Ridling Zaine. Philosophy: Then and Now. A look back at 26 centuries of thought

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

Ridling, Philosophy Then and Now: A Look Back at 26 Centuries of Thought

198

psychophysics, and developed toward the end of the century by Freud on the

psychoanalytic level of the unconscious.

Epicureanism and egocentric hedonism have few faithful representatives

among 20th-century philosophers, though the viewpoint remains as a residue

in some strains of popular thinking.

Criticism and Evaluation

In the first half of the 17th century, at a time when Pierre Gassendi was

reviving atomistic Epicureanism, René Descartes, often called the founder of

modern philosophy, offered arguments that tended to undercut Atomism.

Reality is a plenum, he held, a complete fullness; there can be no such thing as

a vacuous region, or the void of Atomism. Since matter is nothing but spatial

extension, its only true properties are geometrical and dynamic. Because

extension is everywhere, motion occurs not as a passage through emptiness, as

Epicurus supposed, but as vortices, or “whirlpools,” in which every motion

sets up a broad area of movement extending indefinitely around itself – a view

that has tended to be confirmed in contemporary gravitational and field

theory.

Close to the heart of Epicureanism is the principle, which occurred also

in Democritus, that denies that something can come from or be rooted in

nothing. In a poem composed by an ancient monist, Parmenides of Elea (born

c. 515 BCE), this principle had been expressed in the two formulas: “Being

cannot be Non-Being,” and “Non-Being must be Non-Being.” Though

Epicurus had faithfully adhered to this principle almost throughout his system,

he has been criticized for abandoning it at one point – in the swerves that he

Ridling, Philosophy Then and Now: A Look Back at 26 Centuries of Thought

199

attributed to occasional atoms that take them aside from their normal paths.

Epicurus abandoned the principle at this point in order to avoid espousing a

physics that was inconsistent with the autonomy that he observed in the

physical behavior of men and animals. But to his Stoic critics, the swerves of

the atoms were a scandal, since they implied that an event can occur without a

cause. It has seldom been noted, however, that the swerve is merely a special

case – a transposition into atomistic terms – of Aristotle’s theory of accidents

(i.e., of properties that are not essential to the substances in which they occur),

inasmuch as an accident, too, as Aristotle himself had stated (Met. I 3), is

without a cause. Moreover, a similar view has been seriously advanced in

modern times under the name of tychism by Charles Sanders Peirce, a

philosopher of science.

To the Stoic charge that Epicurus lacked a doctrine of Providence (since

he viewed the gods as being lazy), Epicurus answered that “mythical gods are

preferable to the fate” posited by the Stoics. It has been suggested that he

might equally well have added that the “immobile Prime Mover” of

Aristotle’s theology was hardly less lazy than Epicurus’ gods. Epicurus’ way

of phrasing this issue, however, must not obscure the fact that the problem of

Providence and its secularization has been a crucial one in the philosophy of

history ever since ancient times.

The effort of Epicurus to reduce the good to pleasure reflects the only

criterion to which he would entrust himself, the “evidence of those passions

immediately present,” which gives man the word of Nature. In the argument

of psychological hedonism, here implied, the Epicurean holds that men as a

matter of fact do take satisfaction in pleasure and decry pain, and he argues

then to an egoistic ethical hedonism that identifies the (objective) good with

pleasure. Most moralists, however, have felt that a thoroughgoing

Ridling, Philosophy Then and Now: A Look Back at 26 Centuries of Thought

200

psychological hedonism cannot be defended; that desire is often, as a matter

of fact, directed toward an object with no thought at all about the pleasure that

it will bring; that a mother’s impulse to save her young from danger is more

fundamental than any pleasure involved (which usually comes only

afterward); that the tendency of a child to imitate his parents can be, in fact,

quite painful; and that, as a 19th-century Utilitarian, Henry Sidgwick, has

argued, in what he called the “hedonistic paradox,” one of the most ineffective

ways to achieve pleasure is to deliberately seek it out.

