Motives for Philosophy in Plato’s Protagoras

 

     Though philosophy today is most often regarded as an abstruse special interest which, indeed, struggles to survive even within academia, this isolation is distinctly modern.  If one sees the end of philosophy as the search for a formula for leading the best possible life, it is clearly a matter for everyone’s consideration.  If philosophical speculation is aimed at a determination of ethics, it is likewise a subject that engages all people.  The goal of understanding one’s place in  the cosmos or getting some sense of ultimate reality has been ceded to religion.  Yet we understand that in ancient Athens Socrates plied his trade in public places, the gymnasia and the agora, always a devoted amateur, and in such places made a name and attracted followers and challengers.  General interest in philosophy and skill with words became sufficient to support a class of teachers, the sophists, who, unlike Socrates, were professionals whose tutelage came at a price.  In one Platonic dialogue, Protagoras, traditionally regarded as the first sophist, engages wits with Socrates before an audience of over twenty onlookers who probably would have considered such an encounter as a world-class contest of ideas, as worthy of watching as the Olympics.  From their disputation two motives for philosophic training emerge that suggest that intellectual training has value for everyone. 

     The course of their dialogue suggests several purposes for philosophic thought, though the putative topic under discussion is a somewhat different theme: whether virtue is teachable.  These days few would think of justifying the work of philosophers by its value in furthering social ends, since their expertise seems irrelevant to the lives of most citizens.  Yet Protagoras claims that that he can “promise to make men good citizens” [1], only for Socrates to object, saying that social decisions are made by everyone together, regardless of profession, and neither any individual nor any particular profession has particular expertise in statecraft.          

      Of course, in Classical antiquity, skill in logic and rhetoric was closely associated with deliberative and forensic arenas, either the assembly and other governmental forums or the courts.  Not only did every free Athenian male have a voice in deciding issues of the common good, but, for those engaged in litigation or legal defense, the jury system made persuasiveness of cardinal importance.  Today a mere vote is thought to be all an individual owes the state, though some will go so far as to write an occasional letter to the editor or to put out an election yard sign.  Yet in the view of the ancient Greeks (and the founders of the United States), a healthy democracy requires fuller participation by all, apart from slaves, foreigners, and women.  The disastrous recent American election of a would-be dictator, propelled to power by uneducated voters, reveals the hazards of an ignorant population. 

     For the Greeks a man’s identity was largely constituted by his political role, and the necessity of sound reasoning by the populace is required for a healthy, well-functioning democracy.  Moreover, the training that qualified one to formulate one’s views in a coherent and convincing way and present persuasive arguments when discussing legislation or pleading a legal case, is applicable in many  arenas of life.  The ability to manipulate symbols is the distinguishing characteristic of our species.  The general intellectual skills of taking in information, analyzing it, and producing astute responses are, of course, critical in all endeavors requiring thought and judgement.  Often in our era, with the decay of debating as a common practice in American secondary schools and philosophy classes on that level virtually non-existent and ignored by mot collegians, the development of even fundamental proficiency in thinking and self-expression is left to the belated attention of those who teach freshman English classes in universities.  Whether one engaged with a professional teacher like Protagoras or simply a talkative figure familiar about town like Socrates, the Greeks’ system may have been more effective at encouraging a generally educated populace, more capable in their civic role and in private life as well.  The assumption that every person should possess logical and verbal skills is so strong that people are suspicious of sophists who claim a special expertise and work for hire, and Protagoras concedes that some think ill of professionals like himself, though he is willing to proudly affirm his profession in spite of the “malice and ill-will” and “intrigues” of their critics [2].

     In Plato’s Protagoras Socrates is pleased to be able to meet with Protagoras, ostensibly to gain wisdom from him, but  the reader suspects, even more to enhance his own reputation by showing up a rival in philosophical argumentation.   The traditional subtitle of “On the Sophists” suggests a focus on evaluating those who teach logic and speaking professionally, so, though the general topic is whether virtue may be taught, the rivalry of Socrates and Protagoras provides the drama.

     In the end, as in other Platonic dialogues, especially early ones, most of the logical argumentation has been negative, indicating that received ideas are flawed yet providing no definitive alternative answer to settle the question.  The reader, along with Protagoras and Socrates’ friends, is left wondering.  In  the Meno this process, at the heart of much Platonic ἔλεγχος, is described as a beneficial in itself [3], though in that dialogue aporia is simply a way-station preceding truth.  In the Protagoras there is no further resolution.  The discussion can dislodge error, but it makes little attempt to formulate a correct answer.  What, then, is the point? 

     Greek philosophy offers several options to avoid the cul-de-sac of finding a desired answer unknowable.  In Stoicism suspended judgement, or ἐποχή, is appropriate for some sense experiences (φαντασίαι), while others are sufficiently convincing as to be kataleptic  or “graspable.” [4]  For Skeptics, however, particularly the Pyrrhonist variety, all impressions are doubtful, but in withholding assent and denial alike, the individual might find a serene mental state or ἀταραξία, following the recognition that nothing can be certainly known.  Here, in a mysterious reversal, not-knowing is transformed into enlightenment. 

     Both Plato’s Protagoras, though, and his Socrates seem clearly to be in pursuit of answers.  They are also competitors as providers of wisdom, and each is characterized as polite yet jealous of his reputation.  So the reader might imagine Socrates here as elsewhere playing devil’s advocate for the more vigorous play of ideas and the chance to display his ratiocination to greater advantage.  He may care more about out-talking Protagoras than in finding Truth.  The discussion is civil and good-humored, more in the nature of a friendly game of cards than an angry argument.  The audience listens to both and the conversation, enjoying the spectacle, making the event resemble an athletic contest or a dramatic production, both of which encode tensions and antagonisms in  a generally harmonious form. 

