The Beginnings of Philosophy in Greece Maria Michela Sassi Translated by Michele Asuni Pr i nc eT on U n i v e r si T y Pr e ss Pr i nc eT on & ox for d Sassi_Beginnings.indd 3 3/6/18 7:14 PM Originally published as Gli inizi della filosofia in Grecia, copyright © 2009 by Bollati Boringhieri; this English translation is published by arrangement with the publisher and is copyright © 2018 by Princeton University Press. Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press.princeton.edu All Rights Reserved LCCN {~?~to come} ISBN 978-0-691-18050-2 Editorial: Ben Tate and Hannah Paul Production Editorial: Debbie Tegarden Jacket Design: Pamela Schnitter Jacket Credit: Jean-Baptiste Hilaire (1753–1822), The Ruins of Miletus and the Maeander Valley. Courtesy of Sotheby’s Picture Library Production: Jacquie Poirier Publicity: Amy Stewart Copyeditor: Anne Cherry British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Miller Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Sassi_Beginnings.indd 4 3/6/18 7:14 PM con T e n Ts A Note on This Edition · ix Introduction · xi Chronological Chart · xix chaPTer 1 chaPTer 2 chaPTer 3 chaPTer 4 Thales, Father of Philosophy? 1 Before the Presocratics 1 Ex Oriente Lux? 8 Back to Aristotle 19 Knowledge Has Many Faces 26 Philosophy in the Cosmogonies 32 Hesiod: Cosmic Masses and Divine Personas 32 Anaximander in a World “without Gods” 37 The Invention of the Cosmos 44 The Horizon of the Theogonies 47 Pherecydes’s “Mixed Theology” 51 A Cosmogony in the Temple of Thetis? 53 A New, Self-Conscious Knowledge 57 Writing Experiments 64 A “Hot” Society 64 Egotisms 70 The Power of Writing 73 Anaximander: The Treatise and the Map 81 Xenophanes, Satirist and Polemicist 93 The Obscure Heraclitus 98 Adventures of the Soul 110 The Soul, the Cosmos, and an Orange 110 [ vii ] Sassi_Beginnings.indd 7 3/6/18 7:14 PM [ viii ] con Ten Ts chaPTer 5 From Breath to the Self 112 Restless Souls 119 Empedocles and His Daimōn 120 To Each His Own (Compound) 136 Voices of Authority 139 The Odd Couple 139 Farewell to the Muse 142 Power Games 148 The Truth Revealed in Song 151 Between Muses and Other Gods 160 The Specialization of Reason 168 Bibliography · 179 Index · 203 Sassi_Beginnings.indd 8 3/6/18 7:14 PM a no T e on T his edi T ion This ediTion Pr esen Ts a few changes compared to the Italian one. Besides the necessary corrections to oversights found during translation, it contains a revised introduction and several updates to the footnotes. Since neither the essential lines of my argument nor any specific parts of it have changed, I simply added references for works published after 2009 that are particularly relevant to the topics covered in the book, and for a few essays in which I myself have expanded on some points. This book is also meant for readers who do not know Greek. All of the texts quoted have been translated into English (by Michele Asuni, from my Italian translations unless otherwise noted), but for important terms and passages I have also given the Greek in transliterated form (always in parentheses for direct quotations). Accents are not marked, except for one rare instance of two homographs (Heraclitus’s bìos and biòs); the macron sign has been used to indicate long o and e vowels. The fragments of the Presocratics are cited from Diels and Kranz’s edition (where A indicates a testimony, B a fragment). Quotations from Plato and Aristotle use the Stephanus and Bekker pagination, respectively. For works of secondary literature that have been translated into English, the page numbers indicated in the footnotes refer to the English translation. The date of the original publication is given in brackets. [ ix ] Sassi_Beginnings.indd 9 3/6/18 7:14 PM i n T rodUc T ion i Bega n To Think about The Beginnings of Philosophy in Greece during a conference organized in Lille by André Laks ten years before the book’s publication in Italian in 2009. The conference dealt with a fundamental question: “What is Presocratic philosophy?” (Laks-Louguet 2002). That question expressed the difficulty of giving a unitary definition of so-called “Presocratic” thought, but more important was that it brought to the fore an intriguing basic issue: is it appropriate to call this thought “philosophy,” and even to say that it is precisely with that thought that Philosophy with a capital P is born? Looking in hindsight twenty years later, that conference seems to have marked the rebirth of an already noble research trend on the Presocratics. In fact, there has been an extraordinary increase in publications on early Greek philosophy, whose authors are often, not by chance, scholars who participated in the Lille conference. As just a few examples, limited to the English-speaking world, we must mention at least the Oxford Handbook of Presocratic Philosophy, edited by Patricia Curd and Daniel Graham (2008); Daniel Graham’s two-volume edition and