Ancient Philosophy

by Julia Annas

  6. Aristotle, portrayed as serious and studious

  * * *

  Aristotle and authority

  ‘The investigation of the truth is in one way hard, in another easy. An indication of this is found in the fact that no one is able to attain the truth adequately, while, on the other hand, no one fails entirely, but every one says something true about the nature of things, and while individually they contribute little or nothing to the truth, by the union of all a considerable amount is amassed. Therefore, since the truth seems to be like the proverbial barn door, which no one can fail to hit, in this way it is easy, but the fact that we can have a whole truth and not the particular part we aim at shows the difficulty of it . . . It is just that we should be grateful, not only to those whose opinions we may share, but also to those who have expressed more superficial views; for these also contributed something, by developing before us the powers of thought.’

  Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book 2, Chapter 1

  ‘When a Schoolman tells me Aristotle hath said it, all I conceive he means by it, is to dispose me to embrace his opinion with the deference and submission which custom has annexed to that name. And this effect may be so instantly produced in the minds of those who are accustomed to resign their judgement to the authority of that philosopher, as it is impossible any idea either of his person, writings or reputation should go before. So close and immediate a connexion may custom establish, betwixt the very word Aristotle and the motions of assent and reverence in the minds of some men.’

  Bishop George Berkeley

  * * *

  Chapter 6

  When did it all begin? (and what is it anyway?)

  Many people have turned expectantly to the beginnings of Greek philosophy, only to find that the first philosopher they meet, Thales in the sixth century BC, held, apparently, that ‘everything is water’. Anyone teaching ancient philosophy has to cope with the bafflement that this discovery tends to produce. It is an odd beginning to a philosophical tradition. Yet something happens in the sixth century, later to acquire the name philosophia or love of wisdom, which we can recognize as philosophical. What exactly is it?

  It is in keeping with what we have seen of the varied and disputatious nature of ancient philosophy that this question is quite hard to answer. There is little that non-trivially unites philosophers from Thales to the end of antiquity. There is a tradition, but a mixed and contested one.

  In view of the great cultural prestige of Greek philosophy, it has at times been resented, and sometimes groups that have felt themselves culturally marginalized by it have claimed that Greek philosophy is nothing new at all, but just a tradition taken over without acknowledgement – usually, it is claimed, from the group in question. The early Church fathers held that the pagan philosophers stole their ideas from the Jewish scriptures. Afrocentric writers in the twentieth century have made the same claim for Egyptian mystery religion. These claims, however, are historically non-starters.

  * * *

  Differing views on the Greeks’ originality

  ‘What provokes admiration is the mental vigour and independence with which these people sought after coherent systems and did not shrink from following their lines of thought to astonishing conclusions. It may well be that contact with oriental cosmology and theology helped to liberate their imagination; it certainly gave them many suggestive ideas. But they taught themselves to reason. Philosophy as we understand it is a Greek idea.’

  Martin West, 1986

  ‘What is Plato but Moses writing in Greek?’

  Numenius of Apamea (second century AD).

  ‘We should not be surprised to say that the Greeks are capable of filching the beliefs of the Jews, given that they have not only plundered their other sciences from the Egyptians and Chaldaeans and other foreign nations, but even now can be caught robbing one another of their literary reputations . . .

  It is reasonable to think that the Greeks, who contributed nothing of their own in wisdom (only verbal facility and fluency) and filched everything from foreigners, should also have been aware of the sayings of the Jews and laid hands on these in turn . . . Not just my words but their own establish them as thieves . . .

  Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea (AD c.260-339)

  * * *

  The Greeks themselves did not think that philosophy was original with them; they thought of it as coming from a variety of sources outside Greece, usually Eastern. But then, they did not value originality as such very highly, and they certainly did think that philosophy was something that they did distinctively and well. And indeed, when we read the fragments even of an author as elusive as Thales we can see an interesting and distinctive way of thinking emerging.

  A tradition of reasoning?

  What makes it philosophical? Usually this is characterized as explicit appeal to reason and argument. Stated as generally as this, the claim is undoubtedly true. Philosophers are distinguished by arguing for their conclusions and against other philosophers’ conclusions, and by demanding reasons for others’ claims and giving reasons for their own. But while this may mark philosophy off from poetry and the like, it does not give us a very determinate way of proceeding, or of marking philosophy off from other intellectual endeavours. There are many kinds of reason and argument – which is to count? When we look at the different kinds of project that the Presocratics produced, we are hard put to find a single kind of reasoning at work, or a demand for a single kind of argument.

  The first Presocratics, Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes – from Miletus in Asia Minor – were concerned to provide cosmologies, reasoned accounts of the world we live in. As Aristotle acutely saw, they focused on what he called the material cause – the question of what our world is composed of. This is the question to which we find answers in terms of water, air and ‘the boundless’. These answers show a very striking degree of simplicity and economy, and bring with them explanations of a wide variety of puzzling physical phenomena. Because of this, these philosophers have at times been seen as precursors of science, with its explanatory hypotheses. It is clear, however, that there is little in these very speculative theories that can be usefully compared with any precise concept of scientific enquiry. A just account has to see these Presocratic figures as transitional, with an intellectual impulse to render our world explicable which has much in common with later philosophy and science.

