Robert Fagles (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 297. It may even be that the scholiast understood this reference in Homer to be an authority for the assertion made by Xenophanes, insofar as the divinity of the rainbow as the goddess Iris is not explicit in the Homeric line, though the rainbow is still an omen from Zeus. 32. Lesher cites N. Marinone’s Lessico di Senofane, 65, “essere per propria natura.” Lesher, Xenophanes, 140. 33. Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, “Te Cloud-Astrophysics of Xenophanes and Ionian Material Monism,” in Te Oxford Handbook of Presocratic Philosophy, ed. Patricia Curd and Daniel W. Graham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 136. 34. Lesher, Xenophanes, 143.

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distinguishes between god and nature. Tis was something new under the sun. Te experience may have been somewhat like mine when singing a hymn I know as Trinitarian but which had been altered just enough to be sung by Unitarians. Te initial cognitive dissonance was subconscious, and then it gradually occurred to me that something radical had been done, but in a way that seemed more or less innocuous. Xenophanes resonates with an Homeric trope, but alters it just at the point of expectation. After Xenophanes, people could read “references to the gods” naturalistically, but not before. Xenophanes is the frst witness, of which record is extant in the Greek tradition, to the distinction between the gods and the natural world. Following the analysis of Jonathan Barnes, the Xenophanean distinctions make possible not only a naturalistic understanding of the world but also a natural theology.35 For Homer, however, all of physics is metaphysics,36 that is, about being qua being, but, according to the analysis of Vico, imaginatively rather than rationally. Xenophanes, by beginning the explicit demythologization of the world, implicitly distinguishes physics and metaphysics. From a discredited mythological account, Xenophanes rescues both world and god. As Lesher observes, commenting on B23, “Xenophanes does not fault . . . Homer and Hesiod for saying that there are gods, but for what they say those gods are like.”37 For Xenophanes, gods become more comprehensible when they are distinguished from rainbows and rivers. 35. Barnes observes, “Te various theological sayings which have come down to us can be ftted into a coherent and impressive whole.” He then goes on to list seven “dogmas” “secured by actual fragments of his poems.” Barnes, “Divine Philosophy,” 84–85. Perhaps Barnes over-reads the fragments; still, he makes a strong case for the conclusion that “Xenophanes’ theology is a remarkable achievement.” Barnes, “Divine Philosophy,” 94. 36. Tis insight is ultimately derived from Vico: “Te theological poets in their extremely crude physics saw in man these two metaphysical ideas: being and subsisting.” Vico, New Science §693. 37. Lesher, Xenophanes, 98, and more generally on the divine, 98–100.

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For all that Xenophanes advances the philosophical enterprise through his distinction, at the same time by the distinguishing of gods and nature, wonder is lost.38 Tis conclusion arises from Lesher’s literary analysis of 21B32. Te literal terms of Xenophanes’s naturalism actually displace the word “thauma.” As has been seen above, for Aristotle the philosophical enterprise begins in wonder. If in the distinction of god and nature wonder is lost, then one may rightly ask if the work of Xenophanes is properly philosophical. By further extrapolation, one might also ask if any wonder-less intellectual endeavor trading under the banner of philosophy can and ought properly to be called philosophy, at least—at this point in my argument—from an Aristotelian stance.39 In the Homeric poems, both god and natural phenomenon are wondrous, because each is known through the other. I suggest that at the heart of wonder is the realization, belief, feeling, or hope that there is more to reality than what meets the eye. In Homer, when one sees the rainbow one is also seeing the goddess Iris. After Xenophanes, when one sees the rainbow, one sees only the rainbow. Te work of demythologization is—to use the term of Mourelatos—“reductivist.” Not only is the natural object reduced, so is the divinity. In Homer, a divinity is also a thing of nature. For Xenophanes, a god is only a god. Tus, as has already been observed—following Barnes—demythologization produces not only a natural world but also a natural theology. Whether 38. Tis point and its development ensued from my response to the challenge of Professor C. Wesley DeMarco at the Metaphysical Society of America annual meeting, March 18, 2016, to whom I express my heartfelt thanks. 39. I recognize that my extrapolation may seem harsh or at least narrow, but I observe that Wittgenstein seems to have arrived at the same or a similar point: “If, e.g., we call our investigations ‘philosophy,’ this title, on the one hand, seems appropriate, on the other hand it certainly has misled people. (One might say that the subject we are dealing with is one of the heirs of the subject which used to be called ‘philosophy’.)” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Preliminary Studies for the “Philosophical Investigations:” Generally known as Te Blue and Brown Books (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), 28.

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in the realm of the gods or of the world, there really is nothing more than what meets the eye, and, therefore, wonder is lost. I suggest that Aristotle saw the commonality of wonder between himself and the mythlovers because they like him understood that the true nature of the world can be apprehended only by penetrating the sensible phenomena and reaching an underlying reality. For Homer, that underlying reality was a divinity; for Aristotle, substance, “that-which is” or, in other words, being. Both Homer and Aristotle wonder at the world they perceive with their senses because they penetrate the appearances to that underlying reality hidden from their senses. Xenophanes 21B32 witnesses to the failure, if perhaps only the beginning of that failure, of Homeric mythology as an explanatory account of the world.40 Te Xenophanean distinction of divine and natural beings is strong evidence that Homer held Iris to be an actually existing entity, and not merely a fctitious being to whom are attributed various natural qualities. Otherwise, making the distinction would have been pointless. Because I have demonstrated the precedent of a demythologizing motive in 21B32, it is now easier to argue that one can fnd that same demythologizing move in other Xenophanean fragments and, therefore, that 21B30 is an implicit rejection of the Oceanus myth and the replacement of it with a naturalistic account: “Te sea is the source of water and of wind,/ for without the great sea / nor streams of rivers nor rainwater from on high;/ but the great sea is the begetter of clouds, winds,/ and rivers.”41 Tis is a scholium on Iliad 21.196.42 Lines 194–96 read, “Neither can the 40. Other fragments of Xenophanes support the view that he demythologizes Homer, rendering divinely infused beings as merely natural phenomena. One observes a general anti-Homeric character of the fragments (e.g., B11 and 12). In B29, earth and water are accounted frst principles: “All things which come into being and grow are earth and water.” Lesher, Xenophanes, 34–35; substantially repeated in B33. Lesher, Xenophanes, 36–37. 41. Lesher, Xenophanes, 134. 42. Lesher, Xenophanes, 134.

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might of the deep Ocean stream—from which all rivers take their waters, and all branching seas, all springs and deep-sunk wells.”43 Te scholiast understood Xenophanes as commenting upon the Oceanus myth. Indeed, 21B30 reads like a naturalistic rewriting of the Homeric lines. As is the case in 21B32, Xenophanes here ofers a naturalistic account of the world in place of Homer and Hesiod’s mythological account. Lesher comments: It would also not have escaped Xenophanes’ notice that the poets had long ago assigned a special importance to the earth-encircling rivers Oceanus and Tethys in the process of creation (Iliad 20.7–9; 21.195–97) and spoke of Pontos-Sea as the son of Gaia and begetter of other deities (Hesiod Teogony 132, 233f.). Xenophanes’ audience would have taken fragment 30 as a sign that he knew both his oceans and his epic poetry. If they had listened carefully they might also have sensed something original in Xenophanes’ way of linking the sea with clouds, rivers, rains, and wind; and if they had thought about the implications of his account for the deities they had long associated with the seas and heavens they might well have been disturbed by his revolutionary idea.44

Xenophanes, as after dinner entertainer, placed his own account of the world where his audience would have had the expectation, even if in an entirely unthought way, of some variation of the mythological account. Te shift was subtle, because Xenophanes employed Homer’s technology of epic verse,45 and the content has strong resonances with the myth of Oceanus. In more general terms, Xenophanes’s poetics—and that of other early Greek philosophers, for example, Empedocles and Parmenides—strongly suggests that they understood themselves to be engaged in the same kind of enterprise as Homer and Hesiod. 43. Homer, Il. 21.194–96; Fitzgerald, 499. 44. Lesher, Xenophanes, 135. 45. “Extant fragments are either from his Satires (Silloi) in hexameters and iambics (including those traditionally attributed to a philosophic poem) or from elegiac occasional pieces.” Allan Hartley Coxon, “Xenophanes,” in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, 1141.

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As Glenn W. Most observes, “Te only validation of their poetry [i.e., the poetry of Homer and Hesiod] is that it tells the truth, conforming veridically to a real past or present state of afairs.”46 Beginning with Xenophanes, Homer ceased to be authoritative because his poems no longer were deemed to correspond to reality as people experienced it, but some of those who sought to correct or replace Homer felt obliged to continue to use the authoritative medium of poetry. In short, there ceased to be adequation between Homer’s texts and the world, but the new accounts often employed the same medium. Every culture has its validating medium. For half a century in America, it was television. Today, perhaps it is Facebook.47 Providing a new account of the world in an old medium was the task Xenophanes set himself. He treats Homer’s poems as an account of the world which no longer obtains and which he now replaces, but in the medium of Homeric verse. Lesher characterizes Xenophanes’s work: “Te whole complex of explanations displays not only logical consistency but an evident interest in explanatory coherence, an orderliness of theory to parallel that of the cosmos.”48 To recapitulate, Xenophanes writes in poetic depiction, as does Homer, but the underlying account is naturalistic rather than mythological. At the same time, Xenophanes ofers depiction and not argument. His naturalism is of frst intentions and not of second. Rational concept, properly understood, remains in the future. Aristotle disparages Xenophanes along with Melissus as not worthy of consideration, calling them “bumpkins (agroikoteroi).”49 46. Most, “Poetics,” 343. 47. Tis is another point missed by Aristotle in relation to his predecessors, though in missing it he gives us a clue when he points out that Empedocles wrote in verse, but that did not make his writing poetry, because the content was not poetic and could have been written as well (or better) in prose. Poet. 1447b16–19. Aristotle did not see the need to employ the Homeric medium as a means of authentication. 48. Lesher, Xenophanes, 147. 49. Aristotle, Metaph. 1.5 986b26–987a1.

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Yet Xenophanes was pivotal in the transformation from myth to nature. Did Aristotle miss his insight? Te possibility exists that when Xenophanes points out the rainbow is not a goddess, this seems to Aristotle as too obvious to mention. Evidence in support of my view comes from Aristotle’s Rhetoric. When he writes about metaphor in the Rhetoric, Aristotle makes a clear distinction between things possessing life and those which are lifeless. He employs examples from Homer: It has already been mentioned that liveliness is got by using the proportional type of metaphor and by making our hearers see things. We have still to explain what we mean by their “seeing things”, and what must be done to efect this. By “making them see things” I mean using expressions that represent things as in a state of activity. . . . So with Homer’s common practice of giving metaphorical life to lifeless things; all such passages are distinguished by the efect of the activity they convey. Tus, [there follow fve examples, the last of which is] And the point of the spear in its fury drove full through his breastbone. In all these examples the things have the efect of being active because they are made into living beings; . . . . In his famous similes, too, he treats inanimate things in the same way. . . . Here he represents everything as moving and living; and activity is movement. Metaphors must be drawn, as has been said already, from things that are related to the original thing, and yet not obviously related—just as in philosophy an acute mind will perceive resemblances even in things far apart.50

It does not seem to have occurred to Aristotle that some people might not make this distinction between entities with life and entities without life, which is to say, entities with soul and without soul. But if one agrees with Vico, as I do, that what Aristotle calls Homeric similes are not similes at all but accounts about states of afairs in reality, then everything is ensouled and nothing inani50. Aristotle, Rhet. 3 1411b24–1412a9; Barnes 2:2252–53.

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mate.51 Aristotle assumes that Homer saw the world as he saw it and that his similes are merely literary devices. Further evidence in support of this explanation is that Aristotle supposes much of mythology to have been intended as pedagogical. When writing in Metaphysics 12.8 of the genius of mythmakers to propose gods for the movers of heavenly bodies, Aristotle says that they were pointing to the same frst principles as his immaterial actualities, which he proposes as the causes of the movement of those heavenly bodies. It is, he says, the only way myths make any sense.52 Aristotle never considered the possibility that spears might really be furious just as men are furious. Te diference, according to Aristotle, between Homer and himself was the mode of discourse. Both sought the frst cause. Aristotle makes that all the clearer in his remark that the mind of the philosopher and that of the poet work either in the same way or in a closely analogous way; they both “perceive resemblances even in things far apart.” So, 51. Tis is the burden of my article, “Vico’s Metaphysics of Poetic Wisdom.” I argue that by the time of Aristotle there is a radical shift in the use of metaphor from what is found in Homer: “Te operation of poetic metaphor is from the concrete particular to an imaginative genus which is that particular. Te sky cloudy, the sky clear, the sky by night, and the sky by day is always Jove . . . . Te image, ‘Jove’ . . . is the concrete particular. . . . Vico observes a second kind of metaphor that operates in the opposite direction. It is the metaphor ‘conveyed by likenesses taken from bodies to signify operations of abstract minds.’ Tis is rational metaphor, and it is also metaphor as the word is ordinarily used from Aristotle on.” Wilson, “Poetic Wisdom,” 355. See also Donald Phillip Verene, Knowledge of Tings Human and Divine, 183–84. 52. “Te rest of the tradition has been added later in mythical form with a view to persuasion of the multitude and to its legal and utilitarian expediency; they say these gods are in the forms of men or like some of the other animals, and they say other things consequent on and similar to these which we have mentioned. But if we were to separate the frst point from these additions and take it alone—that they thought the frst substances to be gods—we must regard this as an inspired utterance, and refect that, although probably each art and science has often been developed as far as possible and has again perished, these opinions have been preserved like relics until the present. Only thus far, then, is the opinion of our ancestors and our earliest predecessors clear to us.” Aristotle, Metaph. 12.8 1074b1–14; Barnes 2:1698, quoted by Luc Brisson, How Philos­ ophers Saved Myths. Allegorical Interpretation and Classical Mythology, trans. Catherine Tihanyi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 38.

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when Xenophanes points out that the rainbow is not a goddess, but merely a colored cloud, Aristotle thinks, “Who ever thought otherwise? What a bumpkin!” No one could have been more startled or even perhaps outraged than Aristotle by the notion that everything, absolutely everything, in Homer has life. Only when one takes the position that Homer held all things to be alive does the radical and revolutionary character of Xenophanes’s insight become clear. Te analysis thus far of Tales and Xenophanes has rendered three main results. First, there is a transition from the imaginative genera of mythology to the natural genera of early Greek philosophy to the rational genera of classical philosophy. Second, early Greek thinkers de-mythologized the Homeric accounts, which led to a frst intentional understanding of the world. Tird, in the move from myth to demythologized nature, wonder—deemed by Aristotle as the starting point of philosophy—was lost. Now I turn to Plato for further elucidation of these three points.

Plato and Socrates on the Loss of Wonder Plato’s Teaetetus ofers evidence that, like his pupil, Plato too was concerned that the work of some demythologizers went too far and, namely, the same two already considered above, Tales and Xenophanes. In my reading of Plato’s texts discussed below, I aim to distinguish Socrates the usual protagonist from Plato the author. In so doing, I am often able to suggest Plato’s position on a given point from what he is doing as author. Tis is in addition to and often with more clarity than what Socrates as protagonist says. Tis results in a more layered reading of Plato’s texts, corresponding, I hope, to the compositional method which I believe he employed. Also, I am more comfortable asserting a view of Plato that is based upon repetitions in diferent dialogues,

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rather than depending on analysis of any one dialogue alone. For example, there are parallel discussions of Heraclitus’s supposed transformation of Homer’s Oceanus myth in Plato’s Cratylus and Teaetetus. In the Cratylus, Socrates, commenting upon Heraclitus 22B91 (and 12), “you cannot step into the same river twice,” asserts that the Heraclitean doctrine of fux is derived from the Oceanus myth.53 In the Teaetetus, Socrates similarly asserts, “For when Homer talked about ‘Ocean, begetter of gods, and Tethys their mother,’ he made all things the ofspring of fux and motion.”54 Tese and other similar passages deserve more attention than I shall give them here both in respect to the original Heraclitean fragments and in Socrates’s assertion that Heraclitus derived his doctrine from the Oceanus myth. In the context of this chapter, however, I merely want to take those discussions as background. We know from them that Plato as author was occupied with the relationship of Homeric myth and the demythologized doctrines of early Greek philosophy. In the Teaetetus, Socrates takes on “an army led by Homer,”55 including Protagoras, Heraclitus, and Empedocles,56 but it is Protagoras whom he seeks to refute at length. With Socrates’s refutation of the army of fux and motion as immediate context, Socrates asserts, in contrast to the method of the advocates of fux and motion, “Tis is an experience which is characteristic of a philosopher, this wondering: this is where philosophy begins and nowhere else. And the man who made Iris the child of Taumas [Wonder] was no bad genealogist.”57 53. Plato, Cratylus 402a-c in Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), 120; hereafter Cooper, 120. 54. Plato, Tt. 152e; Cooper, 170. See also Plato, Tt. 160d, where Socrates observes that according to the theories of Homer and Heraclitus . . . all things fow like streams” (Cooper, 179), and 180d, where Socrates explicitly explains that in the same theories “Ocean and Tethys, the origin of all things, are actually fowing streams, and nothing stands still” (Cooper, 189). 55. Plato, Tt. 153a; Cooper, 170. 56. Plato, Tt. 152e; Cooper, 170. 57. Plato, Tt. 155d; Cooper, 173.

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In the frst sentence, Plato has Socrates say the same thing that Aristotle afrms in Metaphysics 1 982b10–21: philosophy begins in wonder. In the second sentence, Socrates is quoting Hesiod’s Teogony 265.58 Is it possible that Plato has Socrates quote Hesiod in response to Xenophanes 21B32? To begin, it is stunning that Plato has Socrates quote favorably an author of mythology at all. Although Hesiod never comes in for repeated indictments in the way that Homer does, still he represents the world in mythological terms. Also noteworthy is that Plato names Xenophanes only once in his entire corpus, in Sophist 242d, and with apparent afrmation. Still, I have shown above, following Lesher’s analysis, that Xenophanes replaces the word thauma (wonder) with the vocabulary of naturalism in his reference to Iris and the rainbow. Here, Socrates—in his refutation of Protagoras especially, as well as the army led by Homer—re-connects the goddess Iris with wonder, the god Taumas. Whether or not Plato as author has Xenophanes in his aim here, he is reversing, in fact, the move made by Xenophanes. Tis is a delicate move by Plato as author, because what he does not do and what would be directly contrary to the entire argument of the Teaetetus, is to re-mythologize the world. He does not have Socrates say that Iris really is identical with the rainbow after all. His task is to recover wonder without re-mythologization. Why does Plato have Socrates make this speech just at this junction? Socrates explains to Teaetetus that he means to counter the “uninitiated . . . the people who think that nothing exists but what they can grasp with both hands; people who refuse to admit that actions and processes and the invisible world have any place in reality.”59 Te loss of wonder arises from those who believe there is nothing more to reality than what can be apprehended by the fve senses. According to Socrates of the Teaetetus, as long as 58. Cooper, 173 n.12. 59. Plato, Tt. 155e; Cooper, 173.

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sense perception is thought to be sufcient for apprehending the totality of reality, then there is only fux and motion and becoming. “What you see is what you get,” and wonder is lost. Only when one understands that there is something stable which underlies the changing scene before our eyes is wonder possible. What underlies the ever-changing world apprehended by the senses? Being. Wonder and the discovery of being are inextricably bound up together. If the world consists only of what we can get our hands around, then there is nothing at which to wonder.60 Te move made by many early Greek thinkers, Homer’s army, is to reduce the imaginative genera of mythology to the mere natural genera apprehensible by the senses alone, and thereby is wonder lost. Plato, like his student Aristotle, seeks to restore wonder. Although both Plato and Aristotle do not return to the imaginative genera of Homer, Plato—unlike Aristotle—does not credit Homer with doing the same work as the true philosopher with merely a shift in rhetorical form. Plato sees the reductive tendencies of the early Greek thinkers as consistent with the metaphysics of Homer: there is no underlying being, only the fux and motion apprehended by the senses. In a word, Plato and Aristotle agree that wonder is the starting place of philosophy; they disagree over whether Homer is allied with true philosophers in the enterprise of wonder. As an instance of how early Greek philosophy had an ambiguous beginning, Plato has Socrates tell the story of the well-meaning but slightly incompetent Tales. Tales begins aright by looking up at the stars, but then he stumbles into a well, falling into his frst principle, water.61 It is helpful to remember that Homeric cosmology held that the dome of the sky was holding up water. 60. I would argue this is one of the fundamental points for which the entirety of the Teaetetus argues, but one passage shortly after those just quoted goes far in providing support for my thesis. Plato, Tt. 157a–c. Tat passage continues the discussion following the declaration that philosophy begins in wonder at 155d. 61. Plato, Tt. 174a–b.

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Oceanus circumscribed the known world. All water fowed from Oceanus, including the water in the local well. In the naturalism of Tales, the god, Oceanus, is reduced to a single material cause, water. In the depiction of this splendid joke, Tales gets philosophy both right and wrong. He begins correctly, by considering the big questions, but then he blunders by supposing there is nothing more to the world than material causes. As Burnet observed, we do not really know what Tales said; we have only testimony. What is interesting here is to note that the joke told by Plato’s Socrates depicts what Aristotle says in Metaphysics 1 generally about philosophy (1 982b10–21) and specifcally about Tales (1 983b19–984a2). In Socrates’s story, Tales begins by wondering about heavenly phenomena and, realizing that he does not understand the world in which he lives, he seeks an explanation. Unfortunate is that his search leads to his tripping into the idea of a material frst principle, namely water. Plato—or at least Plato’s Socrates of the Teaete­ tus—and Aristotle agree that Tales gets it right because he concerns himself with the questions of universals and of cause (rather than of particulars, for example Socrates’s “next-door neighbor”), but Tales also gets it wrong because he reduces universals and cause to one merely material principle. My analysis of passages from Plato’s Teaetetus adds to the earlier conclusions. Whether Plato has Xenophanes explicitly in mind, his afrmation about Iris as the daughter of Taumas in fact reverses the move made by Xenophanes, but subtly by asserting the primacy of wonder in the philosophical enterprise without remythologizing the world. In a similar way, Socrates’s account of Tales depicts Tales as someone who asked questions in the way determinative of philosophy, namely, about the natures of things, but then answered those questions reductivistically, in terms of a material cause and to the detriment of wonder. Where Plato and Aristotle seem to disagree sharply is the relationship of philosophy to mythology. For Plato, they are methodological alternatives,

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myth giving a false account of the world and philosophy—at least philosophy rightly undertaken—a true one. For Aristotle, mythology seeks to tell the same truth about the world as philosophy, but the rhetorical form of philosophy has rightly succeeded that of mythology.

Conclusion We have Aristotle’s analysis of Tales to suggest that the mythological frst principle of the god Oceanus has become the naturalistic principle of water; it is important to remind ourselves that the second intention of “principle” belongs to Aristotle, not to Homer or to Tales. Socrates’s anecdote consistently depicts Aristotle’s account of Tales. Te mythological is reduced to the natural, and, thereby wonder is lost. In Xenophanes 21B32, however, we do not have to rely on testimony. Te naturalistic apprehension of the world replacing the mythological is both explicit and methodological. Analysis, based on that conclusion, was then applied to 21B30. Te method of analysis I have developed here in relation to Tales and Xenophanes can be applied to other early Greek philosophers. Te work of demythologization seems to be universal in the extant fragments of early Greek philosophy, though there is a range in the reductionism that implies the destruction of wonder, because, as I said above, if the world consists only of what we can get our hands around, then there is nothing at which to wonder. Te destruction appears complete in the atomism of Democritus, for example. By contrast, it may be that the oracular character of Heraclitean fragments is aimed at least in part to recover a sense of wonder, precisely because no thing is ever only what it appears to be. Across the range of early and classical Greek philosophy, the various thinkers seem united in the view that the Homeric account of the world no longer obtained as an adequate explanatory account of the world. Tey are not unit-

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ed, however, on the thesis that a naturalistic account is sufcient explanation as a replacement. To return to the points made by Lévi-Strauss and Aristotle that were set forth at the outset of this chapter, mythmakers, the frst philosophers, and philosophers in the unqualifed sense all seek to understand the principles and causes that are at work in the world. Homer depicts those principles and causes in the imaginative genera of myth. Tales and Xenophanes as well as other early Greek thinkers name those principles and causes in the naturalistic genera of frst intentions. Tey stand at a point of radical disjuncture from Homer and the mythological tradition in general, distinguishing the natural world from the divinely infused world of mythology. In this dramatic shift, something is gained, but something is lost. Te world becomes more intelligible, but loses something of its mystery. Te march is a long one to Max Weber’s “disenchantment of the world,”62 but it begins with the early Greek philosophers, and specifcally with Xenophanes when he informs his hearers that the rainbow is not the goddess Iris, but only a colored cloud. In the Homeric world, everything is alive, even spears; everything is moved by some deity. After Xenophanes, the natural world is distinguished from the divine. Te movement is radical, but incomplete: from imaginative to natural genera, but not yet to the rational genera of second intentions characteristic of Plato and Aristotle. Te transition from myth to nature often entailed a concomitant loss of wonder, because the world was understood in material terms only, in terms of what could be apprehended by the fve physical senses. Te world of Tales and Xenophanes could be explained in purely material 62. Max Weber, “Science as Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 129–56; also available at http://anthropos-lab.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/ 12/Weber-Science-as-a-Vocation.pdf, 16. Weber took the phrase from Friedrich Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Ian H. Angus, “Disenchantment and Modernity: Te Mirror of Technique,” Human Studies 6, no. 2 (1983): 141.

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terms. Against that backdrop, one can see that Plato and Aristotle—for all the diferences in their metaphysical systems—were solidly united in afrming a wondrous and enchanted world in which what the senses apprehend is the least part of reality. Tose sensible phenomena do but signify the immaterial realm of being which is, by far, the greater part of reality. For Plato and Aristotle, in a steady state of wonder, the inquiry into that immaterial realm of being constituted the essence of philosophy.

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Metaphysics and the Origin of Culture donald phillip verene

Culture and Being In a fragment, “Te Concept of the Symbol: Metaphysics of the Symbolic,” left among Ernst Cassirer’s unpublished papers, Cassirer claims: “there is no ‘being’ of any kind except by virtue of some particular energy (‘nature,’ for example, only by virtue of artistic, religious, or scientifc energy) and without our taking this relation into account, the concept of ‘being’ would be completely empty for us.”1 Te apprehension of what is, for Cassirer, requires the human power to form experience through the symbol. Man is the animal symbolicum who lives and thinks within the circle of human culture. Human being and being as such require the symTis chapter had its origin as the Presidential Address at the 60th annual meeting of the Metaphysical Society of America, March 2009, at Emory University. A subsequent version of it was published in Te Review of Metaphysics: Donald Phillip Verene, “Metaphysics and the Origin of Culture,” Te Review of Metaphysics 63 (December 2009): 307–28. 1. Ernst Cassirer, Te Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 4, Te Metaphysics of Symbol­ ic Forms, ed. John Michael Krois and Donald Phillip Verene, trans. John Michael Krois (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 224.

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bolic forms of culture in order for us to have knowledge of them. Cassirer states: “By ‘symbolic form’ one should understand every energy of spirit by which the content of spiritual signifcation is linked to a concrete and intrinsically appropriate sensuous sign.”2 Myth and religion, language, art, history, and science, as well as other areas of culture, are ways of forming through symbols the energy of Geist.3 Tere is not, for Cassirer, a literal interpretation of the world and a symbolic one. All of human experience is symbolic. All perception of the object is symbolically charged; there is no sensory grasp of the object that does not at the same moment stand in relation to an intellectual or spiritual structure. Cassirer calls this immediate bond between the sensory and the nonsensory “symbolic pregnance.” He states, “By symbolic pregnance [symbolische Prägnanz] we mean the way in which a perception as a sensory experience contains at the same time a certain nonintuitive meaning which it immediately and concretely represents.”4 Cassirer ofers a phenomenological thought experiment as a demonstration of the fact that the being of any object and its nature depends upon the manner in which it is apprehended. He asks the reader to consider a Linienzug, a graph-like line drawing. We may frst grasp the line in terms of its physiognomic character, its dynamic rise and fall. It may glide along in part and then appear to be broken of and jagged. We may move from our apprehension of these perceptions and feeling-characteristics of the line to grasping it as a mathematical structure, a geometrical fg2. Ernst Cassirer, “Te Concept of Symbolic Form in the Construction of the Human Sciences,” in Te Warburg Years (1919–1933): Essays on Language, Art, Myth, and Technology, trans. S. G. Lofts with A. Calcagno (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013), 76. 3. Cassirer mentions but does not develop a number of other symbolic forms—morality (Sitte), law (Recht), economics (Wirtschaft), technology (Technik). See Ernst Cassirer, Te Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2, Mythical Tought, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1955), xv. 4. Ernst Cassirer, Te Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3, Te Phenomenology of Knowledge, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957), 202.

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ure. We may see it as a schema representing a universal geometrical law. We may further leave this mathematical sense of the line drawing behind and grasp it as a mythical symbol representing the division between the providences of the sacred and the profane in the world, and as perhaps having a magical power. We may also gain more distance from its immediacy and regard it as an aesthetic ornament having artistic signifcance. Cassirer states, “Here again the experience of spatial form is completed only through its relation to a total horizon which it reveals to us—through a certain atmosphere in which it not merely ‘is,’ but in which, as it were, it lives and breathes.”5 Cassirer sees culture as the ultimate fulfllment of what he calls the “basis phenomenon” of the work (Werk). Tis phenomenon is not that of work in the sense of labor (Arbeit) but in the sense of something made, factum. A work is the product of human accomplishment, as, for example, an art work. Te work is the key to self-knowledge, not in the sense of pure introspection or psychological self-awareness but in the Socratic sense of contemplation of the nature of the human. Cassirer holds that “self-knowledge is the highest aim of philosophical inquiry.” 6 Cassirer regards Socrates as the discoverer of self-knowledge as the product of contemplation. He says that Socrates’s new and unique call for self-knowledge means, “Know your work and know ‘yourself ’ in your work; know what you do, so you can do what you know.”7 Te symbolic forms that constitute human culture 5. Cassirer, Symbolic Forms, vol. 3, 201. In remarks to his seminar on the philosophy of history at Yale University in 1942, Cassirer gives another version of such a thought experiment, using the example of an imaginary fgure, like Robinson Crusoe, fnding a stone on a desert island and realizing that the marks on it may represent a kind of writing. In this example Cassirer combines the perspective of the Linienzug with the principle of symbolic pregnance—that an object is both physical and spiritual at once. See Donald Phillip Verene, Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer 1935–1945 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), 135–36. 6. Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1944), 1. 7. Cassirer, Symbolic Forms, vol. 4, 196.

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are the energies of spirit writ large. Te human being is defned through the work of culture, and in this work we encounter ourselves as beings who transform the immediacy of sensory experience into structures of meaning. Te primary work out of which culture arises for Cassirer is myth. In Cassirer’s phenomenology of knowledge (Erkenntnis), mythical thought arises from the expressive function of consciousness (Ausdrucksfunktion). Te phenomenon of expression is characterized by our reaction to the world as an array of benign or malignant forces. Tese reactions become formed in mythical thought as the principles of sacred and profane. Myth as a symbolic form provides a complete account of being. Mythical thought brings together the worlds of the human, natural, and divine. Te truths of the myth are categorical truths. Myths are the keepers of the master images out of which human culture is developed. All the various symbolic forms, including science, contain an expressive moment from which their various inner forms or identities develop. Our original contact with being and the real takes the form of mythical thought. Metaphysical thought is the other form of human knowledge that takes being and the real as its direct subject matter. How is metaphysics related to myth? What can be learned by considering them together? My thoughts on these questions are what follow.8

The Poetic Metaphysics of Jove Cassirer regards Giambattista Vico as the founder of the modern philosophy of mythical thought. He calls Vico “the real discoverer of the myth [der eigentliche ‘Entdecker des Mythos’].”9 Vico, in 8. My thoughts on these questions refect and are partially taken from my work Donald Phillip Verene, Speculative Philosophy (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, Rowman and Littlefeld, 2009). 9. Ernst Cassirer, Te Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History since

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presenting his doctrine of “poetic wisdom” (sapienza poetica) in the New Science, gives an account of the appearance of the supersensible as the origin of culture.10 Following the universal food, the sons of Noah become sons of the earth through generations of their ofspring over two centuries, while the world dries out. Originally they are men of ordinary stature, but over the generations their ofspring gradually become giants, and they disperse and roam the great forests of the earth. As their bodies increase in size, their capacity for thought decreases. Te three principles that distinguish humanity—religion, marriage, and burial—disappear. Te descendants of Noah become feral, living from moment to moment in a world of passing sensation. Without the power of language to fx the meaning of objects in their world, these giganti regard every facial expression as a new face.11 For them there is no frm division between the earth and sky. Te sky is no farther than the treetops. Tere is no community, no human place of gathering within the continuous trackless forests. It is not the state of pity and compassion that Rousseau later claims as original and natural. It is more Hobbes’s state in which life is “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”12 Unlike the frst men of either Hobbes or Rousseau, Vico’s giganti do not come together through a covenant or contract. With nothing before their minds, the giganti are confronted suddenly with a new phenomenon, a new and completely diferent sensation. Te world, having become sufciently dry, emits thunder and lightning. Vico’s frst men—otherwise without fear, except as an animal instinct in response to specifc threat of danHegel, trans. William H. Woglom and Charles W. Hendel (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1950), 296. 10. Giambattista Vico, Te New Science, trans. Tomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), §374f. 11. Vico, New Science, §700. 12. Tomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (New York: Penguin, 1968), pt. 1. chap. 13.

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ger—suddenly experience terror (spavento) as an inner passion, a sensation that shakes their very existence. In imitation of the sound of thunder they cry out pa, which they double as pape!13 Tey now respond to the sky as an alter-body, a being beyond themselves, diferent in kind. From their frst sounds they articulate the frst word: Jove. Te terror for which they now have a named object causes them to fee out of the sight of Jove and enter caves. Tey form marriages out of shame (pudore)—the second emotion that they feel for the frst time. In Vico’s passions of the soul, fear and shame are the keys to civil life.14 Some of the giants remain wandering, unable to experience these passions, but those who do, become the fathers of the frst families. Tey cut clearings in the forest and build altars from which to take the auguries of the actions of Jove in the sky. From these clearings eventually come cities, and the ofspring of those who remained feral become clients of the founders of families and their descendants. Te diference between the patricians and the plebeians develops. In this way the giants became the founders of the gentile nations that mark the beginning of history. In semiotic terms Jove becomes the frst name in that, prior to uttering “Jove,” each instance of thunder is a unique event. Once thunder has a name each instance of thunder can be found again in the name. Te immediacy of the stream of sensations becomes mediated and the knower comes into existence as separate from the known. Once one thing can be named, the knower possesses the power of the name and all in the world can be named. Te world then becomes full of gods as each thing is named. For the world to come into existence, the sky must become separated from the earth, and this cosmic separation has a parallel with the separation of the knower from the known. 13. Vico, New Science, §448. 14. Vico, New Science, §504.