translation, The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy: The Complete Fragments and Selected Testimonies of the Major Presocratics (2010); and the completely revised edition, in 2011, of Richard McKirahan’s Philosophy Before Socrates. An Introduction with Texts and Commentary, first published twenty years before. The last, most important result of this rich season of scholarship has been the publication of the fragments and testimonia of Early Greek Philosophy by André Laks and Glenn W. Most in nine volumes of the Loeb Classical Library (2016; a French version of the same work was published simultaneously by Fayard). This edition is destined to change our perception of early Greek philosophy in a significant way, thanks to a series of choices that represent a firm break away from (though not a complete unhinging of ) the patterns of reception consolidated during the course of the last century in the framework set up by Herman Diels’s Vorsokratiker; the most remarkable indication of this is the inclusion of Socrates (in the section devoted to the Sophists), but there is also, for instance, an extensive section devoted to “philosophies and philosophers” in comedy and tragedy. Moreover, this relocation of texts and doctrines (and the addition of a good number of new monographs on single Presocratic authors) has gone hand in hand with a more properly historiographic reflection on the validity and limits of the definition of “Presocratic” thought, together with a consideration of the vastness and variety of the “intellectual endeavor” that took place in the period before Socrates. Laks himself undertook the latter path with a series of studies that eventually fed into a book with an eloquent title, whose [ xi ] Sassi_Beginnings.indd 11 3/6/18 7:14 PM [ xii ] in TrodUcTion English translation has been published by Princeton University Press: The Concept of Presocratic Philosophy: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (2018). I have moved in the same direction with the present book. Here I have not tried to delineate a “history” of the doctrines of single Presocratic authors, nor did I aim to illustrate cameos of strong intellectual personalities such as Anaximander, Heraclitus, Xenophanes, Parmenides, or Empedocles— even though in certain sections of the book I ended up tracing an overview of these thinkers. Rather, I have tried to answer a fundamental question: To what extent are we able to trace the birth of the particular form of knowledge, which today we call philosophy, back to these thinkers, as well as to other more- and less-well-known ones, and also to poets such as Hesiod, or to personalities that are traditionally classified as sages, such as Pherecydes? It is no longer possible today to accept more or less passively the image of Thales as the “first philosopher” that the ancient sources (starting with Plato and Aristotle) have handed down to us. We have known for a long time that this is not a historical fact but rather, the fruit of a representation stemming from a retrospective projection of a “philosophical ideal of life” that is a product of a time much later than that of Thales. As Werner Jaeger demonstrated in a memorable study (Jaeger 1928), the ideal of the superiority of contemplative life originated and developed in the Academy and the Lyceum in the wake of inquiries started by their respective founders, and it immediately accompanied (for promotional purposes, we might say) an elaboration of exemplary images and stories of prior sages that was as rich as the available documentation was lacking (especially in the case of Thales). Another fundamental landmark in the scholarship on the Presocratics was Harold Cherniss’s acute and painstaking analysis of the wealth of references in Aristotle’s writings, which enabled him to draw conclusions that are of paramount importance for any subsequent interpretation. In fact, not only is Aristotle the most generous source on Presocratic doctrines but he also inaugurated in his school a process of gathering and arranging the “opinions” (doxai) of the preceding philosophical tradition. This activity marked the beginning of ancient doxographical literature, still an indispensable tool for our knowledge of that tradition. (It is well known that no text by these thinkers has come down to us, with the exception of two great discoveries of the second half of the twentieth century, both included as new entries in Laks and Most’s edition: the Strasbourg papyrus, containing more than seventy lines of a poem by Empedocles, and the Derveni papyrus, containing an allegorical commentary to a writing attributed to Orpheus, interspersed with references to Preplatonic cosmological doctrines.) Now, Cherniss has demonstrated that Aristotle’s goal is not to write a history of the preceding theories (nor, after all, should we expect that of him) but rather, to identify single pieces of the puzzle and relocate them in different places of