     In the last analysis, the Greeks at Callias’ [5] house were passing the time of day, amusing themselves with intellectual calisthenics that they found pleasurable for their own sake, without necessarily coming to a conclusion or uncovering new knowledge, a form of play very like attending the theater, a foot-race, or any other diversion.  What makes philosophy superlatively entertaining is that human cognitive skill, the ability to deal in subtle symbols and recombine words in ever new combinations , is the distinguishing characteristic of our species.  The speakers and the audience in the Protagoras are doing neither more nor less than having fun with their brains.  So philosophy here is a sort of highest level divertissement with no further end in view than the kitten has when tossing a stuffed mouse, the dog in retrieving a stick, people idly chatting over a backyard fence, or while sitting on barstools. 

     Though neither good citizenship nor amusement is likely to occur to people today as motives for philosophy, their endurance in antiquity is suggested by the fact that both are cited by Cicero three hundred years after Plato.  In his Tusculan Disputations he argues that civilization itself is the result of philosophy, allowing people to live together in large numbers.  He then notes that some come to the Olympic Games to compete, while others come to sell their goods to the crowds, and yet a third group come simply to look on, for the sake of the spectacle.  This last, he says, resembles philosophers, who observe life itself, purely out of curiosity, because they wish to “look with interest into the nature of things.” [6] 

     Philosophy as an enabler of democracy and as an entertainment may seem to have little in common, even to be opposed: one seems serious, even lofty, aiming toward the betterment of society, while the other might appear frivolous and trivial, simple amusement.  Yet casual conversations such as that depicted in the Protagoras form the basis for close ties among fellow-citizens while providing practice in ratiocination and communication that can equally serve the larger community in legislative and legal deliberation.  Philosophy here represents a shared belief that people do have common problems and a common language for inquiring after solutions, and that the quest for knowledge is a primary human pleasure, whether or not anyone ever can arrive at the Truth. 

     Practice in thinking, analyzing, understanding, writing, and speaking had been the basis for all education for millennia.  We moderns can deplore, though we cannot change, the contemporary destruction of the ideal of a liberal education and the transformation of post-secondary schooling into vocational training.  Perhaps a rebirth of philosophic studies justified by social utility or the pure fun of it might rejuvenate our stricken American political culture and reawaken people to the joys and benefits of juggling concepts.  

 

1.  ὑπισχνεῖσθαι ποιεῖν ἄνδρας ἀγαθοὺς πολίτας 319a.

2.  In Greek the terms are φθόνοι and δυσμένειαί (316d).

3.  See Meno (84c)  “Isn’t this numbing then a good thing?” (ὤνητο ἄρα ναρκήσας;).

4.  Epictetus, Discourses 1.18.1 maintains that all human decisions originate in “feeling,” including the suspension of judgment associated with uncertainty.  Thus the ignorant are not to be blamed for their errors.

5.  According to numerous authorities (Andocides, 130, Aristophanes, The Frogs, v. 432, Athenaeus, iv. 67; and Aelian, Varia Historia, iv. 16 as well as Plato Apology 20a), Callias is said to have spent his patrimony in support of sophists and ended his life in penury. 

6.  Book V, section 5 for the growth of civilization and V, 9  for the disinterested inquirer into truth, acting out of curiosity.  In this latter passage the relevant Latin phrases are “sed visendi causa venirent studioseque perspicerent, quid ageretur et quo modo” (“but come to visit to see what was going on and how”).  It is these who “rerum naturam studiose intuerentur” (“look with interest into the nature of things”). 

Notes on Recent Reading 47 (Colette, Alegría, Xenophon)

 

Chéri and The Last of Chéri (Colette)

     The fascination of Chéri is the reader’s vicarious delectation in reading about these demimondaines.   Chéri is as languid a figure as anyone in Ronald Firbank (though considerably more substantial) and yet his love for Léa is intense, creating an impossible tension, the mainspring of the plot’s movement.  The secondary characters are marvelous, old Pal, Madame Aldonza (whose name memorializes her quondam career), and the masculine (as the reader is all too often reminded) Baroness de la Berche.  Colette afforded us all the recreation of reading of characters bred (or said to have been bred) in the borderlands between the light of accepted society and its only semi-hidden counterpart where love is for sale.

     As the title suggests, the sequel The Last of Chéri strikes a more somber tone with its merciless description of Léa’s aging.  The exaggeration dramatizes Chéri’s horrified reaction to aging.  The conclusion is disturbing, even painful, full of pathos.  The focus turns from the high spirits of the theatrical performers to Chéri’s melancholy end.  Though this endgame was surely implicit in his decadent hedonism in the original novel, it is, to one reader at least, less of an entertainment.

 

The Golden Serpent (Alegría)

     The Golden Serpent is less a novel than a collection of sketches of the rural poor in Ciro Alegría’s home territory on the banks of the Marañón River in Peru.  Episodes describe the ordinary round of life for the community of farmers and boatmen, stressing the hazards and hardships they regularly face and the effects of visitors: an engineer contemplating development, a couple of sufferers from a dreadful disease, a fugitive on the run. 

     Alegría’s sympathies are altogether with the poor cholos or “half-breeds” of his story.  A founder of the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (Apristas), the author was a lifelong advocate for progressive change whose activism led to his imprisonment, a twenty-four-year exile, and eventual election to the Chamber of Deputies.  The book was published in 1935, when variations on socialist realism were prestigious, and its constant theme is the survival of the people against the challenges of their lives.  The message resembles that of Ma Joad when she assures her son, “Why, Tom, we're the people that live. They ain't gonna wipe us out. Why, we're the people - we go on.”

