Selfhood and Rationality in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Heraclitus to Plotinus 9780198803393, 0198803397

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Selfhood and Rationality in Ancient Greek Philosophy

Selfhood and Rationality in Ancient Greek Philosophy From Heraclitus to Plotinus A. A. LONG

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © A. A. Long 2022 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2022 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2022940731 ISBN 978–0–19–880339–3 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198803393.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

In memoriam Charles Clements LeGrice

Contents Acknowledgements Preface Citations and Abbreviations

Introduction 1. Finding Oneself in Greek Philosophy

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2. Ancient Philosophy’s Hardest Question: What to Make of Oneself?

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3. Eudaimonism, Divinity, and Rationality in Greek Ethics

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4. Heraclitus on Measure and the Explicit Emergence of Rationality

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5. Parmenides on Thinking Being

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6. Socratic Idiosyncrasy and Cynic Exhibitionism

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7. Socrates’ Divine Sign

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8. Politics and Divinity in Plato’s Republic: The Form of the Good

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9. Platonic Souls as Persons

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10. Cosmic Craftsmanship in Plato and Stoicism

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11. Aristotle on Eudaimonia, Nous, and Divinity

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12. Second Selves and Stoic Friends

195

13. The Self in Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations

212

14. Plotinus on Self and Happiness

226

Epilogue Bibliography Index of Passages Index of Names and Subjects

241 243 253 261

Acknowledgements Apart from Chapter 6, all these essays have been published in earlier form elsewhere. They are reprinted, with minor changes and corrections, thanks to permission of the original publishers, whom I gratefully acknowledge here. 1. Finding oneself in Greek Philosophy: from Tijdschrift voor Filosophie, 54.2 (1992): 255–79. 2. Ancient Philosophy’s Hardest question: What to make of Oneself? from Representations 74 (2001): 19–36. 3. Eudaimonism, Divinity and Rationality in Greek Ethics: from Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 19 (2004): 123–43. 4. Heraclitus on Measure and the Explicit Emergence of Rationality: from Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy, ed. D. Frede and B. Reis (De Gruyter, Berlin and New York, 2009): 87–110. 5. Parmenides on Thinking Being: from Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 12 (1996): 227–51. 7. Socrates’ Divine Sign: from A Companion to Socrates, ed. S.Ahbel-Rappe and R. Kamtekar (Blackwell Publishing, Malden, MA, 2006): 63–74. 8. Politics and Divinity in Plato’s Republic: The Form of the Good: from Themes in Plato, Aristotle, and the Hellenistic Philosophers. The Keeling Lectures 2011–18, ed. F. Leigh (Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, 2021): 63–82. 9. Platonic Souls as Persons: from Metaphysics, Soul, and Ethics in Ancient Thought. Themes from the Work of Richard Sorabji, ed. R. Salles (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2005): 173–92. 10. Cosmic Craftsmanship in Plato and Stoicism: from One Book, The Whole Universe, Plato’s Timaeus Today, ed. R. D .Mohr and B. M. Sattler (Parmenides’ Publishing, Las Vegas, 2010): 37–54. 11. Aristotle on Eudaimonia, Nous, and Divinity: from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics: A Critical Guide, ed. J. Miller (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011): 92–114. 12. Second Selves and Stoic Friends: from Thinking about Friendship: Historical and Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives, ed. S. Caluori (Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2013): 218–39. 13. The Self in Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations: from A Companion to Marcus Aurelius, ed. M. van Ackeren (Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2012): 465–80. 14. Plotinus on Self and Happiness: from Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, suppl. vol. 2012: 245–64.

Preface This is a collection of essays on the themes of selfhood and rationality in ancient Greek philosophy. With one exception (Chapter 6), the pieces have been published before, mainly in multi-authored volumes and conference proceedings. I am grateful to their editors and publishers for permitting them to be reprinted here. Most of the essays originally appeared during the last two decades, but the book also includes two older pieces on Heraclitus and Parmenides. I have made stylistic alterations and corrections throughout, but the pieces are republished without substantial changes. In its broad range of philosophers and time periods the book is similar to the collection I published under the title From Epicurus to Epictetus: Studies in Hellenistic and Roman Philosophy (Oxford, 2006). The difference here is my focus on a single theme that is central to ancient Greek philosophy from its beginnings with Heraclitus and Parmenides to its elaboration seven centuries later in the Enneads of Plotinus—the notion of a rational self. The Greek philosophers did not generally highlight rationality and self for explicit discussion. (Marcus Aurelius, to whom I devote Chapter 13, is the chief exception.) These notions largely emerged discursively in the way the philosophers explored topics of moral psychology, ethics, cosmology, and metaphysics. As is evident from some of the chapter titles, the book’s main theme is closely interwoven with ideas about divinity and happiness or eudaimonia. From a modern Western perspective such notions are remote from what we ordinarily associate with selfhood and rationality. For the Greek thinkers, however, philosophy of mind included a normative investigation of human identity at its best. The first chapters of the book explore this proposition in the round. With Chapters 4 and 5 I focus on Heraclitus and Parmenides. Socrates is the central figure in Chapters 6 through 8. The remaining chapters are devoted to Plato, Aristotle, Stoicism, and Plotinus. Taken as a whole, the book complements and elaborates on three of the lectures I incorporated in Greek Models of Mind and Self (Princeton, 2015). It also complements two studies on Seneca (Long 2006b and 2017), which I omit from this collection for reasons of length. As I have remarked in the prefaces of my earlier collections of essays, I have benefited hugely from invitations to present these pieces as lectures or conference contributions. My burgeoning interest in selfhood and rationality was greatly fostered by the company I kept as a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 1991–92, and by the students of my graduate seminars at Berkeley. I am deeply indebted to Peter Momtchiloff of Oxford University Press for encouraging me to put this work together, and for seeing it through to the end. I also thank Ajax Fu

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for his excellent help in making the Index of Names and Subjects, and I am very grateful to Kalpana Sagayanathan of OUP for her careful attention to the proofs and corrections. My wife Monique has been a wonderful support throughout. During World War II I was nurtured by my maternal grandfather, Charles Clements LeGrice, in the delightful Norfolk town of King’s Lynn. One day he said to me aged seven: ‘When you grow up, you will read Aristotle and Plutarch.’ I dedicate this book, with great fondness and gratitude, to his memory.

Citations and Abbreviations Full references to ancient authors and their works are given in the Index of Passages. For citations in the form Sedley 1999a, see the Bibliography. The following abbreviations are used for frequently cited ancient and modern authors and collections. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from Greek or Latin are my own. DK DL NE LS

OSAP SVF

H. Diels and W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6th edn. (Berlin, 1952) Diogenes Laertius Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers. 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1987). A reference in the form LS 61A refers to the chapter number of either volume and the corresponding letter entry Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, ed. H. von Arnim, 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1903–5)

