The Political Vocation of Philosophy. Donatella Di Cesare
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even if only fleetingly, for a second. Even if that means risking his own life. Perhaps for this reason, the concave space – the mirror of the convex face of the stars – would, in later versions of the anecdote, become a hole or a ditch, in order to avoid jeopardising the philosopher’s very survival.
But it is impossible to identify all the countless meanings that skies and abysses would take on across philosophy’s centuries-long history. We need only mention Kant’s frozen ‘starry firmament’ covering the ‘moral law’, Heidegger’s troubling Abgrund, the abyssal depths upon which existence stands. Surprising though it may seem, philosophers would feel more protected in this kinetics of verticality, up high or down low, according to an admirably variegated symbology. But a horizontal kinetics would prove much more adventurous and full of the unforeseen.
The gaze toward the sky betrays an aspiration which must have been widespread right from the outset: that of divining the future. Thales, too, was tempted by this, though at least it can be said that he was an expert in astronomy. According to the doxography, he managed to predict the solar eclipse in 585 BC (A 17). An indirect confirmation comes from another famous tale, this time narrated by Aristotle, in his Politics. Again, the theme is disdain toward theory, but this time it is vaunted not by a single Thracian slave girl but by the entire community of Miletus. For the first time, an explicit accusation was pronounced – one destined to have a far-reaching and protracted success.
Aristotle writes that ‘since he was so poor’, dià tèn penían, his fellow citizens damned Thales for the ‘uselessness of philosophy’, hos anopheloûs tès philosophías. But then, thanks to his astronomical calculations, he managed to foresee an abundant olive harvest; having a small amount of money available, he bought up the olive presses of not just Miletus but also Chios, even in the heart of winter when there was no demand. The ‘time’, the kairós, of the harvest arrived. Everyone was urgently looking for olive presses. Thales rented them out at a hefty price and earned a lot of money. So, the happenings in the sky served to orient him down on earth.
Such was the riposte from the philosopher who temporarily donned the vest of the wheeler-dealer, who abandoned his reflection and speculation to try his hand as … a speculator. And he succeeded, because he saw earlier and further than others. But his ambition was not monetary gain. Aristotle comments that Thales ‘prov[ed] that it is easy for philosophers to be rich if they choose, but this is not what they care about’.3 So here, after the surprise of the well, came Thales’ redemption. Able to predict even what was supposedly unpredictable – phenomena both celestial and earthly, the eclipse of the sun and the olive harvest – he temporarily entered into the logic of the economy using his calculations, only to prove that this is not the logic proper to philosophy. This did not mean that the tension with his fellow citizens went away – indeed, it could only become sharper, if their values were so opposed. Even if philosophy really was ‘useless’, it was proving to be a subversive threat to the city.
Notes
1 1. Theaetetus, 174a, trans. Harold Fowler.
2 2. Hans Blumenberg, The Laughter of the Thracian Woman, London: Bloomsbury, 2015.
3 3. Politics, 1259a 5–8, trans. H. Rackham.
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