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Vico’s poetic wisdom (sapienza poetica) fts the ancient defnition of wisdom that Cicero records: “Wisdom [sapientia] is the knowledge of things divine and human and acquaintance with the cause of each of them.”15 From their practice of the “science in divinity” (scienza in divinità) the founders of the frst families form a knowledge of Jove, and through the development of language they form a knowledge of government.16 What Vico calls “poetic” we would today call “mythic.” Myth is vera narratio, always a true story. Like the sensations they form, all myths are true. Te guiding trope of myth is metaphor, and every metaphor is a myth, a fable in brief. Irony is not possible at the level of myth, for irony presupposes a speculative sense of truth and error. Irony states a truth by claiming its opposite. Irony is the philosophical trope. Although poetry in its modern sense as a type of literature plays upon mythic archetypes, irony is available to it. Hence the poetry of which Vico speaks is myth, not poetry in a modern sense. In an addition to his New Science concerning the reprehension of the metaphysics of Descartes, Spinoza, and Locke, Vico criticizes modern metaphysics as it develops from Descartes, on the basis that supposition cannot provide a true starting point for a knowledge of being and that certainty alone is insufcient as a standard for knowledge.17 To suppose things to be other than they appear to be, and in this process of doubt to have reason turn back upon itself results in certainties, but these certainties as frst principles are vacuous. Tey do not generate a knowledge per causas. To obtain a metaphysic from these principles all sorts of uncertainties must be attached to them, for which no ground is adduced. Having once asserted with certainty that the “I” exists 15. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. J. E. King (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 4.26.57. 16. Vico, New Science, §365. 17. Donald Phillip Verene, “Giambattista Vico’s ‘Reprehension of the Metaphysics of René Descartes, Benedict Spinoza, and John Locke’: An Addition to the New Science (Translation and Commentary),” New Vico Studies 8 (1990): 2–18.

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as a thinking thing, Descartes incorporates into this assertion a defnition of thinking for which no proof is given. Vico ofers another conception of the starting point of metaphysics. He states, “Te metaphysics of the philosophers must agree with the metaphysic of the poets, on this most important point, that from the idea of divinity have come all the sciences that have enriched the world with all the arts of humanity: just as this vulgar [poetic] metaphysic taught men lost in the bestial state to form the frst human thought from Jove, so the learned must not admit any truth in metaphysic that does not begin from true Being, which is God.”18 Vico resolves the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry in one stroke by making poetry, that is, myth, the necessary precursor and beginning point for philosophy. Te theological poets, as Vico calls the formulators of myth, are not philosophers, nor do they formulate rational truths. Teir images of Being, however, are the archai from which the science of metaphysics must begin. In the well-known claim concerning the origin of philosophy in the frst book of the Metaphysics (982b), Aristotle connects philosophy to myth: “It is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at frst began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difculties, then advanced little by little and stated difculties about the greater matters, e.g., about the phenomena of the moon and those of the sun and the stars, and about the genesis of the universe. And a man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant (whence even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of wisdom, for myth is composed of wonders); therefore since they philosophized in order to escape from ignorance, evidently they were pursuing science in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end.”19 18. Verene, “Vico’s  ‘Reprehension,’ ” 2. 19. Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.2 982b12–22, in Aristotle, Te Complete Works of Ar­ istotle: Te Revised Oxford Translation, 2 vols., ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, N.J.:

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Aristotle suggests that philosophy and mythology have wonder (thauma) as a common point of departure that grows from an initial difculty (aporia). For the philosopher this is a difculty had because of conficting arguments. Wonder is the basis of dialectic. Dialectic is the confrontation of opposites through reason. Te mythologer, the lover of myth, is led to myth because of the aporia that naturally attends opposites and the power of the mythic image to encompass them. Te confict the lover of myth experiences is a clash between forces, between gods, between gods and men, between man and events in nature, between what is benign and what is malignant. Myth does not explain the wonders it records through its images; it allows us to stand in amazement at them and experience them over and over. We come to myth out of wonder, but wonder is not the primary passion through which myth is originally made and through which the frst men are humanized. Te power of the mythic image is generated through terror, through the break in being of the thunderous sky. Read in Vichian terms, Aristotle’s view suggests that the wonder at the basis of the love of myth takes us to the wonder at the basis of the love of wisdom. Te mythic or poetic image, the metaphor, is the frst response to the difculty that produces wonder, but wonder pursued further leads to the exercise of reason. Te oppositions embraced in the mythic narrative at the hands of the lover of wisdom become the elenchus—the process of dialectic in which what is originally joined in the metaphor is then subjected to the device of the question. We engage in metaphysics, not out of human strength but out of our weakness, our inability fully to know. Tere is always more before the mind than there is in it. Te really real (to ontos on) is always just beyond the mind’s grasp, causing the passion of Princeton University Press, 1984), 2:1554; hereafter, Aristotle, Metaph. 1.2 982b12–22; Barnes 2:1554.

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wonder and continuing to generate our propensity toward metaphysics.

Metaphysics and Myth If we ask what is metaphysics, based on what has been said so far, the answer is metaphysics is always myth remembered. Te frst metaphysics is poetic metaphysics or myth. Te world is made accessible to human beings through their power of imagination to emerge from the immediacy of sensation into a world mediated by the power of symbolic forms. In accord with Claude Lévi-Strauss, we can say that totem animals are not good because they are good to eat but because they are good to think. Lévi-Strauss says, “Tere is simultaneous production of myths themselves, by the mind that generates them and, by the myths, of an image of the world which is already inherent in the structure of the mind.”20 Te world of the mythmaker, like the world of the child, is not accomplished by the conscious pursuit of rationality. Its distinctive feature is the formative power of the imagination. But once we have passed through childhood we can never be children again. Once culture develops beyond the world of the mythmaker, that world does not come again. Metaphysics, like poetry, is the attempt to recapture what is lost. In the last words of Modes of Tought, A. N. Whitehead joins philosophy with poetry: “Philosophy is akin to poetry, and both of them seek to express that ultimate good sense we term civilization. In each case there is reference to form beyond the direct meanings of words. Poetry allies itself to metre, philosophy to mathematic pattern.”21 We may add to this Hegel’s sense of art, 20. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mythologiques: Le Cru et le Cuit (Paris: Plon, 1964), 346; Te Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 341. 21. A. N. Whitehead, Modes of Tought (New York: Capricorn, 1958; 1938), 237–38.

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in his fragment “Über Mythologie, Volksgeist und Kunst,” where he declares Memory (Mnemosyne) to be the “absolute Muse [die absolute Muse].” Te work of the artist recalls what is originally made in the mythology of a people. It recalls a time when the imagination actually made human culture and was not simply a power to refect culture. Hegel warns, “When in our time the living world does not form the work of art within it, the artist must place his imagination in a past world; he must dream a world, but the character of dreaming, of not being alive, of the past is plainly stamped on his work.”22 Poetry, as Whitehead puts it, attempts to recover this world of the origin by allying itself to meter, and metaphysic attempts this recovery by employing mathematical pattern that is a hallmark of reason. Te True is the whole. Te sense of the whole is originally supplied to the human spirit by the primal myth, but once the living world does not form the myth within it we must discover a way to remember it. As Vico says, the frst science to be learned should be mythology.23 Te ultimate good sense upon which civilization depends resides in the cultivation of such memory. How then are we to regard memory in this sense? In On Memory (451b) Aristotle describes memory in the sense of recollection: “When one wishes to recollect, that is what he will do: he will try to obtain a beginning of movement whose sequel shall be the movement which he desires to reawaken. Tis explains why attempts at recollection succeed soonest and best when they start from a beginning.”24 We may add to this sense of recollection Vico’s threefold description of it in the New Science: “Memory thus has three diferent aspects: memory [memoria] when it remembers things, imagination [fantasia] when it alters 22. George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “On Mythology, National Spirit, and Art,” trans. Donald Phillip Verene, in Hegel’s Recollection: A Study of Images in the Phenomenol­ ogy of Spirit (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 37. 23. Vico, New Science, §51. 24. Aristotle, On Memory 451b29–32; Barnes 1:718.

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or imitates them, and ingenuity [ingegno] when it gives them a new turn or puts them into proper arrangement and relationship. For these reasons the theological poets called Memory the mother of the Muses.”25 Metaphysical memory is the reconstruction of what otherwise would be lost in time. It preserves and extends our sense of the real that is had only in a glimpse, like Dante’s glimpse of the dilettoso monte as he begins his journey toward the ultimate reality of Paradiso. In claiming that metaphysics is myth remembered I do not intend that the author of a metaphysics consciously aims to rewrite a primal myth in terms of a rational discourse. I intend that metaphysics, like myth, responds to two requirements of the human soul—to provide a comprehension of the whole and to provide a comprehension within the whole of the interrelation of opposites, including the opposition among the human, the natural, and the divine. Metaphysics, as Hegel points out in his “Who Tinks Abstractly?” causes our common-sense conception of the world to walk on its head. He says, “For metaphysics is a word, no less than abstract, and almost thinking as well, from which everybody more or less runs away as from a man who has caught the plague.”26 It is common sense which reduces the reality of things to a single feature of them. Metaphysics attempts to return thought to a grasp of the internal reality of things. It attempts to act against what Whitehead called “vacuous actuality.”27 To use Hegel’s metaphor, the metaphysician unbuttons his “metaphysical overcoat” and lets loose “the fashing star of wisdom.”28 Another way to put 25. Vico, New Science, §819. 26. George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “Who Tinks Abstractly?,” in Miscellaneous Writings of G. W. F. Hegel, ed. Jon Stewart (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 284. 27. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 43 and 253. 28. Hegel, “Who Tinks Abstractly?,” 284.

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the problem one faces in engaging in metaphysics is what Ibsen said of the artist: “To live is to war with the trolls.”29 Te metaphysician, as I understand him, is an artist of reason. What the metaphysician shows us is a world not made for doing business—and it is shocking. To use a distinction of Whitehead’s Function of Reason, the ordinary thinker can understand the reason of Ulysses, a reason that is clever and can approach any problematic situation and work out a course of action to achieve a solution. But there is also the reason of Plato, the reason of speculative thought that takes us beyond appearance to see with the mind’s eye what is beyond the bodily eye.30 Consideration of the connection between metaphysics and myth contains the answer to the question of why human beings create metaphysics—why it is an enterprise that the human spirit fnds it cannot avoid. Lévi-Strauss says in his “Introduction to a Science of Mythology” that myth and music “are instruments for the obliteration of time.”31 From what has heretofore been said, metaphysics may be added to this claim as a third term. Myth as an archaic ontology found in primitive or traditional societies acts against what Mircea Eliade calls the “terror of history.”32 Tere are two kinds of time—the time of the origin of things, in which the power of the real is concentrated, and the time of history, of events that occur in a sequence of simply one thing after another. Te terror of the thunderous Jove initiates the ground from which to confront the terror of history. Te time of the origin, the time before time, so to speak, is time as a cycle. Events repeat themselves. Teir patterns do not 29. Henrik Ibsen, “Et Vers”: “At leve er—krig med trolde.” See M. C. Bradbrook, Ibsen the Norwegian: A Reevaluation (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1966), 16. 30. A. N. Whitehead, Te Function of Reason (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1929), 10–11. 31. Lévi-Strauss, Te Raw and the Cooked, 16. 32. Mircea Eliade, Te Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005).

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change in essence. Tese patterns are refected in ritual and set forward in the images of the myths. In this cycle the world is continually renewed. Te opposites that govern experience come back upon themselves. Te myth and the ritual connect to the real, divine order that lies outside the time of human vicissitude—as above, so below. Metaphysics is the impulse to locate the real from within the world of appearance—to gain as a project of thought and to hold in mind the nature and internal structure of the real. Metaphysics is musical in the sense that music is never to be heard only once. A piece of music or a song exists through repetition. It can be heard over and over again, each time in a slightly diferent sense. A metaphysic, once stated, is read and reread, argued out, refned and interpreted, often over centuries. Metaphysical systems are never refuted; they are abandoned out of fatigue. Te terror of history is the opposite of the music of the spheres. Historical or chronological time is time measured, everyday time, time-by-the-clock. One event simply leads to another. Te doctrine of historicism embraces this sense of time and illuminates it but does not produce an answer to the question: What is the meaning of the sequence, the meaning of history? Te answer is conceived only in the broadest terms—as growth or progress or an advance in freedom, all of which contain some truth but do not reduce the impulse to obtain a grasp of Being beyond the sequence. Even if the terror of history is simply embraced as the doctrine of “deconstruction” or results in the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” the impulse to metaphysics remains—the need to deny time from within time. Te need to achieve a reference point outside of time is shared by the primitive ontology that resides in myth and that of the metaphysical use of reason to grasp the real. As Mircea Eliade puts it, “Hence it could be said that this ‘primitive’ ontology has a Platonic structure; and in that case Plato could be regarded as the outstanding philosopher of ‘primitive mentality’, that is,

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as the thinker who succeeded in giving philosophic currency and validity to the modes of life and behavior of archaic humanity.”33 To locate metaphysics along with poetry in memory as recollection is to subscribe to the frst sentences of Francis Bacon in his essay “Of Vicissitude of Tings”: “Salomon saith, ‘Tere is no new thing upon the earth.’ So that as Plato had an imagination, that ‘all knowledge was but remembrance’, so Salomon giveth his sentence, ‘that all novelty is but oblivion.’ Whereby you may see that the river Lethe runneth as well above ground as below.”34 Te truly novel is oblivion, in that it is never repeated and thus cannot be remembered. To remember is to remake what was, to enact a palingenesis. Metaphysics, like all of the human sciences, acts against forgetting. It is the means whereby we remember the world.

Speculation and the Critical Temperament F. H. Bradley begins his Appearance and Reality with the claim that “[M]etaphysics is the fnding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct, but to fnd these reasons is no less an instinct.”35 “Instinct” in its original Latin form of instinctus has the sense of instigated, incited, impelled. Tose primary, non-individualized impulses that allow us as human beings to be in the world determine our beliefs in what the world is. I wish to add to the dialectic between instinct and speculative reason captured in Bradley’s statement the middle term of the mythic imagination. In the development of human culture, 33. Eliade, Myth of the Eternal Return, 34. 34. Francis Bacon, “Of Vicissitude of Tings,” in Francis Bacon: Te Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 451. See also Jorge Luis Borges, “Te Immortal,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1998), 183–200. 35. F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959; 1893), x

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myth precedes metaphysics. Our impulse to grasp the order of things is manifested frst in myth. Later what is attained by the mythic imagination is transferred to the power of reason to form the whole of things in thought. Once reason arises within human experience it can never be confned to a purely critical function. Reason always seeks to exercise its speculative powers. I wish to suggest further that the speculative use of reason easily and naturally incorporates the distinct human capacity of humor that is not found in metaphysics based on refection and criticism. A second point that Bradley makes concerns the “self-stance” of the metaphysician. He says: “Te metaphysician cannot perhaps be too much in earnest with metaphysics, and he cannot, as the phrase runs, take himself too seriously. But the same thing holds good with every other positive function of the universe. And the metaphysician, like other men, is prone to forget this truth.”36 Especially prone to forget this truth, I think, is the critical philosopher who builds his metaphysics of experience on refection. In contrast, the dialectical philosopher who bases his metaphysics on speculative reason remembers this truth and incorporates it into his thought. Dialectic, with its sense of how opposites attract, repel, and transform themselves into each other, lends itself as a way of thinking that, while serious in its pursuit of truth, also realizes that the absolute standpoint—comprehension of the real—can never be mastered. Te basis of Bradley’s account of appearance and reality is his interpretation of Hegel’s idealism. Hegel is the speculative philosopher par excellence. Bertolt Brecht says of Hegel that “he had the stuf of one of the greatest humorists among philosophers; Socrates is the only other one who had a similar method. . . . eye twinkling was innate to him, so far as I can see, like a birth defect and he had it until death; without being conscious of it he continuously blinked his 36. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, ix–x.

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eyes like someone with St. Vitus’s dance. He had such humor that he could never think of something like order, for example, without disorder. It was clear to him that right next to the greatest order dwells the greatest disorder. . . . For him concepts were always rocking in a rocking-chair, something that makes a very good initial impression until it falls over backwards.” Of Hegel’s metaphysics, Brecht says, “I once read his book, the ‘Larger Logic,’ as I had rheumatism and could not move myself. It is one of the most humorous works in world literature. It deals with the life of concepts, their slippery, unstable, irresponsible existence, how they revile each other and do battle with knives and then sit themselves down together at dinner as if nothing had happened.”37 Furthermore, Brecht says, Hegel’s opposites “appear, so to speak, in pairs; each is married to its opposite and they settle their afairs in pairs, that is, they sign contracts in pairs, enter into legal actions in pairs, contrive raids and burglaries in pairs, write books and give afdavits in pairs, and do so as pairs whose members are completely at odds with each other. What order afrms, disorder, its inseparable partner, opposes at once, in one breath where possible. Tey can neither live without one another nor live with one another.” To look at one thing is not to look at it truly until one has looked at its opposite. Hegel realizes that to grasp experience we must always double up. Experience itself is a matter of doubling up, pairing of. In actuality nothing lives alone. Anything is, even to itself, something else—an other. We know ourselves by being our double. We cannot take ourselves seriously when it means thinking that who we are, is simply thus and so, because to claim this we must pair up with the rest of ourselves, that which is not thus and so. Brecht concludes, “I have never met a person without a sense of humor who has understood Hegel’s dialectic.” 37. Te quotations found in this paragraph and the next are from Bertolt Brecht, Flüchtlingsgespräche (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1961), 108–11. My translation.

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As mentioned earlier, we have become accustomed to regarding refection as the key to metaphysical thought, if not to philosophical thought itself. In the Science of Logic Hegel says that ancient metaphysics was founded on the premiss that thought could achieve a knowledge of things. He says, “But refective understanding took possession of philosophy [aber der refektierende Verstand bemächtigte sich der Philosophie].” Hegel holds that in modern philosophy “refection” has become a slogan (Schlag­ wort).38 Vico coins the term “barbarism of refection” (barbarie della rifessione) to describe the form of thought of the modern world.39 Refection as a manner of thinking in which thought can come back upon itself is associated with modern optics, which has its beginnings in the Optics of Roger Bacon. Bacon says there is a kind of perception “which cannot take place by the sense alone, and does not depend on a comparison with previous vision, but without limitation considers the thing present. For its perceptions several things are required and the process is like a kind of reasoning.”40 It is a short step from Roger Bacon’s conception of this way of seeing as like a kind of reasoning for us to entertain the converse of this proposition, that reasoning is like an optical process carried on internally. Bacon emphasizes refection as a key to the soul. Te soul’s knowledge of the divine in the soul’s own bodily existence “is correctly said to be by refection.”41 As moderns we are the ofspring of Descartes, who in his Discourse on Method is the historical source in French for the philosophical meaning of réfexion.42 In part 5 of the Discourse 38. George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969), 45. 39. Vico, New Science, §1106. 40. Roger Bacon, Te Opus majus of Roger Bacon, trans. Robert Belle Burke, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1928), 499. 41. Bacon, Opus majus, 580. 42. For a full discussion of refection in modern philosophy, see Donald Phillip

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Descartes uses the phrase, “après y avoir fait assez de réfexion,” in claiming that certain laws that God has established in nature have also been implanted in our minds. “After adequate refection we cannot doubt that they are exactly observed in everything which exists or occurs in the world.”43 In his proof for the existence of God, in part 4, Descartes employs the term refection in arguing from doubt as part of a proof of his own existence, to the existence of God: “Refecting upon the fact that I was doubting [faisant ré­ fexion sur ce que je doutais].”44 In a letter written to Arnauld on July 29, 1648, among objections raised to some of his views in the Principles, Descartes writes, “We make a distinction between direct and refective thoughts corresponding to the distinction we make between direct and refective vision, one depending on the frst impact of the rays and the other on the second.” Descartes says the simple thoughts of infants are direct and not refective, such as when they have feelings of pain or pleasure originating in the body. Refection can occur in adults. Descartes writes, “But when an adult feels something, and simultaneously perceives that he has not felt it before, I call this second perception refection [hanc secundam perceptionem refexionem appello], and attribute it to the intellect alone, in spite of its being so linked to sensation that the two occur together and appear to be indistinguishable from each other.”45 In this passage Descartes draws the analogy that is the basis of the modern conception of refection. He compares the refection of light in perception, the subject of optics, with refection in the intellect, the subject of mental philosophy. Verene, Philosophy and the Return to Self-Knowledge (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), chap. 1. 43. René Descartes, Te Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothof, and Dugald Murdoch, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–91), 1: 131. 44. Descartes, Philosophical Writings, 1:127. 45. Descartes, Philosophical Writings, 3:357.

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Kant’s critical philosophy is the successor to Descartes’s methodological use of refection as a means to certainty. Descartes employs refection from his rationalist position in metaphysics. Kant equates philosophy itself with refection. He establishes the frm connection between refection and the nature of the Understanding (Verstand). In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant states, “Te act by which I confront the comparison of representations with the cognitive faculty to which it belongs, and by means of which I distinguish whether it is as belonging to the pure understanding or to sensible intuition that they are to be compared with each other, I call transcendental refection.”46 Transcendental refection is the proper operation of the Understanding, of the knowing subject delineating the conditions of its own knowing so that its powers to sense the object are held in proper relation to its powers to form logically what is sensed. Transcendental refection is a synonym for critique. Kant was greatly interested in Johann Heinrich Lambert’s Neues Organon, published in 1764, in which he advocated a science of “phenomenology, or the doctrine of appearance.” Lambert called this phenomenology a “transzendente Optik.” Tis optics allows us to see through the forms of appearance, avoid error, and employ human understanding. On September 2, 1770, Kant wrote to Lambert: “A quite special, though purely negative science, general phenomenology (phaenomenologia generalis), seems to be presupposed by metaphysics. In it the principles of sensibility, their validity and their limitations, would be determined, so that these principles could not be confusedly applied to objects of pure reason, as heretofore almost always has happened.”47 In a letter 46. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1958), A262; B317. Kant’s term for refection is “Überlegung,” which he makes clear he is using for the Latin “refexio.” 47. On Lambert, see Johannes Hofmeister, “Einleitung,” in George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 6th ed. (Hamburg: Meiner, 1952), xiii. My translation.

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to Marcus Herz dated February 21, 1772, Kant wrote he planned to produce such a general phenomenology as the frst part of a metaphysics.48 Kant did not carry through his plan as such, but the sense of optics is carried on into critique as a doctrine of “transcendental refection.” To approach the real through refection is to see through a glass darkly, albeit with certainty of what is seen. Te real itself remains a thing-in-itself, removed from our mind’s eye. Speculative reason, as opposed to refective reason, attempts to see the real face-to-face. Its optics is one of seeing per speculum, of spying out or seeing into what is, to seeing beyond appearance as contrasted with seeing with certainty what is seen and thus producing a metaphysics of experience as contrasted with a metaphysics of the real or the divine. In the one passage in the frst Critique in which Kant becomes poetic, he extols the merit of the pure Understanding. He says that he has considered everything in the territory of the pure Understanding and assigned everything to its rightful place. He says, “Tis domain [the pure Understanding] is an island, enclosed by nature itself within unalterable limits. It is the land of truth— enchanting name!—surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where many a fog bank and many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer ever anew with empty hopes, and engaging him in enterprises which he never can abandon and yet is unable to carry to completion.”49 Te attraction to certainty that Kant’s blessed isle of the Understanding ofers instead of the adventure ofered by the fog banks of illusion that surround this isle is tied to a timidity of soul, a fear of error, a desire for continued and complete security of thought. To attain this security the mind must take itself se48. Hofmeister, “Einleitung,” xiv. 49. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A235–36; B294–95.

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riously. It must remain carefully optimistic and be ever at work, shoring up its distinctions and ramifying their connections. It must not become melancholic or ironic about its project. Refective thinking requires seriousness of purpose and vigilance so that nothing rash is considered or embraced. Along with seriousness of mind comes respectability, the opposite of poetry. Poetry is never respectable because it upsets language. It, like metaphysics, directs vision into the nature of things; it causes its audience to stand on their heads and see diferently. Tis sense of reversal and insight leaves speculative thinking open to humor. Humor has us see the opposite, see into things in a way other than we believe they are. Certainty is placed in relation to its opposite, uncertainty. Refective reason aims always to separate truth from error, not to present their connection in which all truth is partial error and all error is partial truth. Te truth that refective reason or the Understanding seeks is a monologic or single, correct version of things. Refective apprehension of things is always one-eyed. Te philosophical mind, tied fast to the power of refection and its optics, is comparable, I think, to that of Jorge, the librarian who hides from the world the lost work of Aristotle on comedy, in Umberto Eco’s Te Name of the Rose. Jorge says, “Laughter [il riso] is weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our fesh. It is the peasant’s entertainment, the drunkard’s license. . . . laughter remains base, a defense for the simple.”50 Refective, critical philosophy seems to be proper philosophy—for the same reason people took Jorge seriously: his overall grimness. William, the hero and protagonist, in confronting the grimness of Jorge says to Jorge that he would like to lead him around, naked, “with fowl’s feathers stuck in your asshole and your face painted like a juggler and a bufoon. . . . I would like to smear honey all over you and then roll 50. Umberto Eco, Te Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 474.

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you in feathers, and take you on a leash to fairs, to say to all: ‘He was announcing the truth to you and telling you that the truth has the taste of death, and you believed, not in his words, but in his grimness [tetraggine].’ ”51 Te problem with conducting our reasoning concerning the real solely through refection is that it is a closed circle. It comes back upon itself and secures its results as an island of certainty. It does not move the mind to what is beyond its own powers. Refection will not take the risks that both Descartes and Kant warn us against taking in our thoughts. Tey tell us not to be like knights-errant, attempting feats beyond our powers to complete. In Te Name of the Rose, William says “Jorge feared the second book of Aristotle [that on comedy] because it perhaps really did teach how to distort the face of every truth, so that we would not become slaves of our ghosts. Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh [fare ridere la verità], because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.”52 Critical refection practiced as the sum and substance of philosophy generally and of metaphysics specifcally, makes us “become slaves of our own ghosts.” Te transcendental method ofers us just the principles of our own knowledge of the object. It does not offer us the truth of ourselves—self-knowledge. Truth pursued in a one-eyed, monological fashion ofers us a kind of rational madness, a process of constant argument and terminological refnement— the attempt to prove without question whatever the argument is about, and to make its terms infallibly clear. In philosophy, argument is a paltry thing, in that for any argument, no truth is reached that cannot, by the further application of human wit, be challenged by a counter argument, in an unending chain of critical thoughts. In Hegel’s terms, the philosophical or metaphysical sentence 51. Eco, Name of the Rose, 477. 52. Eco, Name of the Rose, 491.

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has an internal motion within it—unlike the refective sentence.53 Te refective sentence joins its subject with its predicate. Te copula connects them together but leaves what is connected in a still-standing position. In the speculative sentence (spekulativer Satz) we grasp the meaning of the subject as residing in the predicate. But once the predicate is grasped, its meaning points us back to its relation to the subject. Tis circular motion is not a simple return, because the meaning of the subject is now altered by this process. In this movement we see further into the inner form that the subject and the predicate share. Refective discourse holds us at a distance. Speculative discourse pulls us into the actuality of what it expresses. Te circle of speculative discourse always passes beyond itself in a spiral. Te circle of refective discourse is always completing itself, always closing in on itself. Te metaphysician, I think, must transcend the ghosts that the mental optics of the metaphysician’s own refective reason produce and attempt speculative vision. In so doing the metaphysician must attempt to grasp in language the unseen in the seen. Tis aim is driven by wonder. Wonder takes us beyond the certainties of thought that refection produces. Wonder is tied to not taking oneself seriously, because to wonder causes us to let go of the world of experience as certifed by our rational understanding. To wonder is to see into or beyond what is there for us, into what is in-itself. We cannot reach being by hypothetical thinking. Being must be apprehended in a face-to-face manner. Dialectic is the basis for not taking ourselves seriously, because it forces us to question our own mastery of the world as it appears. Not taking oneself seriously is the key to approaching metaphysics with a sense of humor, to accepting a level of incongruity, incoherence, and paradox in the human condition and within human experience taken as a whole. 53. George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Te Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), §61.

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Laughter, as we know from Aristotle, is a distinctively human capability. Man, Aristotle says in Parts of Animals, “is the only animal that laughs.”54 Humor allows metaphysics to come alive as a human enterprise and to think in a manner so as to instruct, delight, and move. With these properties metaphysical discourse is a lively form of speech. Metaphysics shares with poetical discourse, and with mythical narrative that has gone before poetical discourse, the exercise of human imagination which it connects to reason. Metaphysics as myth remembered begins in wonder, and in its speculative form it adds humor to wonder—the two human passions that motivate metaphysics as an art of thinking beyond the sheltered and secure isle of our understanding. As myth remembered, metaphysics takes us back to the origin of culture. Te drive to give form to being, to what is, that generates myth out of which human culture is born, is the same drive that generates metaphysics. But between these two moments reason has intervened. Te metaphysical narration is one of thoughts, whereas the mythical narration is one of images.55 What Cassirer claims of language and art may also be claimed of metaphysics, that “although language and art both become emancipated . . . from their native soil of mythical thinking, the ideal, spiritual unity of the two is reasserted upon a higher level.” He says that if language is to become a vehicle of thought (as is required for metaphysical thought): “Tis evolution can be achieved only at the price of forgoing the wealth and fullness of immediate experience.” He holds that the word can regain the creative power that it commanded in myth only when language becomes poetic again, because “here it recovers the fullness of life; but it is no longer a life mythically bound and fettered, but an aesthetically liberated life.”56 54. Aristotle, Part. An. 673a4–5; Barnes 1:1049. 55. See Donald Phillip Verene, “Metaphysical Narration, Science, and Symbolic Form,” Review of Metaphysics 47, no. 1 (1993): 115–32. 56. Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, trans. Susanne Langer (New York: Dover, 1953), 98.

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We may add to this picture of the regeneration of language as poetry the regeneration of language as metaphysics. Tat is, we may do this if we comprehend the sense in which the metaphysician must go to school with the poets, not to turn metaphysics into poetry but to grasp the necessary connection between the image and rational thought. To go to school with the poets is to return to the origin of culture with the poets, in order to reaffrm the power of the metaphor to produce beginning points for thought. From the poet and from metaphor we learn the art of having what James Joyce called “two thinks at a time.”57 Without the metaphor that originally resides in myth, rational thought cannot renew itself and give us the new lease on life that every metaphysics ofers. 57. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber & Faber, 1939), 583.07.

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five

Flux-Gibberish For and Against Heraclitus william de smond

Opening Tis refection is occasioned by an impression gleaned from Aristotle’s Metaphysics. It is a not a refection on Heraclitus in the mode of straightforward scholarly or philological study but one inspired by, companioned by Heraclitus. In a companioning ap­ proach the thinker who occasions the refection is less an object of scholarly research and more one who brings forth connatural thinking in us, as we try to understand him and the matters that engage him. Such a companioning approach has not been uncommon with Heraclitus, since he seems to be just the kind of thinker who calls forth such a response. Tere is another approach that I call the ventriloquizing approach, which makes the thinker a medium on whom to project the favored ideas of the interpreter. Companioning can become ventriloquizing, and then the words we have of Heraclitus function like such a medium: Rorschach blobs or indeterminate pictures onto which we project ourselves. I have that worry with some of the important interpreters of

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Heraclitus—at times with Heidegger, for instance; though he might well make claim to epitomize companioning thought with Heraclitus, in fact he may be ventriloquizing.1 I will look at aspects of the respective approaches of Hegel and Nietzsche, both of whom witness to a sense of Heraclitus’s companioning presence.2 And yet here too one senses some element of ventriloquizing, and the voice of Heraclitus comes to sound not entirely unlike the voice of Hegel or of Nietzsche. Admittedly, there may be an inevitable temptation to fnd in Heraclitus what one brings to him. It may be impossible to avoid ventriloquizing entirely. At the same time, there is something resistant in Heraclitus’s mode of articulation that makes one difdent in (pro)claiming that now, at last, one is the privileged interpreter to understand him and fully take his philosophical measure. Heraclitus ofers us striking thoughts that strike one into thought—thought that opens up philosophical porosity to the deepest perplexities. He can be challenging as a companioning thinker without necessarily being made an object of scholarly research—which, of course, is not to gainsay the need to learn from the scholars and philologists. I will explain presently the impression gleaned from Aristotle, 1. It would require a separate study to do justice to Heidegger’s engagement with Heraclitus, so I put it to the side here. In Early Greek Tinking, Heidegger’s rumination on “Alētheia” seems to me to ofer some of the best things he has to say, with some bearing on the sense of doubleness I take up below. Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Tink­ ing, trans. D. F. Krell and F. A. Capuzzi (San Francisco, Calif.: Harper and Row, 1975), 113–14). His refections in the essay on “Logos” tells us more about Heidegger than Heraclitus. I have ofered some thoughts on the porosity of being which seems to me to enter a space where Heidegger’s sense of alētheia might be developed in directions not quite the same as Heidegger’s. As called to agapeic service of the true, our being truthful does not make us the “wrester” of truth from its hiddenness, or even its thief, but the receiver of it, the benefciary of its gift. 2. On ventriloquizing and companioning hermeneutical practices, and indeed also on other possible approaches, specifcally with respect to Hegel, see my paper, “Despoiling the Egyptians—Gently: Merold Westphal and Hegel” in Gazing through a Prism Darkly: Refections on Merold Westphal’s Hermeneutical Epistemology, ed. B. Keith Putt (Bronx, N.Y.: Fordham University Press, 2009), 20–34. Te points made there can have application to other thinkers also, Heraclitus included.

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but overall I am interested in the relation of becoming and intelligibility, interested in how the identifcation of Heraclitus as a thinker of fux has been understood as undermining the stability of intelligibility. Pure fux without stable intelligibility would seem to lead to fux-gibberish, as I am inclined to call it. In the fnal analysis becoming would seem devoid of an abiding intelligibility, while our eforts to articulate it without falsifcation would seem to lead to gibberish rather than articulate speech. I think of Socrates in the Teaetetus (183a), where he connects the position that all is motion with Protagoras’s view of man as the measure: “If all things are in motion, every answer, on whatever subject, is equally correct.”3 If all things are equally correct, all things are equally incorrect (a view that comes alive again and again, in Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, for instance). Te threat of fuxgibberish does not seem so far away. I will come again to what I intend by “fux-gibberish” and how this bears on the determinacy and constancy of intelligibility. But if some pervading sense of the fow of becoming must be granted, how does this bear on the constancy of intelligibility? My guiding question: How to think the fow and the constancy together? And can we look less askance on gibberish and what its equivocal promise communicates? If we have to speak against Heraclitus, do we need also to speak for him—even more for than against him? My refections will be as much about fux and gibberish as about the inspiring companionship of Heraclitus. I will also say something about what it means to be true to mystery without sacrifce of the philosophical quest for intelligibility. 3. “Supporters of the theory of forms were led to it by means of Heraclitus’s argument concerning truth, in which he holds that whatever is perceived by the senses is in a state of fux. [Accepting that much of his argument these philosophers go on to argue] that if there is to be science our knowledge of anything there must be other entities in nature besides those perceived by the senses, inasmuch as there can be no science of what is in a state of fux.” Aristotle, Metaphysics 13.4 1078b12–17; translation in Philip Wheelwright, ed., Te Presocratics (New York: Macmillan, 1985), 80.