Some scholars have even argued that an Epicurean egoistic hedonism,

however foresighted it may be, must logically be self-defeating. If the view is

universalized, the egoist must advocate the maximization of his enemy’s

pleasure as well as of his own, which can lead to actions painful to himself. In

consequence, the entire branch of ethics that covers the advising or judging of

other agents is banned from consideration, and it may be questioned whether

such a view can comprise an ethic at all.

On the other hand, it has been argued that man is subject to antinomies,

or contradictions, that no system can escape; there are dimensions in his

nature that transcend the rational level. Thus, whatever its rational credentials

may be, Epicureanism, as an attitude toward life that was theorized in its

purest form by Epicurus, nonetheless remains one of the important forms that

human behavior has often assumed; and, at its best, it has achieved a type of

asceticism that, even in retirement and solitude, does not negate company but

welcomes it, finding the purest joys of life in the unique richness of human

encounters.

Ridling, Philosophy Then and Now: A Look Back at 26 Centuries of Thought

201

Platonism

Since Plato refused to write any formal exposition of his own

metaphysic, our knowledge of its final shape has to be derived from the

statements of Aristotle, which are confirmed by scanty remains of the earliest

Platonists preserved in the Neoplatonist commentaries on Aristotle. These

statements can, unfortunately, only be interpreted conjecturally.

Aristotle’s Account of Platonism

According to Aristotle (Metaphysics i, 987 b 18-25) Plato’s doctrine of

forms was, in its general character, not different from Pythagoreanism, the

forms being actually called numbers. The two points on which Aristotle

regards Plato as disagreeing with the Pythagoreans are (1) that, whereas the

Pythagoreans said that numbers have as their constituents the unlimited and

the limit, Plato taught that the forms have as constituents the one and the great

and small; and (2) that, whereas the Pythagoreans had said that things are

numbers, Plato intercalated between his forms (or numbers) and sensible

things an intermediate class of mathematicals. It is curious that in connection

with the former difference Aristotle dwells mainly on the substitution of the

“duality of the great and small” for the “unlimited,” not on the much more

significant point that the one, which the Pythagoreans regarded as the simplest

complex of unlimited and limit, is treated by Plato as itself the element of

limit. He further adds that the “great and small” is, in his own technical

terminology, the matter, the one, the formal constituent, in a number.

If we could be sure how much of the polemic against number-forms in

Metaphysics xiii-xiv is aimed directly at Plato, we might add considerably to

Ridling, Philosophy Then and Now: A Look Back at 26 Centuries of Thought

202

this bald statement of his doctrine, but unluckily it is certain that much of the

polemic is concerned with the teaching of Speusippus and Xenocrates. It is

not safe, therefore, to ascribe to Plato statements other than those with which

Aristotle explicitly credits him. We have then to interpret, if we can, two main

statements: (1) the statement that the forms are numbers; and (2) the statement

that the constituents of a number are the great and small and the one.

Light is thrown on the first statement if we recall the corpuscular physics

of the Timaeus and the mixture of the Philebus. In the Timaeus, in particular,

the behavior of bodies is explained by the geometrical structure of their

corpuscles, and the corpuscles themselves are analyzed into complexes built

up out of two types of elementary triangle, which are the simplest elements of

the narrative of Timaeus. Now a triangle, being determined in everything but

absolute magnitude by the numbers that express the ratio of its sides, may be

regarded as a triplet of numbers. If we remember then, that the triangles

determine the character of bodies and are themselves determined by numbers,

we may see why the ultimate forms on which the character of nature depends

should be said to be numbers and also what is meant by the mathematicals

intermediate between the forms and sensible things. According to Aristotle,

these mathematicals differ from forms because they are many, whereas the

form is one, from sensible things in being unchanging. This is exactly how the

geometer’s figure differs at once from the type it embodies and from a visible

thing. There is, for example, only one type of triangle whose sides have the

ratios 3:4:5, but there may be as many pure instances of the type as there are

triplets of numbers exhibiting these ratios; and again, the geometrical triangles

that are such pure instances of the type, unlike sensible three-sided figures,

embody the type exactly and unchangingly. A mathematical physicist may

thus readily be led to what seems to be Plato’s view that the relations of

Ridling, Philosophy Then and Now: A Look Back at 26 Centuries of Thought

203

numbers are the key to the whole mystery of nature, as is actually said in the

Epinomis (990 e).

