Philosophical Ideas. Donald Phillip Verene
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pulls the mind toward the divine.
In the fifth book of the Tusculan Disputations, Cicero says: “Though we see that philosophy is a fact of great antiquity, yet its name is of recent origin” (5.3.7). He says that Pythagoras was the first to call himself a philosopher but he was not the first to be known as wise. Prior to Pythagoras having coined the word philosophos, the Seven Sages and Lycurgus, as well as such mythical figures as Ulysses, Nestor, Atlas, Promethus, and Cepheus were thought wise—such that their names became legend. Cicero says that Pythagoras spoke learnedly and eloquently with Leon, the tyrant of Phlius, the chief town of a small district of northeastern Peloponnesus.
Leon admired the genius and eloquence with which Pythagoras engaged in their discourse. He asked Pythagoras what skill (sophia) he professed. Pythagoras replied that he knew no skill but that he was a lover of wisdom (philosophos), making a word-play on sophia and philosophos. Leon, astonished by this unusual term, asked what philosophers were and how they differed from other human beings. Pythagoras replied with an analogy of the great games at Olympia, at which some sought fame and glory by competing, others were attracted to the games as an opportunity to profit from buying and selling, but a third group, the noblest of all, sought neither of these things but came to see and comprehend the nature of the spectacle.
Pythagoras said that, of these three types of persons at the games, the first and second corresponded to the lives of those who are slaves to ambition and honor and those who are slaves to money. But the third are rare spirits, who hold all else as nothing in order eagerly to understand the universe. They seek no personal gain and are pure spectators, engaged in a life of contemplation. These spectators are philosophers. The question Leon asks is typical of the thought of ancient Greece, which placed all individuals within one or another form of life. Leon wished to know where to place Pythagoras.
Cicero’s account is based on that of a dialogue of Heraclides of Pontus, (Peri tes apnou) relating the story of a woman whose breathing had stopped and whom the medical doctors were unable to save. Empedocles succeeded in restoring the woman to life by realizing that her condition was due to the temporary absence of her soul. Heraclides had been a pupil in Plato’s Academy at the same time as Aristotle and was known as a man of letters. This dialogue described the occasion of the banquet to celebrate Empedocles’ success in resurrecting the woman and the apotheosis of Empedocles that took place in the night following the banquet, when he ascended into the heavens. Empedocles’ wisdom was of a different order than that of the physicians, for to revive the woman required a knowledge of human nature as a whole. This knowledge entails the understanding of the nature of the universe and its divine order. The discussion concerning Pythagoras explains this sense of wisdom, although we are not told how Empedocles applied this wisdom to revive the woman.
Diogenes Laertius credits Pythagoras as the first to use the term “philosophy” and to call himself a “philosopher” when conversing with Leon. He adds to Heraclides’ account the claim that “no one is wise except god” (1.12). If we join this claim to Pythagoras’ reply to Leon we see how clever Pythagoras was. Leon, as the absolute ruler of the Phliasians, is wise in the sense of the skill necessary to gain and hold political power, and through it to obtain honor and wealth. Should Pythagoras have claimed that he was in fact wise, taking the term sophia in a sense beyond that available to Leon, Pythagoras would have commanded a divine power, like that of the gods. He would have had a kind of wisdom superior to Leon, placing himself in a precarious position.
Instead, Pythagoras is the exclusus amator of wisdom. He is interesting and novel, but harmless, occupying a position intermediate between the wisdom of practical skill and divine or complete wisdom. Pythagoras sets the stage such that the philosopher can claim a role that allows the philosopher to move freely within the realm of political power, but never of it. Yet because the philosopher does not regard the polis as ultimate, as do politicians and the hoi polloi, the philosopher, while wearing the mask of the “lover of wisdom,” is always a danger to the state because the philosopher does not take the polis as ultimate.
Phlius appears a second time in the history of philosophy. In the first lines of the Phaedo we learn that Phaedo is returning from Athens to his home on Elis and stops off at Phlius. He is questioned by Echecrates as to whether he was present at Socrates’ death in prison and whether he would be willing to give an account of it. Echecrates says: “Hardly anyone from Phlius visits Athens nowadays, nor has any stranger come from Athens for some time who could give us a clear account of what happened, except that he drank the poison and died, but nothing more” (57a–b). Phaedo then relates to Echecrates and a group of Pythagoreans the details of Socrates’ last day. The Pythagorean connection is present in the dialogue itself, in the presence of Simmias and Cebes, who discourse with Socrates on the immortality of the soul.
The intent of Plato is clear in his setting of the Phaedo in Phlius. It is in the Phaedo that Socrates defines philosophy as preparation for death. Socrates shifts the figure of the philosopher from the spectator of the natural world to the self in the human world. The Presocratics’ concern with nature becomes the Socratic concern with human nature. In the Phaedo Socrates redefines philosophy. We learn of this redefinition of who the philosopher is in the same place that the philosopher is first defined, and it is told directly to the present-day followers of Pythagoras. The beginning point for the philosopher is not the order of the universe but the order of the soul. We philosophize because we are mortal. The idea of wisdom is interwoven with the ignorance we have of the meaning of our mortality.
Simonides’ Discovery
Simonides, wisest of poets.
Polydore Vergil, On Discovery 1.1.8
The idea of memory is the necessary companion to the idea of wisdom. Without memory there cannot be knowledge. Cicero says: “Wisdom [sapientia] is the knowledge [scientia] of things divine and human and acquaintance with the cause of each of them” (Tusc. 4.26.57). There can be no learning without memory and no wisdom, for wisdom brings what is learned together into a whole. Eloquence (eloquentia) is to put the whole of a subject into words. To put the whole into words requires a knowledge per causas. In his little treatise On Memory, Aristotle says that to recollect “one must get hold of a starting-point. This explains why it is that persons are supposed to recollect sometimes by starting from ‘places’ [topoi]” (452a).
In his work On the Orator, Cicero relates the discovery of the connection between memory and places (topoi, loci) by Simonides of Ceos, who was known not only for the wisdom of his poetry but for his greed, being perhaps the first poet to charge a fee for his compositions. Simonides was commissioned by Scopas, a wealthy nobleman in Thessaly, to present a lyric composed for a banquet at his house. Simonides devoted a long passage of his poem to the twin gods, Castor and Pollux. After his presentation Scopas told Simonides he would pay him only half the agreed sum, and if he so wished he could seek the balance from Castor and Pollux.
As the banquet proceeded, a message was delivered to Simonides that there were two young men at the door who wished earnestly to see him. Simonides left the banquet hall and went out to meet the strangers, but found no one. In the interval, the roof of the hall fell in, killing Scopas and all his guests. The next day, when their friends and relatives came to bury them, they were unable to tell the corpses apart, as they were so severely crushed in the ruins. Simonides was able to identify them by recalling the places where each was reclining at table.
His ability to do so suggested to Simonides that the best aid to memory is orderly arrangement, such that persons wishing to train themselves in memory should select localities and associate with each place a mental image of what they desired to remember. The arrangement of these places will act as an internal writing, analogous to that on a wax tablet, allowing the speaker to bring forth in a single, orderly speech all that the speaker intended to say. Simonides’ mnemonic became the basis of the art of memory (De orat. 2.86.352–55). But who were the two young men who called for Simonides? Were they Castor and Pollux? Also, why did Simonides choose Castor and Pollux to include in his panegyric.