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Aristotle’s Irritation Reading Aristotle’s Metaphysics one can be struck by what seems like an irritated tone in his presentation of thinkers whom one can take to be the defenders of the fux. Te irritated tone is ambiguous in that it is not always directly and immediately zoned on the person of Heraclitus himself, but seems to regard those infuenced by his doctrines, those Heracliteans who perhaps put stress only on fux, followers perhaps not entirely true to the very rich complexity of Heraclitus himself. Heraclitus is indeed mentioned when Aristotle calls the law of contradiction the most certain (see Metaphysics, 1005b20f.). With regard to such a frst axiom, those who demand a demonstration lack education (1006a). Te word that Aristotle uses here is apaideusia—one who is not the benefciary of paideia, one still a pais, a child, an infans, without language, perhaps one still babbling, gibbering—I will return to an overlap with Heraclitus’s child. In book 4 of the Metaphysics we sense a certain exasperation in Aristotle’s criticism. Tose people who demand a reason for everything, claim the right to contradict themselves (1011a). Again Heraclitus is not expressly named, but Aristotle refers to those who afrm and deny. Te goal seems to be to say both “yes” and “no” (1008a), and perhaps neither “yes” nor “no.” Such a thinker thinks and does not think (1008b) and the question is posed: What is the diference between him and a vegetable? Earlier Aristotle had said that here discussion is pointless (1008a30). Again he makes reference to the “professed followers of Heraclitus” as well as Cratylus (1010a), with respect to the indeterminate and the impossibility of true predication. Cratylus ends up only moving his fnger; for one cannot step into the same river even once. A remark on Plato’s Cratylus is not irrelevant here. Most philosophical interest has been focused on the refection on names and things in the latter part of the dialogue, but in truth there is

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much in Socrates’s earlier etymological concerns in Cratylus that is related to my theme of fux-gibberish. What can we say at all, if all is fux? Cratylus himself is said to have been reduced to silence, allowing himself only the gesture of communicating with his raised fnger. Aristotle rightly draws our attention to the performative oddness of this. A raised fnger, whether index fnger or not, indicates. But what? Tink of Cratylus as not unlike an ancient Samuel Beckett as trying to back out of words—but the unwording can be done only with words. Te silence of the fux is not exactly the gibberish of the fux, and yet to speak its silence we must give a sign, must word the unwording. Undoubtedly too, the context of the Cratylus is very Heraclitean, with the stress on running, on motion and so on—even to the metaphor of Socrates himself as a runner in the athletic games who in rushing along cannot quite stay on the race-course (414b; see also 420d). Even if some of Socrates’s etymologies risk being parodies of the Heracliteans, they make lots of sense, given the orientation that is communicated by Socrates’s ingenuity. Socrates is both playful and serious in ofering his etymologies of the gods. Te Loeb translation speaks of these as “facetious” but this has connotations of superciliousness. 4 “Being facetious” does not capture entirely the doubleness of being playful and serious simultaneously. Socrates says. “For the gods too are fond of play” (philopaísomenes gar kai theoí, 406c). Te word paidikon recalls too the word paideia: having relation to the child who in being playful is yet serious. Call this doubleness of Socrates a light-hearted Heracliteanism. He vindicates the possibility of a comic Heraclitus, by contrast with Heraclitus of lore as “the weeping philosopher.” Comedy and logos are not simply antithetical, and there is a mordant humor in some of Heraclitus’s sayings. One is tempted to juxtapose Socrates’s playfulness to the pon4. Plato, Cratylus in Plato in Twelve Volumes, trans. H. N. Fowler (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library), vol. IV, 81.

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derous seriousness of Heideggerian etymologies. Where is the laughter in Heidegger’s thinking? What role has the comic poet in the destiny of Heideggerian Seyn? Tere is nothing analogous to the huge role Plato gives to Aristophanes in the Symposium. Notice how again and again Socrates refers back to the archaic meanings of words as the most true, and the most liable to distortion by additions or deletions over time; notice indeed his contrivance, his mechanē, of attributing these distortions to outside infuences, the infuences of the barbaroi. One might see here the comparison of the autochthonous and the allochthonous—almost Heideggerian, did not Socrates’s playfulness communicate an explicit disclaimer that we must take all of this with some grain of etymological salt. Yes, perhaps these etymologies might even be true, but we must retain the orientation of the “likely story”— in the double sense of likely, meaning likely and unlikely! Still, it is undoubtedly true that many of his philosophical etymologies of the names of the gods (including those of Cronos and Rhea, 401e–402b) are deeply interesting, even qua speculative suggestions, since to one who is attuned to what is on ofer there is a deep-lying ontological orientation coming through in the playfulness.5 To do justice to this would require another study. To return more directly to Aristotle: among the important issues at stake are his commitment to the law of identity and the law of excluded middle. A being is itself and not another thing. It is logically impossible to suppose that the same thing is and is not, as some think Heraclitus said (Metaphysics, 1005b 24). To be is to be determinate, a tode ti.6 If this is the case, our quest for intelligibility will always be marked by a certain predilection for univocity. Tose who stress the fux will not be interested in letting 5. Apropos Heidegger, see Socrates’s etymology of alētheia (421b) as connected to the divine motion of the universe, because it is a divine wandering (theía ale). 6. “Te doctrine of Heraclitus, which says that everything is and is not, seems to make all things true.” Aristotle, Metaph. 4.7 1012a25–26. See 4.3 1005b: if all true, all is untrue. Heraclitus is named again at 4.8 1012a34.

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beings settle into a more or less constant position. Similarly, there will be the temptation to mimic in speech this fuid ontological character in unsettling rhetoric. I am not now judging between Aristotle and these defenders of the fux, merely recounting the impression that grew on me. Tus if these defenders spoke, as it is implied they did, and intelligibility requires some ontological stability, the ensuing position they would embody might be aptly described as “fux-gibberish.” Ostensibly this seems a rather negative and dismissive categorization, but my question is: Is it so simple? Te term certainly will be so dismissive if gibberish is just seen as meaningless discourse, and, of course, gibberish is often seen so, and rightly. But the question again: Is it so simple? One of the things I want to suggest is that if we look a little bit more closely at the meaning of gibberish, gibberish itself is not just gibberish. And perhaps also “fux-gibberish” might suggest more than just a merely negative and dismissive judgment. Tere is the hint of dual possibility here. Te universal impermanence is not to be gainsaid but neither is a certain perplexing permanence of the universal— perhaps not quite Aristotle’s immanent universal but what I call the intimate universal.7 I recall how for some deconstructionists, it was fux all the way down, and some critics of deconstruction bridled in a way reminiscent of Aristotle’s irritation.8 Flux-gibberish? Is it fair to say that here we fnd patterns of thought that would preserve a kind of “radical” indeterminacy and that, it seems, do not want to risk “contamination” by commitment to anything more determinate? I overhear in my imagination a conversation with a possible (impossible) deconstructionist like this: 7. See William Desmond, Te Intimate Universal: Te Hidden Porosity Among Reli­ gion, Art, Philosophy and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 8.See John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), where it is repeated again and again that it is fux all the way down. Te companioning constancy of the logos does not always escape mockery: clapped in postmetaphysical stocks for collusion with static being and rotten fruit thrown at it for all the sins of logocentrism.

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A: Te jug is half-full. B: No, the jug is half-empty. A: Very well, the jug is half-empty. B: No, the jug is half-full. A: Very well, the jug is half-full. B: You said that before! But the jug is half-empty. A: You are incorrigible, impossible! B: Impossible! Yes! A: But no, No! We can’t decide. B: Half-full, half-empty. A: Neither half-full, nor half-empty. B: Not one, not the other. A: Nothing. B: (sighing): Impossible! I am put in mind of Hegel’s sharp remarks about unbridled skepticism, comparing it to bickering children who love to contradict each other.9 Skepticism, of course, manifests the negativity of thought, but if it is only negative we are ultimately deprived of an afrmative outcome. Analogously, the above deconstructive oscillation between determinacy and a “certain” indeterminacy is not unimportant for the issue of whether in naming “fux” we are fnally naming “anything” or “nothing”; though, oddly, this radical indeterminacy seems to have infnitely protean power, and seems just as able to mutate from “nothing” into the superabundance of illimitable excess. And hence one has to wonder if the radical indeterminacy remains so radically indeterminate after all, and that the naming of it is only a quasi-naming; and that really we cannot tell if, after all, nothing is named at all. Flux-gibberish again? Tis mingling of the negative and positive seems to be the twinning together of two opposites or irreconcilables. Te mingling of opposites, or the twinning, is often thought to refect 9. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), §203; on the importance of skepticism, see §§78–79.

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something about the essential character of Heraclitus’s own utterances, and I will come to this too a little bit more fully. Heraclitus states, “Opposition brings concord. Out of discord comes the fairest harmony.”10 I would speak of a certain saturated equivocity in this way of speaking, saturated because this seemingly equivocal speech could well be defended as containing deeply afrmative signifcance. Te equivocal speech is often seen as defcient speech by philosophers who put the ideal of univocal precision on a philosophical pedestal. Aristotle has a tendency in this particular direction. And this is perhaps the source of his irritation. Of course, Aristotle is not just a mere univocalist, given the fact that he says that being is said in many senses, given the fact that in addition to the univocal sense, he also speaks of the equivocal and analogical senses. Te many senses of being is itself a large question. Nevertheless, the point is this: If there is this saturated equivocity, then any simple “yes” or “no,” uttered in the mode of univocity, will not do justice to the issue at stake. Again there is a certain sense in which we will have to speak for and against Heraclitus, and say our “yes” and/or “no” almost simultaneously. If this seems to fall into the mold of equivocal utterance too soon, let me say a word or two about the words “fux” and “gibberish,” before turning more directly to Heraclitus.

Wording Flux and Gibberish I ofer a short etymological excursus, mingling, with respect for Socrates, the playful and the serious, and not without due reverence for the gods’ high friendship of play. In the word fux there is the sense of the fuent (fuere) and with this the sense of the 10. Wheelwright, ed., Presocratics. τὸ ἀντίξουν συμφέρον καὶ ἐκ τῶν διαφερόντων καλίστην ἁρμονίαν καὶ πάντα κατ’ ἔριν γίνεσθαι. Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz, eds. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6th ed. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1952), 22B8; hereafter referred to as DK 22B8.

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labile and the mobile. Flux is often thought of as formless, but this is obviously not so if we think of the connection of fux and refux: Tere is a coming and going—we are referred to a recurrence, a pattern. Two examples: Te tides—they come in, they go out according to a cyclic pattern; the circadian rhythm—there is a temporal pattern ingrained in the body, governing the cycle of waking and sleeping, stubborn to our interventions seeking to alter the pattern of passing from diurnal to nocturnal, nocturnal to diurnal.11 Or one thinks also of the notion of efux—fowing out, efuence. One adverts to the notion of infuence: fowing in. Flux seems to be a more watery word than a fery—more Tales’s word, and less Heraclitus’s word (for whom fre fgures notably). 11. Here we fnd constancy in rhythmic recurrence. Te circadian rhythm synchronizes us with the daily round of the sun, which duration falls between 23.8 and 24.8 hours. Te sun rises and sets and rises again. Tis is a very Heraclitean thought: the going up and the going down: one and the same, and yet there is no cease from motion. Tere is a rhythm of recurrence in the rising and the setting. Circadian rhythm is interesting as an embodiment of the logos in the cycle of a recurrent becoming. It is not an intellectual construction. It is immanent in the fesh of the being, and this fesh as living is in communication with rhythms in the cosmos that are not living and potentially mindful in the same sense. Te logos runs in and through the rhythm. Circadian rhythms have been studied in relation to sleep patterns; for instance, jet lag might be seen as an example of straining the logos: though the rhythm is not entirely impervious to infuences, it is very difcult to bend it from itself and its own cycle of becoming. Consider how the health of shift workers frequently sufers. Young children go to bed earlier, get up earlier. Older people, from 55 on, recur to the rhythm of the very young; becoming morning people, the circadian rhythm comes back. In the middle years the energies of the body can shift the patterns of waking and sleeping. But if we are deprived of light, say, by living in a cave, or if we are someone who is totally blind—the rhythm can be disturbed. Tose blind with a little light tend to synchronize with the circadian rhythm. A communication from without resonates with a feshed clock that is within. Te body has its timed being in resonance with the time of nature’s cycles—a relevant thought with respect to aging and the timing of the fesh. I take these examples in a Heraclitean spirit: everything runs, but the fux is not formless. A more subtle forming is at work. Not listening to the logos, we can override the fner form, say, of the cosmic “clock”: our digital clocks—dianoetic machines to measure the passage of time, measuring, however, our projections of univocal instants. In this respect, listening to the circadian rhythm of the fesh is not a matter of “vulgar time.” Tere is recent research suggesting that burns incurred in the day heal quicker than burns incurred in the night; a connection with the low level of night activity is suggested, as if circadian rhythms are in the skin cells themselves.

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Interesting is the word “fush”: a rush of water. A fush of the face, in shame, for instance—in the blush, say. “Flush” may be related to “fash”— water and fre coming together. We think of a fash food—the fash of fre and the fush of water together (Heraclitus and Tales). A royal fush in poker—the summum of card combinations, the highest run of the cards, beyond which nothing greater can be gotten . . . one cannot run or fow or move higher. Running, of course, reminds one of streaming: Panta rhei, Πάντα ῥεῖ, all fows. Tere is a downside in older age when we sufer from rheumatism: rheumatizein, sufer from the fux—from rheuma (that which fows)—a bodily discharge. Worse in wet weather, it is said according to folk wisdom. Dryness and wetness are not far away in the thinking of Heraclitus. A drunk soul is wet (see DK 22B118). Rheum and rhea—the fow again, as in diahor­ rhea—logorrhea: excessive fow of words—already on the threshold of gibberish. (Žižek!) Rheum: there is a possible relation to rhythm: a rhythm marks an unfolding with a recurrent pattern—if there is fux here once again it is not quite formless. Tere is the story, perhaps apocryphal, that Heraclitus, disgusted with his fellow men, retreated to the mountain and fed on herbs, only then to sufer from the dropsy. To be cured of this—and not before issuing his paradoxical taunt: How do you make a drought out of a rain storm?—Heraclitus is said to have immersed himself in a heap of dung, with the thought that the heat of the dung would evaporate the moisture of the dropsy. Alas, it was Heraclitus himself who evaporated and passed on.12 What now of the word gibberish? It refers us to a speech that is quick and unintelligible, rapid and inarticulate. It is related perhaps to jabber, to chatter. It was used in the early seventeenth century for the language of rogues and gypsies: outsiders, beyond 12. From Diogenes Laertius, IX, I; see G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, Te Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 182.

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the law. Te language of the stranger or foreigner is gibberish: they gibber-jabber, they gabble. Gibbering is sometimes associated with idiots, madmen; they speak and they do not speak. Tink of the “language” of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: English “deconstructed” and “reconstructed” by runs of mongrel punnings, plurivocal in the infux of many other languages, replete with saturated equivocity, perhaps a kind of fux-gibberish for those who would disparage it (his brother Stanislaus thought it “genius gone mad,” though Joyce himself referred to it as a “great joke”). But only recall the moving speaking of Anna Livia Plurabelle, the river Lifey that runs through Dublin, the “Black Pool” (in Irish: Duibh­ linn) at the end of her journey, as she is about to fow into the arms of the sea: powerfully evocative of the meeting of the waters, riverrun rush home to sea. I think too of the story of the sad man in the tavern who, when asked about his sadness, spoke of his wife’s incessant speaking: “She talks and she talks and she talks.” And they asked of him: “But what does she say?” His answer: “Tat she don’t say.” Gibberish: A speaking that is not speaking. It speaks to none. Does it give a sign? Heraclitus: “Te Lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks out nor conceals but gives a sign” (DK 22B93). Perhaps slightly surprising, since Apollo is the god of light (among other things, plague included). Of course, the language of oracles is gibberish to scientistically minded philosophers. Te language of a Hegel or a Heidegger is gibberish to them. Flux-gibberish: a fash food of speech that comes forth to communicate but passes by without communicating. Saying everything in a rush, and saying nothing that remains despite this rush. A cascade of sounds seeming to be signifcant but signifying nothing. Is it idiotic? Idiotic without wisdom? Or can there be an idiot wisdom in it?13 13. Te sense of the idiotic is central in my work, for instance, in Te Intimate Uni­ versal, chapter 5. See also “Idiot Wisdom and the Intimate Universal: On Immanence and Transcendence in an Intercultural Perspective,” in Transcendence, Immanence, and

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Tere can be an element of threat or menace or fear in gibbering. Tink of a child gibbering in fear before a punitive or brutal parent, say; or terror at a ghost, itself gibbering—an apparition of the labile dead that reduces one to jelly, one’s bones fowing away like water. Heraclitus, thinker of the double word: Dionysus is also Hades (DK 22B15). Te shades of Hades are themselves gibbering shadows . . . squeaking like bats rather than speaking like humans. Tere is a late poem of William Butler Yeats in which Cuchulain enters the otherworld, and fnds that the dead, weaving shrouds, sing, but they “had nor human tunes nor words,/ Tough all was done in common as before;/ Tey had changed their throats and had the throats of birds.” 14 One recalls examples of a horrifying kind of gibbering, such as when William James, speaking of the sick soul, mentions “the green skinned youth of black hair” that reduced the observer to horror and “a mass of quivering fear.”15 Tere is a similar image in Nietzsche: “What I fear, is not the horrible shape behind my chair, but his voice: it is also not the words, but the dreadfully inarticulate and inhuman sound of that shape. Yes, if he only could speak as human beings speak!”16 Our fear of fux-gibberish is not only logical irritation but here is closer to existential, indeed metaphysical horror. Intercultural Philosophy, ed. Nahum Brown and William Franke (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 153–81; also William Desmond, Philosophy and Its Others: Ways of Being and Mind (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 309–11; William Desmond, Perplexity and Ultimacy: Metaphysical Toughts from the Middle (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), chapter 2. 14. W. B. Yeats, Te Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: Everyman, 1990), “Cuchulain Comforted,” 379–80. Yeats is very Heraclitean (DK B62) when he entertains the thought of dying each other’s lives, and living each other’s death. 15. William James, Te Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Penguin, 1985), 160. 16. Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in Drei Bänden, ed. Karl Schlecta (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1956), vol. 3, 148 (hereafter 3:148): “Was ich fürchte, ist nicht die schreckliche Gestalt hinter meinem Stuhle, sondern ihre Stimme: auch nicht die Worte, sondern der schauderhaft unartikulierte und unmenschliche Ton jener Gestalt. Ja, wenn sie noch redete, wie Menschen reden!”

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Heraclitus and Saturated Equivocity Here briefy is a picture of Heraclitus in which the above insinuated sense of doubleness is important. Heraclitus has normally been presented as someone who defends the view that everything becomes. On this score, there are many philosophers who have shown deep respect for him, and among them Hegel and Nietzsche can be particularly mentioned in recent centuries. Of course, it is a one-sided picture to think of Heraclitus as stressing only being as becoming; equally crucial in Heraclitus is the doctrine of the logos that runs through all things. If there is a stress on becoming, this is not a matter of merely formless fux. To the contrary, truly philosophical attention to phusis hears the logos that is immanent in all being. We fnd ourselves witness to a kind of startling doubleness: the conjunction of the fuency of fux with the constancy of form. A process of becoming is not genuinely a process of becoming without those two. Here are some representative citations where we see something of this doubleness: In one fragment we fnd the togetherness of the seawater as both pure and polluted, pure for the fsh, poison for the human (DK 22B61). “Te name of the bow is life but its work is death” (punning word-play on bios: biós as bow, bíos as life: βιός τῷ τόξῳ ὄνομα βίος ἔργον δὲ θάνατος, DK 22B48). In another, we are minded of how the living and the dead are as changing into each other (DK 22B88)). In another again, things are to be taken a whole and not a whole (DK 22B 10). In one more, the doubleness of descriptions is deemed suitable of God, who is both day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and want (DK 22B67). “It is in changing that things fnd repose” (DK 22B84a: μεταβάλον ἀναπαύεται—to ofer one instance of Heraclitus’s semantic compression). Tere is the well-loved saying about how things being at variance are in agreement, the harmony being in the bending back, as with the lyre and the bow (DK 22B51: bow

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and lyre so intimately related to Apollo). To return to the divine again: “one the wise—it is willing and unwilling to be called by the name of Zeus” (DK 22B32). Ten further again, immortal mortals, mortals immortal—both together and perhaps as passing into each other, they live each other’s death and die in each other’s life (DK 22B62). I have already mentioned the double sign of the oracle at Delphi, not I think made enough of by the Nietzscheans: Dionysus is also Hades (DK 22B15). Te sacred barley drink separates when it is not stirred (DK 22B125)— for the equipoise of the whole we need the togetherness of opposites of rest and motion, constancy and change. Tat sampling should sufce. In many of these fragments we witness the characteristic themes of Heraclitus: not stress on fux simply but on transformation in which there is becoming but also rhythm and recurrent pattern; yes, transformation of one into many, or an opposite into its opposite, but also the togetherness of one and many, of the opposites themselves.17 One is reminded of James Joyce’s pithy phrase: “two thinks at a time.” And, strikingly, this togetherness of the opposites is not simply in diferent phases of an unfolding, such that the opposites are simply outside of each other. Tey are not just, so to say, diachronically strung out but are synchronically superposed. Te syn is a between joiner— meaning that it is also the dia— a separator but also a between of transition—the matter is not chronological simply but ontological, I would say. We see also (to borrow a term from quantum theory)18 the superposition of opposites in relation to the divine. 17. Epitomized by DK 22B31: πυρὸς τροπαὶ πρῶτον θάλασσα, θαλάσσης δὲ τὸ μὲν ἥμισυ γῆ, τὸ δὲ ἥμισυ πρηστήρ . . . θάλασσα διαχέεται καὶ μετρέεται εἰς τὸν αὐτὸν λόγον ὁκοῖος πρόσθεν ἦν ἢ γενέσθαι γῆ. Kirk and Raven translation: “Fire’s turnings: frst sea, and of sea the half is earth, the half ‘burner’ [i.e. lightning or fre] . . . is dispersed as seas, and is measured so as to form the same proportion as existed before it became earth.” Te Presocratic Philosophers, 199. Plodding prose, I agree. 18. Te double languages of quantum theory are suggestive relative to the breakdown of the more univocal language of classical mechanics, and the need to think both the corpuscle and the wave together: the corpuscle is the staple unit, atomic and reliable,

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If the Lord whose oracle is at Delphi does not communicate in univocal propositions nor conceal but gives a sign, the sign given is marked by a saturated equivocity that can be taken in diferent ways, just because of this superposition of opposites. A relevant interpolation: it is important to approach rightly the fact that in all these communications there is a signifcant inter-animation of muthos and logos. We do not see the logical as a regnant univocal reason superimpositing itself on equivocal muthos. It is logos, in one sense emergent from muthos, but in another sense nurtured on it, and not as a provisional food that later will be replaced by the truer rational substitute. Tere is a kind of superposition of muthos and logos, and hence the saturated equivocity is inherent in, immanent in, the logos itself. It is constitutive and not provisional. It is not biding its time for the advent of emancipated logos. Te logos is what it is and articulates itself like the oracle at Delphi with signs that themselves resist an entirely univocalizing mastery. Even though there are jibes by Heraclitus against the religious practices of the day,19 there is a porosity at work in his thought between muthos and logos. One senses a univocalization at work in Aristotle that somehow misses the mark when the ultimate principle taken as water or fre or air is treated as an original cause, understood in a more determining univocal sense. Te tendency then is toward the loss of the saturated equivocity that comes so to say; the wave is the fuent rhythm in which the dynamic indeterminacy/overdeterminacy at the bottom of all things takes form; but constancy and fuidity are both required, perhaps to be thought together in a superposition. In calling for the need of such a double modality of descriptions quantum mechanics does have the appearances, to the more univocalizing mind, of a kind of post-Newtonian fux-gibberish. And yet this seems required by truthfulness to what is. See William Desmond, Being and the Between (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), chapter 3. 19. Bigotry is the sacred disease (DK 22B46); they pray to images as if they were to talk to houses (DK 22B5); their processions and hymns to the phallus would be shameless were they not done in honor of Dionysus (DK 22B15); when defled, they purify themselves with blood, as if flth were to be washed of with flth (DK 22B5).

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up from the more mythic root, and that allows these words to be charged with resonances that have been silenced in the determinability of univocal causation. Te closing of of the rising up of this root has not happened in Heraclitus. Tis is not because he is “primitive” in this “Aristotelian” sense. He is primitive in being more in resonance with the original sources, themselves frst expressed in myth, and perhaps never entirely leaving the space of the mythic when they are meant to communicate these more original sources. Muthos and logos are communications eventuating in the porosity of being. Close this porosity and logos becomes univocal, becomes logic, becomes reason in a more determinate form. If we take the light of the latter as the light, the one and only true light, Heraclitus is either more primitive in the undeveloped sense, or more confused in the univocal sense. Tis is not the meaning of the saturated equivocity. Tere is a consequence here too for how we are philosophically to approach the sayings of Heraclitus. Tere is a certain performative dimension to his wording of the thoughts. Performing them they come more dynamically to life. I think of the onomatopoeic quality in the Greek to the famous saying about never stepping into the same river: Potamoı˜si toı˜sin autoı˜sin embaínousin, hetera kai hetera hudata epirreı˜—the fuency of the water is worded, worded as it fows in a speaking enactment that communicates fuid passing.20 We have to remember the threshold of utterance 20. ποταμοῖσι τοῖσιν αὐτοῖσιν ἐμϐαίνουσιν ἕτερα καὶ ἕτερα ὕδατα ἐπιρρεῖ· καὶ ψυχαὶ δὲ ἀπὸ τῶν ὑγρῶν ἀναθυμιῶνται. DK 22B12. See above my remark about the fnal fow of the river Lifey, Anna Livia Plurabelle, into the arms of the sea at the end of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake—it too is marvelously onomatopoeic. Listen to these lines: “Can’t hear with the waters of. Te chittering waters of. Flittering bats, feldmice hawk talk. Ho! Are you not gone ahome? What Tom Malone? Can’t hear with hawk ofbats, all thim lifeying waters of. Ho, talk save us! My foos won’t moos. I feel as old as yonder elm. A tale told of Shaun or Shem? All Livia’s daughter­sons. Dark hawks hear us. Night! Night! My ho head halls. I feel as heavy as yonder stone. Tell me of John or Shaun? Who were Shem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of? Night now! Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm! Night night! Telmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of,

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whereon logos is between the oral and the literal, the spoken and the written. We who lack fnesse for the enacting logos in its de­ termining and favor the enacted utterance in its determinacy tend also to favor more the ideal of univocal precision in logos, in the wording of being, and hence too the fxed proposition. If we are attuned to this threshold of utterance, we understand it cannot be adequate to take Heraclitus only as proposing univocal propositions or theories which we are then to subject to conceptual or logical analysis, that is, subject to the measure of a determinable and univocal precision, for then surely we are going to fnd that Heraclitus contradicts himself. Mon Dieu! Tis cannot be allowed to stand, and we quickly construct more coherent theories, or perhaps ventriloquize a meaning through selected sayings of Heraclitus, a meaning less insolent to our more univocal measures of determinate argumentation. Tis is something that, for instance, can happen with eforts to interpret the frst of Heraclitus’s words marking the opening of his book on nature, words themselves insolent toward those who try to understand the logos and him.21

Companions of Heraclitus: Hegel and Nietzsche Nietzsche and Hegel were two philosophers partial to Heraclitus as a companioning thinker, and in them we do not fnd the hitherandthithering waters of. Night!” James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, ed. Robert-Jan Henkes, Erik Bindervoet, Finn Fordham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 215–16. 21. Aristotle (Rhetoric 1407b11–18) criticizes Heraclitus for bad grammar in DK 22B1, his opening fragment: “To punctuate Heraclitus is difcult because it is often unclear whether a given word should go with what follows or with what precedes it. When, for instance, at the beginning of his treatise he says, ‘Although this logos exists always men are unaware [of it],’ it is unclear whether ‘always’ belongs with ‘exists’ or with ‘are unaware.’ ” Where Aristotle has a tendency toward univocity, Heraclitus tends toward equivocity, and between the two some misunderstanding is bound to happen. Hegel expresses his agreement with Aristotle’s criticism on this point—a surprising lapse in dialectical fnesse.

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irritation of the univocal mind with equivocal doubleness. In Nietzsche’s little monograph Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, unfnished and unpublished in his life,22 he tends to ofer a fairly simple contrast of being and becoming in his portrait of Heraclitus. He generally sees himself as a banner-carrier for becoming, over and against the mummifying tendencies of the metaphysicians in their sanctifcation of static being. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche suggests even that Zarathustra has been anticipated by Heraclitus. Nietzsche does share with Heraclitus the poetic ability to capture deep insights in an image that is saturated with ambiguity but also pregnant with the promise of signifcance. When it comes to the more systematic elucidation of what this secret promise is, Nietzsche is not always the most trustworthy guide in wording fux. It is interesting to see Nietzsche’s own adherence to Schopenhauer seeping into his early picture of Heraclitus in touches of infuence that refect Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the will, the high solitude of the genius manifested in the pride of Heraclitus, with tragic pessimism not being far from what made Heraclitus “the weeping philosopher.” Agon is important for Nietzsche, polemos being the father of all things for Heraclitus (DK 22B53). But it is interesting to refect that Nietzsche in a later work (Genealogy of Morals) speaks of this crucial antagonism: Plato versus Homer. We are startled to remember that Heraclitus tells us that it is Homer who should be thrown out of the lists and beaten with a stick (DK 22B42). Nietzsche did love Heraclitus, but he would not beat Homer with a stick. He would beat Plato. Heraclitus is perhaps more like Plato in his criticism of the anthropomorphic gods, though perhaps in all three, Plato included, the permeability of the poetic and philosophical is a fertile origin of thought. Hegel, the great systematizer, has something to say on the par22. Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. Marianne Cowan (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1996).

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ticular score of being and becoming. He tells us that there is hardly an utterance of Heraclitus that he has not somehow managed to include in his own Science of Logic. Tere is something paradoxical here also, insofar as we think of Hegel, the systematizer, as believing that everything can be brought into the lucid life of the rational concept. How then pair him with Heraclitus the obscure (ho scotenos), pair them as he pairs himself with Heraclitus? Heraclitean obscurity seems the antipodes to the lucidity demanded by Hegel’s logical concept. And did not Hegel himself often rail against the obscurity of his own contemporaries, particularly those claiming immediate intuition or romantic imagination as the surest, indeed sacred guide to darkest truth. Heraclitus was called “riddler” (ainiktēs).23 Consider what Hegel says of the riddling phase of Geist which fnds expression in the symbolic form of art. Riddles are perplexing and perplexed beginnings but the maturing of Geist solves all riddles and attains the lucidity of the rational concept. Here is what Hegel says about the riddle in his discussion of the symbolic form of art: “Te riddle still conceals the explicitly known meaning, and the chief thing was still clothing the meaning in related though heterogeneous and far-fetched ways. Allegory, on the other hand, made the clarity of the meaning so very much the sole dominating end that personifcation and its attributes appear degraded into purely external signs. Now the fgurative unites the clarity of the allegorical with the pleasantry of the riddle.”24 Symbolic art expresses the spiritual world of the Orient, and there is something of the Orient in Heraclitus, or at least in Hegel’s interpretation of him. But one cannot see Hegel quite endorsing the Sybil who, raving, being full of the god, reaches out over a thousand years (DK 22B92). Speaking of the metamorphoses 23. On this see Kirk and Raven, Te Presocratic Philosophers, 184. 24. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), vol. 1, 403.

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of fre into water, water into earth, and earth again become fuid and fery (referring, I take it, to DK 22B31), Hegel says: “Tese oriental, metaphorical expressions are, however, in Heraclitus not to be taken in their strictly sensuous signifcation.”25 Hegel holds that the unfolding of spirit will overcome the riddle and the oracle. Te saturated equivocity, as I am calling it, the riddling, seems at most a promising beginning for Hegel, but the dialectical development of this beginning will drive toward lucid conceptual self-determination. Te riddle of the beginning is not seen as promising something other, promising perhaps another sense of beginning (with a half bow in the direction of Heidegger). Of course, the affinity between Hegel and Heraclitus has much to do with Hegel’s own eforts to ofer us a logic of becoming, to think process qua process. His speculative dialectic is not fxated on the logic of identity, since everything identical is inseparably related to what is other to itself. In a process of becoming, a being becomes other than itself, indeed becomes itself more fully in becoming other to itself. Flux names an ongoing process of being in which the self-becoming of things unfolds according to an immanent logic. It is not hard to see here the overlap with Heraclitus’s emphasis upon the logos that runs through things, or the thunderbolt that pilots all things. And all of this with reference to the most common (koinon), that is to say, most universal space within which our own truest thinking takes shape. Speculative dialectic is waking up from the sleep of fnite thinking. The contrast of these two thinkers, Nietzsche and Hegel, helps me state a problem or, perhaps better, an orientation. Te Nietzschean orientation—and this we see more in his later writings then in the relatively early monograph I mentioned—tends to stress fux at the expense of form. I am thinking, for instance, of Nietzsche’s claim in the Gay Science: Te world is to all eterni25. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co, 1892), vol. 1, 289.

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ty chaos. Admittedly, this itself is more ambiguous than just the antithesis of intelligibility and form. In an archaic sense of “chaos,” there is contained the meaning of a kind of gap, a gap of which we might think as almost a kind of nothingness, even a kind of between, in which things come to be. Hesiod: Out of chaos the order of the gods (theogony) and the order of the cosmos (cosmogony) come to be. Nevertheless, in Nietzsche there is a tendency to attribute this form to us: we as somehow imposing our own values and intelligibilities on the fux otherwise devoid of them, and simply marked by a will to power that resists our full anthropomorphization. “Nature is always worthless—but one has at some time given, donated worth to it, and we were those givers and donators! We human beings have frst created the world that pertains to human beings!”26 Such worthless nature is a modern reconfguration of given becoming, not the phusis that loves to hide. I see here elements of an inheritance from Kantian epistemology in which the constructive powers of the human knower are stressed, such that without our contribution to the shaping of fux there is no stability to be found there, even though we no sooner contribute intelligibility than we become amnesiac about our own contribution and take it simply to be there for itself. Hegel, on the surface, seems to be an heir of Kant in the same direction who would but difer in emphasis, insofar as he does 26. Friedrich Nietzsche, Te Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), §301: “Die Natur ist immer wertlos: sondern dem hat man einen Wert einmal gegeben, geschenkt, und wir waren diese Gebenden und Schenkenden! Wir erst haben die Welt, die den Menschen etwas angeht, geschafen.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in Drei Bänden, ed. K. Schlechta, 2:177. Tere is no given worth to the “to be” as such. Tink, by contrast, of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s great poem “Tat nature is a Heraclitean fre.” Nietzsche’s view, just stated, seems to me to be a very modern orientation to nature, not at all resonant of the charge of phusis, communicated in the saturated equivocity of Heraclitus’s wording of naturing. What a chasm separates the view that nature loves to hide (φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ, DK 22B123) from nature as always worthless! Nietzsche stresses Heraclitus as a student of Anaximander (in Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, 50f.). But his insinuation there is of a Schopenhauerian pathos, made congruent with the “wisdom” of the Silenus that “it is good not to be.”