Introduction In Chapter 1 I introduce aspects of rationality and selfhood by asking what our studying ancient philosophy now can tell us not only about the earliest Greek material but also about ourselves. Rather than viewing Heraclitus and Parmenides as ancient artifacts, fixed and static as it were, I seek to approach them dynamically, on the assumption that the history of philosophy inevitably changes because historians change according to their contemporary interests and conceptual frameworks. Drawing on the work of Thomas Nagel in his book The View from Nowhere, I argue that early Greek philosophy anticipated his notion of an ‘objective self ’ in its attempts to view the world from a decentred and impersonal perspective. My chief focus is on Heraclitus’ injunction to listen ‘not to me but to the logos’, and on the self-understanding that he seeks to promote in ways that neither Plato nor Aristotle seems to have appreciated. I also discuss Marcus Aurelius’ meditative perspective of being both a purely contingent part of the life of the universe and a uniquely situated individual. Chapter 2, ‘Ancient Philosophy’s Hardest Question’, was written for a general audience. It offers an introduction to Greek ethics by viewing the field as a series of attempts to achieve both self-understanding and self-transformation. I start from a wish to defamiliarize the notion of Greek eudaimonism as an ethical project that dispassionately and detachedly sets out the essential conditions of human happiness. The project’s central idea, that philosophy can make life safe for long-term happiness and moral virtue, was extraordinarily bold, and it remains a source of wonder. How first, did it arise, and second, what models of the self did it presuppose? The principal explanatory factors were radical revisions to conventional assumptions about the theological and psychological conditions that determine a good life. For happiness to be ‘in our power,’ it had to be removed from arbitrary divine control and external contingency, on the one hand, and, still more importantly, it had to be grounded in the internal ‘rule of reason’. The idea that reason could impose structure and balance on a human life struck the ancient philosophers as a godlike endowment as it were. Hence happiness and goodness could be thought to be largely or even entirely in our power, should we choose to be ruled by our rational capacity. Chapter 3 is a more technical study of ideas adumbrated in Chapter 2. My principal question here is how to interpret the inter-entailment of moral virtue and happiness, as expressed by the term eudaimonia. Does eudaimonia in Greek ethics signify ideal prosperity or flourishing, according to the word’s traditional Selfhood and Rationality in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Heraclitus to Plotinus. A. A. Long, Oxford University Press. © A. A. Long 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198803393.003.0001

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connotations in Greek culture, or is it, as Julia Annas has argued, in her book The Morality of Happiness, only ‘a weak and unspecific’ concept, providing ‘the final good’, construed as virtue, with ‘a handy name’? I argue that Greek ethics was thoroughly traditional in its understanding eudaimonia to be ideal prosperity and to be correspondingly evocative and desirable. The radical turn was making the rule of reason, not fortune and material well-being, the essential content of prosperity and the source of virtue. Greek philosophy would lose its distinctive contribution to ethics if we weakened the happiness of morality. That notion was essential to the Socratic postulate that to flourish you need to be virtuous. To gauge the full measure of philosophical eudaimonia, we should attend closely to the word’s etymology. Greek philosophers were attracted to the term eudaimonia because daimôn, the word’s main constituent, had three traditional connotations—divinity, fate, and monitoring spirit. To these senses they added the normative notion of good functioning, expressed by the adverb eu, and interpreted daimôn as an exalted name for the faculty of reason. In Chapter 4 I return to Heraclitus with a view to identifying the conceptual constituents of his doctrine of the logos. Plato and the subsequent philosophical tradition could presuppose rationality as the term’s primary usage, but that meaning was not available to Heraclitus as a native speaker of Greek in about 500 BC. Rather than invoking a pre-existing concept of rationality connoted by logos, Heraclitus found himself discovering that very thing by reflecting on such notions as order (kosmos), structure (harmoniê), law (nomos), balanced mentality (sôphrosynê), and measure or proportion (metron). Because of Heraclitus’ aphoristic style, these notions figure only episodically in his sentences; but by reference to Plato, we can see that both philosophers shared a systematic idea of rationality as typified by the values of measure, harmony, and proportion. While Heraclitus’ predecessors did not anticipate his conception of rationality as such, they had the words, as mentioned above, on which he could draw to articulate his usage of logos as both a cosmological principle and a normative mentality. His originality was analytical rather than linguistic. He intuited the unifying power of measure in the world’s physical processes, and he posited the human capacity to think and speak commensurately, hence according to reason. His riddling statements, in their balanced structure, are a representation of the rationality he finds at work in the cosmos and in himself as the spokesman of its logos. Heraclitus’ near contemporary Parmenides was early Greek philosophy’s most brilliant exemplifier of rationality in word and argument. In Chapter 5 I propose that the ‘being’ whose properties Parmenides deduces in his Way of Truth is not only what can and must be thought but is also identical to veridical thinking. I call this the ‘mind/being identity’ reading, and I contrast it with the more familiar interpretation according to which Parmenides’ being is mindless and simply the object of veridical thought, which I call ‘the mind/being non-identity reading’. The latter has been the preferred interpretation of modern scholars, but the most

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natural translation of the critical line B3 (Diels-Kranz) runs: ‘It is the same thing to think and to be’, or, as it may be equally well translated, ‘thinking and being are the same’, which I take to mean that thinking and being are completely coextensive, as Plotinus would postulate in his reading of Parmenides’ verse: thinking is the life or heart of Being, and Being characterizes the ontological and veridical status of thinking. Parmenides’ goddess inquires into thinking and finds that it has Being as its propositional content (‘it is’) and excludes not-being (‘it is not’). While Parmenides’ argument was completely original, most early Greek philosophers shared his view that mind and life are basic properties of reality. We have no autobiographical access to Socrates, but thanks to the impression he made on those who knew him and memorialized him his contribution to the themes of normative selfhood and rationality was cardinal. I already indicated the Socratic lineage of these notions in Chapters 2 and 3, and in the next three chapters I make aspects of Socrates’ literary persona centre stage. Rather than treat the historical figure as completely elusive (which modern fashion tends to do), in Chapter 6 I offer a sketch of the persona conferred on him by Plato, with a view to asking how he perceived himself and how he wished to be perceived by others. By virtue of his idiosyncrasy, Socrates was the most vivid and memorable individual in fifth-century Athenian experience. How should we assess his selffashioning, whether we view it in relation to philosophy or psychology or Greek mores? For the Stoic Epictetus, five centuries later, Socrates ‘attended to nothing except reason in everything that befell him’. Yet this image of Socrates has been sanitized and sanctified to the point of eliding the appearance and personality of Plato’s extraordinary figure. The theatricality of Socrates, whether we view him in the fraught setting of the Apology or the merriness of the Symposium, is unmistakable. To take its measure, I compare striking features of Plato’s Socrates with the persona of the fifth-century sophists and the flagrant exhibitionism of the Cynic Diogenes. Of all Socrates’ peculiarities, none was more remarkable and controversial than his unpredictable tendency to experience what he called a divine voice or sign (daimonion) that checked him from acting in the way he had intended to act. In Chapter 7 I ask how we should interpret Socrates’ adherence to these admonitions, especially their compatibility with his commitment to live a self-examined life and to act only on the best of reasons. There has been much debate about this issue, with some scholars presuming that the divine sign should be treated as falling outside the domain of rationality. In fact, however the sign’s divine source is tantamount to its having the absolute authority of reason for Socrates. Strong support for this proposition is to be found in Plutarch’s essay On Socrates’ divine spirit (De genio Socratis), composed as a dialogue. Plutarch’s main character conjectures that what Socrates experienced was a discourse or reason (logos) that contacted his mind, not in audible words, but struck him by its phenomenology as unquestioningly correct and authoritative. Viewed in this way, the daimonion certified the essential link for Socrates between divinity and rationality.

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In Chapter 8, I explore Socrates’ views of rationality and selfhood in the political and theological contexts of Plato’s Republic. In all his political dialogues Plato incorporates divinity in the interests of establishing policies that are as good as humanly possible. In the Republic Socrates makes access to a divine and ultimate principle, called the Form of the Good, the pinnacle of education for the philosophical rulers of his ideal community: accessing and contemplating the Good, is to be ‘the model for the Guardians in regulating the community and themselves’ (7.540b). While modern scholars, unlike ancient Platonists, have been reluctant to view the Good as god or a god, I argue that we should interpret this super Form as Plato’s divinity in propria persona. Although it is supremely transcendent, the Good is accessible to minds that have run the full gamut of dialectical training and who are predisposed to see it because of their own rationality and civic devotion. The metaphysical status and sun-like luminosity of the Good were no doubt Plato’s invention, but the essential goodness and rationality of divinity was a notion that he shared with and indeed learned from Socrates. I conclude this chapter by conjecturing that what got Socrates into legal trouble at Athens was not his divine admonitory sign, but his intuition that the world’s supreme divinity is not accessible in temple and ritual sacrifice but by its divine offshoot in ourselves, meaning our rational faculty and capacity to do philosophy. There is no word in Greek that corresponds exactly to our word ‘person’, with its connotations of individual self. In Chapter 9 I propose that Plato had a strong inkling of the normative attributes of personhood in his concept of psychê. The conventional translation of psychê as soul can be misleading in many ways, but the absence of an agreed alternative has generated the suspicion that Plato’s various uses of the word are inconsistent with any single notion in our own conceptual scheme. I seek to counter that assessment. Drawing on John Locke’s seminal analysis of ‘person’ and ‘personality’, supplemented by ideas advanced by Daniel Dennett and Harry Frankfurt, I argue that the Platonic psychê gives human beings the capacity for living as persons, with personhood typified by such attributes as moral agency, desire, intentionality, accountability, happiness, and misery. The life that the Platonic psychê constitutes for human beings is teleological through and through; it leaves no place for a personal identity that is ethically neutral or not ‘for the sake of something’. In striking contrast with Aristotle, who begins his analysis of psychê at the nutritive and reproductive level, Plato works from the top down, making the paradigmatic psychê a lover of truth and beauty. In Chapter 10 the book’s focus shifts from rationality as the normative attribute of persons to the Platonic and Stoic ideas of divine craftsmanship. This chapter can be read as a sequel to Chapter 4, where I explore Heraclitus’ pioneering notion of rationality as typified by ideas of balance and measure. Heraclitus drew on these concepts to envision a cosmic principle that manifests itself in the regularity and