his reflection, at times to appreciate them and at other times to denounce their insufficiency in light of his Sassi_Beginnings.indd 12 3/6/18 7:14 PM in TrodUcTion [ xiii ] own theoretical apparatus; the terms and concepts that Aristotle attributes to the Presocratics, then, are mostly the result of his reformulation (Cherniss 1935). This “discovery” has been the foundation for a long series of studies that has emphasized the broader, general panorama of ancient historiography on the Presocratics, sounding out the particular modalities that govern the selection and classification of philosophical doxai in ancient doxographical texts, from Plato to Diogenes Laertius to the Christian authors (Cambiano 1986, Osborne 1987b, and Mansfeld 1990 are just a few examples). At the same time, scholars have expressed strong doubts regarding the validity of what was, since the beginning of the twentieth century, the essential research tool for studying Presocratic thought: Hermann Diels’s arrangement of texts by and on these authors in Vorsokratiker, one of the most influential products of nineteenth century Altertumswissenschaft (Diels 1903, after Diels 1879), a mature fruit of the “positivistic” confidence of being able to reconstruct “what the Presocratics really said,” based on careful philological analysis of the sources that mention them, in the form of direct testimony or a more or less literal citation. On the other hand, this framework was shaken by the long wave of an anthropological approach to Greek culture that owes much to the pioneering studies of Eric R. Dodds (1951) and Francis M. Cornford (1952), among others. The second half of the twentieth century saw a burgeoning interest in the great themes of myth and the irrational, which had remained in the background of a classicist perception of Greek culture described in terms of balance and rationality. Thus scholars gradually broke free of that dichotomy between rationality and irrationality (inherited from Aristotle, on one hand, and from the Enlightenment on the other) that had, until then, dominated a history of ancient thought seen as a history of the advances of reason. In the new perspective, the knowledge of the Presocratic period too has revealed new fields, such as the exposure to magic, the vitality of the mythical unconscious, soteriological aspirations—consider Walker Burkert’s “shaman” Pythagoras (1972) or Peter Kingsley’s “magician” Empedocles (1995). It is also remarkably important, from this perspective, that more and more attention is finally being paid to the historical, sociological, and anthropological conditions of the Presocratics’ intellectual activities. These factors have brought about an extraordinary widening of the horizons that has enabled scholars to align or, better yet, to interweave Presocratic thought with other manifestations of the broad “intellectual endeavor” of the period before Plato; an endeavor that involved not only natural philosophers but also doctors and mathematicians, geographers and historians (Lloyd throughout his career, but especially 2002c; Gemelli Marciano 2002). The new panorama, brought to light by historical and comparative studies, is undoubtedly rich and well suited to the antihistoricist trend in contemporary culture. Yet I take issue with the fact that a great part of it is constructed Sassi_Beginnings.indd 13 3/6/18 7:14 PM [ xiv ] in TrodUcTion not only without resorting to the information contained in the Aristotelian tradition but also, often, against Aristotle and his “falsifications” (among the most malicious, the identification of phusis as the exclusive object of philosophical inquiry, from Thales onward). In other words, some interpreters seem to believe that in order to free ourselves from the historiographic patterns of Aristotle and other ancient sources, we should deny any validity to their writings, or perhaps systematically turn them around—and this seems to me to be a new form of slavery. Let us consider, for instance, how Andrea Nightingale developed (not without remarkable insights) her thesis that philosophy is a construction intimately connected with Plato’s and Aristotle’s speculations on the notion of contemplation (theōria) as the goal of the philosopher. Her argument hinges on the observation that the term philosophia, in its first attestations toward the end of the fifth century BCE, denotes generic intellectual activity, without referring to a specific discipline; and here Nightingale sees the proof that the earliest thinkers were not philosophers, since they did not give a specific definition of their own intellectual activity but instead aspired to be perceived as “wise men” (sophoi), engaging themselves more in the performance of a practical and political wisdom than in the knowledge of nature (Nightingale 1995, 2001, 2004). Yet Nightingale is not the only scholar to deny the philosophical intent of the Presocratics’ intellectual