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stress the dynamic and active contribution of the knowing subject. Nevertheless, granting our contribution, what we know, in fact, are the things themselves, and there is an enigmatic sense in which our contribution contributes nothing, beyond its openness to the intelligibility that shows itself in the process of becoming as such. I think that this more “realistic” understanding of Hegelian “idealism” can be put in the same family as the Aristotelian view of the identity of the knower and the known. Tat aside, the important point to make here is that we fnd an acknowledgment of a certain kind of indeterminacy in the nature of things, but since we are also in quest of intelligibility, we have to make the move from indeterminacy as such to something more determinate. Hegel’s dialectical sense of the development of a process of becoming answers to this passage from indeterminacy to determination. Nietzsche has no such dialectical sense, and if I am not mistaken he tends to think that the determination is a superimposition on our part on what in itself is, by its very nature (if one could say that) indeterminate. It is not surprising that Nietzsche would have hermeneutical successors in some of the practitioners of deconstruction, to name just them. One has the impression, now and then, when reading Derrida, that the ghost of Aristotle turns in his grave and utters a wordless communication from beyond death: fux-gibberish. Te companioning constancy of the logos is not honored highly enough. If the picture above is correct which portrays the doubleness in Heraclitus, in which fux and logos are in the state of superposition, to borrow again the apposite notion from quantum theory, then charges of logocentrism are themselves parasitic upon lack of attention to the double languages that are required to do justice to just such a superposition. To sum up here with respect to the indeterminate and the determinate: If Nietzsche sees the chaos of the indeterminate, it may be chaos giving rise to form, and yet he seems to see determinations from the standpoint of our imposition of form on fux. We make

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determinate what in itself is indeterminate. Tis may be a widespread epistemological and ontological orientation today, but it is not Heraclitus. Te doubleness there has an ontological, one might say even theological, resonance to it. Te mythic language of Zeus needs to be taken seriously, as seriously as the language of the logos. Muthos and logos, for all the strain of their diference, belong to a family in which the true names of the ultimate are sought. Admittedly, there is a recurrence to myth in Nietzsche, often in opposition to what he sees as the superfciality of logos in the philosophical tradition since Socrates. I sense that Heraclitus speaks from somewhere else again, and I will say a bit more about that later.

Hegel’s Endorsement of Heraclitus— and Aristotle Tere is something about Hegel as a Heraclitean that, by contrast to Nietzsche, could be said to be more fully true to Heraclitus, and this on both fronts of the fux and of logos. One representative citation from Hegel on Heraclitus which ofers a sort of oversight of the issues at stake: If we put aside the Ionics, who did not understand the Absolute as Tought, and the Pythagoreans likewise, we have the pure Being of the Eleatics, and the dialectic which denies all fnite relationships. Tought to the latter is the process of such manifestations; the world in itself is the apparent, and pure Being alone the true. Te dialectic of Zeno thus lays hold of the determinations which rest in the content itself, but it may, in so far, also be called subjective dialectic, inasmuch as it rests in the contemplative subject, and the one, without this movement of the dialectic, is abstract identity. Te next step from the existence of the dialectic as movement in the subject, is that it must necessarily itself become objective. If Aristotle blames Tales for doing away with motion, because change cannot be understood from Being, and likewise misses the actual in the Pythagorean numbers and Platonic Ideas, taken as the

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william de smond substances of the things which participate in them, Heraclitus at least understands the absolute as just this process of the dialectic. Te dialectic is thus three-fold: (α) the external dialectic, a reasoning which goes over and over again without ever reaching the soul of the thing; (β) immanent dialectic of the object, but falling within the contemplation of the subject; (γ) the objectivity of Heraclitus which takes the dialectic itself as principle. Te advance requisite and made by Heraclitus is the progression from Being as the frst immediate thought, to the category of Becoming as the second. Tis is the frst concrete, the Absolute, as in it the unity of opposites. Tus with Heraclitus the philosophic Idea is to be met with in its speculative form; the reasoning of Parmenides and Zeno is abstract understanding. Heraclitus was thus universally esteemed a deep philosopher and even was decried as such. Here we see land; there is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my Logic. 27

One might speak here of Hegel’s sense of the beginning of a process of becoming in terms of indeterminacy. “Being” is said by Hegel to be the sheerly indeterminate, as lacking all determination. And yet it is not for that reason the really frst concrete thought. While the indeterminate is acknowledged by him, one might say this is never mere fux devoid of form. Quite to the contrary, here we come upon the very impetus to determinacy, suggesting that sheer fux rather reveals itself as a process of forming, which when more fully developed turns out to be a process of self-forming. Tis is inherent in his very ontology of the indeterminate as such: at the outset merely implicit but as the process more fully unfolds itself, it shows itself as becoming, via the negation of being, and becoming more explicitly logical to the end. But it would seem, in a way not always clear, that the logos is at work from the outset. I should point out that there are many passages in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and in his Science of Logic that, on initial reading, certainly would seem to again cause Aristotle’s ghost to turn towards the light and the judgment: flux-gibberish.28 27. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 1, 278–79. 28. See when thought “runs to and fro” causing its terms to “spin . . . round and round

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Recall, however, Hegel’s endorsement of Aristotle’s criticism of the grammatical ambiguity of Heraclitus’s formulation (Rhetoric 1407b11–18): Aristotle and Hegel are joined together in their philosophical desire for determinacy and do not see that grammatical ambiguity might be redolent of the saturated equivocity, itself full with overdetermined ontological signifcance. Tat said, it would be unfair to Aristotle not to grant that his view of becoming is very sophisticated vis-à-vis the matter of holding together fux and the constancy of intelligibility. For that matter, Aristotle and Hegel are blood brothers here. Tere are extraordinary passages in the Phenomenology of Spirit, for instance, where Hegel is, so to say, ofering conceptual mimeses of fuctuations between sameness and otherness that ask of his readers energetic participation in the very unfolding of the process itself. Tis can never be truly described from an external point of view uttered in neutrally indicative propositions. Tis is part of the truth of what Hegel calls the speculative proposition.29 It is also true of his description of life, an extraordinary efort to mimic in conceptual terms the enin their whirling circle.” Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §131. “Argumentation is refection into the empty ‘I,’ ” the vanity of its own knowing.” Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §59. Running to and fro might remind one of Joyce’s “hitherandthithering waters” but recall also my claim that the modalities of wonder are not a three-layered cake but rather there is fuctuation and permeability in tune with the original porosity of the wonder itself. See William Desmond, Te Voiding of Being: Te Doing and Undoing of Metaphysics in Mo­ dernity (Washington, D.C.: Te Catholic University of America Press, 2020), chapter 3. 29. Te speculative proposition: “Te general nature of the judgment or proposition, which involves the distinction of Subject and Predicate, is destroyed by the speculative proposition, and the proposition of identity which the former becomes contains the counter-thrust against that subject-predicate relationship.—Tis confict between the general form of a proposition and the unity of the Notion which destroys it is similar to the confict that occurs in rhythm between metre and accent. Rhythm results from the foating center and the unifcation of the two. So, too, in the philosophical proposition the identifcation of Subject and Predicate is not meant to destroy the diference between them, which the form of the proposition expresses; their unity, rather, is meant to emerge as a harmony. Te form of the proposition is the appearance of the determinate sense, or the accent that distinguishes its fulflment; but that the predicate expresses the Substance, and that the Subject itself falls into the universal, this is the unity in which the accent dies away.” Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §38.

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ergetic pulsation of the living process itself as a simple infnity. Hegel on life: [A] simple infnity, or the absolute Notion [Concept], [which] may be called the simple essence of life . . . whose omnipresence is neither disturbed nor interrupted by any diference, but rather is itself every difference, as also their supersession; it pulsates within itself but does not move, inwardly vibrates, yet is at rest. It is self-identical, for the diferences are tautological; they are diferences that are none.30

All this granted, the movement from the indeterminate toward the more determinate, while serving to show the forming unfolding of the logic of process, is oriented in Hegel’s way of thinking toward self-determination. Indeterminacy determines itself in the determinate and so always is the promise of a more complete self-determination. I mention this because at this end, Hegel and Nietzsche do not entirely diverge as descendants of Kant. Strangely even in Nietzsche, what above I call the double descriptions are subtended by a monism of will to power, and the most explicit characterization of this in Nietzsche is self-afrming. Self-afrming will to power is not quite the rational self-determination of Hegel but it is also not entirely other to it. Te monism of absolute Geist that thinks itself in mimicry of Aristotle’s thought thinking itself is not entirely strange to the will that wills itself as the fux comes to full self-afrming utterance. Hen to pan can be applied to Wille as much as to Vernunft. Hegel and Nietzsche are very exotic univocalists, and both of them are not entirely devoid of that same tendency to be found in Aristotle in response to Heraclitean doubleness, interpreted as an equivocity that runs away from stable intelligibility in claiming that all things run.31 30. Phenomenology of Spirit, §162. 31. Tis might not seem evident with Nietzsche, but if one reads him as fnally being defned by a monism of will to power, then the surface of plurality, even in his later thought, will not be the last word. Noteworthy is the intrusion of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the will in Nietzsche’s picture of Heraclitus in Philosophy in the Tragic Age

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Being True to Mystery and the Dearth of Ontological Astonishment Helpful here might be a brief refection on what one might take to be a dearth of ontological astonishment which stands in the way of our being true to mystery and which is bound up also with a contraction of the meaning of philosophical wonder. Tere are implications in this for what it means to be true to mystery and how we might understand a companioning philosophizing with Heraclitus. Tere are connections to be drawn between our understanding of “being true,” mystery and what in Being and the Between I formulate as the fourfold sense of being. Te univocal understanding correlates with a more determinable sense of the true, the equivocal with a more indeterminate sense, the dialectical with a more self-determining sense, the metaxological with an overdeter­ minate sense of being and truth. Tis overdeterminacy exceeds determinability and self-determination, and is not just a matter of a lacking indeterminacy. But what then of “mystery”? “Mystery” is often a null category for philosophers, being seen as a defection from the quest for the determinability of truth. Particularly for the more rationalist philosopher, it is a canonization of our lack of knowledge, an evasion of the demand to know, and a curb on reason’s project of more and more complete self-determination. By contrast, I would correlate a surplus sense of mystery with being true to the overdeterminate, and not to be construed simply in terms of univocal determinacy, equivocal indetermination, or dialectical self-determination. Tere is a being true to mystery which of the Greeks. While Hegel endorses Aristotle’s claim from the Rhetoric of grammatical obscurity with respect to the placing of words in Heraclitus, and seems to put it down generally to the limitations of Heraclitus “the obscure,” Heidegger’s sense of the unconcealing that also conceals, conceals even itself in the event of unconcealing, is closer to what is more intimately at stake in Heraclitus. See note 21.

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comes to know itself in the spirit of truthfulness which knows it does not know. Being true is not just in thought thinking itself but is called on to thought that is more than and other to thought at home with itself. Tere is an ontological-metaphysical side to this in the granting of an agnostic between where non-possession of absolute truth is inseparable from truthful fdelity to truth beyond one. What this means is that the modern ideal of philosophy as autonomous knowing comes to be untrue to this being true to mystery. It means also that the familial relation between religion and philosophy need not be repudiated. Rather it opens a between space where the overdeterminacy of given being and a surplus sense of mystery call forth a being truthful, itself called to fdelity to the true as other to our determination or self-determination.32 One might fnd this dearth of ontological astonishment in what, on the surface, look like two very disparate forms, namely Hegel’s determinate negation and the scientistic orientation to being.33 Hegelian negativity has had many successor forms, though they might not describe themselves as such. As we have seen, both prior to Hegel and after him a widely present view is that to be intelligible is to be determinate; indeed, to be, properly speaking, is to be determinate. I understand the scientistic orientation as a formation of curiosity taken over by a desire for the relentless univocal determination of being, in both theoretical and practical senses. How comes the determinate to be determinate? How does it come about that being as determinate is determinable by thought and hence rendered intelligible? Tat the issue of a becom­ ing determinate is at stake, not just some entirely static sense of being, we fnd in Hegel’s stress on determinate negation, or more generally on subjectivity as self-relating negativity. What is simply 32. See Desmond, Te Voiding of Being, chapter 7, “Being True to Mystery and Metaxological Metaphysics.” 33. On these two more fully see, Desmond, Te Voiding of Being, chapter 3, “Te Dearth of Astonishment: On Curiosity, Scientism and Tinking as Negativity.”

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given to be is not intelligible as such; it is a mere immediacy till rendered intelligible, either through its own becoming intelligible, or through being made intelligible by thinking. Tinking as negativity moves us from the simple givenness of the “to be” to the more determinately intelligible; but the former (the “to be”) is no more than an indeterminacy, and hence defcient in true intelligibility, till this further development, determination has been made by thinking as negativity. Hegel’s view is that thinking as determinate negation is crucially in process toward knowing itself as a process of self-determining. Hence his more complex description: self-relating negativity. Te operation of negation is not only a determination of what is other to the thinking, it is the coming to itself of the thinking process. In that sense the return of thinking to itself, in the process of determining what is other, is not just making determinate, it is self-determining. An overall logic governs the movement of thinking as negativity: from indeterminacy to determination to self-determination. I see an analogous process in the scientistic form of curiosity, itself a contraction of wonder now zoned on the determinate. Te dearth of ontological astonishment in Hegel sees being as the most indigent of the categories, a category that is all but nothing, till thought understands that it has already passed over into becoming. Instead of being as the marvel of the “too much,” it is an indigence of all but nothing. In scientistic curiosity we fnd a contraction of this sense of the given marvel of being. I distinguish between diferent modalities of wonder: frst a more primal ontological astonishment that seeds metaphysical mindfulness; second a restless perplexity in which thinking seeks to transcend initial indeterminacy toward more and more determinate outcomes; third, more determinate curiosity in which the initiating openness of wonder is dispelled in a determinate solution to a determinate problem. Such determining thought can be correlated with a powerful curiosity that renders intelligible the given, rather than with

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a primal astonishment before the marvel of the “to be” as given.34 Te given “to be” shows a fullness impossible to describe in the language of negativity, though indeed in a certain sense it is no thing. Te overdeterminacy of being asks of us a diferent logos, a diferent sense of being, a diferent sense of nothing—not the nothing defning a determinate process of becoming, or a determining nothing defning a self-becoming: a nothing out of which a coming to be arises—a coming to be that is more primal than becoming. Becoming and self-becoming presuppose this other sense of coming to be. A sense of this is communicated in the happening of a primal astonishment before the happening of the “to be.” Tis is an overdeterminacy rather than just an indigent indeterminacy. In light of it, the processes of determination and self-determination are secretly accompanied by what they cannot entirely accommodate on their own terms. All this has implications for a kind of counterfeit infnity that can be generated by the limitless self-expansion of the contracted curiosity we fnd in scientistic orientations. Tese, no less than Hegel’s claim to a self-sublating infnity, cause one to question whether we are really dealing with a counterfeit double of the true infnite as overdeterminate rather than self-determining. Te defection from metaphysical wonder in the mode of primal astonishment also has implications for the rampant will to univocalize all life, whether in a theoretical or practical sense.

The Overdeterminacy of Being and the Fluent Cosmos Hen kai pan was the motto of the youthful Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin for their “Church invisible.” And of course, there is a 34. On diferent ways of wondering, see Desmond, Te Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics after Dialectic (Washington, D.C.: Te Catholic University of America Press, 2012), chapter 10.

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kind of “monism” in Heraclitus: “It is wise to agree all things are one (hen panta einai: DK 22B50).” How think of this? Te response I want to suggest is to consider the doubleness diferently, taking note of the reserve of communication: just so in terms of the overdeterminacy that is neither the indeterminate, the determinate, nor the self-determinate. What I am calling the saturated equivocity of Heraclitus’s discourse is his entry into the space of the overdeterminate, and out of that space his efort to speak the superposition of seeming opposites that calls for utterance there. Tere is a oneness to it: “Wisdom is one thing. It is to know the thought by which all things are steered through all things.”35 Yet there is a doubleness to it, even in the oneness: “Wisdom is one, it is willing and not willing to be called by the name of Zeus.”36 Is this fux-gibberish and yet not fux-gibberish, both all at once: dark enigma and sober lucidity together? Suppose we grant the fuent sense of the cosmos, the universal impermanence. Fluency cannot be a matter of determinacy only. If it were, the cosmos would be the collection of static constants, a collection itself static. How one would move from one to the other, how the one moves to the other, would be hard to make intelligible. Tat we do move, and that beings move, sometimes move themselves, indicates a passage between determinations, and this passage between cannot itself just be another determination. Between determinations there is a between of transition, and one of the reasons we often have recourse to the idea of indeterminacy is to make sense of passage between one determination and another. Where orientation to the happening of process has an univocal character, we will fxate on the determinacies but we cannot make sense of the passage between determinacies. If we insist on univocity, this passage between will count for nothing, precisely because it cannot be made univocal. 35. DK 22B41: εἶναι γὰρ ἓν τὸ σοφόν, ἐπίστασθαι γνώμην, ὁτέη ἐκυϐέρνησε πάντα διὰ πάντων. 36. DK 22B32: ἓν τὸ σοφὸν μοῦνον λέγεσθαι οὐκ ἐθέλει καὶ ἐθέλει Ζηνὸς ὄνομα.

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Tis is one of the reasons why the idea of the indeterminate is often seen in an entirely negative light: it is the absence of determinacy and hence also the absence of univocal intelligibility. In response, what can now happen is that while we seem to save the intelligibility of determinacies, it is at the cost of sacrifcing the intelligibility of the passage between determinacies. I take it that Heraclitus understood all of this. But he does not explain to us what we are to understand. Like the Lord whose oracle is at Delphi, he does not speak out or conceal, but gives a sign. Tat is to say, in the fragments that are extant we see his penetration of the matter, but we do not see from the fragments how it might be made intelligible in a more systematically articulated way. He sees the thing but does not give us a theory of the thing or a theory of how we see the thing. What we have of his work is not in the business of theory in that respect. Tis is one of the reasons why his writing is saturated with striking images; the images themselves are saturated with signifcance that resists an exhaustive univocal determination. Te practice of his writing itself embodies a sense of the needed space between determinations, perhaps porosity between determinations needed to account for passage between one determination and another. Tis porosity perhaps goes a way to making some sense of why opposites are not juxtaposed but superposed. A univocalist might say: superposition means just to pile determinations on top of each other, making it needful to disentangle them from each other, but I do not think this is the best way to understand either the matter itself or Heraclitus. Why not just assent to the Hegelian response? Tis acknowledges the indeterminacy, it acknowledges the fow, it acknowledges the necessity of determination, and it seems to connect them all in the more inclusive process of the self-determination of the logos. Te reason I am difdent about this as the most adequate response is that it stresses the indeterminate as a starting point, in itself lacking in determination that then, just because of this lack,

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is necessitated to determinacy and self-determination. My worry is that this is not at all the archē in the sense implied by the articulations of Heraclitus. Tis and the saturated sense of the equivocal require something analogous to the superposition of two opposed ways of talking. Hegelian dialectic comes very close to this, but my point is rather that if the originating source of determinate articulation is not to be described in the language of indeterminacy, then we have to rethink the matter. Te equivocity has to be looked at diferently. I think we need this notion of overdeterminacy, referring here to a sense of what exceeds all determination; what exceeds also the logic of self-determination; what exceeds also the idea of the indeterminate, particularly insofar as that tends toward the too negative, even empty, idea of a merely indefnite origin; exceeds perhaps also the kind of univocal logos with which many philosophers are most at home. If there is a saturated equivocity here perhaps it is pointing toward a poetic-mythic logos, not the opposite of philosophical logos but emerging out of a source of articulation itself marked by a kind of “too-muchness” for all our fnite determination of things. Overdeterminacy and hiddenness are twinned: rising and setting (see DK 22B16) do not ofer univocal manifestation, or indeed dialectically exhaustive manifestation. Hegel does not get properly the togetherness of muthos and logos, nor dwell mindfully enough on the threshold between the two. He ofers a teleology of logical self-determination, via a becoming of the indeterminate through its own determinations. More remains in reserve, even as it communicates itself. To name the threshold and to be mindful of the togetherness we need the overdeterminacy. Given the highly poetic resonance of Heraclitus’s writings, one might think here of great works of art as ofering such an articulation that is not illogical, that is not alogical either, and that yet exceeds determinate logics of univocity, as well as self-determining

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logics of dialectic, of which Hegel ofers perhaps the greatest expression. Tere is an abiding inexhaustibility, a source enabling of infnite astonishment, an origin out of which fnite articulations emerge but which itself exceeds all fnite articulations, and indeed any articulation claiming to be self-infnitized (as I understand Hegel’s characteristic mode of articulation to be). I am speaking of the excess or “too-muchness,” but, in line with the saturated equivocity, one could equally refer to the sense of emptiness. Tis might equally be seen as hyperbolic in this sense, that it could not be articulated in the language of an indeterminacy marked by the mere absence of determination. I think one might speak here again, with suitable qualifcation, of the indeterminacy in a more afrmative sense and not merely in this negative sense. It is for reasons just implied that I prefer to distinguish the indeterminate, even in this afrmative sense, from the overdeterminate, insofar as our characteristic ways of thinking will tend to link up the indeterminate with the logic of determination or self-determination. Te “too muchness” that is also at the same time an emptiness refers us to a more original space of porosity in which everything fows and out of which everything comes to determinate articulation, sometimes in cyclical ways that reveal recurrent constancies in the very process of fowing itself, sometimes in terms of eruptions of novelty that communicate surprising newness to a process of unfolding. Tat original porosity is very hard to talk about, because it is nothing in particular and hence we are inclined to think of it in terms of the merely negative indeterminacy. But it is not to be described really as nothing in particular, because in this approach our focus upon determinacy takes away from the “too-muchness” as such—again, “toomuchness” that, paradoxically, is an emptiness out of which beings come to be.37 37. On this porosity, see most recently Desmond, Te Intimate Universal, chapter 5.

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I think the distinction between becoming and coming to be is needed here. Te orientations that we looked at above in Nietz­ sche and Hegel primarily stressed a poetics of becoming with the frst, and with the second a speculative logic of becoming, leading to self-becoming. Coming to be is something more original than becoming, more original than self-becoming, insofar as everything that becomes must frst be and come to be before it becomes itself or something other. If becoming cannot be exhausted by the beings that become, in a more original and radical sense coming to be cannot be so reduced, since it is presupposed by every process of (self-)becoming—presupposed also by the things as they become, indeed as they participate in being at all. Te language of fux points to this but it is not enough; and the language of fux with the immanent constancy of recurrent intelligibility may not be enough either. Is the porosity of being of which I speak here to be approached in a subtractive way? We take away what stands in the way; and then one has a way: a po­ ros—the process is no longer stalled by an aporia, an impasse with no way forward. If you take away what bars the way, you open a path. Is this a porosity? Suggestive though this is, I would not put it this way. If the porosity is subtractive only, then the priority of that from which one subtracts remains. How then speak of a prior porosity? Tink of to apeiron: why and how speak of it at all? (Remember, Heraclitus is held to be a disciple of Anaximander.) We know it was an ancient anxiety that all would dissolve in the fog of the indefnite; only the boundary or the peras allows us to speak intelligibly, to avoid gibberish. Intelligibility is defned by boundary. Te subtractive way would say: take away the peras, and you have to apeiron. But then the subtractive way leads to the indeterminate as the indefnite rather than to the afrmative indeterminate as the overdeterminate. If the boundary relative to the overdeterminate is made fuid, it is within an anterior openness in which

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something fows, fow through the openness. But this fow will be possible only if there is an energy that is not just the medium of porosity through which it might fow. Te porosity is the between through which this other energy can fow. If we speak again of coming to be, must there be an even more original energy that itself enables the creation of the porosity? Can we think of any fow or fux without such an original energy? If so, the subtractive strategy cannot be the last word. Tat there is fow means there is more than to apeiron as the indeterminate, the indefnite—the lacking of determination. Tis is where the thought of the overdeterminate must come in, even if we go to the extreme of the subtractive indeterminate. Te latter is in the end essentially negative—a voiding of the determinate. But then the question comes back as to how the determinate comes to be, comes to be determinate; how the limited comes to be from the unlimited; the fnite from the infnite. Once again we need a language that is more than the indeterminate. Tese are hard questions, but sufce it here to say that I cannot fnd either in Nietzsche or in Hegel an adequate sense of the more original coming to be. In both, I suspect, the lack can be traced to a certain weakness with respect to ontological astonishment before the “that it is” of things. Needless to say, I might speak with Schelling here, or indeed with either Leibniz or Heidegger, in respect of the great question: Why is there something rather than nothing, why being at all and not nothing? What I am calling ontological astonishment is very close to the sense of the marvel that fnds its hospitable home in the religious myth, and in which the poet can also participate, ofering us an image in which we can contemplate the memory of the gift of the marvel. It seems to me one of the reasons why we fnd Heraclitus so inviting is precisely because we sense the fermentation, the gestation of that sense of ontological astonishment in his startling, paradoxical utterances. Consider this: “ The sun . . . is new every day” (ὁ ἥλιος . . .

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[καθάπερ ὁ Ἡράκλειτός φησι,] νέος ἐφ’ ἡμέρῃ ἐστίν: DK22B6).38 Tis might seem to be bland and unsurprising. Te sun rises, the sun sets: the diurnal upcoming becoming the nocturnal downgoing. How everyday! But if the newness of the day is taken as striking us into metaphysical mindfulness, there could be seen to be expressed in the utterance the ontological astonishment. Te day returns: amazement at the light, always old, ever new—welcome return of the trusted coupled with shining surprise out of the sea of the unexpected. Te night comes on: trepidation at the impending darkness, perhaps peace settling on the encircling stillness. Tere is marvel at the intimate strangeness of being at all. “How can anyone hide from that which never sets?” (DK 22B16).39 Tis, I suggest, is not an empirical description, not a theory, but is like an exclamation of amazement, as when the child points to the moon and murmurs: Moon! You might say this murmuring is related to gibber(ing) but as idiotic the question is whether it reveals a source of intimate engagement, an idiot wisdom.40 38. We have this fragment from Aristotle’s Meteorologica, BII: Part 2, 355a13, suggesting for him, I would say, a context less of ontological astonishment as determinable causality. 39. “Te sun is new every day.” How compare to the privative alpha in Heidegger’s a-lētheia? Tis might seem like the privative infnite, but there is more at play, if the un­ concealing has to be wrested from the concealed (in the earlier Heidegger, certainly). Tis is not my point about an original giving of porosity. Te original opening of the porosity is an endowing, ofered to us, not wrested from the concealed. Recall how Heidegger uses the likeness of a robbery (ein Raub). Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh. Revised with a foreword by D. J. Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), §44. One is put in mind of Prometheus stealing the fre of the gods, and Zeus as the jealous god who would otherwise keep it from mortals. Teft is not the original gift; in truth, theft comes after the gift given. A pious question to Heidegger: How do you get from Polemos to Gelassenheit, from theft to gift, from robbery to grace? Answer: the silence of mystery? Te primal porosity is not an oscillation between the determinate and indeterminate, not a privative unconcealing of the determinate out of the indeterminate. Tere is the overdeterminacy of the origin in giving the porosity. Tis is agapeic surplus rather than negation of a hiddenness. Nature loves to hide. It hides in its agapeic surplus that gives way in making a way, hides in being out of the way, out in the open fuency of the porous between. “How could anyone hide from that which never sets?” 40. See William Desmond, “Idiot Wisdom and the Intimate Universal: On Immanence and Transcendence in an Intercultural Perspective,” in Transcendence, Immanence,

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Te point might be connected to Heraclitus’s image of time as a child playing draughts (DK 22B52), and I will return to the child and gibberish one more time, but this invocation of the child is again something easily turned into bland platitude. But if ontological astonishment is at work in it, we are talking about something other again. Te sudden precipitation of ontological astonishment reopens the original porosity. Tis is a reason why the poetic compression of Heraclitus calls to mind the Zen compression of the koan. Te thunderbolt may pilot all things but when it strikes, we may fnd ourselves saying with Yeats: “Blackout; Heaven blazing into the head:/Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.”41 When mindfulness is porous to the overdeterminate, there is no (determinate) thought, and there is too much thought; and when one tries to state this (re)doubled condition, one stammers to get it all out. Te wording risks becoming a kind of stuttering. If one can catch one’s breath the wording might fow out. Tere is an overload of signifcance that can look idiotic; when (st)uttered the overdeterminacy looks idiotic. and Intercultural Philosophy, ed. Nahum Brown and William Franke (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 153–81; also Desmond, Philosophy and Its Others, 309–11. 41. W. B. Yeats, Te Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: Everyman, 1990), 341, from the poem “Lapis Lazuli.” For James Joyce’s take on the thunderbolt, hear: “bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!”—a word near the opening of Finnegans Wake, 3: thunderbolt or fux-gibberish, or a gibberish word answering to the thunder? Tis hundred-letter word, meant to signify a thunderclap, comes in the third paragraph, just after “Te fall(baba . . .),” and after the famous opening, “riverrun, past Eve and Adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.” James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, ed. Robert-Jan Henkes, Erik Bindervoet, and Finn Fordham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3. In the book the thunderclap sounds 10 times, each clap being a diferent 100 letter word, though the last clap is made up of 101 letters, in all 1001 letters, thought to recall the 1001 Arabian Nights, and to signifying the commodious vicus (Vico) of recirculation (cyclic history). Suppose, though, there is no circle, no line: no right side of history, not in the past, not in the present, not in the future, but above: above history, in relation to the superior, time’s other, do we fnd the right side? See Eric McLuhan, Te Role of Tunder in Finnegans Wake (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), x–xi; he connects the work with Mennipean satire, and the thunderclaps are not at all gibberish.

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And Heraclitus’s obscurity? We might now see this not as due to a dearth of intelligibility but rather to excess of intelligibility, excess hyperbolic to determinate and self-determining intelligibility. Tere is a light that blinds us, there is a night that arouses perplexity that is more ultimate than the certainties of determinate day. Heraclitus invites us into that night and into that light.

Listening to Wording the Between And what then again of fux-gibberish? What again of Aristotle’s irritation? Did not Aristotle after all acknowledge at the beginning of the Metaphysics that the human being is marked by wonder, and that this too is the archē which is the originating source of all quests for knowledge? Tat is true. But I fnd it interesting that later and fairly soon in the Metaphysics, and confrmed generally by the orientation of his thinking overall, the coming of wonder moves from an initial indeterminate opening toward a kind of closure of wonder. Wonder has to be made more determinate and precise in order to pose a properly formulated question, again in a determinate respect. By these means we make progress toward an answer that itself will be marked by the appropriate determinacy, responding to the initial wonder, responding in such a way that in the answer the originating wonder is dispelled. Tat he uses the example of the geometrical problem to illustrate this teleology of wonder is instructive. Te logic of determination governs the unfolding of the initial opening, which now seems to have more of the character of an indeterminacy of ignorance, which is overcome in the knowing that determinately answers the question put— put, that is, more precisely and properly. Te enigmatic sayings of Heraclitus are (bad) fux-gibberish only, if this is always what it means to give an answer, or to give a logos. If, however, these sayings are generated out of an intimate dwelling with the overdeterminacy, marked by the porosity of

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never-to-be-dispelled ontological astonishment, this cannot be the last word on the matter. To see it from this orientation is to require a shift in the meaning of originating wonder, and indeed in the sense of what it means to answer that wonder. It may well then be that the family relation between marveling in myth and the desire to know (of which Aristotle takes note) is of deeper signifcance than the supersessionist view of philosophical logic that has been the main inheritance of the history of philosophy. Listening to the logos means reopening the porosity to the original space where the word takes form: a kind of birthing in us: a con-natus: something is being born in the soul; but it is not a self-birthing simply; it is not a work of art giving birth to itself. Te birthing of the working of art is as much received in the promise of inspiration and carried out in the faithful work that redeems the promise, in work that is not work, since the lifting energy of the companioning power is with it: like the runner who suddenly has the wind behind him, though were he to look he would see nothing and feel nothing there, for, in a slight shift of metaphor, the lifting wind is a second wind that is his own and never his own and that carries him into a new space of moving along the way. Or to reverse the metaphor—it may be that only in moving fast into the wind and against the wind, that one gets lift—like those birds who can only take of when they frst run against the opposing wind. Tey are caught by the wind, as they catch the wind, and carried up above, they settle on the serene air, forget its lift and think only their own wings keep them up. I have said just a few words about the fuency of the world and much more could be said, of course. But what about gibberish? It is instructive to call to mind again the origin of the word in terms of its etymology, mentioned at the outset. Gibberish is still a form of speaking, it is a logos, though to the hearer it is an unintelligible logos relative to logical logos. Is this a function of the gibberish itself, or is it a function of our being unable to hear the logos in the

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gibberish? As I pointed out above, there are various words that are involved in the etymologies like gaggle, gabble. One might also think of babble: a babbling brook, say, singing the fux-gibberish of nature, of the stream of life. Babbling brooks often generate bad poetry, of course. To recall, the famous saying of Heraclitus that one cannot step into the same river twice has, in the Greek, an onomatopoeic character to it: the words, orally announced, mimic the babbling of a brook. I can only make one point here and it is the following and it bears upon that rich sense of the origin of articulation already mentioned. I am thinking of the babble of children, origins of our own access into the space of the word, into the space of our being able to word the between. Te image of the child is very appropriate given Heraclitus’s image of the kingly power: “Time is a child playing draughts, the kingly power is a child’s (αἰὼν παῖς ἐστι παίζων, πεττεύων· παιδὸς ἡ βασιληίη, DK 22B52).” It is an image much loved by many, including Nietzsche in the famous opening discourse of Zarathustra on the “Tree Metamorphoses.” In Nietzsche the child is an image of innocent creation: destruction and recreation to infnity but constituting the cycle of the whole. Tat aspect of it I will leave to one side, beyond noting in Nietzsche the stress on the self-propelling wheel (ein aus sich rol­ lendes Rad),42 a stress perhaps suitable to (self-)becoming but not to the shining surprise of more original coming to be. I will make a suggestion that I do not think is made often, if it ever is. Te child is frst an infant, infans, without words, and then it begins to babble; the babble is gibberish; it is a struggle for determination and early on it ends mostly in indeterminate results; but the babbling is the intimate becoming of the power of wording of the child. We adults later listen to the babbling of children, and we try 42. “Unschuld ist das Kind und Vergessen, ein Neubeginnen, ein Spiel, ein aus sich rollendes Rad, eine erste Bewegung, ein heiliges Ja-sagen.” Nietzsche, Werke in Drei Bän­ den, ed. K. Schlecta, 2:294.