  7. A late representation of Anaximander with a sundial he is credited with inventing

  Other Presocratics are anything but scientific. Heraclitus of Ephesus writes in aphorisms of notorious obscurity, uniting an account of the world as fire with concern for the individual’s self-knowledge. His account of both appeals to reason (logos), both your individual reason and the big Reason in the universe that your reason should try to conform to; yet there is little reason or argument to convince us of this. Xenophanes of Colophon uses reason and argument to undermine naive beliefs about the gods. In him we see clearly for the first time reason being used to fault and replace ordinary beliefs by something the philosopher argues to be more rationally adequate. Anthropomorphic views of God are shown to be defective in a convincing way: every people, Xenophanes says, makes gods in their own image (and so would animals, if they could). But his allegedly more rationally adequate conception of God is so peculiar – God seems to be a kind of sphere – that the issue is bound to arise of what the authority is of the reasoning that overthrows our beliefs and gets us to this point.

  * * *

  A new way of thinking?

  ‘My aim has been to show that a new thing came into the world with the early Ionian teachers – the thing we call science . . . It is quite wrong to look for the origins of Ionian science in mythological ideas of any kind . . . It is to these men we owe the conception of an exact science which should ultimately take in the whole world as its object.’

  John Burnet, 1892

  ‘I have tried to show how the philosopher retains his prophetic character. He relies for
his vision of divinity and of the real nature of things on the assumed identity of his own reason with a portion of the cosmic consciousness . . . The intuitive reason replaces that supernormal faculty which had formerly been active in dreams and prophetic visions; the supernatural becomes the metaphysical . . . It would have been a miracle if the wise men of the sixth century . . . should have swept their minds clean of all mythical preconceptions.’

  Francis Cornford, 1952

  * * *

  This question arises extremely sharply for Parmenides and Zeno of Elea, authors of some of the most notorious arguments in antiquity. Parmenides produced an abstract argument to a conclusion that nobody could accept: namely, that there is really only one object we can think of or refer to, which cannot without absurdity be said to be pluralized, qualified or divided. Thus our experience of a varied and changing plurality of objects is totally misleading. Zeno produced many arguments reducing to absurdity our everyday assumptions about plurality and change. The problem here is that the arguments are hard to fault, but the conclusions cannot be accepted. This creates a discomfort about reasoned argument: what do we do when its results conflict with our beliefs?

  Responses to this differ. Some thinkers continue to produce big explanatory theories of the world, taking on board the point that their theories undermine common-sense beliefs. Anaxagoras of Clazomenae tells us that ‘the Greeks are mistaken’ in saying that things come into and go out of existence; in terms of his theory what emerges was there already. Similarly Empedocles of Acragas and the Atomists Leucippus and Democritus of Abdera produce theories which revise our commonsense beliefs about reality and change in accordance with their own hypotheses. None of them doubt that their reasoning has the power to do this. None of them deal adequately with the question of how we get to their theories from the beliefs we all start with – indeed Democritus. recognizes a problem in that we get from our experience to the deliverances of reason, which then devalues our experience.

  Other thinkers, however, including some of the sophists, fasten on the point that there is something suspicious about the way that philosophical reasoning leads by arguments that you can’t fault to conclusions that you can’t accept. Cleverness in argument becomes something to be feared and envied, and seen as a technique in its own right. Seen this way, there is little distinguishing philosophical reasoning from the amoral cleverness of the effective speaker in politics or the law courts.

  This situation can reasonably be seen as rather a mess, and goes some way to explain why these philosophers have come to be called ‘Presocratics’, implying that Socrates is the crucial reference point. Whatever their individual accomplishments, they do not clearly belong within a unified tradition in which reasoning has a clear philosophical role. That begins with Socrates.

  Reason and understanding

  At first sight, as we have seen in Chapter 4, Socrates seems an unlikely figure to characterize the philosophical tradition. He is the perpetual amateur, who refuses to do any of the things which philosophers of his time did. Moreover, he utterly despises all these things – producing theories of the world, giving displays of oratory, winning debates – as being a pretentious waste of everybody’s time. So what made him such a founding philosophical figure?

  Socrates, as we have seen, argued against the views of others, showing them by their inability to withstand his arguments that they lacked understanding of what they were talking about. To have understanding of something, it emerged, you have to be able to ‘give an account’ of it, where this means giving reasons, and ultimately a rational account of what the subject in question is. But this will not be possible until you have rigorously asked yourself what reasons there are for the belief you hold. Thus, when you ask someone what reasons they have for what they say, you can show that they lack understanding if they have none, or have reasons that are confused or inconsistent. But, particularly if you are good at this sort of questioning (as Socrates undoubtedly was), you will realize that the same applies to you; you may have developed views, but you cannot be said to understand them, and hence have the right to put them forward authoritatively, unless you can withstand the challenges of others by giving reasons for them.