     The symbolic machinery (such as the river as snake) can sound a bit clunky, but it is consistent and appropriate.  The narrator is a local man, a normative figure, a lens on the others with little to distinguish him.  Alegría went on the write The Hungry Dogs (1939) in which he depicted the life of the full-blooded Indians and, most ambitiously and successfully Broad and Alien is the World (1941).  Here his primary motive is to educate his readers on how the other half lives.

 

Anabasis (Xenophon)

     Xenophon’s Anabasis contains such detailed reports of the author’s leadership of the ten thousand in their “march up country” that the reader’s experience is almost cinematic. Of course, the speeches and conversations he records are his own composition, doubtless shaped by his own interests as well as the erosion of memory and the conventions of oratory.  Still, the descriptions of the daily life of the troops is vivid and convincing.  For those who take an interest in military tactics, the battle narrations are rich in data, though their interest may pale for others.  The frequent repetition of vocabulary and phrasing in battle scenes, which seemed a gift to the centuries of students for whom the Anabasis was the first book read in Greek, is unlikely to please to common reader. 

     Unsurprisingly, Xenophon comes off as a patriotic hero, devoted to his men, discerning in judgement, altruistic and unambitious. His rise to command is the result of his impressing the assembled troops with realistic strategy couched in well-chosen words. 

     The modern soldier will be surprised at the degree of democracy in the decision-making of this army of mercenaries. In a crisis the troops assemble to decide on a course of action. Xenophon himself, after proposing his own plan, explicitly invites any of his comrades-in-arms, officer or common soldier, to suggest alternatives. The decision to return to Greece occurred only when the army, realizing that Cyrus had hired them under false pretenses, rebelled, and Xenophon agreed to continue to lead.  On the other hand, in combat situations he regards absolute discipline as mandatory. 

     Xenophon was at times a controversial figure. Though an Athenian, he, like others in Socrates’ circle, sympathized with Sparta, and was for that reason exiled. The Spartan king Agesilaus gave him an estate for his services which, in the continuing political turmoil was confiscated after several decades. 

     One may come to Xenophon from a historical interest.  He wrote an account of the Peloponnesian War that picks up where Thucydides’ history leaves off, the Hellenica, a number of works on political theory, and four Socratic works, our fullest picture of the philosopher outside of Plato.  In the Anabasis Xenophon consults Socrates about whether the army should accept Cyrus’ offer and Socrates prudently warns him that he might be criticized in Athens for doing so.  After finding favorable sacrificial omens, Xenophon decides to ignore his teacher’s advice.  Though he had come along solely due to the invitation of his friend Proxenus (who was among those treacherously put to death by Tissaphernes) with the thought that he might achieve greater advancement from Cyrus (whom he admired) than at home, the unusual processes of Greek democracy made him a “people’s leader” and the author of one of the most-read books of antiquity. 

Zola’s Nana and the Conundrum of Sex Work

 

Though it engages Zola and Xenophon, this piece is really more about the nature of sexual relations than aesthetics.

 

     Surely in Nana (1880) Zola meant to portray the sordid degradation of the sex workers of his time, even those who populated the more luxurious regions of the demimonde, where salons were occupied by genteel and titled aristocrats as well as by a once penniless girl of the streets.  In this he was contributing to a growing literature of prostitution that included most of the prominent writers among Romantics, Realists, and Naturalists alike.  Among the many who depicted streetwalkers and courtesans were de Vigny in his novel Cinq Mars (1826), Hugo in Marion Delorme (1828), Dumas père in Filles, lorettes et courtisanes (1843) and La Dame aux Camélias (1848), the Goncourt brothers in La Lorette (1853), Eugène Sue in “La Lorette” (1854), Augier in Le Mariage d'Olympe (1855), Huysmans in Marthe (1876), and de Maupassant in “Boule de Suif” (1880). [1]

     Though Zola’s approach was sociological rather than moral, tracing Nana’s ruin to her dreadful childhood, her story very nearly fits the form of a medieval exemplum, so horridly does her beauty dissolve in the end into suppurating lesions.  The chance event of her illness reveals to the reader, though not to the lady herself, the vanity and destructiveness of her career as a courtesan.  Yet Nana herself, despite her ups and downs, her short-sightedness and extravagance, had largely maintained a good humor, while her lovers fall into hopeless perdition one after another in what must amount to the greatest career of romantic destruction prior to Dorian Gray (whose conquests are far more obscurely suggested).  Philippe Hugon falls into crime, Georges stabs himself, and Fauchery, Vandeuvres, and Count Muffat suffer financial collapse in the attempt to support her profligate spending, while Nana herself never realizes what she is doing and is brought low only by the random calamity of infectious disease.

     There can be, of course, no question of the fundamental power structure of the patriarchy represented in the novel’s social relations.  The men hold the money and the power and Nana, as she periodically reflects, has nothing but her magnificent body.  Still, the misery and distress she brings her devotees and the disasters they suffer contrast with her generally self-satisfied moods.  She sacrifices true love, perhaps, by cynically using each man she cultivates, and can experience only a cruel caricature of selfless affection in her attachment to Fontan who beats her when he is not simply cold and thoughtless.  Love appears in the narrative only warped by either financial or physical exploitation or hopeless and one-sided obsession.  With fearful concision, Blake knew almost a hundred years earlier in London that “the youthful Harlots curse” “blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.”  As the professional in Cole Porter’s “Love for Sale” (1930) admits, she can offer “Every love, but true love.”