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proportion of physical processes. Plato and Stoic philosophers accept this account of the physical world as a rational and balanced structure, but they transform Heraclitus’ impersonal logos into the purposive intelligence of a divine craftsman. By both philosophers god is conceived as a providential and supremely rational creator. They differ profoundly, however, in the ways they construe the relation of divinity to the world. Plato’s demiurge, a transcendent being, makes the physical universe by reference to an eternal model exterior to his mind. By means of mathematical principles he imposes order on amorphous materials that are not of his own making, manufacturing the world into an entity that governs itself by means of a rational soul. The Stoic demiurge, endowed with the hallowed name Zeus, is an immanent divinity, coextensive with the world. He everlastingly creates and recreates everything, by transforming himself into the structures of animate and inanimate things alike. Unlike Plato’s mathematical progenitor, the Stoic divinity functions as the world’s literal creator, infusing matter with life and energy. While both philosophies invoke divine craftsmanship as a goal for human rationality to emulate, Stoicism is distinctive in construing the world as a polity, making it quite literally the city of gods and human beings. In Chapter 11 I turn to Aristotle’s notion that the essence of the human self is the godlike capacity of intellect (nous). This doctrine is most elaborately formulated in the final book of the Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle maintains that happiness at its best is a purely theoretical activity. I argue that the divinity of nous pertains to happiness throughout the entire work rather than bifurcating it, as commonly argued, into the political goal of moral virtue and the intellectual end of contemplation. The latter, as Aristotle emphatically says, is the highest human function, but to the second-level happiness of the former the practical wisdom (phronêsis) of nous is central. Its role in that activity does not diminish its distinctively divine quality, thus making man the only creature capable of happiness, whether engaged in political life or that of pure philosophy. The ‘thinking element’, as Aristotle repeatedly says (NE 1166a5, 1178a7), is to be regarded as the human self par excellence (malista). I grant, as any reader must do, that parts of NE 10 are difficult to accommodate to a unitary conception of happiness, but the contemplative role of intellect should be interpreted as ancillary to the mainly practical thrust of the Aristotelian ethics. By arguing, as Aristotle does in NE 9, that perfect friends love one another as second selves, united by reciprocal virtues of character, Aristotle anticipated and almost certainly influenced, Stoicism. In Chapter 12 I explore this doctrine in its Stoic formulations. The Stoics share the common Greek and Roman idea that mutual benefit is the essence of friendship, but they restrict its authentic occurrence to completely virtuous persons. We may wonder, then, how mutual benefit can contribute to Stoic virtue, which seems to be a purely self-contained good, and therefore in no need of external assistance. In fact, the Stoics consider friends to be both ‘external’ and ‘productive’ goods. Friends benefit one another not in the

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tangible terms of providing material benefits but by sharing in one another’s virtues and providing each other with moral knowledge and motivation. Seneca and Epictetus show how this theory can also illuminate our understanding of friendships between imperfect people. The Stoics challenge the egoistic and utilitarian features of friendship as commonly conceived. They can be seen to have canvassed what Jennifer Whiting calls ‘impersonal friends’, whereby friends value one another not because of their individuality but entirely because they are persons of a certain sort. Marcus Aurelius offers a remarkable instance of impersonal friendship in the attitude he adopts to the rationality of natural change: ‘Everything is harmonious for me that is harmonious for you, O Universe’ (4.23). In Chapter 13 I explore the theory of selfhood that the Roman emperor deploys in his reflections on human identity and its being an ‘offshoot’ of the Stoics’ providential Nature. The Greek philosophical tradition had treated psychê, the generic principle of life, as constituting mind and reason in the human constitution. Marcus follows suit, but what chiefly interests him is the part of the psychê that Stoic philosophers had called hêgemonikon, ‘the governing part’. In the Meditations the hêgemonikon is precisely the self, the conscious subject of agency and motivation. Construed ontologically, this self is physical, but Marcus typically contrasts it with his flesh or life breath. In this way he is like a modern thinker who accepts the physicality of all events, but declines to reduce mental states to their neuro-physiological accompaniments. As a therapeutic exercise, he seeks complete detachment from his body and surroundings, to achieve harmony with his internal divinity (daimôn). By identifying himself accordingly, he seeks to integrate his subjective identity with his objective participation in Nature’s causality. In Chapter 14 I discuss Plotinus’ argument in his essay on eudaimonia (Ennead 1.4) that a truly happy life is viable only if we divide the self into an embodied soul, subject to the vicissitudes of physical existence, and an everlasting incorporeal intellect that is completely unaffected by its bodily counterpart. Starting with a critique of Aristotle, Epicureans, and the Stoics, Plotinus invokes his own version of Platonic metaphysics. He represents the embodied life treated by these other philosophers as only an imperfect image of the authentic, rational self whose task is to completely detach its volition and identity from the body and external things. Plotinus arrives at his final specification of eudaimonia, ‘living superabundantly’, by a subtle synthesis of Aristotelian theôria, Stoic indifference to every value except perfect rationality, an affirmation of the Epicureans’ static pleasure, and his special concept of an ‘undescended’ soul that is constantly engaged in intellectual activity. He acknowledges that the embodied self seeks health and absence of pain, but as the Platonist that he is, Plotinus construes these natural objectives not as ingredients of happiness but merely as necessary contributors to corporeal existence.

1 Finding Oneself in Greek Philosophy I How do we find ourselves in Greek philosophy? In asking this question I want to explore two things that overlap. The first is our relation to philosophers of the distant past and what this implies about our studying them now. The second point is what our studying them now can tell us about ourselves. One could ask a similar question about finding oneself in Greek history or Greek literature, or for that matter in anything at all that someone else has written. Our relation to a text always involves two contents, what is inscribed there and all that we bring to the text as readers and interpreters. However, the way we find ourselves in Greek philosophy is distinctive for several reasons. The Greeks were, of course, pioneers in shaping categories of thought that we Westerners have inherited, and in some cases discarded. That is familiar enough. But what mainly concerns me in this chapter is a way of looking at the origins of Greek philosophy through a conception of the human self that their inquiries into nature brought to light. In beginning Western philosophy, the Greeks, I shall argue, activated an entire aspect of the self that had been mainly latent before: they discovered a larger dimension of being human.¹ What I mean by this is something that we share with even the earliest Greek philosophers, but which they did not share with their predecessors and most of their contemporaries—the viewpoint or mental faculty that we conventionally call scientific objectivity. For a plethora of reasons, some of them good and others bad, objectivity has become a contentious notion in certain circles today. In using the term here, I want to sidestep questions about cultural relativism, paradigm shifts, privileged description, or the possibility of access to truths that might hold good independently of our own conceptual scheme—in other words, the vast issue of

¹ This chapter is the revised version of a lecture I delivered as Cardinal Mercier Professor of Philosophy at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven during March 1991. I thank my hosts for the stimulus they gave me and their generous hospitality. The main thesis of the lecture originated in a graduate seminar on the Presocratics that I taught at the University of California at Berkeley in the fall of 1990. I am especially grateful to Miriam Pittenger, to whose paper on Heraclitus I returned in thinking about the lecture, to Monique Elias, whose comments helped me to get a clearer idea of what I wanted to say about objectivity and subjectivity, and to John Ferrari and Alan Code, who made many helpful suggestions. The Classics Department at the University of Leiden provided me with a splendid place in which to prepare the text. For the leisure to do so I am indebted to fellowships from the United States National Endowment for the Humanities, and the University of California at Berkeley.