We can now, perhaps, see the motive for the further departure from

Pythagoreanism. It is clear that the Pythagorean parallelism between geometry

and arithmetic rested upon the thought that the point is to spatial magnitude

what the number 1 is to number. Numbers were thought of as collections of

units, and volumes, in like fashion, as collections of points; that is, the point

was conceived as a minimum volume. As the criticisms of Zeno showed, this

conception was fatal to the specially Pythagorean science of geometry itself,

since it makes it impossible to assert the continuity of spatial magnitude.

(This, no doubt, is why Plato, as Aristotle tells us, rejected the notion of a

point as a fiction.)

There is also a difficulty about the notion of a number as a collection of

units, which must have been forced on Plato’s attention by the interest in

irrationals that is shown by repeated allusions in the dialogues, as well as by

the later anecdotes that represent him as busied with the problem of doubling

the cube or finding two mean proportionals. Irrational square and cube roots

cannot possibly be reached by any process of forming collections of units, and

yet it is a problem in mathematics to determine them, and their determination

is required for physics (Epinomis 990 c-991 b).

This is sufficient to explain why it is necessary to regard the numbers

that are the physicist’s determinants as themselves determinations of a

continuum (a great and small) by a limit and why at the same time the one can

no longer be regarded as a blend of unlimited and limit but must be itself the

factor of limit. (If it were the first result of the blending, it would reappear in

all the further blends; all numbers would be collections of one and there

Ridling, Philosophy Then and Now: A Look Back at 26 Centuries of Thought

204

would be no place for the irrationals.) There is no doubt that Plato’s thought

proceeded on these general lines. Aristotle tells us that he said that numbers

are not really addable (Metaphysics xiii, 1083 a 34), that is, that the integer

series is not really made by successive additions of 1; and the Epinomis is

emphatic on the point that, contrary to the accepted opinion, surds are just as

much numbers as integers. The underlying thought is that numbers are to be

thought of as generated in a way that will permit the inclusion of rationals and

irrationals in the same series. In point of fact there are logical difficulties that

make it impossible to solve the problem precisely on these lines. It is true that

mathematics requires a sound logical theory of irrational numbers and, again,

that an integer is not a collection of units; it is not true that rational integers

and real numbers form a single series.

The Platonic number theory was inspired by thoughts that have since

borne fruit abundantly but was itself premature. We learn partly from

Aristotle, partly from notices preserved by his commentators, that, in the

derivation of the integer series, the even numbers were supposed to be

generated by the dyad that doubles whatever it lays hold of, the odd numbers

in some way by the one that limits or equalizes, but the interpretation of these

statements is, at best, conjectural. In the statement about the dyad there seems

to be some confusion between the number 2 and the indeterminate dyad,

another name for the continuum also called the great and small, and it is not

clear whether this confusion was inherent in the theory itself or has been

caused by Aristotle’s misapprehension.

Nor, again, is it at all certain exactly what is meant by the operation of

equalizing ascribed to the one. It would be improper here to propound

conjectures that our space will not allow us to discuss. A collection and

examination of the available evidence is given by L. Robin in his Théorie

Ridling, Philosophy Then and Now: A Look Back at 26 Centuries of Thought

205

platonicienne des idées et des nombres d’après Aristote (1908), and an

admirable exposition of the significance of the problem of the irrational for

Plato’s philosophy by G. Milhaud in Les Philosophes-géomètres de la Grèce,

Platon et ses prédécesseurs, new ed. (1934). For a conjectural interpretation

see A.E. Taylor, “Forms and Numbers,” in Mind, new series, vol. 35 and 36

(1926, 1927).

The Academy After Plato: The Rise of Neoplatonism

Plato’s Academy continued to exist as a corporate body down to CE

529, when the emperor Justinian, in his zeal for Christian orthodoxy, closed

the schools of Athens and appropriated their emoluments. Plato’s greatest

scholar, Aristotle, had finally gone his own way and organized a school of his

own in the Lyceum, claiming that he was preserving the essential spirit of

Platonism while rejecting the difficult doctrine of the forms. The place of

official head of the Academy was filled first by Speusippus, Plato’s nephew

(c. 347-339 BCE), then by Xenocrates (c. 339-314 BCE). Under Arcesilaus (c.