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to divine in the babble what the child is trying to communicate. (We adults can be speechless, infans—with surprise!) Te babble in due course takes on form, and becomes more intelligible to the hearer or to the interlocutor with the child. Babbling is on the way to wording, gibberish on the way to logos. But now consider this: Will the babble ever take articulate communicative form if the child is not in the frst instance spoken to? Te playing of the child with words, its wording of its being in the between, is not the child playing simply with itself. Tere is another speaking to it. If there were not this wording of another, say, the communication of the mother that woos the infant into words, what is latent in the play of babble would not unfold truly, and the child would never enter the cosmos of communication, in a fuller sense. Te child plays with itself, but this seems to me to be an incomplete image if we forget that without the other playing with the child, then worlds, like words, do not take on the constancy of form that we do fnd in the cosmos that communicates. Tis sense of being spoken to before one speaks seems to me to correspond to the diference between coming to be and becoming. Te child becomes, it does not come to be as giving its own being to itself, and yet it comes to be. In the gibberish of the fux the communication of coming to be is prior to the becoming of both the gibberish and the fux. And it is because of this that the fux is fux and not fux, the gibberish is gibberish and not gibberish.

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Into the Dark How (Not) to Ask “Why Is There Anything at All?” e r i c d. p e r l Τὸ δὲ πάντων αἴτιον οὐδέν ἐστιν ἐκείνων. pl o tin u s 1

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Nicht w i e die Welt ist, ist das Mystische, sondern d a ß sie ist. witt g e nst e in 2

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Ich muß noch über Gott in eine Wüste ziehn. an g e l u s sil e si u s 3

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Boston Colloquy in Historical Teology, Boston College, August 2017. 1. “Te cause of all things is none of them.” Plotinus, in Plotini Opera, ed. P. Henry and H.-R. Schwyzer, editio minor, rev. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964–1982), 6.9.6, 55–56. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. 2. “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but rather that it is.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), 6.44. 3. “I must pass beyond God into a desert.” Angelus Silesius, Cherubinischer Wanders­ mann, in Sämtliche Poetische Werke, ed. Hans Ludwig Held, vol. 3 (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1949), 1.7.4.

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I Recent discussions of the question “Why is there anything at all?” or “Why is there something, rather than nothing?” often treat this as a distinctively modern question, citing its explicit formulation by Leibniz4 and occasionally its resumption by Heidegger.5 But refection on the problem that the question raises did not begin with Leibniz.6 When Neoplatonic philosophers such as Plotinus and Proclus fnd it necessary to discuss a frst principle which is the “cause of all things” or the “cause of being,” when Tomas Aquinas, in the same tradition, argues to God as the “cause of beings insofar as they are beings,” it is clear that they are addressing this very question, even if they do not formulate it in set terms.7 But they do so in a radically diferent way from contemporary philosophers, including many of those who take the question as the starting point of an argument for “theism.”8 Contemporary treatments of the question tend to proceed in one of two ways: either they limit its scope, or they dismiss it altogether as senseless 4. E.g., Jan Heylen, “Why Is Tere Something Rather Tan Nothing? A Logical Investigation,” Erkenntnis 83, no. 3 (2017): 531–39, at 531. Heylen provides an extensive bibliography of recent treatments of the question, although he omits the papers collected in Te Ultimate Why Question: Why Is Tere Anything at All Rather than Nothing Whatsoever?, ed. John F. Wippel (Washington, D.C.: Te Catholic University of America Press, 2011). 5. E.g., Stephen Maitzen, “Stop Asking Why Tere’s Anything,” Erkenntnis 77.1 (2012): 51–63, at 51. 6. On medieval formulations of the question see John F. Wippel, “Tomas Aquinas on the Ultimate Why Question,” in Te Ultimate Why Question, 84–106, at 84–86. 7. Te Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed points in the same direction: “I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.” Heinrich Denzinger, Enchiridion symbolorum defnitionum et declarationum de rebus fdei et morum, ed. Peter Hünermann et al. 43rd ed. (San Francisco, Calif.: Ignatius Press, 2012), 65. Taken strictly, this says that all things—no qualifcations or exceptions—have a cause or “maker,” and therefore implies that God is not one of all things. 8. On this use of the question see Maitzen, “Stop Asking,” 51–53, 60. As we shall see, Aquinas’s reasoning to God as the cause of all being, or of beings insofar as they are beings, should not be assimilated to modern arguments to God as a “frst being” or “necessary being” which is the cause of “contingent beings.”

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or meaningless. Philosophers such as Plotinus, Proclus, and Aquinas, however, neither limit it nor dismiss it, but rather, recognizing its full, all-inclusive scope, show how it forces the inquiring spirit, on strictly rational grounds, to abandon itself into the darkness and silence of philosophical mysticism. One way of limiting the question’s scope is to take it to mean, “Why are there any contingent beings?” 9 Leibniz himself approaches the question in this way, attempting to answer it by arguing that there is a “necessary being” (called ‘God’) which causes all contingent beings. Tis approach limits the question to a certain kind of beings, contingent ones, rather than asking about absolutely all that is, all being as such. Another, more recent way of limiting the question is to take it to mean, “Why are there any concrete objects?”10 Peter van Inwagen provides a good example of this approach, beginning his paper “Why Is Tere Anything at All?” thus: “Te question that is my title is supposed to be the most profound and difcult of all questions. Some, indeed, have said that it is a dangerous question, a question that can tear the mind asunder. But I think we can make some progress with it if we do not panic.”11 Te reason for this defationary attitude emerges in what follows: By a ‘being’ I mean a concrete object—whatever that may mean . . . I do not think that the question people have actually intended to ask when they ask why anything at all should exist could be answered by pointing out . . . that the number 510 would exist no matter what. If the notion of an abstract object makes sense at all, it seems evident that if everything were an abstract object, if the only objects were abstract objects, there is an obvious and perfectly good sense in which there would be nothing at 9. See Heylen, “Why,” 531; Maitzen, “Stop Asking,” 57. 10. Heylen, “Why,” 531. Maitzen, “Stop Asking,” 58, evidently confates “contingent” and “concrete.” 11. Peter van Inwagen and E. J. Lowe, “Why Is Tere Anything at All?,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 70 (1996): 95–120, at 95.

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e r i c d. p e r l all, for there would be no physical things, no stufs, no events, no space, no time, no Cartesian egos, no . . . [ellipsis in original]. When people want to know why there is anything at all, they want to know why that bleak state of afairs does not obtain.12

Like the Leibnizian approach, this expressly interprets the question in such a way that it fails to ask about absolutely all being as such, including even “abstract objects” such as numbers or anything else which, qua abstract, “would exist no matter what.” It is precisely because van Inwagen interprets the question in this limited sense that he believes it can be approached safely, without the risk of “tearing the mind asunder.” Tose who acknowledge the absolutely all-inclusive scope of the question, on the other hand, frequently dismiss it as meaningless, on the ground that absolute nothing, or an alternative to ‘something’ or ‘being,’ is unthinkable. Brian Martine ofers an exceptionally clear example: If ‘the ultimate why question’ [that is, why is there anything at all?] is taken to mean asking why there is something rather than nothing, where the expression ‘nothing’ is supposed to mean ‘nothing at all’ or ‘absolutely nothing,’ I don’t think the question is worthy even of being called useless. It is simply meaningless. Proposing ‘abolutely nothing’ as the alternative to ‘something’ is the same as saying that there is no alternative to ‘something.’ . . . In order for the question ‘why is there something rather than nothing’ to mean anything, there has to be at least in principle an alternative proposed to the existence of something. Where no alternative is proposed—as is certainly the case when one suggests that the alternative is absolutely nothing—what was formulated as a question turns out to be an assertion, the assertion of something or other.13

Franklin Gamwell makes much the same point: “On my accounting, the question is not sensible because it presupposes that there 12. Van Inwagen, “Why,” 95–96. 13. Brian Martine, “Pragmatic Refections on Final Causality,” in Te Ultimate Why Question, ed. John F. Wippel, 206–16, at 206.

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being nothing at all is a sensible thought, and . . . I do not think that this is the case,”14 and again, “Existence as such cannot be completely absent, and thus a complete negation of existence is senseless. So far as I can see, a putative thought whose conceptual content is in no way existentially positive cannot be distinguished from a putative thought that has no sensible content at all.”15 Te unthinkability of an “alternative to ‘something,’ ” or of a “complete negation of existence,” is no doubt why the question appears liable, as van Inwagen says, to “tear the mind asunder.” But to dismiss the question as meaningless on the ground that an alternative to being is unthinkable is to fail to take thinking to its uttermost extreme, to question meaning or thinking itself, and thus to compel thought to transcend itself. Both of these contemporary approaches render the question anodyne, depriving it of its true, mind-shattering force, even prior to any consideration of whether it can be answered or what answer, if any, there may be.

II Te question before us is not “Why are there contingent beings?” or “Why are there concrete objects?,” still less “Why is there a 14. Franklin Gamwell, “Speaking of God after Aquinas,” Te Journal of Religion 81, no. 2 (2001), 185–210, at 204 n. 26. 15. Gamwell, “Speaking of God,” 205. See also John Heil, “Contingency,” in Te Puz­ zle of Existence: Why Is Tere Something Rather Tan Nothing, ed. Tyron Goldschmidt (New York and London: Routledge, 2013), 167–81, at 175–76: “I fnd it hard not to think that the question ‘Why is there anything?’ or ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ makes sense only when the nothing in question is really a something: empty space, the void. . . . If, in contrast, nothing is understood as the absolute absence of being, the question cannot so much as be addressed.” Cf. Goldschmidt in the “Introduction” to this volume, 1–21, at 4: “Te question should thus not be construed as a question about why a possible world containing some being obtains rather than a world containing no beings at all. Te notion of such a perfectly empty world is incoherent.” He adds (4 n. 3), “For my part, I don’t really get the notion of such a bare possibility as there being nothing at all.” Tese remarks occur in the introductory setup of the problem to which all the essays in the volume are devoted, thus ruling out a priori the question in its absolute sense.

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physical universe?,”16 but “Why is there anything at all?” or “Why is there being, rather than nothing?” Te terms ‘anything’ and ‘being’ are absolutely all-inclusive: there cannot in principle be anything whatsoever that falls outside their scope. Tey are altogether inescapable. No matter what we may think, imagine, come up with, propose, or mention, it is already included under the head of ‘anything’ or ‘being.’ As Aquinas observes, “Tat which intellect frst conceives, as most known, and into which it resolves all conceptions, is being [ens, that which is].”17 Or, as he explains more fully, “Being [ens] falls frst in the conception of intellect, because anything is knowable according to this, that it is in act. . . . Wherefore being is the proper object of intellect, as it is the frst intelligible, as sound is the frst audible.”18 Just as whatever can be heard is necessarily some sound, so whatever can be thought is necessarily some being. ‘Being,’ then, is absolutely all-comprehensive; there can be no more comprehensive term. Tus, “To be [esse] itself is 16. Te foregoing remarks should make it clear that the question in its full sense has nothing whatsoever to do with cosmology. Te question is not about “the physical universe” but about being as such. To use the question as the starting point of a cosmological argument for theism is to fail to understand its full, unrestricted sense. Nor does it have anything to do with generation or origination. Te question is not “How did this or that thing, or the entire physical universe, begin?” but rather, “Why does anything and everything exist? Why is there reality at all?” To confuse the question of existence with that of origination is to be blind to existence itself and so to miss the very point of the question. See further below, notes 31 and 83. 17. Aquinas, De veritate, 1, 1, resp. 18. Tomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, editio altera emendata (Ottawa: Commissio Piana, 1953), 1, 5, 2, resp. Brian Davies, OP, “Disputed Question: Are Names Said of God and Creatures Univocally?” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 92 (Spring 2018): 321–327, at 323, observes, “I may say that there is nothing between the west of Ireland and the coast of North America. But I would mean that there is no land, not that there is absolutely nothing. Te ‘nothing’ in ‘God accounts for there being something rather than nothing’ means ‘no spatio-temporal reality’ or ‘nothing that can be taken to be part of the empirically explainable universe.’ ” Tis limitation cannot apply in the case of Aquinas, for two reasons. First, for Aquinas the world of created things includes the angelic intelligences, which are non-spatial, at most quasi-temporal, and not “part of the empirically explainable universe.” Second, Aquinas expressly and repeatedly insists that being, ens, which is what God “accounts for,” includes absolutely all possible objects of thought whatsoever, not merely spatio-temporal or empirical things.

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common to all things”19—a simple, seemingly innocuous or even tautological observation which is nonetheless the foundation for Aquinas’s entire doctrine of God as esse tantum, “just ‘to be’,” or ipsum esse, “ ‘to be’ itself.” In making such statements Aquinas is echoing at long remove “father Parmenides,”20 who inaugurated the tradition of classical metaphysics by reporting the declaration of the Goddess: Come, I will tell you—and having heard the story keep it safe—the only ways to seek out for thinking: the one, that it is and is not not to be, is the road of persuasion, for it follows truth; the other, that it is not and is needful not to be, this I say to you is a wholly unknowable path; for you could not know that which is not, for it cannot be done, nor express it. For the same is for thinking and for being.21

Quite simply, the Goddess is saying, there is not anything that is not, anything that falls outside the scope of being: “For never will this prevail, that there are things that are not.”22 It is indeed impossible to think absolutely nothing: to think at all is necessarily to think something, that is, some being. As she observes, “Without being, in which it is expressed, you will not fnd thinking. For nothing else is or will be apart from being.”23 Being, or that which is, is all-comprehensive: there can be nothing else that is not included in it. Plato takes up the same point in the Sophist, quoting Parmenides and asking frst whether “we dare utter ‘that which in no way is?’ ” and then “What must this name, ‘that which is not,’ refer to?”24 He 19. Aquinas, Summa theologiae 1, 4, 3, resp.; cf. Quaestiones disputatae de potentia, ed. P. Bazzi et al., 9th ed. rev. (Rome and Turin: Marietti, 1953), 1, 3, resp.: “Esse is found common to all things.” 20. Plato, Sophist, in Platonis Opera, ed. John Burnet (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900–1907), 241d5. 21. Parmenides, in Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz, eds. Die Fragmente der Vor­ sokratiker, 7th ed. (Berlin: Weidmannsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1954), 28B2, 1–8; 28B3; hereafter referred to as DK 28B2. 22. DK 28B7, 1. 23. DK 28B8, 35–37. 24. Plato, Sophist 237b7–8, c1–2.

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concludes that it cannot be something, and therefore that the person who says “that which is not” is not saying anything at all. Hence, “We must say that he who tries to utter ‘that which is not’ does not speak [i.e., express any meaning] at all.”25 His conclusion is that “it is not possible rightly to utter or to say or to think ‘that which is not’ itself by itself, but that it is unthinkable and unspeakable and unutterable and meaningless [ἄλογον].”26 Plato later revisits this conclusion and argues that we can and must meaningfully think and speak of relative non-being, or diference, but never withdraws the judgment that that which is not anything at all in any way at all can neither be thought nor meaningfully said. Meaningful speech necessarily expresses something, not nothing, and to think is necessarily to think something, not nothing. Parmenides, Plato, and Aquinas all concur, then, that it is altogether impossible for thought to escape from being, from what is, which is all-comprehensive, from which nothing can be excluded and to which nothing can be added. Tere is nothing else from which being can be distinguished. From this it follows that all distinctions whatsoever—abstract/concrete, necessary/contingent, real/fctional, or any others—are necessarily distinctions within being.27 Hence it is illegitimate to exclude anything at all from the scope of the question “Why is there anything at all?” To limit the question to “Why are there any concrete (as distinct from abstract) objects?” is to fail to ask “Why is there anything at all?” Let us take van Inwagen’s example of the number 510 as an instance of an abstract object. No matter what numbers may be—sets, abstractions, universals, concepts, Platonic forms, or anything else—the number 510 is 25. Plato, Sophist 237e1–2. 26. Plato, Sophist 238c7–10. 27. On necessary/contingent as a distinction within “all being” (totum ens), where “all being” refers to that which comes from God and does not include God himself, see Tomas Aquinas, Expositio libri Peryermeneias, editio Leonina, vol. 1*/1, editio altera retractata (Rome: Commissio Leonina; Paris: Vrin, 1989), 1, 14, 22. On this passage see further below, p. 202. Tis is radically diferent from identifying God as a necessary being and creatures as contingent beings.

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most defnitely something, not nothing. If it were not anything, it could not be distinct from anything else, e.g., the number 511, or the sheet of paper on which these words are printed. Indeed, if it were not anything, it could not be an abstract object. Hence it is already included in what we are asking about. Te fact that such things exist does not answer the question, because the question is, “Why is there anything at all?” Even if numbers, or other abstract objects, “would exist no matter what,” we can and must still ask, “Why is there something that would exist no matter what? Why is there anything at all? Why not nothing?” Te same objection applies if we limit the question to “Why are there contingent (as distinct from necessary) beings?” Even if we could demonstrate that there is a necessary being (often called ‘God’), that being would still be something, some being, and would therefore be included within what the question in its unrestricted form is asking about. A “God” who is a necessary being would not be the maker of all things, absolutely and without exception, but only of all things except himself. Even if there is a necessary being, we can and must still ask, “Why is there this necessary being?” ‘Necessary,’ here, is a determination of ‘being.’ But as Aquinas insists, being is logically prior to all determinations thereof, and all determinations are determinations of being. A necessary being is necessary only given that it is, so its necessity cannot account for its existence. To be sure, if some being is a necessary being, then to deny its existence would be self-contradictory. But we can still eliminate even a necessary being from consideration, not by thinking it and denying that it exists, but by not thinking it at all. Hence a necessary being, even if we could prove that there is one, would not serve to answer the question “Why is there anything at all?” Such a being, or a God who is understood as a necessary being, is still included in the scope of that question. Te assumption underlying the “necessary being” argument, in terms of “possible worlds,” is that if some being is necessary, that

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is, exists in all possible worlds, then an “empty world” is impossible, and the question is therefore answered. In such discourse the question “Why is there anything at all?” is taken to mean “Why not an empty world?” But an empty world is not nothing: an empty world is still a world. Within such a world, the conditions of logic, the laws of thought, still obtain. Tis indeed is what it means to be a “world.” But those very conditions are themselves something, not nothing. If logic itself is taken for granted, being is already given. If there is a world, it must be a possible world, and then indeed the only question is, “Why not an empty world?” But suppose we ask instead, “Why any world at all? Why not no world?” To ask this is in efect to ask, “Why the very conditions of thought itself?” Tis question completely sets aside all logical issues of possibility, impossibility, and necessity, which only serve to determine what worlds are possible within the presupposed framework of thought. From within “possible worlds theory,” the only answer is “No world is not a possible world.” Tis is of course true, but it begs the question by presupposing that there must be some world and thus taking logic itself, and with it being, for granted. Wittgenstein famously observed that “the world is all that is the case,” and again, “Te world is the totality of facts, not of things.”28 A “world,” in this sense, is a set of facts or a “state of afairs,” and a possible world is a possible state of afairs. From this point of view the question “Why any world at all?” becomes the question “Why is anything the case?” Te obvious reply is that “Nothing is the case” is a performative contradiction: if nothing were the case it would be the case that nothing is the case. Hence it is impossible that nothing is the case. Tis is quite true, and is efectively equivalent to “No world is not a possible world.” Again, therefore, this begs the question by presupposing the very con28. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 1 and 1.1.

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ditions of thought. It is indeed impossible to think that nothing is the case, or that there is no world. But this is simply to repeat Parmenides’s dictum that to think is always already to think something, that there can be no thinking without being, that nothing is not an intelligible option. Tis is precisely why Martine, Gamwell, and others, interpreting the question in its absolute, all-inclusive sense and recognizing that thought cannot escape from or dispense with being, declare the question meaningless. But at this point, the question “Why is there anything at all?,” taken without restriction in its full, radical sense, reveals itself to be in fact the question, “Why thought, meaning, logic, or intelligibility itself?” We can now see that if the question taken in its full sense appears to be meaningless, this is because what it is questioning is meaning itself.29 As Gamwell rightly says, “a complete negation of existence is senseless.”30 But, why sense? If we are questioning intelligibility itself, which we can now understand to be what is really put into play by the question “Why is there anything at all?,” then it is no response to say that there is no intelligible alternative. To be sure, given thinking, being is already given, not only because thinking itself is something but because to think at all is necessarily to think something, not nothing. To think away everything is to think away thinking itself, which is, again, a performative contradiction. But to dismiss the question on the ground that an alternative to being is senseless, meaningless, or unthinkable is to presuppose sense, meaning, or thought itself. Te question now is, why thought? Why thinking, and with it, necessarily, being? Taken in its full sense, then, the question “Why is there anything at all?” directs thought where it cannot go. It asks for a 29. Cf. Jean Trouillard, “Procession néoplatonicienne et création judéo-chrétienne,” in Néoplatonisme: Mélanges oferts à Jean Trouillard (Fontenay aux Roses: Les Cahiers de Fontenay, 1981): 1–30, at 1: “It is not surprising that this radical undertaking seems devoid of meaning [sens], for it aims at that by which there is a meaning.” 30. See above, p. 183n15.

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source, ground, principle, or explanation of thought, of intelligibility, of being, which cannot itself be within the scope of thought, intelligibility, or being. It thus leads thought to its own stultifcation. Properly understood, therefore, the question does indeed threaten to “tear the mind asunder,” or rather to annihilate it altogether. Tose who do not panic when confronted with this question show no adequate awareness of what it means to question πᾶν—everything—to which the only alternative is

III At this point it should be clear that the question “Why is there anything at all?” does not admit of an answer: any proposed ex­ planans would, necessarily, be something, and would therefore be included in the explanandum. Indeed, all that has gone before has merely served to highlight the absolutely all-inclusive scope of the terms ‘anything’ or ‘being’ and hence of the question itself. In that sense Heylen, Maitzen, and others are right to demand that we stop asking the question, in the sense of asking it with a view to getting an answer. Rather than calling for an answer, the question leads instead to the silencing of the mind at the astonishing realization, vouchsafed to Parmenides by the Goddess, that being is.31 And this, rather than any answer—which would of necessity be a wrong or question-begging answer, revealing a failure to understand the question—is what we fnd in the Neoplatonic discourse 31. Cf. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Te Friend, vol. 3.11, in Te Collected Works of Sam­ uel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, vol. 4.1 (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press and Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 514: “Hast thou ever raised thy mind to the consideration of existence, in and by itself, as the mere act of existing? Hast thou ever said to thyself thoughtfully, It is!, heedless at that moment, whether it were a man before you or a fower, or a grain of sand? Without reference, in short to this or that particular mode or form of existence? If thou hast indeed attained to this, then thou wilt have felt the presence of a mystery which must have fxed thy spirit in awe and wonder.” Tose who limit the question, or dismiss it as meaningless, or mistake it for a question about origination (see note 16), are evidently immune to this experience.

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of the One, and in Tomas Aquinas’s apophatic treatment of God as ipsum esse.32 Plotinus follows the tradition established by Parmenides in afrming the inescapable co-belonging or togetherness of thinking and being: “Intellect, by thinking, establishes being, and being, by being thought, gives to intellect thinking and existence. . . . For they are simultaneous and exist together and do not depart from each other.”33 Tinking is, necessarily, the apprehension of being, and as such possesses being as its content; being means, and can only mean, that which is intelligible, and as such is that which is given to thinking. But Plotinus goes beyond Parmenides when he argues that thinking and being, precisely in their togetherness, are conditioned and in that sense have a “cause” which is other than themselves. Tus in between the two sentences just quoted, he says, “But the cause of thinking is something else, which is also [the cause] for being; thus something else is the cause of both simultaneously.”34 But this cause, precisely as the cause of being itself, cannot be anything, any being: All things come to [intellect] from there . . . because he [that is, the One] is none of all things. . . . For this reason, that is none of the things in intellect, but all things are from it.Tis indeed is why they are realities: because they are already determinate. . . . Being must not foat, as it were, in indeterminacy, but must be fxed by determination and rest; and rest in intelligibles is defnition and shape, and by these it possesses existence.35

Precisely as intelligible, being is determinate and thus conditioned, and so cannot be absolutely frst. Neither being as a whole nor any being, therefore, can be the frst principle, and the frst principle cannot be any being. 32. On Aquinas’s ipsum esse as apophatic, see Brian Davies, OP, “Kenny on Aquinas on Being,” Te Modern Schoolman 82, no. 2 (2005): 111–29, at 126–27. 33. Plotinus, 5.1.4, 26–28, 30–31. 34. Plotinus, 5.1.4, 28–30. 35. Plotinus, 5.1.7, 19–26.

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Plotinus moves from being to the frst principle by observing that anything exists in virtue of its unity, the determining ‘one’ that it has, whereby it is one thing, is itself, is intelligible, and so is at all: “All beings are beings by the ‘one,’ both those which are primarily beings and those which are in any way said to be among beings. For what would something be, if it were not one? If they are deprived of the ‘one’ which is said [of them], they are not those things.”36 Plotinus’s point here is that ‘one’ is “the transcendental condition of appearing,”37 the condition under which anything and everything can appear, or as we might say “show up” or be constituted as anything at all. As such it is the condition at once of thinking and of being. In this sense, and in this sense only, we may speak of ‘one itself ’ or “the One” as the “cause of all things,”38 “the cause of thinking . . . which is also [the cause] for being.”39 But this is not to say that there is something named “the One” which causes all things to be. Tis is clearly impossible, since in that case the One would be included among all things and thus would not be the cause of all things. As Plotinus carefully explains, “Even to say ‘cause’ is not to predicate some accident of it, but of us, in that we have something from it, while that is in itself; but speaking precisely, one must not say ‘that’ or ‘is.’ ”40 “Te One,” so called, is not a thing or being which has ‘one’ as an attribute; if it were, it would be merely one of the beings, rather than the condition such that there are any beings at all. “Te One” is not even one: “If 36. Plotinus, 6.9.1, 1–3. 37. Reiner Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 146. See also 144: “Plotinus has seen that any discourse which seeks to anchor phenomena in an unconditioned foundation falls into a vicious circle. To seek the reason of beings in another being is to spin around among what is representable. In other words, he has seen the strategic diference between an entitative cause, which is representable and knowable, and a non-entitative condition, which is unrepresentable and only indirectly thinkable” (italics in original). 38. E.g., Plotinus, 6.9.6, 55–56. 39. Plotinus, 5.1.4, 28–30. 40. Plotinus, 6.9.3, 49–52.

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‘the One,’ the name and what is expressed, were some afrmation, it would become less clear than not saying any name of it; for perhaps this was said so that he who seeks, beginning from this which is wholly indicative of simplicity, may fnally negate even this.”41 Nor is it the attribute ‘one’ as found in and limited to any or every being. It is not the ‘one’ of something, but rather, as Plotinus says, “one without the something; for if it were some ‘one,’ it would not be one itself [αὐτοέν].”42 To arrive at what Plotinus often calls “the power of all things,”43 that is, the condition such that there is anything at all, we must as he insists take away all intelligible content, all that is, all being, anything and everything whatsoever. For any such content, any thing, would necessarily be something that has ‘one’ as an attribute and so would not be “one without the ‘something’ ” or “one itself,” the principle of all things. Having reasoned his way to the recognition that being as such is conditioned and so cannot be the frst principle, Plotinus therefore asks, What then could the One be, and having what nature? It is not surprising that it is not easy to say, since it is not easy even [to say what] being or form [is]; but knowledge bearing on forms is possible for us. But insofar as the soul goes toward formlessness, since it is quite unable to comprehend what is not defned and as it were stamped by a varied stamp, it slips away and is afraid that it may have nothing.44

Plotinus has the good sense to panic when, upon recognizing that all things are conditioned and therefore not frst, he fnds himself compelled to ask why there is anything at all. For as we have seen, the removal of all things is the demise of thought itself. And precisely because the One is the cause of all things in the sense we have explained, it follows by strict necessity that the One is not 41. Plotinus, 5.5.6, 30–34. 42. Plotinus, 5.3.13, 52. 43. Plotinus, 3.8.10, 1; 5.1.7, 10; 5.3.15, 33; 5.4.1, 36; 5.4.2, 39; 6.7.32, 31. 44. Plotinus, 6.9.3, 1–7.

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any thing. As Plotinus repeatedly observes, if the One were anything at all, it could not be the cause of all things, because it would itself be included among all things. Te logic is incontrovertible: “Tat is not anything, but prior to every thing, and is not a being. . . . For since the nature of the One is generative of all things, it is none of them.”45 Again, “Te cause is not the same as the caused, and the cause of all things is none of them.”46 Again, “In order that being may be, on this account he is not being, but its generator.”47 Or, as Plotinus explains at greater length: Since the reality which is generated is form . . . and the form not of something but of everything, so that there is nothing else left out, it is necessary that that [that is, the frst principle] be formless. But if it is formless, it is not a reality [οὐσία]; for a reality must be some “this,” that is, something determinate; but that is not understood as a “this”; for then it would not be the principle, but only that “this” which you said it was. If therefore all things are in what is generated, which of the things in it will you say it is? Since it is none of these, it can only be said to be beyond these. But these are the beings, and being; therefore, “beyond being.” Tis “beyond being” does not mean a “this”—for it does not afrm—and it does not say its name, but it conveys only “not this.”48

Te One, then, is not anything, none of all things, and therefore is not an (inevitably wrong) answer to the question “Why is there anything at all?” or “Why are there beings?” Rather, the passage beyond being represents the self-annihilation of thought upon the recognition that being, just in that it is intelligible and therefore conditioned, is dependent, derivative, not frst. “How then can this come about? Take away all things.”49 “If you wish to grasp the ‘isolated and alone,’ you will not think.”50 45. Plotinus, 6.9.3, 55–56. 46. Plotinus, 6.9.6, 55–56. 47. Plotinus, 5.2.1, 7. 48. Plotinus, 5.5.6, 2–14. 49. Plotinus, 5.3.17, 39. 50. Plotinus, 5.3.13, 33. Te phrase, “isolated and alone,” is a decontextualized tag from Plato’s Philebus, 63b7–8.

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Te so-called “ascent to the One,” therefore, is not an ascent to an object, a being, to something or anything. It is rather an ascent of the self, an ascesis or mortifcation not merely of the body and the senses but of the mind itself. Tis is why, for Plotinus, what is sometimes termed the “outer” path, the metaphysical argument to a frst principle from the existence of the world, coincides with the “inner” path, the phenomenological or existential discovery of the frst principle as the inmost ground of consciousness or selfhood.51 Te way “up” is the way “in”:52 Te soul must become formless if there is to be no obstacle set in it to the fulfllment and illumination of the frst nature. If so, letting go of all outward things, it must turn altogether to the inward, not inclining toward any of the outward things, but unknowing all things, as previously with regard to sense, but now even with regard to the forms, and unknowing even itself, come into the vision of that.53

Plotinus compares this ascesis of the mind, this “unknowing all things,” not merely sensible things but intelligible reality or being itself, to fasting in preparation for a religious ritual: Te frst is the principle of being and more properly [frst] even than reality. So opinion must be reversed; if not, you will be left deprived of God, like those who at festivals, by gluttony, stuf themselves with things which it is not right for those going toward the Gods to take, thinking that these things are clearer than the vision of the God, for whom it is proper to celebrate the festival, and do not share in the rites within.54

Te demand that we unknow all things, even intelligible reality itself, may explain Plotinus’s enigmatic remark that beauty—not merely the beauty of sensible things, but intelligible beauty which is identical with being or intelligible reality itself—can distract us 51. For these “paths” see W. Norris Clarke, SJ, Explorations in Metaphysics (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 162. 52. See, e.g., Plotinus, 1.6.8, 1–5, and the whole of 5.1, especially sections 1–2 and 10–12. 53. Plotinus, 6.9.7, 15–21. 54. Plotinus, 5.5.11, 12–17.

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from the frst principle: beauty “even draws those who do not understand away from the Good, as the beloved [draws a child] from its father.”55 Expressions such as “Take away all things” and “You will not think” clearly articulate the ascent to the One not as a passage to a “frst and highest being,” which would be included among beings and therefore would itself be put into question when we ask “Why is there anything at all?,” nor as an ascent to something beyond being, which is obviously self-contradictory, but rather as the self-transcendence or silencing of thought to which that question impels the mind. It is a “standing outside and simplifcation and giving up of oneself,”56 so that we ourselves become “not reality but beyond reality by this intercourse.”57 One of Plotinus’s best and favorite metaphors for the One is that of light. He repeatedly compares the One not to a source of light, such as the sun, but rather to just light itself.58 As light itself is not any visible thing, but rather the condition by which anything is visible, so the One is not any intelligible thing, any being, but the condition such that anything is intelligible and so is. Te only way to “see” light itself is to redirect our attention, in seeing visible things, from the things themselves to the condition by which they are visible. Likewise, to pass from beings to the One is not to turn to another thing, but rather to attend to the condition by which there is anything at all: “If [intellect] dismisses the things seen [that is, the intelligibles, or beings] and looks toward that by which it sees, it looks at light and the source of light.”59 Te question “Why is there anything at all?” serves to prompt this shift of attention. But to attend to sheer light itself, taking away anything that underlies it or is illuminated by it, any visible thing, is not 55. Plotinus, 5.5.12, 36–37. Tis distraction may perhaps be compared to what Heidegger calls the “forgetfulness of being” (Sein) in our attention to beings (die Seienden). 56. Plotinus, 6.9.11.2. 57. Plotinus, 6.9.11, 42–43. 58. E.g., Plotinus, 5.3.17, 27–38; 5.5.7, 12–14; 5.6.4, 14. 59. Plotinus, 5.5.7, 18–21.

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to see anything, to “unsee” all things. Tus Plotinus describes the “vision” of the One as “flling the eyes with light, not making one see something else by it, but the light itself is what is seen.”60 Tis analogy should once again evoke the mind’s fear and distress at the passage beyond being, for eyes flled with light are dazzled, blinded, not seeing anything. Tis super-saturation and blinding of the intellect, not the apprehension of a “frst and highest being,” is what Plotinus means by the “vision” of the One. Proclus formalizes and systematizes the inescapable logic by which Plotinus argues that the cause of all things must be none of all things. A fundamental governing principle of his entire system is that the cause of any level of reality must itself not be that level or any member of it, since, as cause, it is prior to that level and all its members: “In every case, the cause is other than the things caused. And on this account nature is incorporeal, being the cause of bodies; and soul is altogether everlasting, as cause of things that come into being; and intellect is unmoved, as cause of all things that are moved.”61 Tis is precisely why we make the dialectical ascent to a higher level by the negation or “taking away” (ἀφαίρεσις) of the lower. Such ἀφαίρεσις constitutes the type of negation that signifes neither privation nor co-ordinate diference, but causal priority.62 By the same logic, Proclus continues, “If then in every procession of beings, the things that pertain to the efects are denied of the causes, it is thus necessary to take away all things likewise from the cause of all things.”63 “Te cause of all things,” Proclus explains, “must be that which all things participate.”64 Tat is, the cause of all things must not have, but must rather be nothing but, the character that all things 60. Plotinus, 6.7.36, 20–22. 61. Proclus, Platonic Teology (Plat. theol.) (Téologie platonicienne, 6 vols., ed. H. D. Safrey and L. G. Westerink [Paris: Belles Lettres, 2003]), 2.10, 62.12–15. 62. For these three types of negation see, e.g., Plat. theol. 2.5, 38.18–25. 63. Proclus, Plat. theol. 2.10, 62.15–18. 64. Proclus, Plat. theol. 2.3, 24.15–17.