  From Socrates on, reasoned argument is the lifeblood of philosophy because it is only in the give and take of argument that we achieve understanding of the positions we hold and want to put forward to others. (Understanding, as we have seen, is a kind of knowledge, and we can know only the truth; hence philosophy can also be characterized as the search for truth.) Hence the emphasis on reasoning and arguing that we find in all schools of philosophy. Now we find emerging a clear sense of philosophical reason and argument, distinguished from merely arguing others down and linked to the search for truth and understanding.

  From the outside, then as now, all the arguing can seem aggressive and unattractive, and to those with no gift for philosophy it can seem pointless. (There is a story of a Roman bureaucrat who summoned all the Athenian philosophers and offered conflict mediation so as finally to settle all their disputes.) But from now on the importance in philosophy of reasoned argument lies in its crucial role for understanding. Figures who dismiss argument – like the Pythagoreans, who reverence their Master and want only to treasure his words – are always seen as philosophically marginal. And Epicurus’ relative de-emphasis of argument led to criticism by other philosophical schools.

  Philosophy as a subject

  Plato has a claim to be the first philosopher to establish philosophy as a subject. He did so by taking over from Socrates two elements: argument as crucial for understanding, and positive views on a variety of matters. Plato added three other important elements. One is system, a variety of ideas seen as holding together. A second is seeing philosophy as self-consciously demarcated from other ways of thinking. And a third is the institutionalization of philosophy as a subject for study.

  In the ancient world Plato was seen as a pivotal figure, the first philosopher who was concerned to systematize his ideas and thus to hold views on a wide variety of topics as holding together in a mutually supportive way. It is unclear whether it is quite fair to see Plato as the pioneer here – Democritus the Atomist also had views on a range of topics – but Plato is certainly the first to do it whose works we have. Later writers ascribed to Plato the honour of being the first to see philosophy as a system of ideas with three parts – logic, ethics and physics. This is anachronistic, but it is true that Plato held positions over most of the range that later thinkers were to cover.

  Plato does not tell us how his positive systematic ideas relate to the need for understanding to be grounded by argument. But he shows us clearly enough, in writing dialogues in which he is personally never a speaker, thus detaching himself from the positions put forward, that what matters is not just having the right position, but holding it in the right way – understanding it on the basis of reasoned argument. For it is up to the reader to think about the positions put forward and test her own understanding of them. Plato, even where it is clear that he believes a position strongly, never puts it forward authoritatively. If the reader accepts it on Plato’s authority, she is missing something crucial. It has to be tested and argued for before she understands it.

  Plato’s legacy has been a divided one. His own school, the Academy, for most of its life took philosophizing in Plato’s way to be arguing against the views of contemporaries ad hominem, without commitment to a position of your own. It was not till after the end of the school, in the first century BC, that philosophers started to study and promote Plato’s own ideas as a system. Interpretations of Plato perpetually risk overstressing one side at the expense of the other – seeing him as throwing the argument over to us, and seeing him as passionately concerned to put forward certain positions.

  It is modern rather than ancient interpreters who have stressed Plato’s evident desire to establish philosophy as a distinct way of thinking. When he has Socrates tell us at the end of the Republic that there is
an old quarrel between poetry (or literature more generally) and philosophy, he seems to be projecting his own view back. For one of the most striking things about Plato is the way that he is willing to use his own brilliant literary gifts to establish that philosophy is crucially about ‘dialectic’, sheer argument which does not rely on rhetorical or literary skill. Philosophy, he keeps insisting, is just for this reason different from what other people, such as orators, poets and sophists do.

  Whatever the tensions this produces in Plato’s own work, one of his lessons was well learned. Later philosophy develops for itself a professional style: straightforward, transparent, relying only on the force of rational argument. Unsurprisingly, this is often unattractive to ordinary readers, and we find that a gulf comes about between easier, more literary works written for the general public and ‘real’ philosophy, written in an uncompromisingly professional and technical way.

  This gulf is also strengthened by philosophy’s institutionalization. We know almost no detail about the organization of Plato’s school, the Academy, though in every age philosophers have interpreted it on the model of their own university or college. But it was something new, a philosophical school, to which young men like Aristotle came to study philosophy. They probably learned Plato’s ideas; they also learned how to argue. When, later in life, Aristotle set up his own philosophical school, this was seen by some as an uppity gesture, but it established the pattern whereby an original philosopher would set up his own school, finding pupils and disciples who would learn, further and spread his ideas. Hence Plato’s philosophy and Aristotle’s philosophy came to have a history in their own schools; they became objects of study to other philosophers.