Philosophical Ideas

Introduction: Philosophical Ideas

Pythagoras’s Answer to Leon

His mode of instruction was double. And

among those who came to him, the ones

were called “knowers” (mathemetikoi),

the others “listeners” (akousmatikoi).

Porphyry, Life of Pythagoras 37

The idea of wisdom is the beginning of philosophy and is what sustains the will to philosophize. In the discourse Plato arranges between Socrates and Diotima in the Symposium, Diotima informs Socrates of the meaning of the idea of wisdom (sophia). Diotima says: “In fact, you see, none of the gods loves wisdom or wants to become wise—for they are wise—and no one else who is wise already loves wisdom; on the other hand, no one who is ignorant will love wisdom either or want to become wise.” Socrates asks: “In that case, Diotima, who are the people who love wisdom if they are neither wise nor ignorant?”

Diotima says: “That’s obvious. A child could tell you. Those who love wisdom fall in between those two extremes. And Love [Eros] is one of them, because he is in love with what is beautiful, and wisdom is extremely beautiful. It follows that Love must be a lover of wisdom and, as such, is in between being wise and being ignorant” (204b). The people who love wisdom are the philosophoi. The friendly love or fondness (philia) they have for wisdom places them between the extremes of being wise and being ignorant. In this same middle place is Eros. It is through Love, Eros, that we encounter beauty. Pursuit of the beautiful leads us to happiness (Eudaimonia), to having a good daimon, a spirit that will allow us to attain well-being and a good, flourishing life. The friendship with wisdom that characterizes the philosopher provides access to a sense of Eros that, through its powers of contemplation, 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.

In Quintilian’s account, the poem was a victory ode for a boxer who had won the crown (Inst. orat. 11.214–17). Simonides’ digression into an encomium for Castor and Pollux is appropriate, given that Pollux was the great boxer. But Quintilian raises the question as to whether the poem was written for Scopas or for several other possible persons. He says it is agreed that Scopas perished at the banquet. If Scopas hosted the banquet in honor of a boxer, he may have withheld the fee because he concluded that Simonides padded his poem with praise of Castor and Pollux and did not make the effort to address the achievement of the honored guest, or to honor himself as host. Simonides violated a business agreement. Given his reputation for greed, Simonides would have taken the abridgement of his fee especially hard.

The mnenomic discovered by Simonides is that of “artificial” memory—memory that is the result of training in the selection and use of places to organize images to achieve proficiency in elocutio—to speak on a particular subject, to put thought into words. In 1550, near the end of his life, Giulio Camillo dictated, on seven mornings, in Milan, a little work, L’idea del theatro, published at Venice and Florence. Camillo was one of the most famous figures of the sixteenth century, known to his contemporaries as the “Divine Camillo,” but he has been forgotten by posterity.

Camillo realized that the mnemonic of artificial memory could be transposed from a method of rhetoric to a method of metaphysics. From the idea of the Theatrum mundi he formed the idea of the Theatro della memoria. The artificial memory allows for making a speech on a subject within the theater of the world. The theater of memory allows for making a complete speech of the world itself. Instead of arbitrarily selecting places with which to associate images or mental places, Camillo arranged a theater of master images. These pitture represented the components of mythology upon which culture is based and from which thought originates. Camillo unites Hebraic, Greek, and Roman images. These are the topoi of human memory, those sources from which knowledge is brought forth. They are the metaphors, the archai of the human world itself.

Representations of these were arranged in tiers of seven grades, divided by seven gangways proceeding upward from a stage. Versions of the theater were constructed in France and Italy. The spectator entered on the stage as an actor, facing the audience of the pitture. The entrant faced the contents of the treasure-house of human memory. The unstated secret of the theater was the principle of proportion, the principle of the just soul of Platonism. In this way the theater gave access to the Forms, for the images were imitations of the real order of things. To know all there was to know and hence acquire wisdom, whoever entered the stage of the theater needed to contemplate each of the figures on the seven grades, aided by the writings of Cicero, the greatest of orators, kept in drawers or coffers in the theater. The mind of the individual could thus be aligned with the divine mens.

Only those who were prepared to engage in this process of contemplative alignment could accomplish the purpose of the theater, as Camillo states in the first sentence of his little treatise. The rest of the treatise describes only the contents and arrangement of the theater. It does not explain it. Camillo says: “The most ancient and wisest writers have always had the habit of entrusting to their writings the secrets of God under obscure veils, so that they are not understood except by those who (as Christ says) have ears to hear, namely who by God are chosen to grasp his most sacred mysteries.”1

Those “who have ears to hear” are mentioned in Matthew (11:15), Mark (4:23), and Luke (8:8). Warning not to present lofty themes to the many are to be found in Plato’s Letters (2.314a), in the prologue to the Asclepius, in the Hermetica of Hermes Trismegistus, and in the Zohar of the Cabala. Camillo’s art of memory is a work for the neo-Platonic Friends of the Forms, an extension of the Academy. It is the means to attain the wisdom that the philosopher seeks, the means to produce the complete speech.

Aristotle’s Protrepticus

O philosophy, thou guide of life,

o thou explorer of virtue and

expeller of vice! Without thee what

could have become not only of me

but of the life of man altogether?

Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 5.2.5

Among Aristotle’s early writings, the most important is his Protrepticus, the original of which has been lost in its entirety, but its essential content and narrative has been reconstructed. It is a “hortatory essay” (logos protrepticos), an exhortation intended to urge those who would take up the study of philosophy—to do so. The most famous passage, as it appears in the reconstructed text of Anton-Hermann Chroust, is: “The term ‘to philosophize’ (or, ‘to pursue philosophy’) implies two distinct things: first, whether or not we ought to seek [after philosophic truth] at all; and second, our dedication to philosophic speculation [philosophon theoria]” (par. 6).2

With this assertion as his theme, Aristotle pursues its meaning. He says that “there is a science of truth as well as a science of the excellence of the soul. . . . philosophic wisdom (phronesis) is the greatest of all goods, and, at the same time, the most useful of all things” (pars. 35–36). Aristotle concludes: “Since human life is capable of sharing in this faculty [of reasoning and of acquiring wisdom], however wretched and difficult it may be, it is yet so wisely ordained that man appears to be a god when compared with all other creatures. . . . This being so, we ought either to pursue philosophy or bid farewell to life and depart from this world, because all other things seem to be but utter nonsense and folly” (pars. 105–106). Philosophic wisdom takes two forms, as contemplative speculation (theoria) and as guiding conduct to achieve well-being (phronesis).

Chroust’s reconstruction is as above, but, as Chroust says, there is a tradition, stemming from Cicero, Quintilian, Lactantius, and Boethius, that the passage is more like this: “You say that one should (or must) philosophize; then you should (or must) philosophize. You say that one should not (or must not) philosophize, then (in order to prove your contention) you must philosophize. In any event, you must philosophize.” On the passage, put in this way, Quintilian comments: “Sometimes two propositions are put forward in such a way that the choice of either leads to the same conclusion: for example, “We must philosophize (even though we must not philosophize) [‘philosophandum est, etiam si non est philosophandum’]” (Inst. orat. 5.10.70).

The coming together of these two propositions is what Aristotle would call an aporia, an impass that thought brings on itself by arriving at two equally valid but opposed claims. Such an impass generates wonder (thauma), owing to which philosophy first began and by which it continues to be (Meta. 982b). It is a wonder to philosophy that it itself is. The attempt to preclude philosophy from the activity of thought requires an act of philosophizing. Philosophy is the only form of knowing that is justified by its own attempted act of denial. In this way philosophy imbeds itself in the human condition.