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have and exist by having. Not all things are ensouled, or intellective, or living, and therefore neither soul, nor intellect, nor life is the cause of all things. Matter considered in itself is formless, and therefore is not caused by being qua intelligible form. But all things whatsoever are one, and exist only by being one: What then might be participated in every case and by all things? We must examine every being, what all things undergo and whatever is common in them all. . . . What else, then, do we say of each of them, but that it is one . . . and in general, that it is not possible to say anything else of all things, than that each and all are one? For if anything should be without a share of “one.” . . . straightway what becomes without a share of “one” would be nothing whatsoever.65

As in Plotinus, therefore, “the cause of all things” is not anything which is one, but just “one itself.” But since to be, to be anything at all, is to be not just “one” but one thing, that is, a thing that has or participates “one,” it follows that the “cause of all things” neither is nor is anything at all. Since all things whatsoever are from the One, the One itself is no thing. Tus, “as many things are negated of the One as proceed from it; for it must be none of all things so that all things may be from it,”66 or again, “For this reason it is none of all things, because all things proceed from it.”67 Proclus recognizes the performative contradiction entailed by thinking away all things whatsoever and therewith thought itself: “For there is neither any discourse nor any name of that . . . and . . . if there is no discourse of the One, neither is this discourse itself, which maintains these things, appropriate to the One. . . . And it is no surprise that, wishing to know the inefable by discourse, one brings discourse to the impossible . . . so that if there should be a discourse of the inefable, it does not cease overthrowing itself 65. Proclus, Plat. theol. 2.3, 25.7–16. 66. Proclus, In Platonis Parmenidem Commentaria (In Parm.), 3 vols., ed. Carlos Steel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007–2009) 6, 1076.23–25. 67. Proclus, Plat. theol. 2.5, 37.24–25.

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and fghts against itself.”68 Likewise, to say “Tere is no name of the One”69 is to contradict oneself by naming the One in saying that it has no name. Tus in his Parmenides commentary, after negating all things with regard to the One, Proclus asks whether these negations themselves are true of the One, and replies that they are not: “Te negations of the One are not about the One. For nothing whatever applies to it, neither as form nor as privation. . . . So none of the stated negative conclusions is about the One, but on account of its simplicity it is exalted above all opposition and all negation. Rightly therefore in the end he [that is, Parmenides in the dialogue] added that these negations are not about the One.”70 Even such negations, therefore, must themselves be negated: “Rightly therefore he fnally takes away even negations themselves from the One,”71 and “thus by negating he removes all negation and concludes with silence the study thereof.”72 As in Plotinus, then, the dialectical ascent to the “cause of all things” culminates not in negative thoughts but in silence, that is, in not thinking: “Come then, now if ever, let us make away with multiform cognitions, and banish from ourselves the variety of life, and coming into quiet [ἠρεμίᾳ] let us approach near to the cause of all things.”73 We naturally desire to know why there is anything at all, but this desire cannot be satisfed by knowing anything, and therefore by any knowing: “Even the purest of cognitions are not able to comprehend it. . . . But whatever they cognize, they desire more than this, on account of the connatural travail that is in them for the supereminence of the One.” 74 At the culmination of its 68. Proclus, Plat. theol. 2.10, 63.22–64.9. 69. Proclus, In Parm. 7, 508.12. 70. Proclus, In Parm. 7, 518.13–21. 71. Proclus, In Parm. 7, 519.8–9. 72. Proclus, In Parm. 7, 521.24–26. Cf. Trouillard, “Procession,” 2: “Super-negation [ὑπεραποφάσις] cuts away at once afrmations and negations, that is to say all the antitheses of meaning, to deliver the very origin of meaning.” 73. Proclus, Plat. theol. 2.11, 64.11–14; cf., e.g., Plat. theol. 2.9, 58.23; Plat. theol. 3.7, 30.8. 74.Proclus, In Parm 7, 502.33–503.2.

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ascent, therefore, the soul “approaches the One itself and unites, not inquiring what it is not and what it is, but altogether shutting down [claudentem]75 and contracting all activity and content with union alone.”76 Te image is that of the soul contracting to a point and thus, so to speak, blinking out altogether. Here again, therefore, we fnd the self-transcending or self-annihilation of thought in its recognition that all things whatsoever are caused, or derivative, not frst, and thus seeking to pass beyond all things. It is perhaps less well recognized, though demonstrably the case, that a similar line of reasoning can be found in the thought of Tomas Aquinas, who uses the word esse77 rather than ‘one’ to point to the “cause of all things,” which is therefore none of them. A being (ens, that which is), Aquinas explains, is a thing that has, or exercises, an act-of-existing (actus essendi, esse). Since a being is not just esse itself but something that has or “participates” esse, it follows that all beings are caused to be: It cannot be that esse itself is caused by the very form or quiddity of a thing [that is, by what the thing is] . . . because some thing would thus be its own cause and something would bring itself into existence, which is impossible. Hence it follows that every such thing, whose esse is other than its nature [that is, what it is], has esse from another. And since all that is through another is reduced to that which is through itself as to the frst cause, it follows that there is some thing which is cause of existing [causa essendi] to all things, in that itself is just esse. . . . For every thing that is not just esse has a cause of its esse . . . And this is the frst cause, which is God.78 75. Tis part of In Parm. is extant only in Latin translation. Te Greek “retroversion” by D. Gregory MacIsaac takes claudentem to represent μύσασαν, which can refer to shutting either the eyes or the mouth. Not incidentally, this word is the origin of “mystery,” “mysticism,” etc. 76. Proclus, In Parm. 7, 520.20–23. 77. Tis word cannot be translated as “being,” since the latter term here translates ens and refers to that which is, not the principle by which anything and everything is. Esse is best left untranslated, or translated literally as an infnitive verb, “to be.” 78. Aquinas, De ente 3.

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Like Plotinus in similar contexts, Aquinas is clearly speaking loosely when he refers to God as “some thing” (aliqua res), since in the same sentence he calls God the cause of existing to all things (omnibus rebus), not merely all other things. So too, in a similar passage in the Summa theologiae, Aquinas argues that “everything that in any way is [omne quod quocumque modo est] is from God,”79 which implies that God is not included in “everything that in any way is.” In the next article he observes that “the earliest philosophers” assigned causes to beings insofar as they are “such” by accidental forms or “these” by substantial forms. But then “others raised themselves to considering being insofar as it is being [ens inquantum est ens] and considered the cause of things, not only according as they are ‘these’ or ‘such’ but in that they are beings [secundum quod sunt entia].” To seek a cause of “everything that in any way is,” a “cause of things . . . in that they are beings,” is manifestly the same as to ask, “Why are there beings?” or “Why is there anything at all?” Aquinas continues, “Tis, therefore, which is the cause of things insofar as they are beings, must be the cause of things according to all that pertains to their esse in any mode,” and is therefore “the universal cause of beings.”80 Aquinas’s God, then, is clearly not merely a “frst being” which causes only all other beings, or a “necessary being” which causes only contingent beings, but rather the cause of being as such, the cause of existing to absolutely everything that exists in any way at all. God accounts for there being anything at all, in the absolutely all-inclusive sense. Tus Aquinas refers to God as principium to­ tius esse, “the principle of all ‘to be,’ ”81 clearly indicating that ‘to be’ itself, that is, that anything at all exists, is caused by God. So, too, 79. Aquinas, Summa theologiae 1, 44, 1, resp. 80. Aquinas, Summa theologiae 1, 44, 2, resp. 81. E.g., Tomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, ed. C. Pera et al. (Rome and Turin: Marietti, 1961), 1, 68, 3; Summa theologiae 1, 3, 5, resp; 1, 4, 3, resp.; De potentia 3, 1, resp.; Tomas Aquinas In libros physicorum, editio Leonina (Turin, 1954), 8, 2, 5. Tis formula indicates as well that the name esse taken positively signifes not what God is, but what all things have from him.

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he speaks of totum ens, all being or all that is, coming from God, or of God as the cause of all being.82 It follows, as he expressly recognizes, that God himself is not included in all that is.83 God “stands outside the order of beings [extra ordinem entium], as a certain cause pouring forth all being [totum ens] and all its diferences,”84 and again, “Te frst cause is above being [ens] in that it is infnite esse.”85 Tus it is well recognized that for Aquinas, metaphysics as the science of “being (ens) insofar as it is being” does not take as its subject an all-embracing totality “being” that includes both creatures and God, but rather addresses God, not as included in its subject, but only as the cause or principle of its subject.86 Like ‘the One’ or ‘one itself ’ in Plotinus and Proclus, therefore, the term ipsum esse does not provide a conceptual grasp of what God is,87 but indicates God as the principle of what all things—“everything that in any way is”—have from him, namely, to be. Aquinas’s doctrine of analogical predication does not mitigate 82. In addition to the passages quoted here see, e.g., Tomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, 2, 38, 3; Summa theologiae 1, 45, 1, resp.; De potentia 3, 1, resp.; In libros physicorum 8, 2, 5; Sententia libri ethicorum, editio Leonina (Rome: Sancta Sabina, 1969), 6, 2, 16. 83. Cf. Lawrence Dewan, OP, “What Does Createdness Look Like?,” in Divine Creation in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Tought: Essays Presented to the Rev’d Dr Robert D. Crouse, ed. Michael Treschow, Willemien Otten, and Walter Hannam (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007), 335–61, at 344: “ ‘[B]eing in its totality’ (totum ens) is the name for God’s efect, which he is himself beyond,” and again, 360: “Creation is a doctrine which pertains to reality as such. Te Creator creates ‘what it is to be real.’ Te Creator himself must be beyond reality, and can be called ‘real’ only in a somewhat new meaning of the word” (italics in original). Te word “somewhat” is both vague and understated: Aquinas explains precisely in what sense God can, and in what sense he cannot, be called a “being.” 84. Aquinas, Expositio libri Peryermeneias 1, 14, 22. He goes on to say that necessary/ contingent is a diference within being, and that “the frst cause . . . transcends the order of necessity and contingency.” See above, n. 27. 85. Tomas Aquinas, Super Librum de causis expositio, ed. H. D. Safrey (Fribourg and Louvain: Société Philosophique /Nauwelaerts, 1954), 6. 86. See John F. Wippel, “Tomas Aquinas and the Problem of Christian Philosophy,” in Metaphysical Temes in Tomas Aquinas (Washington, D.C.: Te Catholic University of America Press, 1984), 1–33, at 18; Jean-Luc Marion, “Saint Tomas d’Aquin et l’onto-théo-logie,” Revue thomiste 95, no. 1 (1995): 31–66, at 38–39. 87. Cf. Davies, “Kenny on Aquinas,” 126; Marion, “Saint Tomas d’Aquin,” 59–65, esp. 64; Stephen L. Brock, “On Whether Aquinas’s Ipsum Esse Is ‘Platonism,’ ” Review of Metaphysics 60 (2006): 269–303, at 301.

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but rather reinforces this conclusion. Analogy, in Aquinas’s usage, is not a way of explaining how the same concept can apply both to creatures and to God. On the contrary, he invokes analogy to insist that the word ‘being,’ or any other word, does not express the same concept in both cases.88 To say that everything is a being, or is a thing, is one, is good, and so on, and then to predicate the same terms not univocally but rather analogically of God, is just to say that “being” (or “thing,” etc.) is not a common totality that includes both creatures and God. Rather, such predication expresses only the order of all things to God as their principle: “Whatever is said of God and creatures is said according as there is some order of the creature to God, as to its principle and cause, in which all the perfections of things exist excellently.”89 We may say that God is (est) or call God a being (ens) only in the sense that all beings insofar as they are beings are efects and likenesses of God.90 It follows that there is no larger totality ‘beings’ that includes both creatures and God. Analogical predication thus says that God, as the principle of all being, is not included in all being (totum ens) or in “everything that in any way is.” Aquinas’s doctrine of analogy therefore efectively restates his insistence that there is no common totality—“beings,” “being,” “all that is,” “everything”—that includes both creatures and God, but rather that God is the principle of that very totality, totum ens, and as such not any member of it, or as Plotinus and Proclus would say, “none of all things.”91 88. See Ralph McInerny, Aquinas and Analogy (Washington, D.C.: Te Catholic University of America Press, 1996), 93: “[F]or St. Tomas, analogy is a kind of equivocation.” Te interpretation of analogy as meaning that the same concept applies in diferent ways (fnitely and infnitely) to creatures and to God is not Tomistic analogy but Scotistic univocity. By including God within the univocal totality “being,” this leads, via Suarez, to the failure on the part of Leibniz and his successors to this day to ask “Why is there anything at all?” in the full sense. 89. Summa theologiae 1, 13, 5, resp. 90. Aquinas, Summa theologiae 1, 4, 3, resp. 91. Cf. Marion, “Saint Tomas d’Aquin,” 39: “Tus, for Tomas Aquinas, God as such belongs neither . . . to ens commune, nor to ens in quantum ens,” and again, 43: “Common being [L’étant commun] cannot, according to Tomas Aquinas, introduce anything in

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It follows that, as Aquinas argues, we cannot know what God is but only what he is not, and hence can know God only by “remotion” or “taking away.” “Since we cannot know of God what he is, but what he is not, we cannot consider how God is, but how he is not. . . . It can be shown of God how he is not, by removing from him those things that do not pertain to him.”92 But “what he is not” includes absolutely all things whatsoever, because “all things” is precisely what comes from, or depends on, God: For the divine substance by its measurelessness exceeds every form which our intellect attains; and thus we cannot apprehend it by knowing what it is. Yet we have some knowledge of it by knowing what it is not. We approach knowledge of it insofar as we are able to remove more things from it by our intellect. . . . And then there will be proper consideration of his substance when he is known as distinct from all things.93

Tis corresponds precisely to Plotinus’s injunction to “unknow all things” or “take away all things” and to Proclus’s demand that we “take away all things from the cause of all things.” But when all things are removed there is nothing left to think, and so neither being nor thinking. To know God “as distinct from all things” is in fact not to know any thing, to “unknow” altogether. When we proceed to God by way of remotion, frst we negate of him corporeal things, and then even intellectual things, as they are found in creatures, such as goodness and wisdom; and then there remains in our intellect, that he is, and nothing more, wherefore it is as in a certain confusion. But in the end we remove from him even this esse itself as it is in creatures; and thus it remains in a certain darkness of unknowing, according to which unknowing, so far as pertains to the statum viae, we are best joined with God, as Dionysius says.94 common—and above all not its intelligibility—between being insofar as it is being [l’étant en tant qu’étant] and God. Te analogy of being [L’analogie de l’être] . . . never has any other function, for him, than to dig the gulf that separates these two acceptations of esse.” 92. Aquinas, Summa theologiae 1, 3, proem. 93. Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles 1, 14, 2–3. 94. Tomas Aquinas, Scriptum super libros Sententiarum, ed P. Mandonnet and

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Aquinas’s argument from all things to a cause of all things, then, does not lead to a God who is a being, or who is anything at all, but rather to the same self-transcendence, self-emptying, or silencing of thought that we found in Plotinus and Proclus. Such an approach is clearly far more, indeed infnitely more radical than merely positing God as a “frst and highest being” or a “necessary being.”

•

Far from being distinctively modern, the question “Why is there anything at all?” in its absolute sense has scarcely been asked since the Middle Ages.95 Tis question, taken absolutely, does indeed drive thought outside of itself, which is why those who do not limit it but acknowledge its full, absolute scope often set it aside as meaningless. But one man’s meaninglessness is another man’s mysticism. Rather than admitting an answer, the question serves to drive thought to its self-immolation in the face of the “wonder of all wonders,” that there are beings.96 Refecting on this question, neither ofering a positive answer nor dismissing it as meaningless but rather attending seriously to its all-comprehensive scope, thus ofers some insight into what Neoplatonists mean, and what they do not mean, by “the One,” and what Aquinas means when he calls God “ ‘to be’ itself ” or “just ‘to be.’ ”97 Te recognition that whatever M. Moos (Paris: Lethielleux, 1929–37), 1, 8, 1, 1, ad 4. Te reference to the status viae might be taken to indicate by contrast that in patria, that is, in the beatifc vision, knowing God by his essence, we will have a positive knowledge of what God is. Tis would imply that God is a “what,” a “something,” merely unknowable to us during this life due to our limitations. But in Aquinas’s account of the beatifc vision, the divine essence itself is united to the intellect in the role of the intelligible species by which we know, so that it is both what we know and that by which we know (Summa contra gentiles 3, 51, 4). To be flled with “just ‘to be’ ” is not to apprehend a determinate essence, or “something.” Cf. Plotinus’s metaphor for the vision of the One as “flling the eyes with light, not making one see something else by it, but the light itself is what is seen” (see above, p. 197). 95. Heidegger is no doubt the most prominent exception. 96. Martin Heidegger, “Nachwort zu: Was ist Metaphysik,” in Wegmarken, 3rd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1996), 307. 97. Cf. Jacques Maritain, Distinguer pour unir, ou les degrés du savoir (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1946), 457: “In saying ‘subsistent “to be” itself ’ [l’Être même subsistant], or ‘in him no real distinction between essence and existence,’ the metaphysician designates

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can be thought is something, that thought cannot escape from being, leads to the understanding of being as, precisely, that which is intelligible, that which is given to thought. Tis in turn leads to the realization that its very intelligibility implies that being is conditioned and therefore not absolutely frst. But the ground or source of meaning itself, of intelligibility, of thought and being in their togetherness, cannot itself be thought, be intelligible, be something or anything. Tus thought leads itself to its own silencing. Such dialectical mysticism is nothing irrational, but rather the logically necessary culmination of the intellectual ascent to being as that which all thought apprehends. If the question “Why is there anything at all?” points to God, it is not the God of theism (which is also the God of atheism)98 but the God of the mystics, never to be objectifed as a “necessary being” or a “frst and highest being” but inwardly approached with fear and trembling, by the self-transcendence of thought into the darkness of unknowing. without seeing it the sacred abyss that makes the angels tremble with love or terror.” In the tradition to which Maritain refers, angels are, precisely, intellects. 98. Cf. Jean-Luc Marion, Analogie et dialectique: Essais de théologie fondamentale (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1982), 20–21: “Te distinctive feature of modernity . . . does not at all consist in a negation of God. . . . Modernity is characterized in the frst place by the annulling of God as a question. . . . What then is found set in play in a negation or an afrmation of God? Not God as such, but the compatibility or incompatibility of an idol called ‘God’ with the totality of a conceptual vision where the being in its existence [l’étant dans son être] marks the age. . . . Teism or atheism bear equally on a idol. Tey remain enemies, but brother enemies in a common and insurpassable idolatry.” So-called “classical theism” is not classical at all but distinctly modern.

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seven

What Is Philosophy? p h i l i p p w. r o s e m a n n

Toward the beginning of the Symposium, we fnd Socrates and his friend Aristodemus headed to a banquet at Agathon’s. Socrates is looking forward to the event. He had avoided Agathon’s victory feast the day before because he was afraid of “the crowd” (τὸν ὄχλον);1 the more intimate banquet, however, is important enough for him to take a bath, oil himself, and even wear slippers. He wants to look beautiful, he says, “when going to beauty.”2 Despite Socrates’s eagerness to join the party, his conduct on the way is awkward. Having encouraged the uninvited Aristodemus to come along, Socrates begins to lag behind, so that his companion ends up arriving at Agathon’s house alone. Socrates comes later, having “turned his mind toward himself ” (τὸν οὖν Tis is the revised version of a lecture that I delivered at Maynooth University on June 14, 2017, at the invitation of Professor William Desmond of the Philosophy Department. I am grateful to Professor Desmond and to all my colleagues in Maynooth for their warm reception. In revising the piece, I have received incisive comments from Debra Romanick Baldwin in Dallas and Jefrey Dirk Wilson in Washington, D.C. 1. Symposium, 174a. I am quoting R. E. Allen’s translation, unless otherwise indicated: Te Dialogues of Plato, vol. 2: Te Symposium (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991). For the Greek text, see Te Symposium of Plato, ed. R. G. Bury, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: W. Hefer and Sons, 1932). 2. Symposium, 174a.

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Σωκράτη ἑαυτῷ πως προσέχοντα τὸν νοῦν).3 Even a slave who calls out to invite him in does not succeed in disrupting Socrates’s contemplation. He joins the party, but he does so on his own terms, when he decides the time has come. At the very beginning of the Symposium, then, Socrates appears as a fgure who exists in two worlds—one could perhaps say, between them.4 He is an outsider who is quite happy to participate in the activities that occur inside the society to which he belongs; or, conversely, he is an insider who is capable of transcending the mainstream, without however despising it; or, yet again, Socrates is a marginal fgure who is nevertheless at home in the center. Te philosopher is not shown as an alienated outsider—not in the opening pages of the Sympo­ sium.5 Te end of the dialogue returns to its initial characterization of Socrates, which it reafrms but also nuances. Tus, Alcibiades in his speech likens Socrates to Silenus and the satyr Marsyas, beings half human, half beast who, close to the god Dionysus, possessed fabulous gifts that raised them above regular human society. In the case of Marsyas, however, these gifts proved to be very dangerous in the end: Apollo fayed him alive for challenging him in a fute-playing contest. Here we get a frst hint that the margins may not always be a comfortable place for the philosopher to dwell in. Alcibiades’s eulogy to Socrates continues. Te philosopher’s sirenic speech always manages to seduce this handsome but superfcial young man, despite the fact that he entirely lacks a philo3. Symposium, 174d; my translation. 4. Te reader familiar with William Desmond’s philosophy of the “between” will notice considerable common ground between his conception of philosophy and the ideas expressed in this essay. On the philosopher as a fgure existing “between,” see, for example, Desmond’s booklet Being Between: Conditions of Irish Tought (Galway: Centre for Irish Studies; Inverin, Co. Galway: Leabhar Breac, 2008). 5. In the Allegory of the Cave, which we will have an occasion to discuss later, the matter looks diferent.

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sophic disposition: yet, in Socrates’s presence he feels shame that, instead of turning to himself, he indulges in the honors bestowed upon him “by the multitude” (ὑπὸ τῶν πολλῶν).6 The tension is so terrible that Alcibiades has often wished to see his beloved teacher dead—or, as he puts it more obliquely, to see him no longer “being among humans” (αὐτὸν μὴ ὄντα ἐν ἀνθρώποις).7 Tus, the space that the philosopher occupies turns out to be precarious: the outsider at the inside fascinates intensely, kindling fervent admiration and love—until that love turns into resentment and hate. Is it perhaps for this reason that Socrates makes sure his young admirers do not come too close? At any rate, when Alcibiades ofers himself to Socrates physically, the latter discreetly declines. Tey sleep under the same blanket, but at the end of the night, the experience was as though Alcibiades had “slept with a father or an elder brother.”8 No doubt there is also a pedagogical intention here on the part of the philosopher, who endeavors to teach Alcibiades the ascent from merely physical beauty to higher forms, and even to Beauty itself. Let us interrupt our reading of the Symposium here, even though we have certainly not exhausted the motifs of Socrates’s liminal existence in the dialogue. I would like to suggest that Plato’s characterization of the philosopher retains all its value, some 2,400 years after it was composed. Philosophy leads a precarious existence that oscillates between immanence and transcendence in relation to every feld of human experience. In this feld, I distinguish four axes, namely (in addition to philosophy itself ), the narrative, the religious, and the political.9 6. Symposium, 216b. 7. Symposium, 216c; my translation. 8. Symposium, 219d. 9. One is entitled to hear an echo here of Hegel’s claim concerning the co-constitutionality of philosophy, art, religion, and politics in the unfolding of Spirit. While not wishing to embrace the Hegelian metaphysics, I believe Hegel was right in emphasizing the unity of the cultural feld within which philosophy exists.

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Philosophy and Narrative Historically, philosophy arose out of story, which the Greeks called μῦθος. In particular, μῦθος is a signifcant story, one in which something is at stake for the speaker. Its truth is guaranteed by the Muses.10 Story—for which the preferred theoretical term now is “narrative”—is closer to human experience than philosophy is. While all human beings tell stories to understand themselves and their place in the world,11 philosophy comes into existence only once such stories are subjected to critical examination. Tis happened in ancient Greece in what Wilhelm Nestle infuentially termed the movement “from μῦθος to λόγος.”12 Although Nestle’s account of progress from “myth” to “reason” has been criticized as “simplistic”13 (and scholarship on this question has undoubtedly made progress since his seminal work), Nestle did not intend to claim that the development of early Greek thought was tantamount to some kind of fnal “overcoming” of myth. Rather, Nestle spoke of a “gradual movement apart” in the relationship between μῦθος and λόγος, despite their “manifold mutual interpenetration.”14 We can therefore say, in the spirit of Nestle himself, that the movement in question is never complete: philosophy never 10. For this meaning of μῦθος, see Robert L. Fowler, “Mythos and Logos,” Te Jour­ nal of Hellenic Studies 131 (2011): 45–66, esp. 53. 11. Tis is due to the fact that consciousness has a narrative structure. On this point, see for example the helpful discussion in Owen Flanagan, Consciousness Reconsid­ ered (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), esp. 197–200 (“Te Narrative Structure of Self-Representation”). Also see Richard Kearney, On Stories, Tinking in Action (London: Routledge, 2002), esp. chap. 1: “Where Do Stories Come From?” (3–14). 12. See Wilhelm Nestle, Vom Mythos zum Logos. Die Selbstentfaltung des griechischen Denkens von Homer bis auf die Sophistik und Sokrates, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1942; reprinted, New York: Arno Press, 1978). 13. Te term “simplistic” occurs in the very frst line of the abstract preceding Fowler’s essay, “Mythos and Logos” (cited in note 11 above), 45. 14. Nestle, Vom Mythos zum Logos, 18–19: “Trotz dieser vielfachen gegenseitigen Durchdringung ist aber doch ein allmähliches Auseinandertreten von Mythos und Logos unverkennbar, seit einmal das kritische Denken bei den Griechen erwacht ist, d.h. seit dem 6. Jahrhundert v. Chr.”

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fnally “emancipates” itself from story. Or, rather, if it does, it turns into science. Te Symposium testifes to the complicated relationship between μῦθος and λόγος. Plato approaches the question of love, ἔρως, through a succession of speeches, most of which are dominated by mythological elements. Te central speech, Socrates’s own, even relates a view of love that Socrates declares to have received directly from a priestess, Diotima. Te myth-based conceptions of love are, however, not accepted uncritically. Te succession of speeches itself suggests an ascent from more basic to more complete accounts, which build on the ones preceding them. A remark from the beginning of Eryximachus’s speech illustrates Plato’s method: “Well, since Pausanias began his speech beautifully but didn’t end it satisfactorily, it seems it’s up to me to try to bring the account to a conclusion.”15 Not only is Plato’s “theory” of ἔρως in the Symposium distilled from mythological elements; Plato inscribes the dialogue explicitly—though fctionally—into a network of oral transmission that is typical of myth. At the time when Apollodorus relates the story of the banquet at Agathon’s, the event has already receded into such a distant past that many of the accounts circulating about it have become nebulous. What we hear in the Symposium is, we are told, a more reliable version of the story, although even its origins are somewhat tangled. Apollodorus, who was not one of the guests that night, learned the story from Aristodemus, and even confrmed its veracity with Socrates. Yet the story we hear has an additional layer of mediation, for Plato makes us overhear a conversation between Apollodorus and an unnamed companion in which Apollodorus tells the latter of an account of the party that he recently gave to Glaucon. Te element of confusion is deliberate here. Rather than giving us a “theory” of love, Plato introduces us into a complicated web of human relationships in which the 15. Symposium, 185e–186a.

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story of Agathon’s banquet is transmitted due to its existential interest and signifcance. Philosophy is not always as entangled in story as it is in Plato’s case. Aristotle moved away from the literary form of the dialogue. Whereas the early Aristotle composed many writings—now lost apart from a few fragments—after the fashion of his teacher, the mature works that have come down to us are all treatises or lecture notes.16 Aristotle, however, gives up only one of the two central features of story, namely, chronological sequence. (Te lectures of his Metaphysics, say, are not arranged in the order in which things have come to be, but rather according to the structure of causal knowledge.) He retains the other feature, which is polysemy, at least in an attenuated form: his theory of focal meaning. Te most important instance of this theory concerns the meaning of “being.” Tis may be said in many ways, but all of them are intelligible only in relation to one privileged sense (πρὸς ἕν).17 Aristotle’s theory of focal meaning allows him to ofer a unifed account of reality which nonetheless acknowledges irreducible diference. Tus, none of the categories is reducible to any of the others; yet they are all said in relation to—and they cannot exist without—the frst, substance. Again, there are several kinds of substances, which do not have a common source, but to account for their movement we have to assume that they are oriented toward a frst, the Unmoved Mover. In addition to the structure of the πρὸς ἕν, the Stagirite recog16. Anton-Hermann Chroust’s research has shed much light on Aristotle’s lost dialogues; see, in particular, Anton-Hermann Chroust, Aristotle: New Light on His Life and on Some of His Lost Works, vol. 2: Observations on Some of Aristotle’s Lost Works, Routledge Library Editions (London: Routledge, 2016). 17. For a classical treatment of πρὸς ἕν equivocity, see Joseph Owens, Te Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian “Metaphysics”: A Study in the Greek Background of Mediaeval Tought, 3rd ed. (Toronto: Pontifcal Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1978), 107–35, esp. 118–23. Te term “focal meaning” was coined by G. E. L. Owen, “Logic and Metaphysics in Some Earlier Works of Aristotle,” in Aristotle and Plato in the Mid-Fourth Century, ed. Ingemar Düring and G. E. L. Owen, Studia Graeca et Latina Gothoburgensia 11 (Gothenburg: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1960), 163–90.

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nizes the importance of analogy in the texture of the world: “For in every category of Being the analogous (τὸ ἀνάλογον) is present—as the straight is in length, so is the level in surface, perhaps in number the odd and in color the white.”18 Πρὸς ἕν and analogy are not the same, in that the former requires two terms, the latter four; nonetheless both express a view of reality as a diferentiated whole whose levels, while referring to each other, are not able to be collapsed into each other. Since Aristotle regards analogy as the foundation of metaphor,19 there is still a proximity in his thought between scientifc knowledge (ἐπιστήμη) and story. We can understand the movement that occurs within philosophy toward a more scientifc method as a movement toward univocity.20 Science does not tolerate polysemy. A syllogism does not allow valid conclusions if its terms carry diferent meanings in the major and the minor premises. Even more so, quantitative science could not function if there were ambiguity within the numbers it employs. Put diferently, there can be good, more good, and perhaps even a highest Good, but there is no such thing as more and most of the numbers 1 or 27. Narrative, on the other hand, thrives on the ambiguity of metaphor. Te fact that a single term can have diferent meanings opens the text up to a multiplicity of interpretations that give it potential signifcance beyond the particular historical context in which it was composed. If we still read Plato’s Symposium, this is because the dialogue expresses transcendent truths through images—even mythological images, like Aristophanes’s story of the two halves. Philosophy, one could perhaps say, oscillates between two poles: on the one hand, its ground in 18. Aristotle, Met. N6, 1093b18–21; the translation is borrowed from Owens, Doc­ trine of Being, 123. 19. For references, see Owens, Doctrine of Being, 123 n. 67. 20. To point again to parallels between William Desmond’s thinking and mine, univocity is one of the four senses of being that Desmond distinguishes in his metaphysics. See William Desmond, Being and the Between, SUNY Series in Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), esp. 47–83.

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the polysemy of story; on the other hand, the univocity of science. Te sifting of story through the sieve of critical inquiry as well as the translation of story into theory occupy the middle ground. When philosophy tends toward the scientifc mode, as it has in much of modern thought, the price it pays for its precision is loss of existential signifcance. It sheds the ability to tell a story to help structure human consciousness, and therefore establish a sense of self. Understood scientifcally, philosophy is no longer a way of life that endeavors to make sense of “it all,” but becomes a discipline among many.21 It is for this reason that Heidegger speaks of the “end of philosophy” while emphasizing that a “task of thinking” remains, a task guided by a poetic attitude toward language.22 Scientifc philosophy also, like all science, loses its ability to reach for truth that transcends history. Tere is a reason why a contemporary physician no longer studies Avicenna’s Canon: the progress of medicine has superseded earlier forms of medical knowledge in a decisive manner. Te insights about love in the Symposium will never be left behind in this way. Christian thought remains inextricably tied to story, unless it misunderstands itself fundamentally. Just as λόγος arose from the ground of μῦθος in ancient Greece, so in the Christian era of thought theology and philosophy (which were at frst indistinguishable) came to be as an attempt to clarify the richly ambiguous biblical text. For a long time, biblical commentaries typifed the nature of Christian refection; that is to say, such refection remained tied to the narrative logic of the biblical text. A decisive rupture occurred only in the thirteenth century, when—among other factors—the introduction of Aristotelian metaphysics into 21. On the topic of philosophy as a way of life, I refer to the well-known book by Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed. Arnold Davidson, trans. Michael Chase (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 1995). 22. See Heidegger, “Te End of Philosophy and the Task of Tinking,” trans. Joan Stambaugh, in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco, Calif.: Harper, 1977), 373–92.

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the Christian West led to the ideal of theology as a “science.” At that point we encounter texts such as Aquinas’s great Summa theo­ logiae, in which the rigor of reasoning and system creates the edifce of a scientia divina.23 Tis edifce is as impressive as it is dry: Aquinas’s scientifc language, which carefully distinguishes meanings and deploys analogies in a tightly controlled manner, cannot be as enjoyable and edifying to read as, for example, the rhetorically brilliant narrative of Augustine’s Confessions. Te Summa is about as far as Christian thought can go toward science without losing itself.

Philosophy and the Divine Te stories upon which philosophy builds are not just fairy tales. We have already seen that the Greeks endowed μῦθος with a particular authority, that of the Muses. “ Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον,” as the text of the Odyssey famously begins: “Tell me, Muse, of the man of many devices.”24 Te notion that the poet relays a voice, or lends his or her voice to a message received from a higher authority, has by no means become obsolete today. In one of his last songs, “Going Home,” the late Leonard Cohen audaciously wrote of himself in the third person, as someone addressed by a higher power: He wants to write a love song An anthem of forgiving A manual for living with defeat A cry above the sufering 23. I have explored this topic in my 2003 Aquinas Lecture at Maynooth; see “Sa­ cra pagina or scientia divina? Peter Lombard, Tomas Aquinas and the Nature of the Teological Project,” in Tomas Aquinas, Teacher and Scholar: Te Aquinas Lectures at Maynooth, volume 2: 2002–2010, ed. James McEvoy, Michael W. Dunne, and Julia Hynes (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2012), 50–70. 24. Homer, Te Odyssey, Books 1–12, trans. A. T. Murray and rev. George E. Dimock, Loeb Classical Library 104 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 1.1.