Selfhood and Rationality in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Heraclitus to Plotinus. A. A. Long, Oxford University Press. © A. A. Long 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198803393.003.0002

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objective truth and its grounds. Objectivity, in my use of the term, is to be construed as a function of human psychology, and more particularly, as a concomitant of imagination, intellectual curiosity, and experimental aptitude.² I shall use it as a way of referring to what I do believe to be a fact about human beings— that we have a capacity and inclination, if our material circumstances and education favour their development, to try to understand our milieu on the basis of articulated reasons that are not simply reducible to what is customarily thought or to what we like to believe on the basis of our idiosyncrasies or such things as gender, family, social class, and political or religious affiliation. Even with these qualifications, which of course I have stated baldly, it is easy to overlook three remarkable facts about objectivity. First, although we find it convenient to call the world that scientists study objective, the world as such, the world in its own right so to speak, is not the sort of thing that could be objective if objectivity characterizes viewpoints, theories, or faculties of mind. It is scientists who confer objectivity on the world in as much as they try to study it from an impersonal or detached or disinterested or theoretical perspective. The second remarkable fact about objectivity is its being an impersonal or detached outlook by a person, or at least, a set of persons. Only persons, i.e. human individuals, can think objectively, and prima facie there is something distinctly odd about a person’s being able to do anything impersonally. The greatest Greek philosophers grasped this latter point. Plato, in a memorable phrase, described philosophy as ‘practising death’ (Phaedo 64a), and death is the ultimate detachment from the embodied self. Aristotle, rejecting the proverb about the need to think human thoughts, recommended ‘immortalizing oneself as far as possible’ in a reference to the life of the theoretical intellect (NE 10.7, 1177b 30–4). Plotinus went even further, in his conception that human beings have an immortal intellect that never descends into the phenomenal world. All three of these philosophers were committed to the notion that trying to perceive things ‘as they really are’ is an essential part of what it is to be properly human; they take it that this kind of activity is a feature of the self, but not of the ordinary self. It is you and I in an extraordinary mode of our being. However, it is a third remarkable fact about objectivity that will chiefly concern me here. Unlike Plato and his successors, the earliest Greek philosophers had to ² My use of the term is to be contrasted with two problematic senses that are distinguished by Rorty 1980, 333–4: ‘objective’ to mean both ‘characterizing the view which would be agreed upon as a result of argument undeflected by irrelevant considerations’ and ‘representing things as they really are’. The first of Rorty’s senses is an obvious mirage. If it is applied to the history of philosophy and science, most of the best argued views will turn out to have been non-objective. Yet it would be an act of supreme arrogance for us to label them so on the grounds that, from our later perspective, they are deflected by irrelevant considerations. Rorty’s second sense of objectivity is still more troublesome since there seems to be no way in which ‘things could be represented as they really are’ that does not import the inquirer’s viewpoint into the representation. That, of course, is quite compatible with the fact that conscientious inquirers will try to represent ‘things as they really are’ from the perspective of their evidence, methodology, assumptions, etc.

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discover that they had this faculty; we should see their inquiries into nature as being inward as well as outward looking. Their objectivist approaches to the world cannot be treated as merely a cultural artifact or a conventional outlook since they were not living in a society that recognized the possibility and existence of scientific objectivity in the ways that I have just characterized it. In studying Heraclitus and Parmenides we may be witnessing the first full-scale emergence of this faculty in recorded history. That helps to explain the boldness and confidence of their speculations—their attempts to conceptualize the world in ways that subvert everyday beliefs and appearances. In this book’s fifth chapter I explore Parmenides’ radical experiments in tracing a path for thought that leaves him and his listeners or readers nowhere to be as the individuals that they are. My main focus in this introductory chapter is on Heraclitus. I argue that he not only has a notion of objectivity in the sense I have just explained, but also one that looks strangely modern if we connect it with ideas developed by Thomas Nagel in his classic book, The View from Nowhere (1986).

II Before getting to details I want to say something about how I conceive of the history of philosophy, and the place of the Greeks within it. Is it possible, let alone profitable, for us to connect any of our contemporary concerns with philosophers who are so distant from us in time and culture? I think it is not only possible but unavoidable, at least if we want to learn something about ourselves from the Greeks, and provided that we conduct our dialogue with them in appropriate ways. The dialogue that Greek philosophy invites is one of the main reasons why the subject is so alive today. Oddly enough, Michael Frede, who contributed hugely to the modern vitality of Greek philosophy, seems to miss this point. In the first chapter of his book Essays in Ancient Philosophy (1987), Frede explains what, in his opinion, a historian of philosophy should be trying to do. Frede distances himself from a Hegelian notion of philosophy’s optimistic and progressive relation to its childlike beginnings. As he rightly says, ‘The history of philosophy is as much a history of failure where success was possible as of achievement where failure was possible’ (xxiv). What Frede does not comment on is our dynamic and interrogative relation to earlier philosophers when we attempt to think their thoughts. The history of philosophy is not something static. It changes because we change. We try, of course, to avoid anachronism in our interpretations, but what we take earlier philosophers to be saying depends not only on their context but also on our own. By ‘our own context’ I mean our specific intellectual tradition and interests. We cannot completely discount these or even be fully aware of them, but we can try to use them conscientiously and creatively as a further guide

10

      

to interpretation. How philosophers were judged by their contemporaries or immediate successors may not be a good guide to their significance over a longer period of history or even for ourselves. Our encounter with Aristotle’s reflections in his book On the Soul is bound to be different from that of Aquinas. Knowing how the mind/body problem has been discussed since Descartes, we can evaluate the strengths or weaknesses of Aristotle’s psychology from a perspective in which we see him as innocent of Cartesian theory. For us, though not for Aquinas, Aristotle’s innocence in this respect has become an important part of his philosophical position, especially if we think that Cartesian dualism was a mistake. Aristotle is a significant figure in the contemporary philosophy of mind precisely because he offers a challenging alternative to views that were advanced after his own time. The fact that Greek philosophical texts are constantly open to this kind of reevaluation does not guarantee their modern value, but the two points often go together. Our ethics and metaphysics have been enriched by the attention such philosophers as Alasdair MacIntyre, Bernard Williams, and David Wiggins have paid to Aristotle.³ On certain issues (not, of course, the specific details of his cosmology and biology) Aristotle’s philosophy remains a permanent possibility for our thought. What is at stake here has been well stated by Heidegger in relation to Parmenides: ‘The dialogue with Parmenides never comes to an end, not only because so much in the preserved fragments of his “didactic Poem” still remains obscure, but also because what is said there continually deserves more thought.’⁴ In returning to the Greeks we should not subscribe to the myth of an original philosophy that would have prevented most of our subsequent mistakes. That posture, which Heidegger sometimes seems to adopt, is as unpromising as Hegel’s faith in steady philosophical progress. The point is not to place the Greeks in the cradle or on pedestals, but to allow them to stimulate us, especially in cases where we have reason to think that contemporary thought has lost its way.

III I now come back to my starting point, the objectivist conception of the self that early Greek philosophy brought to consciousness. The argument that I want to develop will emerge most clearly if I begin with some general points about subjectivity and objectivity, and their problematic status in philosophy since Descartes.