     If love vanishes when it finds itself in the marketplace, what remains in its place may not be the “trip to paradise” Porter’s lyrics promise, but something more nasty all around.  The world of the Théâtre des Variétés with its titled boxholders may be unknown to the contemporary reader, but comparable phenomena are commonplace today.  One may imagine, without ever having witnessed, the scene in a self-styled “gentleman’s club” next to a truck-stop at an interstate’s exit.  The parallels with Nana’s world are unescapable.  There, daily, groups of men, with more or less furtiveness, sit with overpriced drinks and drop hard-earned dollars in sacrifice to the sexual charms of the performers whose talents, as in Nana’s case, are irrelevant, their nudity (or semi-nudity) being the commodity the customers purchase. 

     This is only the grossest example and it carries the comforting convenience that many can without difficulty avoid that smoky and dim-lit crowd.  Self-interested love may as well be manifested  in the youthful wife of an aging celebrity (or rich man), in a young man’s proclivity for pornography, or the nude scene propelling an actress’ career.  The ordinary course of erotic experience includes moments at least of many sorts, ranging from possessiveness and aggression through mutual respect and responsiveness and on toward self-abnegation and masochism.  In Nana’s world, though, only the ultimately unsatisfying extremes are possible.

     Without questioning the fundamental power relations at play or the oppressive sexism of the dominant ideology, the observer might wonder whether the men or the women are more brutalized in this unequal substitute for love.  Clearly both are denied a satisfying erotic life.  The objectification forced upon the woman descends no less decisively on the man.  Films like The Blue Angel and Of Human Bondage caricature the degradation of an exploitative affair with the man as victim, though the daily newspaper indicates that the reverse is far more commonly the situation.

     Nana’s social position is not entirely unlike that of the ἑταίρα if ancient Greece.   In Xenophon’s account Socrates visits Theodote, a celebrated courtesan, after hearing of her fabulous beauty.  Arriving at her home, he finds her posing for a painter, but when they can converse, Socrates poses her a question.  “Ought we to be more grateful to Theodote for showing us her beauty or she to us for looking at it?  Does the obligation rest with her if she profits more by showing it, but with us if we profit more by looking?”  Eliding the issue of actual sexual contact by describing only her role as the object of visual attention, he observes that “we already long to touch what we’ve seen and we’ll go away aroused and will miss her when we’re gone.  The natural consequence is that we become her adorers, she the adored.”  As she is “sumptuously dressed” and attended by “many pretty maids” in a “lavishly furnished” house, her advantage seems self-evident, and she concedes to Socrates, “Of course I ought to be grateful to you for looking.” [2]  

     Theodote was, of course, quite prosperous.  Her work occurred like Nana’s in a genteel aristocratic atmosphere, just as some women with “sugar daddies” might today mix in moneyed circles.   The answer to Socrates’ question would have been different had he been interviewing a common prostitute, a πόρνη, a word derived from πέρνημι meaning “to sell” and  associated with exploitation and slavery.  Poor, often literally a slave, lacking agency over her own life, such prostitutes resemble today’s street sex workers who are often addicts or victims of trafficking.

     The question that Socrates poses to Theodote ignores a third possibility, that of mutual affection, but that can hardly occur when sexuality is commodified.  Every economic bargain involves a balance of interests, and, when people are buying and selling, a marketplace can assure a modicum of what looks to both parties like “fairness,” but when love is for sale, it is either not really love or not really for sale.  If one party is more powerful, a price must be paid for cynically using another; the possibility of love vanishes altogether.

 

  

1.  Though never prosecuted in France, Zola was the occasion for several major censorship trials in the United Kingdom that ultimately ruined Henry Vizetelly, his publisher.  For a survey of the theme in visual art, see Hollis Clayson’s Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era.  Crane’s novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) developed an American Naturalism from the considerably more sordid circumstances of the Bowery.  The theme flourished in art movies after World War II in such features as Bresson’s Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (945), Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, Dassin’s Never on Sunday (1960), Godard’s Vivre sa Vie (1962), Pasolini’s Mama Roma (1962), Kurasawa’s Red Beard (1965), and Buñuel’s Belle du Jour (1967).

2.  Memorabilia (III, 11, 2-4) in the Loeb Library translation by E. C. Marchant and O. J. Todd, revised by Jeffrey Henderson. 

A Take on Plato’s Parmenides

 

     The informality of the title of this essay is meant to convey that I here make no pretense to scholarship; indeed, my notions have little ambition even to be called philosophical.  My reading of Plato can only be justified by a reader who finds it poetic.  Yet I have always found that the subjectivity of poets offers an access to truth unavailable to logicians. 

 

     Plato’s Parmenides is to many a puzzler.  One modern reader has called it the philosopher’s “most enigmatic” work, [1] while another, equally Hellenic but preferring more contemporary jargon, finds it "aporetic." [2]   In most of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates’ interlocutors follow their guru like sheep, chorusing “of course, Socrates” and “how could it be otherwise, Socrates?” while at the same time the reader may be shouting, “but no!”  In the Parmenides the roles are reversed, and a youthful Socrates accepts the lead of the elder philosopher.  Parmenides even scolds like an indulgent parent, telling Socrates, “you are still young; the time will come, if I am not mistaken, when philosophy will have a firmer grasp of you.”  [3]  Plato’s point of view can always be elusive, given the dramatic dialogue format and the Socratic pose of knowing nothing, but where is the authority here?   The reader of this dialogue scarcely knows what to think as Socrates allows himself to be passively led first through a rejection of his own opinions and then to what looks like a strange sort of apologetic reconstruction of them, making the second portion if not a refutation a weaker reflected mirror image of the first.  Finally, through the entire dialogue the argumentation is so abstract, abstruse, and repetitive that even receptive readers may find themselves dizzy with fatigue after only a page or two, on the edge of concluding that the whole thing is gibberish. 