pursuits. Geoffrey Lloyd and Laura Gemelli Marciano, for instance, take somewhat similar positions, although they have very different perspectives. They too insist on the fact, undeniable in itself, that a characterization (and more importantly a self-characterization) of philosophy as an autonomous activity does not exist before Plato. My approach is in stark opposition to the one I just described, which I would call “revisionist.” In this introduction I will limit myself to raising two rather general objections. First, I observe that the absence of the noun for and/or the awareness of performing a certain activity does not prevent us from admitting that some significant elements of that activity are at work. Second, I should say that a hermeneutical process is always influenced by certain preconceptions, and in this sense the position of those who reject a priori the possibility of attributing to the Presocratics an activity comparable to what we call “philosophy” shows as much prejudice as the position of those who (like myself ), on the contrary, admit the possibility. Thus, my argument in this book is also driven by a certain preconception about the nature of philosophy (which I preliminarily take as the elaboration of a critical stance toward received opinions). Yet the precision of a hermeneutical process may be aided by a responsible illustration of its premises, such as the one that I am trying to offer in these pages. I should add that I have tried in any way I could to avoid the risks of a predetermined construction. First of all, as is evident from the title, I prefer to speak of a plurality of beginnings of philosophy in Greece, and I trace its Sassi_Beginnings.indd 14 3/6/18 7:14 PM in TrodUcTion [ xv ] various beginnings in different contexts and different periods: in a study of nature centered upon the problem of cosmic order (chapters 1 and 2), in matters of cultural polemics (chapter 3), in the elaboration of a discourse on the soul (chapter 4), and in the formulation of principles of reasoning (chapter 5). Moreover, I have avoided seeking a teleological structure with a beginning and development that were too defined, opting instead to give my exposition a different design from the one normally followed in the histories of philosophy (which tends to be a progressive one, Aristotelian and Hegelian in character). To this end, I have tried to situate various authors, with their particular conceptions and even their respective critical stances, in their specific contexts, by which I mean not only the political environment but also the context of communication in which their intellectual activity took place before being circulated more broadly, thanks to the medium of writing. By applying the most specific and updated historical research on archaic Greece, I believe I was able to avoid a twofold temptation: either glorifying the birth of philosophy as the product of a Greek “miracle” (according to Renan’s famous formulation) or aligning it with other intellectual “revolutions” that might have taken place in response to similar environmental or political transformations in distant societies such as Israel (with the Prophets), India (with Buddha), China (with Confucius and Lao-Tze), or Persia (with Zoroaster), in a phase that lasted six hundred years (800–200 BCE, the so-called “axial age” in Karl Jaspers’s other famous formulation; see Eisenstadt 1986). In the first chapter, I first dwell on the theories of great interpreters such as Francis M. Cornford and Walter Burkert; both were interested in finding— though via different channels—the origin of Greek philosophy in the background of Eastern civilizations, and insisted on the similarities rather than the differences between the cosmological doctrines of the Ionians and the Mesopotamian creation accounts. With all due respect and admiration for this approach, which has been an ever-beneficial antidote to a rationalistic reading of Greek thought as a logos born and developed in stark opposition to muthos, I argue that the search for the archē started by Thales and continued by the other Ionians represents a truly new contribution to the understanding of the nature of things, basing my thesis on the claim that Aristotle’s exposition is fundamentally correct. In general, I believe (as should be clear by now) that any attempt to reconstruct Presocratic thought should utilize not only the ipsissima verba of the Presocratics but also the data of indirect tradition. Philology offers excellent tools for grasping pertinent information, through the filters of theoretical stratification and anecdote, even from highly personal testimonies such as Plato’s and Aristotle’s; these data often facilitate our understanding of textual references and enable us to reconstruct, more or less, their hypothetical context. The alternative approach—regarding the ancient accounts as the product of not only a retrospective projection