³ Cf. Williams 1985; MacIntyre 1981, which I have discussed in chapter 8 of Long 1996a, ‘Greek Ethics after MacIntyre and the Stoic Community of Reason’; and Wiggins 1980. ⁴ Heidegger 1984, 100–1, see p. 76 below.

    

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Self is a name for what we are in our individual identities, as distinct persons, or states of awareness. We mark this point in language by using proper names, pronouns, and possessive adjectives. We say: ‘I think’, ‘she feels’, ‘his thought’, ‘your problem’. Such expressions are personal in the sense that they indicate a human being from that person’s perspective. The facts that they denote are subjective because only I can do my thinking; only she can have her feeling. However, the fact that I can think is not subjective, but objective because it is grounded not in my being me but in my being human. Furthermore, while my thinking is peculiar to me, what I think can be objective and something you share, as when I say there are so many people in this room. That statement does not express my personal perspective. It identifies an objective or public fact. These are elementary points, as I have formulated them, and do not seem to generate a problem. Suppose, however, that Descartes’ evil demon tempts me to think that everything I normally take to exist is an illusion. Suppose, further, that I respond to this challenge by advancing my own consciousness as the one thing I cannot doubt. I refute hyperbolic scepticism by insisting on my own subjective reality. But what do I do next? How does my certainty of my own existence provide me with a firm foundation for viewing anything outside myself? It seems that my grip on the world must start with my own individual consciousness. Subjective me must be the perspective from which I view everything else. We owe to Descartes’ evil demon a host of problems that did not bedevil Greek philosophers, e.g. solipsism, knowledge of other minds, and what our personal identity really consists of.⁵ In spite of crushing attacks from Wittgenstein and Ryle, the ghost of Descartes’ ghost in the machine still haunts us. Although we don’t doubt the existence of the physical world that natural scientists study, we continue to regard it as an external part of reality that is quite distinct from the internal reality of mind or consciousness. In our prevailing model of the mind, consciousness is generally thought of as something essentially individual if not private. Even if you and I think the same thought, we conventionally take it that two consciousnesses are at work. There is a problem, then, in understanding the relation between subjectivity and objectivity. The problem is to explain how individual selves can see the world from a perspective which is genuinely their own but not just that of themselves. Can we be both subjective and objective selves? ⁵ A realist assumption permeates all Greek philosophy, thus distinguishing it decisively from the idealism, initiated by Descartes, that has been so influential in modern philosophy. The point has been excellently explored by Burnyeat 1982, 3–40. Burnyeat notes as peculiarly Cartesian, Descartes’ doubts about his having a body, his proposal that any experience might be the illusion of a dream, his making subjective truth indubitable, and finally his questioning the prevailing Greek assumption that something exists independently of our own mental states. When Greek philosophers talk about ‘the external world’, they do not include a person’s body as part of the content of that world, and so they do not have a concept of the external in the sense that that expression has commonly acquired since Descartes. See also MacDowell 1986, 137–68, and Everson 1991, 121–47.

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      

In The View from Nowhere, Thomas Nagel argues that this is precisely what we are. Nagel proposes the existence of what he calls ‘the objective self ’ as the fact about each of us as individuals that enables us to transcend our purely personal or socially conditioned viewpoints. What links us to the physical world of science, he suggests, is our being or having an objective self in addition to our ordinary human individuality. Nagel offers his conception of the objective self as a way of responding to the Cartesian problem and bridging the gap between physical (external) and mental (internal). The objective self is still me, but it is me seeing the world from a perspective in which I try to discount the fact that it is I who am doing this seeing. The objective self is my thinking of the world as something that contains me and my consciousness along with everything else. It is my capacity to achieve a viewpoint in which my ordinary human individuality ceases to be the perspective from which I look at the world. This ‘higher self ’, as Nagel sometimes calls it, is presupposed by a great many of our attitudes and institutions, but its extreme manifestation is scientific inquiry. Since the objective self is a feature of every normal person, it can form the basis for a universalist or inter-subjective understanding. Nagel does not suggest, of course, that objectivity can ever be complete. We cannot get completely outside of our individual selves any more than we can imagine ourselves not existing. Such objectivity as we may achieve is an approximation to a view from nowhere, i.e. a view from somewhere less individual (67). As a fact about the self and the self ’s relation to the world, it explains why we can get behind the ordinary appearance of things to a non-apparent conception of them. Nagel’s ‘objective self ’, though modem in formulation, is hardly novel in essence. Another name for it, to indicate its being something in which we all share, could be rationality. However, the issue that interests me is not Nagel’s own position in detail but the fact that he finds it necessary, in the contemporary state of philosophy, to argue for this kind of link between our individual selves and the world. How and why did something analogous to Nagel’s ‘objective self ’ come to consciousness at the beginning of Greek philosophy? The focus of my interest is the great difference in background between Nagel’s post-Cartesian or scientific starting-point and that of the Greeks. What can we learn about our modern conception of the self by studying the origins of Greek philosophy? The chief points to remember, as we move to the Greeks, are first, Nagel’s desire to justify objectivity—the non-individualistic viewpoint—and second, his proposal that it need not threaten or be threatened by my subjective identity because the objective self is essentially part of what it is to be me.

IV People had selves before philosophy. From what we know about early Greek literature, pre-philosophical selves were not Cartesian. By saying this I mean

    

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that they did not regard their moment-by-moment consciousness as the principal mark of their identity. What they took themselves to be, in first-person reflection, was determined by publicly observable facts.⁶ Achilles regards himself as the principal Achaean warrior because that is how he is, as others tell him. What can trouble Homeric characters is not doubt about where they stand in the world but living up to the world’s expectation of them. Their outlook on the world is objective in the sense that there is general agreement about the conditions of human society and the gods’ ultimate control of things. The contrast between divine immortality and human mortality provides an objective viewpoint for understanding where people fit into the world. But Homeric characters do not have an objective self in Nagel’s sense. They— and we may guess, their real-life equivalents—have no interest in asking what the world might be like from a perspective other than that in which they presently see it or can readily imagine it. Nagel’s objective self came into being when the first Greek philosophers had the audacity to conjecture that the traditional gods could not explain how the world began or why it has its present features. Thoroughly human in everything except their power and immortality, the Olympian gods provided a basically human perspective for explaining natural phenomena and all the general circumstances of life. Thunder and earthquakes were expressions of the gods’ passions. This pre-philosophical world was conceptualized in entirely personal terms. The Milesian philosophers of the sixth century BC took the first step towards Nagel’s objective self. In place of anthropomorphic gods they introduced the notion of a material stuff, for instance water or air, which could account for both the origin of the world and its present structure. Thus, the Milesian Anaximenes proposed that everything is explicable by aēr, conventionally translated by ‘air’, which can change its density and so appear as something solid such as rock or as something rarefied such as fire. Anaximenes appears to be advancing a physical explanation of the world, but what he means by aēr is something much less specific than what we call the atmosphere. In addition, he takes it to be alive and also divine.⁷ Anaximenes’ ascription of divinity and life to air was a momentous step, far more extraordinary than modern scholars have generally recognized. It is easy to see it as a relic of mythology, but even if that is right, Anaximenes’ position raises epistemological prospects and problems which were absent from the tradition that he was implicitly, if not explicitly, rejecting. The minds of the Olympian gods were inscrutable to mortals, but mortals believed that they and the gods were largely alike in their manner of thought and of feeling. One could at least imagine, as ⁶ On the ‘objective participant conception’ of human identity and its application to ‘being a hero’, see Gill 1996, ch. 2. ⁷ Cf. Guthrie 1962, 127–32.