    If one persists, the effect soon becomes incantatory, hypnotic, at times an astonishing juggling act, at others more a magic charm or mantra, never a usable map of ratiocination.  Perhaps some savant might be able to lock in on the concepts here and follow the funabulistic thought, but could the effort of leaping and dancing and graceful turns lift a contemplative to the sublime?  A good many Hindu, Buddhist, and Scholastic logicians have constructed similarly grand and taxing mental gymnastics based on the conviction that it can.  Perhaps following a moment of surprising grace a certain sort of mind can only heap up argument after argument despite their never quite measuring up to the original flash.  (Does such a dynamo underlie Aquinas’ voluminous productivity?) 

     For me the Parmenides induces not active cognition, but rather its opposite, a surrender of logic in the face of mystery, a submission to circumstance, and a recognition that a human mind cannot encompass the cosmos.  The Milky Way simply will not be swallowed.  Yet that does not doom the philosopher’s equanimity.  In singing the song of powerlessness, in asserting obeisance to the unknown, in insisting on seeing reality naked, and then proceeding to make an exceedingly abstract yet shapely song of what cannot be understood, Parmenides and Socrates and Plato and the reader following along as well dare to affirm, to celebrate even, these borders and limits of humanity. 

     I imagine Plato winking over the centuries, acknowledging that the cumbrous superstructure of Forms (later overlaid with Neo-Platonic Emanations and by the time of Iamblichus crowded with deities and spiritual beings) is only a pastime, a high intellectual amusement.  In Plato’s wink, though it may exist only in fancy, the reader returns to the One, very much the same One that recurs so obsessively in the Parmenides.

     (Another Platonic actor may provide a parallel.  Gorgias had enthralled Athenians with his rhetoric while maintaining a rigorously Skeptical position.  Having concluded that nothing can be shown to exist; that if anything did exist, it could not be known by people; and that if anything were known, it could not be communicated to anyone else, he then spent his time weaving fabulous tapestries of words.  Sitting on a Mediterranean terrace in mid-life, he found he could entertain himself and his tasteful fellow-citizens with such playful projects as a defense of Helen or of Palamedes.  Behind such pleasant theatricals, though, there shone always the One, the Atman, the Ultimate Reality from which each person arises, though only temporarily.)

     This notion is not entirely a vagary of my own.  There is some evidence and a great deal of speculation about the Indian influence on Parmenides himself.  As early as 1894 the author of an article “On the Connexion between Indian and Greek Philosophy” found “the most striking resemblance – I might almost say sameness – is between the doctrine of the All-in-One in the Upanishads and the philosophy of the Eleatics.”  He believed in actual influence from India “without intending to pass an apodictic decision.” [4]  Since then a variety of scholars have examined specific correspondences between Parmenides and Shankara and Nagarjuna. [5]  At least one professor of Buddhist studies argues that Parmenides must have traveled to study in India. [6]  

     While Plato’s precise position must remain ever obscure, considering the Parmenides I cannot avoid thoughts of his “unwritten teachings.”  Though no Rosicrucian or Theosophist, I thought of the old notion of Plato’s esoteric doctrines [7]  One reader, at least, of the Parmenides imagines a spark of the glory of absolute Enlightenment passing from one wounded human psyche to another, diluted and diverted by every possible imp of ignorance, yet casting still a clear light over thinkers of ancient Greece, already struggling, like their South Asian cousins, for a way to live in a cold world.  

 

 

1.      1.  Mitchell H. Miller, Jr., Plato's Parmenides: The Conversion of the Soul. Princeton 1986.

 

2.     2.  R.E. Allen, Plato's Parmenides: Translation and Analysis (Minnesota 1983).

 

3.      3.  I use Jowett’s old translation.  The Greek is “νέος γὰρ εἶ ἔτι . . . καὶ οὔπω σου ἀντείληπται φιλοσοφία” (130ε).

 

4.      4.  Richard Garbe, “On the Connexion between Indian and Greek Philosophy,” The Monist Vol. 4, No. 2 (January, 1894).

 

5.      5.  See, for example, Chiara Robbiano, “Self or being without boundaries: on Śaṅkara and Parmenides” in Universe and Inner Self in Early Indian and Early Greek Thought ed. Richard Seaford; Nathan Tamblyn, “Parmenides and Nāgārjuna: A Buddhist Interpretation of Ancient Greek Philosophy” Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, vol. 4; and Kelly P. Dugan, Understanding Parmenides as a Numerical Monist: A Comparative Study, a University of Kansas dissertation that discusses Shankara in particular. 

 

6.      6.  Ferenc Ruzsa, “Parmenides’ road to India,” Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 42 (2002).

 

7.      7.  Though for a period little discussed, the issue has been revived in recent decades by Irmgard Männlein-Robert and others.  Plato's disputed Seventh Letter declares that the truth of the highest matters cannot be expressed in writing.  "And this is the reason why every serious man in dealing with really serious subjects carefully avoids writing, lest thereby he may possibly cast them as a prey to the envy and stupidity of the public. In one word, then, our conclusion must be that whenever one sees a man's written compositions—whether they be the laws of a legislator or anything else in any other form,—these are not his most serious works, if so be that the writer himself is serious: rather those works abide in the fairest region he possesses.”  Also “Whosoever, then, has accompanied me in this story and this wandering of mine will know full well that, whether it be Dionysius or any lesser or greater man who has written something about the highest and first truths of Nature, nothing of what he has written, as my argument shows, is based on sound teaching or study. Otherwise he would have reverenced these truths as I do, and would not have dared to expose them to unseemly and degrading treatment.”

 

8.      8.  Aristotle in his Physics explicitly refers to such unwritten doctrines (“ἄγραφα δόγματα”) of Plato.  

 

Pindar’s Athlete in Pythian 8

This essay quotes the English translation edited by Diane Arnson Svarlien on the very useful Tufts Perseus website. Line numbers are in parentheses.