but also an inexorably falsifying reconstruction—is like throwing out the baby with the Sassi_Beginnings.indd 15 3/6/18 7:14 PM [ xvi ] in TrodUcTion bathwater. This is why in the first chapter I opted for an unbiased reading and a “strong” interpretation of Presocratic thought like the one offered by Aristotle in the first book of Metaphysics, and found within it various signs of the problematic tension in Aristotle’s construction, as well as still viable and interesting reflections on the character of the new wisdom of the naturalists (whose forefather is Thales), in its relationship with the knowledge of nature that arose from the mythological tradition. In the second chapter, I found it appropriate to identify at least one common trait that allows us to call an intellectual activity “philosophical,” and I defined this trait as a critical intent directed toward traditional, or at any rate established, points of view. This definition should be understood in a minimal sense, that is, it does not require that a determined theoretical stance be accompanied by an explicit and explicitly polemic explanation against the points of view that have been rejected. It is enough that an idea is put forth knowingly, as innovation and as fact. This can already be said of endeavors such as Hesiod’s in the Theogony and Pherecydes of Syros’s (an occasion to discuss the relationships with a tradition between cosmology and “theology”) and is even more true for the cosmic frameworks that Ionian thought began to construct, elaborating an idea of cosmic order that marks, in itself, an epochal break from the structure of the mythical cosmogonies. In the third chapter, after dealing with the link between the rise of the polis and the beginnings of philosophy (by considering in detail the theses of Jean-Pierre Vernant and Geoffrey Lloyd), I turn my attention to the role that writing—or rather, the authors’ specific and well-aimed expressive choices— played in the modalities of philosophical formulation. Convinced that the different types of writing contain very specific clues about the author’s relationship with his or her original audiences (who receive the texts aurally), I tried to understand Anaximander in Miletus, engaged in discussions regarding the political choices of the time, Heraclitus before his fellow citizens in his attitude as a prophet, and Xenophanes in the far-flung places he visited as a professional rhapsode. The fourth chapter reprises a thematic concern, focusing on the discourse on the soul that develops in this period and is intertwined with the discourse on the cosmos in diverse ways. Here, again, places matter—and I was pleased to see that a collective volume on La sagesse présocratique published a few years ago was organized according to the geographical location of the various Presocratic thinkers (Desclos-Fronterotta 2013). We meet Empedocles of Akragas immersed in an Italian scene that is agitated by problems of immortality and spiritual salvation. Not far from Sicily, we find the followers of Orphic religion as well as Pythagoras and his first pupils. Against this backdrop we observe the cognitive experience of Parmenides of Elea, who, in the proem of his writing, presents it as the result of a religious revelation and initiation. Both Parmenides and Empedocles authored a poem in hexameters, the epic Sassi_Beginnings.indd 16 3/6/18 7:14 PM in TrodUcTion [ xvii ] meter, and the fifth chapter revolves around this fact: the adoption of poetry, which may seem problematic according to modern canons of philosophical communication, is on the contrary illuminating, because it confirms that these authors certainly did not think of themselves as philosophers; rather, they placed their activity within a recognized literary tradition, that of epic poetry, in order to give authority to their message, knowing full well how innovative their ideas were. At the same time, prose writing began to emerge among other authors whom I discuss, and I will show how, during the second half of the fifth century BCE, prose would become the medium of rational argumentation par excellence. In conclusion, I have tried to represent Presocratic thought in all its variety and different directions, because so many of these were sacrificed in later philosophy, especially after the Aristotelian delimitation of a precise terrain of competence in philosophical reasoning. And I hope to have succeeded in putting together a narrative that is not blocked by a retrospective glance but rather takes a “perspectival” one, to use Michael Frede’s hopeful term: a story that I have reconstructed while trying as much as possible to walk in the shoes of its protagonists, as it were, who knew where they were departing from and the new paths they wanted to open, but could not predict the twists and forks in the road or the obstacles that would appear later along the way. Sassi_Beginnings.indd 17 3/6/18 7:14 PM