276-241 BCE) the Academy began its long-continued polemic against the

sensationalist dogmatism of the Stoics, which accounts both for the tradition

of later antiquity that dates the rise of a New (some said Middle) and purely

sceptical Academy from Arcesilaus and for the 18th-century associations of

the phrase “academic philosophy.”

In the 1st century BCE the most interesting episode in the history of the

school is the quarrel between its president, Philo of Larissa, and his scholar

Antiochus of Ascalon, of which Cicero’s Academica is the literary record.

Antiochus, who had embraced Stoic tenets, alleged that Plato had really held

Ridling, Philosophy Then and Now: A Look Back at 26 Centuries of Thought

206

views indistinguishable from those of Zeno of Citium and that Arcesilaus had

corrupted the doctrine of the Academy in a sceptical sense. Philo denied this.

The gradual rapprochement between Stoicism and the Academy is illustrated

from the other side by the work of Stoic scholars such as Panaetius of Rhodes

and Poseidonius of Apamea, who commented on Platonic dialogues and

modified the doctrines of their school in a Platonic sense.

The history of the Academy after Philo is obscure, but since the late 1st

century CE we meet with a popular literary Platonism of which the writings of

Plutarch are the best example. This popular Platonism insists on the value of

religion, in opposition to Epicureanism, and on the freedom of the will and the

reality of human initiative, in opposition to the Stoic determinism; a further

characteristic feature, wholly incompatible with the genuine doctrine of Plato,

is the notion that matter is inherently evil and the source of moral evil.

Genuine Platonism was revived in the 3rd century CE, in Rome, and

independently of the Academy, by Plotinus. His Neoplatonism represents a

real effort to do justice to the whole thought of Plato. Two aspects of Plato’s

thought, however, in the changed conditions inevitably fell into the

background: the mathematical physics, and the politics. The 3rd century CE

had no understanding for the former, and the Roman Empire under a

succession of military chiefs no place for the latter. The doctrine of Plotinus is

Platonism seen through the personal temperament of a saintly mystic and with

the Symposium and the teaching of the Republic about the form of good

always in the foreground. Plotinus lived in an atmosphere too pure for

sectarian polemic, but in the hands of his successors Neoplatonism was

developed in conscious opposition to Christianity. Porphyry, his disciple and

biographer, was the most formidable of the anti-Christian controversialists; in

Ridling, Philosophy Then and Now: A Look Back at 26 Centuries of Thought

207

the next century, “Platonists” were among the allies and counsellors of the

emperor Julian in his attempts to invent a Hellenic counterpart to Christianity.

Early in the 5th century, Neoplatonism flourished for a short time in

Alexandria (which disgraced itself by the murder of Hypatia in 415) and

captured the Athenian Academy itself, where its last great representative was

the acute Proclus (CE 410-485). The latest members of the Academy, under

Justinian, occupied themselves chiefly with learned commentaries on

Aristotle, of which those of Simplicius are the most valuable. The doctrine of

the school itself ends with Damascius in mystical agnosticism.

Influence of Platonism on Christian Thought

Traces of Plato are probably to be detected in the Alexandrian Wisdom

of Solomon; the thought of the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher and theologian

Philo, in the 1st century CE, is at least as much Platonic as Stoic. There are,

perhaps, no certain marks of Platonic influence in the New Testament, but the

earliest apologists (Justin, Athenagoras) appealed to the witness of Plato

against the puerilities and indecencies of mythology. In the 3rd century

Clement of Alexandria and after him Origen made Platonism the metaphysical

foundation of what was intended to be a definitely Christian philosophy. The

church could not, in the end, conciliate Platonist eschatology with the dogmas

of the resurrection of the flesh and the Last Judgment, but in a less extreme

form the platonizing tendency was continued in the next century by the

Cappadocians, notably St. Gregory of Nyssa, and passed from them to St.

Ambrose of Milan. The main sources of the Platonism that dominated the

philosophy of Western Christian theologians through the earlier Middle Ages,