     Apart from Classicists, who reads Pindar? And yet we have a generous share of his poetry though it is a small fraction of his collected works. Several factors may play a role apart from the general decay of interest in antiquity. Pindar depends on his readers’ familiarity with the immense web of mythology by which the Greeks and, indeed, all pre-modern people made sense of their world. Like most writers immersed in a living culture, he assumes that he need not narrate the stories of the gods and heroes but need only allude to them, often in fleeting and oblique references. Even the specialist may consult a reference now and then for names and stories that Pindar’s original audience knew from childhood. Footnotes and a Classical encyclopedia with a modicum of patience and rereading can remedy this defect for the motivated reader, but I suspect there is another way in which contemporary American culture has deviated from the ancient Greek’s that might interfere with our appreciation of his writing.
     Though American now has gymnasia springing up on every corner and joggers jostle each other in parks and roadsides, athletics had an even more prominent place in Thebes in the fifth century B.C.E. In part perhaps due to the need to be prepared for total mobilization in wartime, in part associated with a pervasive homoeroticism, and in part reflecting the pursuit of arête in all fields, athletics was celebrated by the Greeks. In my own youth we assumed that intellectuals and athletes were largely mutually exclusive categories, often antagonistic. Physical “education” has always seemed to me a contradiction, and university athletics a maddeningly unjustifiable distraction in higher education. Never in my adult life have I watched a sporting event. Yet I adore Pindar, most of whose surviving works are in praise of victors in competitive athletic contests. What did physical culture mean in the ancient world?
     For all today’s fashion for fitness, we are likely to be surprised when Socrates upbraids Epigenes for being out of shape. [1] Socrates cites many reasons in support of universal physical conditioning, noting first of all that a good citizen must always be prepared for war. Yet he does not stop there. He maintains that workouts lead to not only better health and longevity, but also to better cognitive function. Finally he notes that “it is a disgrace to grow old through sheer carelessness before seeing what manner of man you may become by developing your bodily strength and beauty to their highest limit.” Here is an almost aesthetic argument: pride should lead to exercise from a desire to excel not in functional strength alone but in beauty as well and not merely the beauty of a buff physique, but that associated with fulfilling one’s potential.
     As a professional poet Pindar may have written his victory odes for the same reason that another gifted writer might compose soft drink jingles, because someone will pay for such a product. But, apart from effusive praise of the winners, their families and hometown, he includes a more elaborate and subtle version of the final justification offered by Socrates.
     According to Pindar, “with a willing mind” a person “may observe a certain harmony on every step of my way.” (66-7) That harmony is the experience of the deep order present in the kosmos which one may glimpse through excellence of any sort.
     The poem opens with an address to Hesychia, a personification of peace and serenity, associated with Aigina as a well-ruled thriving city. It may seem incongruous that a figure of peace should also be identified as “holding the supreme keys of counsels and of wars,” (3-4), but Hesychia is described as daughter of Justice, and justice, of course, requires enforcement and, at times, even coercion. The kind of calm Pindar has in mind is not empty, but rather a beautiful order of the sort the Greeks saw in the universe as a whole. The Greek word cosmos (κόσμος) fundamentally means well-organized, and has both moral and aesthetic dimensions, being used to indicate good behavior or morality and also beauty. Only when a system is properly ordered may it be quiet and calm.
     This peace may be threatened by forces represented in mythological terms by monsters and giants. In Pythian 8 these are Typhoeus and Porphyrion who are defeated by Zeus and Apollo respectively. The successful battle against these archaic forces of evil by gods associated with Hesychia is the theme of the first triad of the poem. The same Apollo that overcame disorder in the past welcomes the victor in the present day.
     The second triad praises the excellence of the rulers of Aigina, the Aiakidai, descendents of Aiakos, son of Aigina and Zeus and the origin of the family of the Meidulidai to which Aristomenes belonged. Aigina had a close relationship to the poet’s own city of Thebes and a disproportionate number of his odes are concerned with athletes from that island. Though mentioning other prominent athletes from Aigina, he turns in the epode from the heroic activities of these Aiginitans‎ in a rhetorical apophasis, saying he cannot linger on their greatness but can only speak of Aristomenes, “the nearest of all beautiful things,” and in this way “take flight” through art. At the end of the epode he makes a transition from Aigina to his own city of Thebes by mentioning the words of the prophet Amphiaraus who saw there “by nature the genuine spirit of the fathers is conspicuous in the sons.” (45-6)
     By lauding the deeds of Alcmaeon and Adrastus he not only provides a conventional if oblique compliment to Aristomenes, he also places the action of the athletic contest of the present in the context of the legendary past and places the living individuals in a lineage that includes Oedipus, and Laius, Labdacus, and Cadmus before him. These stories legitimize and transform the suffering and struggles of the present by placing them in perspective as inevitable and divinely ordained, an opportunity for heroes to realize their own heroism.
     Among the countless details of the mythic patterns that shape the poet’s view of the Theban wrestler’s victory are the circumstances of Amphiarus’ participation in the campaign of the epigonoi. The seer himself is a type like Achilles of fortitude in the face of an adverse destiny and his son Alkmaion’s qualities magnify the achievement of Aristomenes. Alkmaion is said to be the poet’s “neighbor” and “guardian” of his possessions as well as the source of prophetic oracles. (56-60) According to Diodorus Alkmaion was persuaded to participate in the attack against his first inclinations by his mother Eriphyle who had been bribed by Thersander with the necklace or, in some versions, the robe of Harmonia, objects which had already a history of cursing their owners. This incident, clearly a doublet of her earlier sending her husband into battle due to being offered the very same necklace by Polynices, casts an ambiguous light on harmony and order itself. Here harmony leads to deception and death and consequently to the violation of taboo when Alkmaion later kills his mother in revenge.
     The web of myth invoked by the poet connects with the present through innumerable other associations, introducing not only a rich and rounded vision, but one that highlights irreducible radical ambivalence. Yet he is altogether sincere in his invocation of Hesychia because arête is a refuge from the unwinnable game of life. One is uplifted through the practice of excellence by a miraculous afflatus. A parallel role is played by the phorminx or lyre in Pythian 1 whose music is said to bring calm and order even to the world of the gods.
     The redemptive power of developing one’s abilities “to the highest limit” is what Socrates recommended to Epigenes, saying that only in that way might he might see “what manner of man you may become.” And the motive is urgent. Buddha’s preaching pictured the unenlightened consciousness in this harsh world as a man whose house is burning or who has been struck by a poisoned arrow. Though Pindar does not use such dramatic images, he looks at life with open eyes and finds the human existential circumstance not merely threatening but approaching the unbearable. The problem inspires some the poet’s loftiest moralizing, familiar sententiae to be sure, but informed here by passion and depth. The conclusion of this poem celebrating human achievement focuses instead on human impotence.