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      

Homer so brilliantly does, thinking the thoughts of an Olympian god. If, on the other hand, we take air with its visible effects and transformations to be alive and divine, our relation to the world is radically changed, and especially so if we take the further step with Anaximenes of treating air as ‘the cosmic equivalent of the life-soul in man’.⁸ Anaximenes’ air brings us both closer to the divine and more distant from it—closer because his air makes the world empirically intelligible in ways that the Olympian gods do not do, more distant because an air god’s life must be something very different from our ordinary modes of thought. What connects Anaximenes to his air god is not a personal transaction but the relationship between himself as thinker and a cosmic principle that functions like our lifesoul although it is not centred in ordinary human consciousness. Speculation about the world has brought with it a new dimension of the self. There is no evidence that Anaximenes reflected deeply on the psychological implications of his comparison between cosmic air and the human soul or vital principle. However, within his lifetime or a little later, philosophers began a direct confrontation with the issues that his kind of speculation raises—issues not simply about what the world is like but what we must be like if the world is to be intelligible and related to us in the kind of way Anaximenes proposed. Following Aristotle’s lead in his surveys of his predecessors, we have tended to think of early Greek philosophy as largely outward-looking, an effort to understand external nature with only superficial attention being paid to psychology and theory of knowledge. I want to suggest instead that Anaximenes’ immediate successors recognized that the inquiry into nature requires a new understanding of the self and its cognitive powers.⁹ As I have already remarked, early Greek philosophy is implicitly an attack on traditional religion, and with Xenophanes this became explicit. He used a brilliant argument to undermine the conventional gods: all peoples, he said, make their gods look and behave like themselves; for instance, the gods of the Ethiopians are snub-nosed and black, while those of the Thracians are blue-eyed and red-haired. If cows and horses had gods, he observed, they would make them bovine and equine (DK 21 B15–16). Xenophanes drew the conclusion that divinity must be wholly different from human beings in form and in thought (B23–4). His argument is the earliest we possess that draws attention to relativity of viewpoint, and the difficulty this creates for scientific knowledge. Xenophanes proposed that god is a unity and a unity that perceives and thinks ‘as a whole’. However, he also wrote as follows: ‘No man has a clear view, nor will there ever be anyone who has knowledge about the gods and everything that I speak. For even if he should fully ⁸ Cf. Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 1983, 161. ⁹ This point is well taken by Toulmin 1972, 4: ‘The rationalist cosmologies of sixth-century Ionia . . . carried double meanings: they were concerned not just with Nature—but with Intelligible Nature—not just with a World that Man might or might not understand, but with this World as an object of Man’s understanding.’

    

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succeed in speaking what is actual, he himself does not know it. Appearance is laid over everything’ (B34). Anaximenes’ physical theory, premised upon the existence of an air god, implied a new perspective from which to view the world. Xenophanes rejects that possibility. He acknowledges the existence of a controlling divinity, but he puts that god, and thus any scientific knowledge of the world, outside human access. Xenophanes can surmise that there is more to the world than the standard viewpoint of his culture. In fact he is the first philosopher to draw distinctions between reality and appearance, and between truth and conjecture. The way he draws them, however, is critical rather than constructive. As the later history of philosophy has shown, attempts to achieve scientific knowledge regularly invite sceptical rejoinders. Xenophanes was not a full-fledged sceptic since he shares Anaximenes’ impulse to get beyond a human-centred perspective; but he doubts our capacity to do so. Our viewpoint cannot be that of the god, who perceives and thinks ‘as a whole’.

V I come now to the astonishing figure of Heraclitus—the principal hero of this chapter. He has been much studied over the past two hundred years, and my reflections on him are unavoidably indebted to that scholarship. Indeed, the difficulties of interpreting Heraclitus may appear so formidable that I risk being accused of rashness or carelessness in advancing thoughts about him without cloaking them in the protective garb of scholarly disclaimers. If I venture to do so here, it is not out of disrespect for that learned tradition, nor, as I want to insist still more strongly, because I lay claim to an authoritative insight into Heraclitus’ dark sayings. The nakedness with which I shall approach him in this paper has a philosophical point. Heraclitus is a type of philosopher—Plato, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein are other examples—whose demand on the interpreter is so exigent that nothing of substance can be thought via his sayings unless we finally converse with them as individual searchers, trying as best we can to perceive the world through the clues that they suggest. Not all philosophers are like that. Aristotle’s philosophy—to take one obviously different style of thought—is greatly illuminated by the scholarly tradition that it has prompted. We do not need, as it were, to internalize all of Aristotle’s concepts in order to engage with his patterns of thought. But in the case of Heraclitus, as it seems to me, any worthwhile insight we may achieve is riskier or more tenuous because there are no secure guidelines external to the conversation we engage in on our own individual responsibility. This does not mean that we cannot learn from one another’s readings. What it does imply is that the final step in learning anything from Heraclitus or Plato is self-exploration, or a

16

      

process of discovering what ideas their reflections bring to birth in our own attempts to think.¹⁰ Following that injunction, I want to suggest that Heraclitus discovered something close to Nagel’s objective self or what Nagel 1989 also calls ‘a selftranscendent conception’. Such a conception, he writes (74), ‘should ideally explain four things: (1) what the world is like; (2) what we are like; (3) why the world appears to beings like us in certain respects as it is and in certain respects as it isn’t; and (4) how beings like us can arrive at such a conception’. The point of my remarks will not be to tell Nagel that he is a latter-day Heraclitean. What I seek to propose, rather, is that Heraclitus had a similar intuition about what the world and we must be like, in general terms, if we are actually capable of seeing it as it is and as it isn’t. Let me recall Xenophanes’ dilemma. He intuited the existence of a divine being that transcended ordinary experience, but he saw no way for humans to apprehend it. Heraclitus too recognized that there is more to the world than uncritical perception and belief can deliver. However, he attacked Xenophanes, along with Pythagoras and others, for doing research that failed to gain him understanding (DK 22 B40). Instead of allocating the non-apparent features of the world to an unfathomable god, Heraclitus drew an extraordinary inference. He proposed that appearances are actually only the surface of a deep structure that they partly reveal and partly conceal.¹¹ He calls attention to this deep structure in a series of memorable sayings, for instance: ‘The way up and down is one and the same’ (B60); ‘God: day night, winter summer, war peace, satiety hunger’ (B67); ‘Mortal immortals, immortal mortals; living the others’ death; dying the others’ life’ (B62). These sayings express the unity of opposites, but they do so in deliberately cryptic ways. ‘Nature’, Heraclitus says, ‘loves to conceal itself ’ (B123). By writing in a riddling manner, he wants to signal the gap between appearance and deep structure. The interpretation that his words demand is his sign of philosophy’s task—a reading of nature’s hidden meaning. If Heraclitus had supposed that appearances are simply at odds with reality, his notion of a deep structure would be arbitrary, lacking in any demonstrable rationale. But he does not deny that the world really presents itself to observers in the ways that we denote by terms like day and night, or up and down. Nor, I think, does he wish to suggest that the underlying unity of such opposites is a higher metaphysical truth such that an objective account of the world would be complete if it denounced all conflicting appearances as illusory without qualification. Heraclitus acknowledges that sea is most pure (for fish) and most foul ¹⁰ Cf. Burnyeat 1982: ‘After explanation and elucidation have done their best, there is nothing for it but to let these memorable sayings [of Heraclitus] take effect in the psyche in their own way.’ ¹¹ Cf. B54: ‘a hidden structure (harmoniē) is better than an obvious one.’ For an excellent exploration of the sentence, cf. Kahn 1979, 203, who says of it: ‘The phrase “hidden structure” . . . might . . . be taken as a general title for Heraclitus’ philosophical thought’.