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p h i l i p p w. r o s e m a n n A sacrifce recovering But that isn’t what I need him To complete I want him to be certain Tat he doesn’t have a burden Tat he doesn’t need a vision Tat he only has permission To do my instant bidding Which is to say what I have told him To repeat25

All the poet must do is say what he or she has been told to repeat. Tere is no burden to be original, to have what we call a “vision.” Te poet’s craft—Leonard Cohen was famous for spending years perfecting his compositions—depends on a receptiveness that precedes his eforts. Te insight that the poet expresses here concerns the radical heteronomy of human existence. Not only have we been “thrown” into a world not of our own choosing, as Heidegger would say; the stories that make sense of it all come to us from elsewhere: from the depths of history, like the Homeric myths, or from on high, like biblical revelation—and perhaps these two types of origin are in fact the same.26 Tese stories constitute the ground on which we stand, even if we choose to question or repudiate them. 25. I have previously commented on this Cohen song in my essay “Vernacularity and Alienation,” Existentia: An International Journal of Philosophy 23 (2013): 139–54. 26. Te idea according to which Christian revelation is the pleroma of a more general revelation in which God spoke to all human beings at the beginning of history is Augustinian. In the Retractationes (Book I, chapter 12) the Bishop of Hippo declared: “For the thing itself that is now called the ‘Christian’ religion existed also among the ancients and was not absent from the beginning of the human race, until Christ came in the fesh, from which point true religion, which already existed, began to be called ‘Christian’ (nam res ipsa, quae nunc Christiana religio nuncupatur, erat et apud antiquos nec defuit ab initio generis humani, quousque Christus ueniret in carne, unde uera religio, quae iam erat, coepit appellari Christiana).” Sancti Aurelii Augustini Retractationum libri duo, ed. Pius Knöll, Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum 36 (Vienna: Tempsky; Leipzig:

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Poetry, then, is close to prophecy. In some cases, the two even coincide, as we can see in some books of the Old Testament, like the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes. One of the diferences between poetry and prophecy no doubt concerns the explicit divine authority that the prophet claims, as well as the specifcally religious message he or she conveys. If what I have just said is true, then philosophy stands in a necessary relationship with the divine. It is a refection on the meaning of human existence within the horizon of authoritative stories associated with a divine source.27 In the case of much of Western philosophy, these stories have been the biblical ones that talk about God’s relationship with his people, and his life among men aimed to bring back home a humanity that has departed and deviated from its source. For a philosopher wishing to distance him- or herself from the religious tradition, there are two ways to attempt to shake of the infuence of its stories: one, which we have already touched upon, is the insistence on univocal language. Tus, Wittgenstein in his justly famous “Lecture on Ethics” declares that ethics, understood as a science of absolute value, is an impossible endeavor. For we cannot know anything like a good in itself, which does not correspond to an empirical state of afairs; all we know is particular goods, especially if they are measurable quantitatively: “Tis man is a good runner,” Wittgenstein explains, “simply means that he runs a certain number of miles in a certain number of minutes.”28 If we are Freytag, 1902), 58; my translation. On this Augustinian assumption, since divine inspiration comes from the depths of history, treating the biblical texts as historical documents is not fundamentally opposed to regarding Scripture as divinely inspired. 27. Tis is a claim Josef Pieper makes in his book Tradition: Concept and Claim, trans. E. Christian Kopf (South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 2010), esp. 63: “After and insofar as I as a person am actually participating in a tradition or, to put it another way, insofar as I actually accept the tradita of sacred tradition as truth for whatever reasons (but of course not uncritically or arbitrarily), then and only then do I have the capacity to practice philosophy seriously.” 28. Wittgenstein, Lecture on Ethics, ed. Edoardo Zamuner, Ermelinda Valentina Di Lascio, and D. K. Levy (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 45.

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always limited to such empirically verifable statements, then, Wittgenstein continues, “we cannot write a scientifc book, the subject matter of which could be intrinsically sublime, and above all other subject matters.”29 In his very disciplined insistence on empirically based, univocal, scientifc language Wittgenstein reduces philosophy to inquiry regarding the proper usage of terms. He realizes that this conception constitutes a narrowing of the scope of philosophical questioning, but he believes his asceticism is necessary to safeguard the intellectual integrity of the philosophical enterprise. Furthermore, Wittgenstein sees with great clarity what the problem is regarding ethical and religious language: it is metaphorical. He writes, “Now all religious terms seem in this sense to be used as similes or allegorically. For when we speak of God and that he sees everything and when we kneel and pray to him all our terms and actions seem to be parts of a great and elaborate allegory which represents him as a human being of great power whose grace we try to win etc.”30 For Wittgenstein, the polysemy of religious language is sufcient reason to eliminate it from the feld of philosophic inquiry. Tere simply cannot be any scientifcally responsible discourse regarding the absolute. Te Austrian philosopher arrives at this conclusion with regret, perhaps even with pain. His “Lecture on Ethics” ends with the words, “Ethics, so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.”31 Te second way for a philosopher to try to step outside the religious tradition is to combat narrative with narrative. Tis is 29. Wittgenstein, Ethics, 46. Te comma after “book” is obviously a mistake. Wittgenstein does not want to say that we cannot write a scientifc book; thus, the relative clause that follows “book” must be restrictive. 30. Wittgenstein, Ethics, 48. 31. Wittgenstein, Ethics, 51.

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Nietzsche’s strategy. Since Nietzsche believes that all language is metaphorical, accusing Christianity of using unscientifc language is not a viable strategy. Nietzsche does not maintain that there is no possibility of speaking about the meaning of life, but rather that the Christian story has promoted countervalues. To undermine its slavish loser morality, the early Nietzsche draws on Greek mythology, as in his description of the Apollonnian and Dionysian forces in Te Birth of Tragedy. Te later Nietzsche, by contrast, constructs his own counternarrative in Tus Spake Zarathustra. He invents a mythology of the prophet Zarathustra’s attempts to convert humanity—not to God, however, but to the idea that God is dead. Tus Spake Zarathustra is a parody of a sacred book, even mirroring the language of the Bible, but with a radically anti-Christian message. For Nietzsche, the point is not to get rid of religious stories, but to tell the right ones—namely, those that will hasten the birth of the overman. My claim, then, is that philosophy, if it wants to remain meaningful, cannot shake of its religious roots. Tis does of course not mean that every philosopher is condemned to be a theist. It may be impossible, however, at least at this point in the development of the Western philosophic tradition, to philosophize outside an ultimately religious horizon. Tus, for example, Marx’s dream of an absolutely just social and economic order draws its force from the transposition, onto secular terrain, of the religious longing for the healing of the world’s wounds in an eschatological future.32 Heidegger’s radical “destruction” of Western metaphysics has been shown to constitute a philosophical adaptation of a key concept in Lutheran theology.33 32. Karl Löwith describes Marx’s transformation of biblical eschatology in less charitable terms, speaking of a “pseudo-morphosis of Jewish-Christian messianism.” Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 46. 33. One of the most detailed treatments of Heidegger’s indebtedness to Luther’s notion of destructio is Benjamin D. Crowe, Heidegger’s Religious Origins: Destruction and Authenticity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 44–66.

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Philosophy as Critique One of the most important functions of philosophy in relation to religion is critical. Wittgenstein is correct that religion has the tendency to represent God or the gods by means of metaphors that are anthropomorphic. From the point of view of a critical examination of the stories of religion, which the believer considers to be divine revelations, it is easy to accuse these metaphors of being naïve projections of human hopes and fears. Nonetheless, the asceticism with regard to metaphorical language that we fnd in Wittgenstein is not foreign to the religious tradition itself. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” the philosopher famously declares in the last line of the Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus.34 Te mystical overtones of this statement have not escaped scholarly attention.35 It is reminiscent of PseudoDionysius the Areopagite, whose Mystical Teology culminates in a denial of the applicability of every human concept to that which transcends all speech. Shockingly, even key terms of the Christian faith such as divinity, godhead, goodness, fatherhood, and sonship fall under Dionysius’s censure of inadequate conceptions. Yet the radical critique of the Mystical Teology is meant not as a denial of the reality of God, but rather as an afrmation of the hyper-reality of that which the soul encounters in the cloud of unknowing. Te Pseudo-Dionysius wants to guide his readers in an ascent that requires a radical purging of the mind to free it for the inefable. When Kant writes, in the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, that he “had to deny knowledge, in order 34. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, International Library of Psychology, Philosophy, and Scientifc Method (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922), 189. Wittgenstein repeats this statement in the preface (27). 35. See Russell Nieli, Wittgenstein: From Mysticism to Ordinary Language (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), as well as the same author’s “Mysticism, Morality, and the Wittgenstein Problem,” Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 9 (2007): 83–141.

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to make room for faith,”36 his philosophical strategy in addressing the claims of religion still bears a certain resemblance to the tradition of negative theology in which the Pseudo-Dionysius was such a central fgure. Kant, admittedly, was no mystic who wanted to guide his readers toward God. Nonetheless, the philosopher from Königsberg also regarded his rigorous delimitation of the rightful use of reason as a necessary precondition for a properly understood religious life. Te origins of negative theology, of course, lie in the celebrated passage from Book VI of the Republic where Socrates declares the Form of the Good to belong in a realm “beyond being” (ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας; 509b).37 It follows that the Good eludes any attempt to capture it in direct, univocal knowledge, so that Socrates has to approach its nature by means of the Simile of the Sun. According to this understanding of the limits of philosophic inquiry, philosophy operates within a space that is opened up by the erotic quest for Beauty and the Good, but is delimited by the impossibility of ever reaching that which is highest—or at least of grasping it intellectually. Another way to formulate this idea is to say that philosophy is propelled toward the Absolute by stories that place the human being in relation to the divine, but that its critical functions show these stories to be what they are: metaphorical language attempting to speak of the unspeakable. Philosophy, then, confronts us with our fnitude, but it cannot promise us salvation.

Philosophy and Society Alcibiades’s love for Socrates places him, as we have seen, in a tension-flled space between his teacher and the multitude. Te 36. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), 29 (B xxx). 37. For the Greek text, see Plato, Platonis Respublica, ed. S. R. Slings, Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003).

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multitude prevents him from turning toward himself, instead showering him with superfcial and distracting honors. Alcibiades experiences the confict as so painful that he imagines Socrates’s death as a possible solution. Philosophy is a dangerous enterprise. Te Allegory of the Cave in Book VII of the Republic confrms this impression. When the person who has been freed from the shackles inside the cave and emerged into the daylight of reality rejoins his former fellow prisoners, they mock him or her for the inability to function in the cave world. More than that, should the freed individual who has seen the light attempt to unshackle the cave dwellers, they will resist to the point of attempting to kill their liberator. Does the picture Plato paints in these passages provide a convincing representation of the relationship between the philosopher and the “crowd” (or, as we would say, society)? Does the philosopher stand in danger of being shunned and persecuted for his or her generous attempts to draw others toward Beauty and Goodness? In the twentieth century, there is one philosopher who has made the confict between the philosopher and society the center of his thought. I am referring to Leo Strauss, the author of “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” who argues that the only way for the philosopher to escape persecution—and possibly death—is to write between the lines, as Plato himself did.38 To divulge the truth to the masses—to those who have no idea what the philosopher is talking about when he returns from the light to the cave—is both futile and dangerous. Strauss suggests that all the major philosophers in the Western tradition have practiced this art of writing, which includes not only the ability to bury sophis38. Strauss incisively articulates his method of reading in “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” Social Research 8, no. 4 (Winter 1941): 488–504. Tis seminal essay was reprinted in Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (New York: Te Free Press, 1952), 22–37.

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ticated hints at deeper meanings in superfcially straightforward passages, but also the willingness to tell Platonic “noble lies” when this is necessary. One of the assumptions underpinning Strauss’s position— and Plato’s as well—is that the philosopher stands totally outside the crowd, being able to separate him- or herself entirely from the prejudices of the many and to rise to transcendent levels of insight. Tis is a claim difcult to uphold in the wake of Hegel, one of whose achievements was to bring to consciousness the inextricable connection between being, truth, and history. For Hegel, the philosopher is not the one who rises above the conditions of his time but, quite the opposite, the one who is capable of articulating the level of self-consciousness that Spirit has reached at a particular stage of its historical unfolding. Truth, rather than standing above time, realizes itself historically since being itself does. Rather than constituting a modern innovation that must ultimately undermine transcendent truth, Hegel’s “historicism” (as Strauss termed this most abominable of philosophical positions) has deep roots in Christian revelation. For Christianity is not—or, rather, it is not only—the belief in an utterly other and transcendent God, but it also afrms that this inefable God has become man; that is to say, that this God has become immanent, assuming the human condition in all its particularity and brokenness. Te Father in heaven has granted salvation through the Cross of his Son on earth, through whom he has spoken to his people: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No man cometh to the Father, but by me” ( John 14:6; Douay-Rheims). Since Jesus was a particular individual born into the particular conditions of a male body, a Jewish religious tradition, an Aramaic language, a Roman regime, and so on and so forth, the path to understanding his message— God’s message—is a path that leads through historical particularity. Put diferently, the Truth is accessible only in time. Tis aspect of Hegel’s philosophy is not, it seems to me, a mere “counterfeit

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double” of the Christian conception but a legitimate philosophical articulation of it.39 Tere are no objective criteria to decide which of these conceptions is true, the Platonic or the Christian/Hegelian. Tey are, however, less totally in contradiction than it might appear at frst sight. Surely, the Hegelian philosopher is not someone who is simply carried along by the everyday assumptions of the average subjects of history; rather, the philosopher is an exceptional individual through whom Spirit utters itself—comparable to the worldhistorical fgure who, in the arena not of theory but of action, enables the violent transition from one historical epoch to the next, higher one. Note that the world-historical fgure tragically falls prey to the ruse of Reason, like Caesar and Napoleon, who sacrifced themselves in facilitating the unfolding of a higher form of political order. Tus, interestingly, both in Plato and in Hegel the philosopher faces a perilous destiny. But the main point here is that, for Hegel as for Plato, the philosopher stands at a level of insight which by far transcends the everyday consciousness of the masses. What, then, of Strauss’s claim according to which the philosopher must hide his or her insights from the masses? Te point we just made about the fate of the world-historical individual— and, therefore, perhaps of the philosopher—seems to validate this claim. Strauss is in fact right in drawing attention to a tradition of esoteric writing that was for a long time part of Western thought—including even Christian thought. For example, in his Mystical Teology the Pseudo-Dionysius warns the fctional addressee of the treatise: “But see to it that none of this comes to the hearing of the uninitiated (τῶν ἀμυήτων), that is to say, to those 39. Te claim that Hegel’s philosophy is a “counterfeit double” of Christian orthodoxy is William Desmond’s. Desmond advances this claim specifcally in relation to Hegel’s understanding of God, which he rightly considers incompatible with an orthodox view of divine transcendence. See Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double?, Ashgate Studies in the History of Philosophical Teology (Aldershot, Hants.: Ashgate, 2003).

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caught up with the things of the world, who imagine that there is nothing beyond instances of individual being.”40 Few believers—let alone those who are caught up in a totally worldly existence—possess the capacity to penetrate to the deepest mysteries of the faith. Tis reality does not mean, however, that the Christian thinker has to tell noble lies, withhold knowledge, or write between the lines. Some of these strategies have indeed been deployed in the history of Christianity—one has to think only of the Church’s erstwhile reluctance to place the Bible in the hands of the ordinary faithful—but the most fundamental way of communicating insights to an audience that is composed of minds of greater and lesser capacity is much simpler. It consists in composing stories. Te stories of the Bible, just like the story of Augustine’s life in the Confessions and, indeed, just like the Platonic dialogues, can be read at diferent levels, according to the capacity of the reader. At the most basic level, a story is just a narrative of events, entertaining but not necessarily very deep. Tus, in the Symposium a group of men get together to give speeches regarding love. Te speeches, some full of mythological detail, are enjoyable to listen to. But is there a particular logic to the order in which the speeches are given? Why is it that Socrates lags behind Aristodemus in joining the party? Why does he relay an account received from the priestess Diotima? Such questions lead to a more complete understanding of the story. Finally, the story may even have an apophatic level. Tus, perhaps Socrates’s refusal to have sex with Alcibiades is not merely meant to teach the latter the need to transcend physical desire; maybe it indicates the ultimate elusiveness of Beauty and Goodness themselves. Tat certainly is the point of the Simile of the Sun in the Republic. 40. Pseudo-Dionysius, Te Mystical Teology, chap. 1, no. 2, in Te Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid, Te Classics of Western Spirituality (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1987), 133–41, at 136. Translation amended. For the Greek text, see Corpus Dionysiacum II, ed. Günter Heil and Adolf Martin Ritter, 2nd ed., Patristische Texte und Studien 67 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012), p. 142, ll. 12–14.

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Conclusion So what is philosophy? Interpreting some key passages in the Sym­ posium that portray the fgure of Socrates, I have suggested that philosophy is of a hybrid nature. To adapt an image from Nie­ tzsche’s Zarathustra, the philosopher walks a tightrope between his or her unifed self, which is concentrated in contemplation of Goodness and Beauty, and the dispersed masses, who are attached to their dim cave world with its superfcial attractions. For the sake of souls like Alcibiades, Socrates has to attempt the tightrope walk, even at the risk of falling. Similarly, in relation to its narrative roots, philosophy performs a balancing act. Philosophy arises from story, whether this is Greek myth or Christian revelation, but its function in this regard is one of critique. We have said that, grounded in the polysemy of story, philosophy moves toward the univocity of science. Among the Greeks, Plato and Aristotle embody opposed attitudes toward story. Plato embraces narrative, though the fctions he creates in his dialogues deploy narrative elements in the service of a philosophical project.41 Aristotle, on the other hand, opts for a presentation that is largely stripped of myth, save for the occasional quotation of a proverb. In the Christian period, Augustine exemplifes a thinker who remains close to his faith understood as story. We witness this approach in his biblical commentaries, but also in the Confessions, an opus sui generis that attempts to place the reader on the path to salvation by drawing him or her into the gripping story of Augustine’s own conversion. Te Bishop of Hippo’s more doctrinal works all focus on particular aspects of Christian teaching, such as the Trinity or question of free will and grace. Augustine never 41. On Plato’s use of myth, see the wide-ranging contributions in Plato and Myth: Studies on the Use and Status of Platonic Myths, ed. Catherine Collobert, Pierre Destrée, and Francisco J. Gonzalez, Mnemosyne Supplements 337 (Leiden: Brill, 2012).

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sets out to develop something like a “system,” in which the order of story is replaced by the logic of the “discipline” of theology. In this regard, Tomas Aquinas is his diametrical opposite. To be sure, Tomas composes biblical commentaries, but his oeuvre culminates in the Summa, which sets out to articulate the Christian faith as a tightly argued system which even claims to be a science in the Aristotelian sense. In our own day, philosophy is characterized by the division into the analytic and Continental traditions. For better or for worse, these are the styles of philosophizing that dominate the philosophy departments of most Western universities. Te lesser representatives of both styles often lack not only the ability to enter into dialogue with thinkers from the other tradition, but even the ability to refect on the historical roots of their own. Te analyticContinental division can be understood as refecting diferent conceptions of the relationship between philosophy and narrative. Nietzsche, undoubtedly one of the founding fgures of Continental thought, regarded philosophy as inextricably connected with story. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, strove to rid philosophy of allegory and metaphor, which he considered unscientifc attempts to speak of that whereof we cannot speak. Te mystical streak in Wittgenstein’s thought is remarkable, however, in that it points to limitations that he understood only too well—unfortunately unlike some of his successors in the analytic school. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”: Wittgenstein’s phrase can be taken to point to the hybrid nature of philosophy in relation to the gods, and to God. Its rootedness in stories that tell of the divine as it were drags philosophy into a quest for the Absolute; yet its recognition of metaphor as metaphor brings philosophy to the sobering insight that there is something for which we long that we cannot know, something extremely important of which we cannot speak, except in images. Since philosophy is not faith, it cannot—qua philosophy—assent to the metaphors

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of myth or revelation. Philosophy can be a preparation for faith, as in Tomas Aquinas, or it can insist that the space of the Absolute must remain empty, as in Nietzsche. In relation to society or, more broadly, to the historical conditions of its existence, philosophy has a similarly ambiguous status. Tat the philosopher stands somewhat outside of society is not only what Plato’s depiction of Socrates suggests; it is also evident from the tension that exists in our own time between philosophy as an academic discipline and the demand that universities provide a “useful” education leading to well-paying jobs. It is easy for medicine and chemistry to meet that demand—although even they need a space for disinterested research—and even certain humanities, like modern languages, can easily argue for their socalled “relevance.” Philosophy must however, if it does not want to lose itself, keep its critical distance from society, just as it cannot allow itself to be absorbed into story and religion. Yet this critical distance, this element of transcendence, does not mean that philosophy is irrelevant. A society cannot function without critical distance to itself. Take the example of Heidegger’s critique of technology. What the philosopher discusses in “Te Question Concerning Technology” will not help us resolve any of the particular technological problems we face, such as the massive collection of personal data or the way in which digital media are increasingly taking the place of reality in people’s lives. Heidegger’s analysis of the ontological status of technology does something else: it challenges the idea that the sophisticated and pervasive use of advanced technology will establish humanity as the “lord of the earth”; in fact, if we so delude ourselves, technology might end up making us into a “human resource” to promote its relentless drive toward efciency and proft. We need to understand our fnitude: at the ontological level, technology is not a set of man-made tools, but it is Gestell, the way in which being is “sent” in our age. Tis is structurally an

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apophatic move: as Heidegger challenges our certainty regarding our understanding and “mastery” of technology, we are confronted with the elusiveness of the ground, namely, with the enigmatic Ereignis. Tere is no “solution” to this situation; there is only Heidegger’s recommendation that we approach the question of technology through art, in particular through poetry. For “all ways of thinking, more or less perceptibly, lead through language in a manner that is extraordinary.”42 Tus, philosophy certainly rises above the level of “average everydayness” to an understanding of the conditions for the possibility of our contemporary world, indeed of being itself. Tese conditions, however, do not open themselves to the intellectual grasp of the philosopher, but remain a mystery. Tis means that, in the end, one of the fundamental functions of philosophy in our contemporary society is to teach not knowledge, but the limits of knowledge; not confdence in our ability to progress relentlessly, but humility in the face of fnitude. 42. Heidegger, “Te Question Concerning Technology,” trans. William Lovitt, in Basic Writings, 307–41, at 307.

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contributors contributors

Contributors WILLIAM DESMOND is David Cook Chair in Philosophy at Villanova University and professor of philosophy emeritus at the Institute of Philosophy, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. He is also the Tomas A. F. Kelly Visiting Chair in Philosophy at Maynooth University, National University of Ireland. His work is primarily in metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of religion. He is the author and editor of many books and more than one hundred articles. He published Te Gift of Beauty and the Passion of Being in 2018. His most recent book is Te Voiding of Being: Te Doing and Undoing of Metaphysics in Modernity (Te Catholic University of America Press, 2019). He is past president of the Hegel Society of America, the Metaphysical Society of America, and the American Catholic Philosophical Association. TIMOTHY B. NOONE, Father Kurt Pritzl, O.P., Chair in the School of Philosophy at Te Catholic University of America, holds degrees from Lock Haven State University and the University of Toronto. He specializes in mediaeval Franciscan philosophy, especially the works of Duns Scotus. Noone is co-editor, along with Jorge Gracia, of A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages, as well as the author of more than ffty articles and book chapters. He is past president of the American Catholic Philosophical Association and of the Society for the Study of Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy in North America. Noone is a part-time professional musician, specializing in bluegrass music played on harmonica, guitar, and banjo.

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contributors ERIC D. PERL received his Ph.D. from Yale University and is professor of philosophy at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. His publications include Teophany: Te Neoplatonic Phi­ losophy of Dionysius the Areopagite; Tinking Being: Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition ; Plotinus, Ennead V.1: On the Tree Primary Levels of Reality: Translation, Introduction, and Com­ mentary, as well as numerous articles and book chapters on Plato, Plotinus, and other fgures in the Platonic philosophical tradition. JOHN RIST was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. He has taught at the University of Toronto, University of Aberdeen, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Te Catholic University of America, and the Istituto Patristico. Te American Catholic Philosophical Association awarded him the Aquinas Medal (2014). He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and an honorary chief of the Tiv tribe in Benue State, Nigeria. He has written on ancient philosophy, patristics, and ethics; his most recent work is What Is a Person? In 2020, he was honored by the publication of a Festschrift, Passionate Mind (edited by Barry David). PHILIPP W. ROSEMANN studied in Hamburg, London, Belfast, and Louvain-la-Neuve. He currently holds the chair of philosophy at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, where he moved in 2018, after happily teaching at the University of Dallas for twenty years. He works at the intersection of contemporary Continental thought and the Christian intellectual tradition. His most recent book is a Foucauldian interpretation of Catholic tradition: Charred Root of Meaning: Continuity, Transgression, and the Other in Christian Tradition. Rosemann is founding editor, and now coeditor, of the series Dallas Medieval Texts and Translations. In 2020, he was elected to the Royal Irish Academy. DONALD PHILLIP VERENE is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy at Emory

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contributors University. He has held visiting appointments at the universities of Oxford, Toronto, and Rome and at the Folger Library. He holds a doctorate of humane letters (L.H.D.), Knox College. He is a fellow of the Italian national academy of arts and sciences, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. His writings are concentrated in the history of philosophy and the philosophy of culture, literature, and morals. He is the author of twenty books and more than two hundred articles, essays, translations, reviews, and encyclopedia entries. JEFFREY DIRK WILSON is collegiate associate professor of philosophy at Te Catholic University of America. He previously taught at Mount Saint Mary’s University. Wilson holds degrees from Bowdoin College, Union Teological Seminary (New York), Oxford University, and Te Catholic University of America. His areas of specialization are classical metaphysics, ancient Greek philosophy, and political thought. He has published in Clio, Te Inter­ national Journal of Philosophy, Philotheos, and Te Review of Meta­ physics. He lives and works on a family farm in Street, Maryland.

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index

index

Index Abelard, P., 50–51 absolute, 120, 125, 159–60, 162, 164, 182, 183, 189, 205, 221, 217–18, 227–28 accident, 27, 34, 192 Achilles, 89n18, 89n20 actuality, 71, 121, 126, 133 Adam, 62, 174n41 Aeschylus, 57 Agamemnon, 93 Agathon, 4, 207, 211–12 Albright, D., 148n14, 173n41 Alcibiades, 5, 208–9, 222, 225–26 Alexandria, 33, 64; school of, 64 analogy, 43, 128, 197, 203, 213 analytic philosophy, 11–12, 227 Anaximander, 157n26, 171 Angus, I. H., 108n63 Anselm, 8n25, 48 Antigone, 81 Antisthenes, 63, 85n7 appearance, 94, 114, 122–25, 139–30, 161n29 Apollo, 147, 150, 208 Apollodorus, 211 Aquinas, Tomas, 1, 3n10, 8, 15, 20, 22, 27, 39, 48, 52, 63, 71–72, 180–81, 183n14, 184–87, 191, 200–205, 215, 227–28 argument, 6, 10n33, 12, 48, 67, 71, 85n7, 96, 99, 104, 132, 138n3, 180, 184n16, 187, 194, 205 arguments, 6, 12, 18, 38, 40–41, 44,

46–48, 51, 66, 69–70, 78, 85–86, 118, 180n8 Aristippus, 85n7 Aristotle, 1, 4, 6–7, 11, 13, 15–22, 25–27, 29, 35, 38n8, 43, 52, 55–56, 58, 63, 67, 70–72, 75, 77, 83–92, 96–97, 99–102, 104–9, 117–18, 120, 131–32, 134, 136–37, 138n3, 139–42, 144, 151, 153n21, 158–62, 162n31, 173n38, 175–76, 212–13, 226 Aristodemus, 207, 211, 225 Aristophanes, 85n7, 141, 213 Arnauld, 128 art, 17, 43–45, 74, 85n7, 92n25, 101n53, 111–12, 119–20, 134–35, 169, 176, 209n10, 222, 229; symbolic, 155; symbolic form of, 155; thought of, 7 astonishment, 4; infnite, 21, 170; ontological, 163–65, 172–74, 176; primal, 166 author, 36, 54, 70, 102, 104, 121, 222; ancient, 94; historical, 36; original, 58, 85; Plato as, 103–4; pseudohistorical, 36 Averroes, 35, 71–72 Avicenna, 35, 71, 214 awareness, 8, 86, 190; human, 3 Augustine, 8, 14–15, 37, 55–57, 59, 69–70, 72–73, 76–77, 215, 217n28, 225–26 babble, 23, 177–78 babbling, 23, 139, 177–78

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index Bacchylides, 57 Bach, J. S., 15 Bacon, F., 56, 124 Bacon, R., 127 Baldwin, D. R., 207n1 Barnes, J., 84n6, 86n12, 87n13, 90n24, 92n26, 95–96, 100n51, 101n53, 117n20, 120n25, 134n55 Bazzi, P., 185n 19 beauty, 5, 195–96, 207, 209, 221–22, 225–26; intelligible, 195 Beckett, S., 140 becoming, 56, 105, 138, 145n11, 149–50, 154, 156–57, 159–61, 164–66; being and, 154–55; category of, 160; logic of, 156, 171; process of, 149, 156, 158, 160, 166 Beethoven, 77 being, 2, 10, 14n42, 18, 23, 27, 82, 83–84, 85n7, 93–94, 95n37, 97, 105, 110–11, 118, 133–34, 141–42, 144, 145n11, 149, 152–54, 156, 159–60, 163–65, 171–73, 178, 180n8, 181–98, 200–206, 212, 213n21, 223, 225, 228–29; Being, 117; beyond, 4, 21, 23, 194, 196–97, 221; category of, 83, 213; cause of, 180, 191, 201; determinations of, 187; discovery of, 82, 105; divine, 91; frst, 180n8, 201; frst and highest, 196–97, 205–6; God’s, 1; human, 24, 110, 113, 175, 218, 221; images of, 117; immaterial realm of, 109; knowledge of, 116; mythological, 91; natural, 93–94; necessary, 180n8, 181, 186n27, 187, 201, 205–6; negation of, 160; non-, 186; overdeterminacy of, 166; porosity of, 137n1, 152, 171; pure, 159; qua being, 95; qua intelligible form, 198; sense of, 163–64, 166, 178; static,

142n8, 154; underlying, 6, 105; univocal determination of, 164 beings, 113, 167, 170–71, 180, 192, 197, 200–201, 203, 205, 208; cause of, 180; contingent, 180n8, 181, 183, 186n27, 201; living, 100; natural, 94, 97. See also human beings Bentham, 74 Berengar of Tours, 8 Bergin, T. G., 83n3, 114n11 Bindervoet, E., 152n20, 174n41 Boehner, P., 50n18 Boethius, 8, 51n20, 55 Boh, I., 50n18 Borges, J. L., 124n35 Bradbrook, M. C., 122n30 Bradley, F. H., 124–25 Brecht, B., 24, 125–26 Brisson, L., 101n53 Brock, S. L., 202n87 Brown, N., 147n13, 173n40 Broxton, R., 89n20 Buridan, J., 50 Burke, R. B., 127n41 Burley, W., 50 Burnet, J., 89, 90n22, 106, 185n20 Bury, R. G., 207 Butler, W., 148 Caesar, 32, 224 Calcagno, A., 111n3 Caputo, J. D., 142n8 Capuzzi, F. A., 137n1 Cassiodorus, 8 Cassirer, E., 15, 23–24, 110–13, 134 categories, 83n4, 165, 212; imaginative, 24; rational, 24, 26 causality, 32, 173n38 cause, 8, 12, 68, 106, 116, 179n1, 180, 191–94, 197–202, 205; frst, 90–91, 101, 200, 202; material,

250

index 106; original, 151; underlying, 26; universal, 201; univocal, 152 causes, 1, 101, 197, 201; material, 106; underlying, 5, 37 certainties, 22, 116, 133, 175 certainty, 10, 26, 67, 116, 129–32, 229 chaos, 157–58 Chappell, T. J. D., 73, 76 Chase, M., 214n22 Cherniss, H., 85–86 Christ, 7–8, 14, 58, 216n27 Christian, 1, 14, 37, 55–56, 69–70, 72–73, 214–15, 216n27, 219–20, 224–27; textualism, 14; theology, 8 Christianity, 14, 69, 219, 223; history of, 225 Chroust, A. H., 212n17 Chrysippus, 58 Cicero, 5, 19, 21, 37, 56, 116 civitas, 23 Clark, K. J., 69n6 Clarke, W. N., 195n51 classical model, 7–8, 10 Clement, 64 Cohen, L., 215–16 Coleridge, S. T., 190n31 comedy, 131–32, 140 coming to be, 166, 171–72, 177–78 communitarian, 12, 16–17, 29, 43–44, 53 community, 5, 11, 16, 29, 37, 66, 114; philosophical, 30 conception, 68, 93n30, 117, 127–28, 184, 208n5, 218; Christian, 224; common-sense, 121 consciousness, 8–9, 113, 195, 210n12, 214, 223–24 constancy, 138, 145n11, 149–50, 178; companioning, 142n8, 158; determinacy and, 138; immanent, 171

contemplation, 4–5, 24, 27, 112, 160, 208, 226; soul-seeing, 4, 16, 27 contradiction, 224; Heraclitean, 21; law of, 139; performative, 188–89, 198 Cooper, J. M., 4n15, 5n19, 6n22, 26n63, 103nn54–58, 104nn59–60 Cornman, J. W., 47, 49 cosmos, 28, 89, 99, 145n11, 157, 167, 178; fuent, 166 Cottingham, J., 128n44 Courtenay, W., 32n3 Cowan, M., 154n22 Coxon, A. H., 98n46 Cratchitt, B. 24 critical temperament, 124 Cronus, 93n32 Crouse, R. D., 202n83 Crusoe, R., 112n6 culture, 45, 99, 110–13, 119–20; Greek, 13; human, 23–24, 110, 112–13, 120, 124, 134; origin of, 110, 114, 134–35 Curd, P., 86n12, 94n34 curiosity, 165; contracted, 166; formation of, 164; scientistic, 165 Dahlstrom, D. O., 82n1 Dante, 121 Davidson, A., 214n22 Davidson, D., 63, 214 Davies, B., 184n18, 191n32, 202n87 Da Vinci, L., 77 deity, 25, 93n30, 108, DeMarco, C. W., 96n39 Democritus, 85n7, 107 demythologization, 88, 91, 95–96, 107 Denzinger, H., 180n7 Derrida, J., 158 Descartes, R., 8–10, 16, 26–27, 38, 44, 48, 52–53, 56, 116–17, 127–29, 132