But the delight of mortals grows in a short time, and then it falls to the ground, shaken by an adverse thought. [95] Creatures of a day. What is someone? What is no one? Man is the dream of a shadow. (96)


This last phrase echoes the very language of the celebrated gatha in the Diamond Sutra.


All conditioned dharmas
Are like dreams, illusions, bubbles, shadows,
Like dew drops or a lightning flash.


     Hanging in a void, feet resting on nothing, one can yet feel a sort of liberation in the thrill of art, a kind of yogic focus in extraordinary athletic achievement, a thrill at acts of unusual wisdom, compassion, or courage. In celebrating the victor of a wrestling match, Pindar celebrates the human species, which in the face of mortality and suffering, nonetheless strives, and sometimes succeeds, in bathing in the “shining light” of Zeus, and, for a time at least, experiencing a “gentle lifetime.” By ignoring ESPN, perhaps I have failed to note that fans of NFL are, in their own way, seeking spiritual sustenance along with beer and chips. Pindar might have thought so.


1. Xenophon, Memorabilia of Socrates, 3.12.1 -13.

A Skeptic’s Faith [Sextus Empiricus]

     I have pursued art rather than religion or philosophy because it seems to me to offer greater access to reality. Indeed, when the practitioners of those other realms appeal to me, in the person of the Buddha, say, or St. Francis, Plato, or Nietzsche, I assimilate them to art. After all, each of these sought symbolic manipulation that would in part make life seem livable. For me, understanding religion is largely a matter of interpreting metaphors, and philosophy’s most important role is that defined by the ancient Greeks, Indians, and Chinese alike: to enable one to live a good life.

     Much of religion and art as well employs ample metaphorical mediation in rendering the world, often glorious and grand as in the Mahabharata or Dante. While I agree that the subtleties of human insight are more precisely expressed in the indirection of figuration, I also appreciate the early Daoists, and some among the practitioners of Zen and Vedanta who look at reality directly, without illusion or protective rhetoric and yet find illumination in that rigorously spare vision. I find elements of the same sort of consolation of philosophy digestible even to a faithless twenty-first century reader in certain of those philosophers of late antiquity, Stoics, Epicureans, Cynics, and Skeptics for whom the Olympian gods had become unsatisfying, but who were not attracted to the salvationist mystery cults of the era. I turn to the pre-Socratics for poetry, to Plato and Aristotle for magisterial system, but to Marcus Aurelius, Epicurus, stories of Diogenes, and to the Skeptic Sextus Empiricus for strategies aimed at a well-lived life.

     Though Pyrrho of Elis, whose ideas we know primarily from Sextus Empiricus, is often named the originator of Greek skepticism, his ideas were by no means altogether novel. The Greek σκέπτομαι means to look about carefully, to view or consider, and thus a skeptic would originally have been simply an inquirer. Indeed the Pyrrhonian skepticism of Sextus encourages continuous questioning and declines to be dogmatic even in its doubts, insisting that one must withhold judgment in the present state of knowledge while allowing for the possibility of knowledge through some future improvement in reasoning and perhaps through non-ratiocinative processes as well. Long before Sextus’ time, late in the fifth century B. C.E. the sophist Gorgias was the author of a lost book titled On Nature or the Non-Existent (an epitome is in Sextus’ Against the Professors) in which he maintained that nothing exists, though if it did exist, it could not be known, but even if it could be known, it could not be communicated, and, if it could be communicated, it could not be understood. A more thorough nihilism is difficult to imagine.

     In some dialogues, Socrates is portrayed as a doubter, saying in the Apology “I am wiser than this man; for neither of us really knows anything fine and good, but this man thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas I, as I do not know anything, do not think I do either. I seem, then, in just this little thing to be wiser than this man at any rate, that what I do not know I do not think I know either.” [2] Similarly the conclusion of the Theaetetus seems to leave the question of what constitutes valid knowledge entirely unresolved.

     Academic skepticism descended through later thinkers associated with Plato’s school, constituting an alternative Skeptical tradition to Pyrrhonianism, embodied in the work of what was also called the New Academy of which Carneades was the most prominent exponent. As a kind of skeptic fundamentalist in this long-established tradition, Sextus aims at providing a systematic formulation of Pyrrhonian skepticism and thus mounting a persuasive and thorough polemic against the Dogmatists , meaning chiefly the Stoics, but including all believers of every sort. He rejected the Stoic faith in reasoning as well as their monistic pantheism and qualified acceptance of sense data as an accurate register of reality.