    

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(for humans; B61). The objectivity I ascribe to him partly consists in his juxtaposing surface and hidden meanings, human and god’s-eye viewpoints. What he takes to be decisively mistaken is the viewpoint from which day is seen as simply separate from night, up from down, living from dying.¹² A deep structure is needed because reflection shows that there can be no day without night, no up without down, no life without death. These apparent opposites imply conceptual unities—the flow of time, the extension of space, the biological cycle. Heraclitus’ deep structure is a way of making sense of the world when we detach appearances from their ordinary perceptual conditions. The unity of opposites invites us to look at wholes rather than at parts: ‘The same . . . living and dead; and the waking and the sleeping; and young and old. For these transposed are those, and those transposed are these’ (B88). Here, quite clearly as it seems to me, is a view from nowhere. It is as if Heraclitus is trying to step outside time with the object of interpreting successive transitions from A to B or B to A as co-present contributors to anything’s identity.¹³ Remove any relativity of viewpoint, and you are both young and old. Every moment you are living you are dying, and every moment you are dying you are living. Remove all temporal distinctions, and you get the identity of living and dead. Jonathan Barnes interprets the identity of such opposites as a fallacious inference by Heraclitus, caused by his dropping the temporal qualifiers from the innocuous proposition, ‘X phis at T¹ and X does not phi at T²’, and so concluding to ‘X phis and does not phi without qualification’.¹⁴ That diagnosis of this ubiquitous element in Heraclitus’ thought seems misguided—not because he was incapable, given his early date, of fallacious reasoning, but because it overlooks his amply attested interest in looking at the world from a de-centred perspective. Heraclitus knew perfectly well that, from the ordinary perspective, living and dead are mutually exclusive conditions. I take him to be saying that, from the perspective of an everlasting world (cf. B30), the individual named Heraclitus is both living and dead. The world’s deep structure, as he conceives of it, does not admit the boundaries between things that our ordinary discourse sets up. Those boundaries are only half-truths, attempts to view the world from a perspective that fails to counter-balance them with the fundamental unity and flux of everything. Heraclitus insists that we individual selves participate in the world as physical and mental processes, but that we typically fail to understand the significance of this participation. He complains that people in general ‘live as though their thinking was a private possession’ (B2)—here is the embryo of disabling ¹² Cf. B57, where Heraclitus criticizes Hesiod for failing to recognize the unity of day and night. ¹³ Thus I look for a more paradoxical sense of identity than Schofield 1991, 31, who writes: ‘These opposites count as the same because they share the same form of change. Of each member of each pair one and the same thing is true: that it changes into the other . . . Identity is identity of process.’ ¹⁴ Barnes 1982, 73.

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subjectivity—and he likens them to sleepers or the deaf (B1). They cut themselves off from what he calls ‘the common’ logos, although self-knowledge, like understanding the logos, is in everyone’s power to achieve (B116). As Heraclitus uses logos, the term appears to signify both the world’s deep structure or rationale and the ‘account’ of this that he gives. He offers himself as the speaker of the logos but he tells his audience to listen to it and not to him (B1 and B50). By distinguishing between privacy and community, sleeping and waking, himself as speaker and the independent authority of his account—by drawing these distinctions, Heraclitus indicates that he is trying to reach a wholly objective view of the world. Those who can follow him, he says, will find it wise to agree that all is one. I have suggested that what led Heraclitus to an intuition of the world’s deep structure was his attempt to do something paradoxical—to think about appearances from a non-relative or non-perceptual perspective. Do we have any clue as to how he saw himself in this regard? To set up a genuine comparison with Nagel, it is not enough to show that Heraclitus conceptualized something like The View from Nowhere. What chiefly interests Nagel is whether a person can look at the world from a detached or objective perspective and include his subjective self as one of the contents of that detached perspective. Can I so detach from my own skin and personality that I see me as simply one thing among everything else, not a thing which is a special centre of attention? And would the I that does this seeing still be me in any recognizable sense? Heraclitus does not talk explicitly about self-transcendence, but he implies it when he says: ‘I went in search of myself ’ (B101). The subject and the object of this sentence seem to be both the same and not the same. Heraclitus is himself. Therefore, if he can search for himself there must be something about him, as the object of investigation, that is not present to him as the searcher. We can interpret what he took this investigation to involve by attending to some of his remarks about the psychê. ‘The soul’s logos’, he says, ‘increases itself” (B115). That cryptic saying seems to be elucidated by another remark: ‘You will not find out the limits of the soul by going, even if you travel over every way, so deep is its logos’ (B45). Note the word logos again. Let us translate the term this time by ‘reason’ or ‘thought’.¹⁵ Heraclitus appears to be saying that the soul or the self is unlimited in its capacity for understanding, and further, that understanding causes itself to grow. ¹⁵ Kahn 1979, 44 translates logos in this fragment of Heraclitus by ‘report’, but in his commentary on the passage (129) he favours ‘measure’. Yet he also writes ad loc.: ‘The possession of rational speech may be a significant overtone here, but this idea cannot explain the adjective “deep”.’ (In fact bathus is a standard adjective to apply to the power of thought in Greek at the time; cf. bathus LSJ sv 4 and Snell 1955, 37.) Later, however (130), Kahn writes, quite correctly in my view: ‘By seeking for his own self Heraclitus could find the identity of the universe, for the logos of the soul goes so deep that it coincides with the logos that structures everything in the world.’ In any event, we should take the soul’s logos to refer to a psychological property that it has. Contrast Schofield 1991, 20, who takes the soul’s deep logos to imply merely that the soul is a difficult topic.

    

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An interpretation of Heraclitus’ search for himself is now at hand: he is seeking for the truths he has tried to present in his conception of deep structure, i.e. an objective understanding of the world. But if that is the search that searching for himself implies, he, or an aspect of him, is an objective understanding of the world. In disclosing truths about nature, Heraclitus is disclosing himself, or rather, in disclosing himself he is disclosing truths about nature; he is discovering the knower in the knowable and the knowable in the knower. The method looks like what we call introspection, but it is not what we typically mean by introspection—reviewing our private states of consciousness. What Heraclitus takes himself to be searching for is a link between his human individuality and a world that transcends the merely human viewpoint. Or, to put it another way, he is seeking the justification for his philosophical inquiry in facts about the self. He uses his language and thought, the structure of himself, as guides to nature. He makes the connection that anyone must make who believes that an individual’s thinking can result in an objective view of the world. The historical and intellectual gap between Heraclitus and Nagel is enormous. Yet they are curiously alike in their approach to self-transcendence. Nagel wants this to explain how we can arrive at a conception of the world which ‘explains why the world appears to beings like us in certain respects as it is and in certain respects as it isn’t’ (1986, 74). Heraclitus meets this condition by his notion of the structure that we and the world share. As perceivers, we relate to the world, let us say, by feeling hot or cold, by ascending or descending We do not perceive the unities hotand-cold, or up-and-down. Yet we know that such apparent opposites co-exist once we think away the purely perceptual perspective on them. They do not appear as unities, but thought permits us access to a world where they are so. In illustrating Heraclitus’ detached viewpoint, I pointed out ways in which he collapses distinctions that are fundamental to ordinary life, living versus dying, or mortal versus immortal. Does he show any of Nagel’s concern about integrating these different perspectives? Can Heraclitus’ view from nowhere include the practice of being a person in the everyday world? There is clear evidence that he thought so. He lived before the time when philosophers subdivided their subject into physics, logic, ethics, and so forth, and one may take his whole philosophy to be a response to the Delphic maxim ‘Know yourself ’. Traditionally that had meant, know your limits, know that you are human and not a god. The same message had been conveyed in the untranslatable word sôphrosynê, which literally means ‘thinking safe thoughts’.¹⁶ Heraclitus, however, redefines sôphrosynê by describing it as ‘the greatest excellence and wisdom, to act and speak what is true, perceiving things according to their nature’ (B112). The final phrase in this sentence alludes to the bold claims he makes for

¹⁶ For further details, see ch. 4 below.

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      

his own philosophical message (B1). The self-understanding that Heraclitus seeks and enjoins is nothing less than access to the laws of nature. Has he, then, abandoned the traditional connection between sôphrosynê and human limitations? I think the answer to this question is partly yes and partly no. Pre-philosophical thought had stressed the limits to human understanding, a point, as we saw, that Xenophanes also emphasized. Heraclitus has a concept of the self that breaches the traditional distinction between human and divine. His relation to the world is, in a sense, an attempt to think the thoughts of God. This would be a very unsafe thing to do if you were dealing with Olympian Zeus. But Heraclitus’ God is the deep structure of the world, a structure to which Heraclitus takes himself to have access through thought. In that case, it is reasonable for him to link safe thought with acting and speaking what is true. If we want to live authentically, we need a double understanding: we need to know who we are, and we need to know what the world in which we find ourselves is like. Although Heraclitus’ objective self changes the perspective on ordinary life, it does not alter its basic conditions. After reflecting on the unity of opposites, we will continue to walk up and down, go to sleep and wake up, but with the option of seeing ourselves differently—not as simply discrete individuals, with uniquely personal concerns, but as beings whose lives are also inter-connected phases of a much larger scheme.