251

index Desmond, W., 2–3, 19–25, 28, 82n1, 136, 142n7, 147n13, 150n18, 160n28, 164nn32–33, 166n34, 170n37, 173n40, 173n40, 207n1, 208n5, 213n21, 224n40 Destrée, P., 226n42 determination, 21, 158, 160, 164–70, 172, 175, 177, 187, 191; fnite, 169; logic of, 170, 175; necessity of, 168; univocal, 20, 164, 168 Dewan, L., 202n83 dialectic, 19, 21, 40, 118, 124–26, 133, 159–60, 169–70; external, 160; immanent, 160; speculative, 156; subjective, 159 dialogue, 39–40, 85n7, 103, 139, 199, 208–9, 211–13, 227 Dickens, C., 24 Di Lascio, E. V., 217n29 Dillon, J., 59n2 Dimock, G. E., 215n25 Dionysus, 204 Diotima, 211, 225 discourse, 15, 26, 41, 121, 127, 134, 142, 167, 177, 188, 192n37, 198; historical, 38; metaphysical, 134; mode of, 91, 101; Neoplatonic, 190; philosophical, 41; poetical, 134; refective, 133; speculative, 133 disenchantment, 25, 108 divine, 1, 2, 5, 15, 21, 37, 75, 84, 87n13, 92–94, 95n38, 97, 108, 113, 116, 121, 123, 127, 130, 141n5, 150, 178, 204, 215, 217, 220–21, 224n40, 227 divinity, 25–26, 92–93, 93n32, 96–97, 116–17, 220 Dixsaut, M., 59n2 doubleness, 137n1, 140, 149, 158–59, 162, 167; equivocal, 154 Druart, Térèse-Anne, 35 Dunne, M. W., 215n24

Duns Scotus, J., 33, 48, 52, 56, 71–72 Düring, I., 212n18 Eco, U., 131n51, 132nn52–53 Einstein, A., 68 Eliade, M., 122–23, 124n34 Empedocles, 98, 99n48, 103 ens, 184, 200–203; totum ens, 186n27, 202–3 Epicurus, 55 epistemology, 1, 9; Kantian, 157; philosophers of, 47 equivocity, 20, 153n21, 162, 169, 212n18; saturated, 3, 144, 147, 149, 151–52, 156, 157n26, 161, 167, 169–70 Eryximachus, 211 esse, 184, 185n19, 200–202, 204; esse tatntum, 185; ipsum esse, 185, 191, 202; principium totius esse, 201 essence, 1, 123, 162, 204n94, 205n97 ethics, 49, 72, 217–18; Nicomachean, 43 etymologies, 140–41, 177; Heideggerian, 141; philosophical, 141; of Socrates, 140 Eucleides, 85n7 Euripides, 57 Eve, 174n41 evidentialism, 39 excluded middle: law of, 141 exist, 1, 9–10, 14n42, 27, 59, 63, 181–82, 184n16, 187, 191, 198, 203, 212 existence, 5, 8, 10n33, 23, 115, 126–28, 159, 182–83, 184n16, 187, 189, 190n31, 191, 195, 205n97, 206n98, 209–10, 225, 228; human, 3, 216–17; proof of, 9n27 experience, 7, 13, 77–78, 95, 103, 110, 112, 123, 125–26, 130, 133–34, 190n31, 209; human, 111, 125, 133, 209–10; religious, 4; sensory, 111, 113

252

index Fagles, R., 93n32 fnite, 22, 159, 170, 172 frst cause, 90–91, 101, 200, 202 frst principle, 77, 90–91, 105, 180, 191–96; material, 106; mythological, 107 Fisch, M. H., 83n3, 114n11 Fitzgerald, R., 89n17, 89n19, 93n32, 98n44 Flanagan, O., 210n12 fux, 103, 138–46, 149–50, 154, 156–62, 171–72, 178; doctrine of, 103; fuency of, 149; and motion, 103, 105; pure, 138 fux-gibberish, 22–23, 136, 138, 140, 142–43, 147–48, 150n18, 158, 160, 167, 174n41, 175, 177; Heraclitean, 23 Ford, G., 34 Fordham, F., 152n20, 174n41 form, 2–3, 14n42, 33, 42, 45, 47, 49, 58, 68–69, 72–73, 87n13, 112–13, 119, 124, 127, 134, 145n11, 150n18, 156–58, 160, 161n29, 176, 178, 187, 190n31, 193–94, 199–200, 204, 212, 224; constancy of, 149, 178; determinate, 152; inner, 133; intelligible, 198; mythical, 101n53; rhetorical, 105, 107; scientistic, 165; speculative, 134, 160; symbolic, 111, 113, 155 forms, 1, 5, 17, 22, 29, 101n53, 129, 138n3, 164, 193, 195, 209, 214; accidental, 201; inner, 113; Platonic, 186; substantial, 201; symbolic, 111n4, 112–13, 119 Fowler, H. N., 140n4 Fowler, R. L., 210n11 Franke, W., 147n13, 173n40 Fraser, A. C., 6n21 Frede, M., 86n12

Gamwell, F., 182, 183nn14–15, 189 genera, 25, 88; abstract, 83, 94; imaginative, 25, 83, 94, 102, 105, 108; natural, 25, 82, 84, 102, 105, 108; rational, 25, 84, 102, 108 genus: imaginative, 89, 101n52; natural, 92, 94 Gerth, H.H., 108n63 Gettier problem, 39 gibberish, 23, 28, 138, 140, 142, 144, 146–47, 171, 174, 176–78 Gilson, É., 44, 51 Glaucon, 211 God, 2, 5, 9, 14n42, 21, 25, 32, 60, 62, 73, 90, 94–96, 104, 106–7, 117, 128, 147, 149, 155, 173n39, 179n3, 180–81, 184n18, 185, 186n27, 187, 190, 195, 200–206, 216n27, 217–21, 223, 224n40, 227; existence of, 8, 10n33, 48, 66, 128; infnite, 2; mind of, 1–3; nature of, 8 goddess, 25, 93–94, 96, 100, 102, 104, 108, 185, 190 gods, 25–26, 81, 87n13, 90–91, 93n30, 95–97, 101, 103, 115, 118, 140–41, 144, 154, 157, 173n39, 195, 208, 220, 227 Goldschmidt, T., 183n15 Gracia, J., 31, 32n3, 36–42, 45–46 Graham, D. W., 86n12, 94n34 Grant, J. N., 58n1 Green, R. P. H., 14n42 Gregory of Rimini, 32, 59, 200n75 Hades, 148, 150 Hadot, P., 214n22 Haldane, E. S., 156n25 Hammond, N. G. L., 88n16 Hanfmann, G. M. A., 88n16 Hankinson, J., 61 Hannam, W., 202n83

253

index Hegel, 15, 20, 24, 119–21, 125–27, 132, 133n54, 137, 143, 147, 149, 153–62, 164–66, 169–72, 209n10, 223–24 Heidegger, 15, 69, 137, 141, 147, 156, 162n31, 172, 173n39, 180, 196n55, 205n95, 214, 216, 219, 228–29 Heil, G., 225n41 Heil, J., 183n15 Held, H. L., 179n3 Hendel, C. W., 113n10 Henkes, R. J., 152n20, 174n41 Henry, P., 179n1 Hephaestus, 89, 94 Heraclitus, 1, 13, 15, 18, 22–23, 27, 78, 88n15, 103, 136–41, 144–56, 157n26, 158–61, 162n31, 163, 167–72, 174–75, 177 Herodas, 57 Herodotus, 11 Herz, M., 130 Hesiod, 86n12, 88n15, 94–95, 98–99, 104, 157 Heylen, J., 180n4, 181nn9–10, 190 historicism, 38–39, 123, 223 history, 11, 16–18, 29–33, 36–38, 40–42, 46, 48–54, 59–60, 65, 67, 70–71, 74, 76, 79, 81, 86n12, 92, 111, 112n6, 115, 174n41, 214, 216, 223–24; philosophical, 38, 40, 46–47, 51–52; of philosophy as philosophical method, 11–15, 18; terror of, 122–23 Hobbes, T., 56, 114 Hofmeister, J., 129n48, 130n49 Hölderlin, F., 166 Homer, 13, 26, 83–84, 86n12, 88–105, 107–8, 154, 210n13, 215n25 Hopkins, G. M., 157n26 human beings, 1, 5, 7, 50, 82, 119, 122, 124, 148, 157, 210, 216n27 Hume, David, 7–10, 15–16, 26–27, 62, 69, 71

humor, 125–26, 131, 133–34, 140 Hünermann, P., 180n7 Hurley, A., 124n35 Hynes, J., 215n24 Ibsen, H., 122 identity: law of, 141 ignorance, 6–7, 15–16, 20–21, 38, 53, 63, 68, 86n13, 117; awareness of, 86; good, 6, 20–21; human, 7; indeterminacy of, 175; Socratic, 6 Iliad, 13, 88, 93–94, 97–98 image, 83n4, 92n25, 101n52, 119, 135, 148, 154, 172, 177–78, 200, 226; mythic, 118; poetic, 118 imagination, 73, 92n25, 120, 124, 142; human, 134; mythic, 124–25; power of, 119; romantic, 155 immanence, 5, 209; univocal, 19 immaterial substances, 1, 73; existence of, 70 impossibility, 51, 139, 188, 221 incompatibilism, 38 indeterminacy, 20, 143, 150n18, 158, 160, 162–63, 165–70, 175, 191; mysterious, 26; radical, 142–43 indeterminate, 21, 25, 139, 143, 158–60, 162–63, 167–72, 173n39, 175, 177 individuation, 46 infnite, 22, 172, 173n39; astonishment, 21, 170; true, 166 infnity, 177; counterfeit, 166; selfsublating, 166; simple, 162 Ingemar, 212 intellect, 128, 184, 191, 196–98, 204; Divine, 1; human, 3, 27; productive, 71; speculative, 3, 27 intelligibility, 1–5, 7–8, 10–11, 19–22, 26, 138, 141–42, 157–58, 165, 171, 189–90, 203n91, 206; abiding, 138; beyond, 2; constancy of, 138,

254

index 161; destruction of, 10; of the determinate, 26; excess of, 2, 22, 175; limit of, 21; recurrent, 171; selfdetermining, 22, 175; stable, 138, 162; univocal, 168 intelligible, 2–3, 6–7, 9, 11, 14, 21, 22, 44, 83nn3–4, 108, 164–65, 167–68, 178, 184, 189, 191–96, 204n94, 206, 212 intention, 13, 58, 69, 209; frst, 89, 92, 94; second, 92, 107 intentions, 84; frst, 89, 99, 108; second, 89, 108 Iris, 25–26, 93–94, 96–97, 103–4, 106, 108 irony, 19, 116; Socratic, 24 irritation, 144, 154; Aristotle’s, 139, 142, 175; logical, 148

86–87, 111, 116, 124, 127, 132, 138n3, 163, 175, 193, 204, 212, 214, 218, 220, 225, 229; determinacy of, 21; form of, 45; historical, 30; human, 113; intellectual, 52; nonpropositional, 77; object of, 7; per causas, 116; phenomenology of, 113; philological, 14; philosophical, 17, 31, 43; pursuit of, 15, 20, 86; scholarly, 63; scientifc, 213; soul’s, 127; universal, 37; univocal, 221 Knox, T. M., 155n24 Knuutila, S., 50n19 Kopf, E. C., 217n28 Kranz, W., 3n9, 88n15, 144n10, 185n21 Krell, D. F., 137n1, 214n23 Kretzmann, N., 50n18 Krois, J. M., 110n2

James, W., 148 John of Mirecourt, 32n3 Jovanovich, B., 131n51 Jove, 101n52, 113, 115–17, 122 Joyce, J., 135, 147, 150, 152n20, 160n28, 174n41

Laertius, D., 146n12 Lambert, J. H., 129 Lanfranc, 7–8 Langer, S., 134n57 language, 14, 66, 111, 131, 133–35, 139, 146–47, 159, 166, 169–72, 214, 219, 223, 229; development, 116; metaphorical, 220–21; modern, 34; mythic, 159; nature of, 41; power of, 114; religious, 218; scientifc, 215, 218; univocal, 150n18, 217 languages, 92n25, 147; ancient, 34; double, 150n18, 158; modern, 228 Latin, 35, 49, 53, 56, 124, 129n47, 200n75 laughter, 131, 134, 141 law, 111n4, 139, 147; geometrical, 112; natural, 49 Lehrer, K., 47 Leibniz, 20, 48, 63, 172, 180–81, 203n88 Lenz, J. W., 9n31

Kahn, C. H., 85n7 Kant, I., 9, 26, 48, 62, 68–71, 74, 129–30, 132, 157, 162, 220–21 Karl, 148 Kaufmann, W., 157n26 Kearney, R., 210n12 Kenny, A., 50n18 Kirk, G. S., 89nn18–20, 93n30, 146n12, 150n17, 155n23 Knöll, P., 216n27 knowability, 2; limited, 9; unlimited, 1 knower, 3, 115, 158; human, 9, 157; limited, 10 knowledge, 5–7, 9, 12, 20, 31, 33–34, 37, 48, 57, 59, 61–62, 68, 76–78,

255

index Lesher, J. H., 88n14, 92n26, 93nn27– 28, 93nn30–31, 94n33, 95–96, 97nn41–43, 98–99, 104 Lévi-Strauss, C., 25, 82–83, 108, 119, 122 lexis, 14 Levy, D .K., 217n29 Lewis, C. I., 50 Lewis, C. S., 50 life, 5, 10, 19, 22, 27, 29, 32, 60, 69–70, 78, 100, 102, 114, 124, 126, 134–35, 149–50, 152, 154–55, 161–62, 166, 177, 198–99, 205n94, 214, 217–18, 223, 225; after, 71; civil, 4, 115; human, 9n27; meaning of, 218–19; philosophical, 5, 11, 29; religious, 221 Lilly, R., 192n37 literature, 39, 57, 80, 116, 126; Greek, 57; history of, 71 Locke, J., 6–7, 116 Lofts, S. G., 111n3 logic, 28, 50, 75, 126, 152, 156, 160, 162, 165, 169–70, 188–89, 194, 197, 225, 227; formal, 47–50; free, 51; immanent, 156; informal, 61, 75; modal, 50; narrative, 214; philosophical, 176; propositional, 49; sentential, 47, 50; speculative, 171 logoi, 22, 27 logos, 1, 5, 14, 19, 21–23, 27–28, 137n1, 140, 142n8, 145n11, 149, 151–53, 156, 158–60, 166, 168–69, 175–76, 178; inner, 14; logical, 176; philosophical, 169; poetic-mythic, 169; underlying, 15; unintelligible, 176; univocal, 2, 169 Lombard, P., 215n24 Lovitt, W., 229n43 Lowe, E. J., 181n11 Löwith, K., 219n33

Machiavelli, N., 56 MacIntyre, A., 42n14, 48 MacIsaac, D. G., 200n75 Macpherson, C. B., 114n13 madness, 19; divine, 15; philosophical, 14–15; rational, 132 magistra vitae, 37 Maimonides, 71–72 Maitzen, S., 180n5, 180n8, 181nn9–10, 190 Mandonnet, P., 204n94 Manheim, R., 111n4–5 Marenbon, J., 12, 14 Marinone, N., 94n33 Marion, J. L., 202n86–87, 203n91, 206n98 Maritain, J., 205n97 Marsyas, 208 Martin, C., 51n20 Martine, B., 182, 189 material, 14, 50, 53, 59, 65–66, 90–91, 108 materials, 30, 44, 52, 82–83; historical, 52; mental, 83; physical, 83 McEvoy, J., 215n24 McGuinness, B. F., 19n49 McInerny, R., 203n88 McLuhan, E., 174n41 Melissus, 99 memoria, 17–18, 32–36, 47, 51, 54, 120 memory, 120–21, 124, 172 Menander, 57 metaphor, 100, 101n52, 116, 118, 121, 135, 140, 176, 204n94, 213, 227 metaphysic, 27, 116–17, 120, 123 metaphysics, 1, 9, 19, 21–22, 24–25, 27–28, 35, 73, 95, 105, 110, 113, 116–19, 121–26, 129–35, 154, 162n31, 202, 209n10, 213n21, 214; ancient, 127; Aristotelian, 214; classical, 185;

256

index modern, 116; poetic, 119; science of, 117; Western, 219 Middle Ages, 7, 59, 205 Mill, 74 Miller, A. V., 127n39, 133n54, 143n9 Mills, C. W., 108n63 modus ponens, 50 Moos, M., 204n94 motion, 133, 138, 140, 141n5, 145n11, 150, 159 Mourelatos, A. P. D., 94, 96 mundus absconditus, 3 Murdoch, D., 128n44 Murray, A. T., 215n25 muses, 121, 210, 215 music, 27–28, 42n14, 43, 45, 80, 122–23 muthos, 5, 21, 151–52, 159, 169 mystery, 1–5, 7–11, 13, 19–22, 26, 77, 108, 138, 163–64, 173n39, 190n31, 200n75, 229 mysticism, 200n75, 205; dialectical, 206; philosophical, 15, 20, 181 myth, 25, 83, 87, 92, 98, 100–101, 107–8, 111, 113, 116–23, 125, 134–35, 152, 159, 172, 176, 210–11, 226, 228; formulators of, 117; Greek, 226; Homeric, 25, 82, 91, 103; Oceanus, 88, 93, 97–98, 103; lover of, 86n12, 117–18 mythmakers, 24, 87n13, 91, 101, 108 mythology, 83n4, 86, 91, 101–2, 104–8, 118, 120, 122, 219; Greek, 219; Homeric, 25, 97 Nagel, T., 76 narratio, 17–20, 22–24, 32–33, 35–36, 54, 116 narrationes, 26, 33–36, 46, 51 narrative, 4, 19, 118, 134, 209–10, 213–15, 218–19, 225–27

nature, 10, 26, 43–44, 84, 87, 90, 93–96, 100, 108, 110–11, 118, 128, 130, 138n3, 153, 157, 173n39, 193, 197; demythologized, 102; frst, 195; fux-gibberish of, 177; human, 83; hybrid, 226–27; possessors of, 9; worthless, 157; sympathetic, 92n25 negativity: Hegelian, 164; language of, 166; self-relating, 164–65; thinking as, 165 Nestle, W., 210 Newman, J. H., 70 New Testament, 57 Newton, I., 63, 68 Nieli, R., 220n36 Nietzsche, F., 15, 19, 69, 137–38, 148– 49, 153–54, 156–59, 162, 171–72, 177, 219, 226–28 Nightingale, A. W., 4n14 Noah, 23, 114 Noone, T. B., 5, 11–12, 15–20, 26, 28–29, 32n3, 34 object, 42, 94, 111, 112n6, 132, 160, 195; abstract, 181, 186–87; concrete, 181; natural, 2–3, 96 objects, 7, 9, 47, 94, 129; abstract, 181–82, 187; concrete, 181, 183, 186; mathematical, 9; meaning of, 114; natural, 25, 91 Oceanus, 88–93, 97–98, 103, 106–7 Old Testament, 64, 217 Onians, R. B., 89n20 ontology, 160; archaic, 122; Homeric, 93; primitive, 123 opposites, 118, 121, 123, 125–26, 143, 150–51, 160, 167–68 optics, 127–31, 133 Origen, 58, 64, 73, 76 Otten, W., 202n83

257

index overdeterminacy, 151n18, 163–64, 166–67, 169, 173n39, 174–75 overdeterminate, 163, 166–67, 170–72, 174 Owen, G. E. L., 212n18 Owens, J., 212n18, 213n19 Parmenides, 13, 18, 63, 98, 160, 185–86, 189–91, 199 Pausanias, 211 Pears, D. F., 19n49 Pera, C., 201n81 perception, 62, 111, 127–28; sense, 3, 27, 105 Perl, E. D., 2, 15, 20–21, 27 Phaedo, 85n7 phenomena, 35, 86n12, 93n29, 117, 192n37; heavenly, 106; mental, 9; natural, 26, 91–92, 97n41; sensible, 97, 109 phenomenology, 113, 129, 160–61; general, 129–30 phenomenon, 39, 47, 73, 93n30, 94, 112–14; basis, 112; natural, 25, 91–92, 96 Philo, 57, 64 philology, 63–64 philosopher, 5, 11, 13–14, 16, 19, 24, 28, 40, 49, 53, 58, 60–64, 66–70, 72, 76–77, 80–81, 86n12, 91, 101, 103, 118, 123, 160, 163, 208–9, 217–24, 226, 228–29; contemporary, 40, 56, 66; critical, 125; dialectical, 125; early, 66; frst, 91; hero-, 74; -kings, 5; speculative, 125; weeping, 140, 154 philosophers, 2, 11, 15–16, 18, 20, 31, 34, 37, 41–46, 49, 51–52, 61–63, 68–69, 75, 77–78, 81, 86, 87n13, 88, 91–92, 108, 117, 125, 144, 147, 149, 153, 163, 169, 181, 201, 222; analytic,

47; Christian, 73; classical, 83; community of, 11; contemporary, 38, 48, 52, 54, 180; frst, 25, 88, 90, 108; Greek, 25, 28, 83, 91, 98, 107–8; late-20th-century, 48; moral, 73; Neoplatonic, 180; true, 105 philosophy, 5, 7–8, 11–13, 15–21, 24, 26, 28–31, 36–43, 45–48, 50–54, 59–63, 67, 71–72, 74–82, 85n7, 86–87, 89–92, 96, 100, 102–7, 112n6, 117–19, 127–29, 131–32, 154, 164, 207, 208n5, 209–10, 212–15, 217–23, 224n40, 226–29; ancient, 8, 56–58, 63, 71; classical, 17, 102; classical Greek, 25, 107; contemporary, 39, 47, 49; early Greek, 82, 84, 85n7 86– 87, 91, 102–3, 105, 107; essence of, 109; historians of, 14, 34, 36–38, 41–42, 47, 52–53, 72; history of, 12–13, 15–17, 26–31, 34, 36, 38–42, 44–53, 55, 57, 61–62, 68, 70, 73–75, 79–81, 176; medieval, 71; modern, 16, 53, 113, 127; moral, 48; nature of, 12, 31, 42, 51, 227; Neoplatonic, 20; Platonic, 87; pre-modern, 34, 42, 60; schools of, 62–63; Western, 217 phusis, 149, 157 Pieper, J., 217n28 Pinborg, J., 50n18 Plato, 1, 4, 5n19, 6, 13, 15–16, 18, 22–26, 29, 43, 52, 55–56, 58–59, 61, 65, 67, 69–70, 72, 77–78, 83–84, 85n7, 86–87, 90n22, 102–6, 108–9, 122– 24, 139, 140n4, 141, 154, 185–86, 194n50, 207n3, 209, 211, 212n18, 213, 221n38, 222–24, 226, 228 Plotinus, 1, 13, 15, 20–22, 27, 55–56, 64, 69, 73, 77–78, 179–81, 191–99, 201–5 Plutarch, 58–59

258

index poetry, 17, 98–99, 116–17, 119–20, 124, 131, 135, 177, 217, 229 porosity, 137n1, 151–52, 168, 170–72, 173n39, 175–76; original, 160n28, 170, 174; philosophical, 137; prior, 171 Posidonius of Apamea, 64 possible worlds, 187–88 praxis, 42, 47, 51, 54 predicate, 133, 161n29, 192, 203 predication, 203; analogical, 202–3; true, 139 principle, 15, 36, 39, 47, 51, 74, 90–92, 107, 151, 160, 182, 184, 190, 193–95, 197, 201–3; frst, 77, 90–91, 105–7, 180, 191–96; material, 106 principle and cause, 90–92, 203 principles and causes, 86–87, 91–92, 108 Pritzl, K. J., 30n1 Proclus, 15, 20, 180–81, 197–98, 199nn68–74, 200n76, 202–5 Prometheus, 173n39 Protagoras, 3, 1032-4, 138 Pseudo-Dionysius, 36, 55, 72, 220–21, 224, 225n41 Putt, B. K., 137n2 quality, 57, 82, 152; accidental, 27; performative, 28 Quine, W. V. O., 65 Raven, J. E., 89n18, 89n20, 93n30, 146n12, 150n17, 155n23 reality, 16, 77, 96, 99, 101, 104, 109, 121, 124–25, 184n16, 184n18, 194, 196– 97, 202n83, 212–13, 222, 225, 228; apprehension of, 27; extra-mental, 9; hyper-, 2, 220; immaterial, 27; indeterminate, 25; intelligible, 14n42, 195; internal, 121; totality of,

105; transcendent, 24; underlying, 26, 97; unknowable, 21 realm, 4, 15, 19, 84, 94, 97, 221; immaterial, 109; superintelligible, 21 reason, 116, 118, 122–23, 125, 134, 152, 210, 221, 224; artist of, 122; exercise of, 118; hallmark of, 120; power of, 125; pure, 129, 220; refective, 130–31, 133; speculative, 124–25, 130; univocal, 151 reasoning, 7, 127, 132, 160, 200, 215; art of, 41 recollection, 29, 120, 124 refection, 26, 61, 125, 127–33, 136, 139, 160n28, 163, 180, 214, 217; barbarism of, 26, 127; Christian, 214; critical, 132; philosophical, 16, 30; transcendental, 129–30 relativism, 40; cultural and historical, 42; theoretical, 45 reliabilism, 39 religion, 4n17, 111, 114, 164, 209n10, 216n27, 220–21, 228; age of, 56; philosophy of, 48 res gestae, 17–18, 32–33, 36, 39, 51, 54 revelation, 76, 228; biblical, 216; Christian, 216n27, 223, 226 rhythm, 145n11, 146, 150, 161n29; circadian, 145 Rist, J., 14–15, 18, 20, 26, 55 Rooke, B. E., 190n31 Rorty, R., 40n10 Rosemann, P. W., 2–5, 8, 18–21, 207 Rousseau, J.-J., 16, 44, 114 Russell, B., 49 Ryle, G., 75 Safrey, H. D., 197n61, 202n85 Salomon, 124 Schelling, F. W. J., 166, 172

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index Schiller, F., 2, 108n63 Schlechta, K., 148n16, 157n26, 177n42 Schmidt, D. J., 173n39 Schmutz, J., 53 Schneewind, J. R., 40n10 Schofeld, M., 89n18, 89n20, 93n30 Schopenhauer, A., 154, 162n31 Schürmann, R., 192n37 Schwyzer, H. R., 73n8, 179n1 science, 19, 50, 83, 86n12, 101n53, 111, 113, 117, 122, 129, 214; in divinity, 116; frst, 120; history of, 65, 75; new, 56, 114, 116, 120 Scullard, H. H., 88n16 self-becoming, 156, 166, 171 self-determination, 156, 162–66, 168–70; dialectical, 163; logical, 169; rational, 162 self-knowledge, 24, 112, 132 self-transcendence, 196, 205, 206 self-understanding, 42 Seneca, 56 sensation, 23, 114–15, 128; immediacy of, 119 Shakespeare, W., 60, 63, 77 Silenus, 157n26, 208 Silesius, A., 179 Simplicius, 63 Skinner, Q., 40n10 sky, 25, 89, 92, 94, 101n52, 105, 114–15; as an alter-body, 23, 115; thunderous, 118 Smith, N. K., 129n47, 221n37 Socrates, 4–6, 13, 23–24, 26, 29, 43, 60–61, 63, 66, 74, 79, 83, 85n7, 102– 5, 112, 125, 140–41, 144, 159, 207–9, 211, 221, 225–26; characterization of, 208; in the Cratylus, 103; doubleness of, 140; historical, 43; in the Phaedrus, 14; Plato’s, 4, 6, 16, 23, 106, 228; in the Republic, 5–7, 13, 21,

23; in the Symposium, 207–8; in the Teaetetus, 18, 103–4, 106, 138 Sokolowski, R., 77 Sophocles, 57, 81 soul, 100, 115, 127, 130, 146, 148, 160, 176, 193, 195, 197–98, 200, 220; human, 121; rational, 2 soul-seeing, 16, 23–24, 28, 29 Southern, R., 8 speculative proposition, 161 Spinoza, B., 116n18 spirit, 223–24; energy of, 111; human, 120, 122; inquiring, 20, 181; unfolding of, 156, 209n10 Stambaugh, J., 173n39, 214n23 Steel, C., 198n66 Steinberg, E., 7n23 Stewart, J., 121n27 Stoothof, R., 128n44 story, 2, 19, 25, 105, 146–47, 185, 210–14, 225–28; of Aristophanes, 213; Christian, 219; polysemy of, 214, 226; of Socrates, 106; true, 116 Strauss, L., 222–24 Suarez, F., 203 substance, 42, 46, 161n29, 204, 212; for Aristotle, 26, 97; divine, 204 substances, 87n13, 101n53, 160, 212; immaterial, 1, 70, 73 symbol, 24, 110; concept of, 110; mythical, 112 Taylor, C., 40, 48 Taylor, R., 35 teaching, 30, 61, 65; Christian, 226; philosophy, 67; philosophical, 37, 79 technai, 28, 42 technē, 42–43, 51 terror, 4, 23–24, 115, 118, 122, 148, 205n97

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index Tertullian, 38 Tethys, 87–91, 98, 103 Tales, 13, 25, 56, 75, 84, 86n9, 86b12, 88–92, 102, 105–8, 145–46, 159 Taumas, 26, 103–4, 106 theism, 180, 184n1, 206 theology, 7–8, 39, 59, 71, 214, 227; Christian, 8; ideal of, 215; Lutheran, 219; mystical, 220, 224–25; natural, 95–96; negative, 221 thinking, 51, 71, 83, 117, 121, 134, 136, 141, 146, 164–65, 170, 175, 183, 185, 187, 189, 191–92, 195, 198–99, 204, 229; art of, 134; cause of, 191–92; defnition of, 117; ethical, 48; fnite, 156; hypothetical, 133; mythical, 134; perfect, 21; refective, 131; refection as a manner of, 127; speculative, 131; task of, 214 thought, 14n42, 33, 49, 60, 63, 73, 84, 111, 117, 119, 121, 123, 125, 127, 130, 133–35, 137, 142–43, 145–46, 151, 159–60, 164–65, 167, 174, 183–84, 186, 188–91, 193, 196, 198, 205–6, 213–14; ancient, 64; Aristotle’s, 162; capacity for, 114; Christian, 214–15, 224; contemporary, 40; Continental, 227; early Greek, 210; form of, 127; historical, 56; laws of, 188; metaphysical, 113, 127, 134; modern, 214; mythical, 113; negativity of, 143; of the overdeterminate, 172; origin of, 154; philosophical, 127; putative, 183; rational, 135; rational categories of, 26; scientifc, 82; self-annihilation of, 194, 200; self-transcendence of, 206; sensible, 183; speculative, 122; Western, 55, 75, 224; Wittgenstein’s, 227 Trasymachus, 67

Tucydides, 11 thunder, 23, 114–15, 174n41; sound of, 23, 115 Tihanyi, C., 101n53 to ontos on (the really real), 21, 118 togetherness, 149–50, 169, 191, 206 tradition, 7, 16, 18, 20, 39, 68, 180, 185, 191, 219, 221, 224, 227; classical, 6–7; Greek, 95; mythological, 108; philosophical, 14, 159; religious, 217–18, 220, 223; Scholastic, 53; Western, 13, 79, 222 transcendence, 5, 22, 209, 224n40, 228; narrative of, 19 Trask, W. R., 122n33 Treschow, M., 202n83 Trouillard, J., 189n29, 199n72 truth, 4, 10, 16, 26, 41, 47, 49, 60, 61, 65n4, 77, 80–81, 99, 107, 116–17, 123, 125, 130–32, 137n1, 138n3, 139, 155, 161, 163–64, 185, 210, 214, 222–23; absolute, 164; agents of, 77; determinability of, 163; love of, 79; of myth, 88; philosophical, 40; pursuit of, 125; transcendent, 223 truths, 61, 77, 113; basic, 60; categorical, 113; moral, 60; rational, 117; transcendent, 213 truth-seeking, 80–81 Tyconius, 56 understanding, 11, 18, 36, 40, 73, 76–77, 129–31, 134, 158, 206, 221, 223, 225, 229; abstract, 160; Catholic, 7; frst intentional, 102; human, 129; naturalistic, 95; pure, 129–30; rational, 133; refective, 127; univocal, 163 universal, 161n29; immanent, 142 universals, 17–18, 83n3, 106, 186; mental, 22

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index universe, 26, 71, 77, 87n12, 117, 125, 141n5, 184n18; physical, 184 univocity, 141, 153n21, 167, 169, 203n88, 213; mode of, 144; perfect, 19 Unmoved Mover, 5, 21, 212 Van Inwagen, P., 181–83, 186 Van Riet, S., 35 Varro, 56 Verbeke, G., 35 Verene, D. P., 4, 21–28, 101n52, 110, 112n6, 113n9, 116n18, 117n19, 120n23, 127n43, 134n56 Vickers, B., 124n35 Vico, G., 4, 15, 23–26, 83, 92, 95, 100, 101n52, 113–17, 120n24, 121n26, 127, 174n41 Vorwerk, M., 84n5, 89n21 Weaver, W., 131n51 Weber, M., 2, 108 Weightman, D., 119n21 Weissman, D., 9n28 well-being, 51 Westerink, L. G., 197n61 Wheelwright, P., 138n3, 144n10 Whitehead, A. N., 15, 49, 119–22 Whittaker, J., 58 William of Ockham, 7–8, 49 Wilson, J. D., 1, 14n41, 82, 83n4, 207n1 Wippel, J. F., 180n4, 180n6, 182n13, 202n86 wisdom, 44, 78, 80, 86, 116, 121, 146–47, 157n26, 167, 204; defnition of, 116; depth of, 37; idiot, 147, 173; lover of, 86n12, 117–18; poetic, 114, 116; pursuit of, 16, 20 Wittgenstein, L., 15, 19, 28, 68–69, 96n40, 179, 188, 217–18, 220, 227 Woglom, W. H., 113n10

wonder, 2, 4, 6, 15–16, 20–21, 24–26, 82, 86–87, 96–97, 102–7, 109, 117–19, 133–34, 143, 160n28, 165, 175–76, 205; Aristotelian themes of, 20; destruction of, 107; divine, 94; fate of, 84; initial, 175; humble, 24; loss of, 26, 87, 102, 104, 108; metaphysical, 166; originating, 175–76; passion of, 22; philosophical, 163; sense of, 88; silence of, 28; soul-seeing, 24 world, 1–3, 6–7, 9, 11, 15, 19, 21, 23–26, 28, 45, 51, 56, 60–61, 73–74, 76–80, 86–89, 91–92, 95, 97–99, 101–2, 104–8, 111–15, 117, 119–24, 126, 128, 131, 133, 156–57, 159, 179n2, 184, 188– 89, 210, 213, 216, 224–25; ancient, 63; cave, 222, 226; contemporary, 229; disenchanted, 2; divinely infused, 108; empty, 183n15, 188; enchanted, 24, 109; ever-changing, 105; existence of the, 8, 10n33, 195; extra-mental, 9–10; fuency of the, 176; Homeric, 25, 108; knowable, 1; knowing the, 3, 83–84; modern, 127; mythological, 25; natural, 95–96, 108; possible, 183n15, 188; post-modern, 57; reductionist, 80; spiritual, 155; unknowable, 10 Xenophanes, 15, 25–26, 84, 88, 92–100, 102, 104, 106–8 Xenophon, 43, 85n7 Yeats, W. B., 148, 174 Zamuner, E., 217n29 Zarathustra, 154, 177, 219 Zeno, 58, 159–60 Zeus, 25, 92–93, 150, 159, 167, 173n39 Zupko, J., 32n3

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Mystery and Intelligibility: History of Philosophy as Pursuit of Wisdom was designed in Jenson with Requiem display type and composed by Kachergis Book Design of Pittsboro, North Carolina. It was printed on 55-pound Natural Ofset and bound by Maple Press of York, Pennsylvania.