     Aiming at providing a thoroughly reasoned case even at the risk of trying his readers’ patience, Sextus repeats the same series of arguments a good many times. His most telling points called tropes or modes, were for the most part inherited from Aenesidemus. [3] His most often repeated argument is that of infinite regress. Since the reason justifying a conclusion itself requires justification, no proposition can be certainly established. [5] For Pyrrho and Sextus every criterion for truth must itself be proven and the criterion used for that proof in turn requires always another proof. The Skeptics insist, in opposition to the implications of everyone’s daily behavior, that we never can be certain we are in fact perceiving reality nor can we know that our own perception is the same as another’s. Since different thinkers come to different conclusions, not only about ideas but even about sense impressions, since all humans are limited by our sensory and cognitive apparatus, since consensus is inadequate as proof, [4] it is difficult or impossible to find truly “self-evident” propositions from which to rebuild, like Descartes, a structure of thought ascending all the way to the heavens.

     Perhaps the most surprising result of Pyrrhonian skepticism as described by Sextus is the state of mind that can occur after one admits one’s ignorance. According to Sextus the goal (or τέλος) of skepticism is ἀταραξία , a quietude in mind. According to Eusebius’ account of Pyrrho’s follower Timon the skeptic experiences “first speechlessness, and then imperturbability, but Aenesidemus says pleasure.” [6] Sextus readily recognizes that this calm may be imperfect and he allows for “moderate feeling” when “unavoidable.” [7] For Sextus as for Buddha, desire is the source of pain. When one suffers what seem to be “natural evils,” one “deems himself to be pursued by Furies, and when he becomes possessed of what seems to him good things he falls into no ordinary sense of disquiet both through arrogance and through fear of losing them.” [8] Pyrrho himself was said to have traveled eastward with Alexander and to have studied with Indian yogis (the gymnosophists or “naked philosophers” whom the Macedonian king himself regarded most highly) as well as with Persian magi before returning to Greece. Many of the anecdotes recorded about him after he set up as a philosopher upon his return relate to his detachment and imperturbability, though tales of his needing to be protected from walking off cliffs or being run down by carts are doubtless hyperbolic. He so impressed his fellow-countrymen that he was made chief priest during his life (his agnosticism having been found no impediment), and statues were erected in his honor both in his native town of Elis and in Athens.

     Sextus emphatically insists that his skepticism in no way denies appearances which he recognizes “induce our assent involuntarily.” [9] To him the problem is in the account given of the appearances. We cannot deny, he says, that honey seems sweet, “but whether it is sweet in its essence is for us a matter of doubt.” He is not performing intellectual stunts (as one might suspect Gorgias of doing) but rather, as he says, “pointing out the rashness of the Dogmatists.” [10] Like all people, he relies constantly on his sense impressions and his cognitive abilities. He differs only in thinking that these useful abilities may fall short of delivering Reality to the consciousness. This is far from being a cul de sac for him; it is rather a beginning. On the first page or so of his book, Sextus warns his readers that he does not “positively affirm” of any of his statements “that the fact is exactly as we state it, but we simply record each fact, like a chronicler, as it appears to us at the moment.” [11] He later restates the concept while commenting on the highly practical matter of his own medical professions’ remedies: “we are unable to say what is the true nature of each of these things, although it is possible to say what each thing at the moment appears to be.” [12]

     For Sextus the same tentative acceptance of the phenomena of everyday reality applies to dialectic, the art of logical argumentation. Thus Sextus concludes his book with a curious passage in which he says that the skeptic sage, being a “lover of his kind,” wishes, like a good physician, to “cure” the delusions of others. He will select the argument to use in a given situation, not on its rational superiority to other possible arguments, but on the basis of what is appropriate to use with a given opponent. [13] “Proof” is not a matter of positivistic conclusions, but rather of rhetorical victory, the verbal formulation that will accomplish the speaker’s task.

     Both this acceptance of admittedly imperfect vision and the elaboration of rhetorical goals sound to me very like poetry. While we cannot grasp at Truth and hold it firm in the hand, we can record a snapshot of the play of subjective mind, and, if we do so accurately enough, it will resonate in others. Every poem, every work of art, no less than the propositions of a skeptic, might begin with the words “it is as if . . .” If such a declaration is the closest we may approach to Truth, it is the part of wisdom to accept that reality and follow Pyrrho and Sextus and those Renaissance writers whom they influenced such as Montaigne in making the most of it.


1. See Sextus Empiricus I, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 21d. I use the Loeb Classical Library edition with a translation by R. G. Bury. Though quotations are in English, references are to sections of the original text. See also Diogenes Laertius II.32.

2. Apology 21, d.

3. Ancient skepticism described their basic arguments as tropes or modes. Sextus Empiricus’ attempt to set forth his position systematically leads to a great deal of repetition. Modern comments taking his arguments into account include those by Karl Popper and, later, Hans Albert who coined the term “Münchhausen trilemma” to describe the choice between dogmatism, infinite regress and “psychologism” (trusting sense impressions) in terms very similar to those used in antiquity.

4. See Sextus Empiricus I, II, 43 on consensus of the majority. The Academic Skeptic Carneades had attacked consensus as a basis for theism.

5. See, for instance Sextus I, I, 116.

6. Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica, Bk.XIV, ch. 18, 1-5.

7. Sextus I, II, 25.

8. Sextus I, III, 237.

9. Sextus I, I, 19.

10. Sextus I, I, 20.

11. Sextus I, I, 3-5.

12. Sextus I, I, 93. As a physician, his name Empiricus would seem to suggest that he practiced in the Empiric tradition though he notes at one point that the Methodic school had much in common with Pyrrhonism, in that it “follow[s] the appearances and take[s] from these whatever seems expedient.” [Sextus I, I, 237] Both schools were opposed to the Dogmatists.

13. Sextus I,III, 280-281.