VI At the beginning of this chapter I argued that past philosophies are not dead artifacts. They have their own historical context, but, like other great works of art, they can leap across centuries. I have looked at Heraclitus from three angles, his historical position, my reading of his sayings, and the modern work of Nagel, who never refers to him by the way. I now add two further perspectives—the first, that of Plato and Aristotle, is an instructive misreading; the second, from the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius, is a serious attempt to define himself in a way that combines individual identity with a Heraclitean conception of his objective standing in the world. Plato notoriously supposed Heraclitus to have held that everything is in flux (cf. Cratylus 402a). From Plato’s viewpoint this implied that there is no being but only becoming, and so knowledge is impossible. Aristotle, following Parmenides’ lead (as I suppose), took Heraclitus’ unity of opposites to be a flagrant rejection of the principle of non-contradiction—that the same thing can be and not be at the same time—and therefore accused Heraclitus of making everything true (cf. Metaphysics Gamma 1005b22; 1012a24). These interpretations, however, fail to fit Heraclitus’ conception of his everlasting logos (B1), where ‘everlasting’, as I take it, implies the changelessness of the truth it comprises, and the intelligible unity of everything that exists. Heraclitus takes his logos to constitute the truth

    

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about the world, a truth that is both knowable and the basis for excluding alternative accounts of things. How could Plato and Aristotle have missed this? The answer is clear once we see that Heraclitus’ logos is the unchanging formula of a world that is incessantly but regularly changing. In terms of its deep structure, the Heraclitean world is a set of regular processes—balanced changes of temperature, density, and so forth. What Plato and Aristotle miss in Heraclitus is a conception of the stable beings that they introduced with their theories of forms. In a sense they are right, but not in a way that threatens the coherence of Heraclitus’ philosophy. Heraclitus is not attempting to ground our common-sense view of the world in a corresponding set of intelligible notions. Unlike Plato and Aristotle, he thinks there is reason to regard the world’s underlying principles as radically different from the way we ordinarily perceive things. Like Nagel, Heraclitus attempts to think himself into a world that is quite lacking in the distinctions that make sense of our everyday perceptions. He could respond to Plato and Aristotle by saying that they share the common fault of idealist philosophers, of projecting our existing conceptual scheme onto the world instead of trying to extend that scheme to include a genuinely non-human-centred reality. In that respect they fall short of the kind of objectivity he is striving to attain. It is Heraclitus’ glimpse of that objectivity, which gives him a major place in the history of science—not his fortunately correct guess that the world’s deep structure is dynamic, but his ‘audacity to think the unthinkable’.¹⁷ I hope I have shown that, despite their different starting points, Heraclitus can illuminate some of Nagel’s concerns, and vice versa. This does not mean that there is a philosophia perennis. What makes the comparison possible is their shared intuition about what we and the world must be like if, despite our subjective identities, we have a way of seeing ourselves and the world objectively. I cannot explain why Heraclitus and Nagel have this similar intuition. It may have much to do with the fact that each of them wants to outflank scepticism, that of Xenophanes in the case of Heraclitus, that of the Cartesian legacy in the case of Nagel. However that may be, both Nagel and Heraclitus help us to realize that we cannot be satisfied with a division of the world into so-called external reality and a purely private domain of subjectivity; and for a reason so simple that it is easily missed. The concept of external reality, however limited our grasp of it, is an essential element of our own identity and sanity. We would not even know that we have a self with which to converse unless there was a public world for us to knock up against. Someone who had to do that much more than he wanted to was Marcus Aurelius. During his work as emperor and military commander, he wrote a series

¹⁷ I take a phrase from p. 15 of the splendid book by Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination (Princeton, 1986). It is part of a context in which the author is claiming (14) that ‘a conceptual revolution consists more often than not in the deliberate adaptation of [previously demonstrated] absurdities.’

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      

of reflections ‘To himself ’ (the title of the work often translated as Meditations). He used Greek philosophy, his interpretation of Stoicism and Heraclitus, as a way of defining himself within the difficult circumstances of his military life. His meditations, which form a spiritual diary, are an excellent example of what it can mean to combine an objective viewpoint with one’s ordinary humanity. Marcus’ starting point is the opposite of Descartes’. He grounds his conception of himself not in the privacy of his own consciousness but in the thought that he is a part of the world and that the world is a community.¹⁸ By world he means both the microcosm, human society, and the macrocosm, the universe at large. He uses his perception of universal nature to cast light upon how he sees himself as a person. ‘Let your imagination’, he says, ‘dwell constantly upon the whole of time and the whole of substance, and realize that their several parts are, by comparison with substance, a fig-seed; by comparison with time, the turn of a gimlet’ (10.17).¹⁹ From this perspective he sees himself as a momentary process in a universe ‘that loves to change what is and to create new things in their likeness’ (4.36). ‘Nature’s law is that all things change and turn and pass away, so that in due order different things may come to be’ (12.21). Or again, ‘Universal nature out of its whole material, as from wax, models now the figure of a horse, then melting this down uses the material for a tree, next for a man, next for something else’ (7.23). He tells himself to note ‘the swiftness of the passage and departure of things that are and of things that come to be. For substance is like a river in perpetual flux, its activities are in continuous changes, and its causes in myriad varieties, and there is scarce anything which stands still, even what is at hand; dwell, too, on the infinite gulf of the past and the future, in which all things vanish away’ (5.23). By such reflections Marcus places himself within a cosmic perspective. What, then, does he have from his own viewpoint? Not the past and not the future but the present (2.14), a finite moment straddled by infinity on either side. Mutable and temporary though he is within the general scheme of things, he and only he is living his life, and his life is what he has now: Remember this, that no one loses any other life than this which he is living, nor lives any other life than this which he is losing. (2.14)

The sentiment reflects Heraclitus both in form and content. Marcus’ objectivity, as this meditation shows, involves attachment as well as detachment. He is not a Platonist, with aspirations to transcend the body and find his identity in being rather than becoming. His detached perspective strengthens his understanding of where he fits within the limits and possibilities of his present existence. At one moment he sees his own life ‘as a tiny pinpoint in time, planted on a minute dot in ¹⁸ See ch.13 below. ¹⁹ I draw on Farquharson’s translations of Marcus Aurelius from vol. l of his 1944 edition.

    

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an infinite universe prolonged through eternity’.²⁰ Yet, he will suddenly alter the perspective and reproach himself for wanting to lie in bed when there is work to be done (cf. 5.1), or remind himself of a homely fable or proverb (cf. 11.22, 6.54). The juxtaposition of these two viewpoints situates him within a Heraclitean combination of opposites. In comparison with the life of the universe, he is insignificant. Yet, however briefly, he is part of the life of the universe, allotted time and opportunities that only he can use. His objectivity presents him with a sense of his responsibility, his autonomy, his being a contributor to a social system. ‘Don’t hope’, he says, ‘for Plato’s Utopia, but be content to make a very small step forward and reflect that the result even of this is no trifle’ (9.29). ‘The matter of the whole is a torrent; it carries all in its stream. What then, man, is your part? Act as nature this moment requires; set about it, if it is granted you, and don’t look round to see whether anyone will know’ (9.29). This last sentence is fascinating. Marcus does not ask for witnesses of his behaviour, yet the fact of his not asking for them attests to his own objectivity. His standard of conduct is what perfected nature, i.e. rationality, requires, and not how he will appear in others’ eyes. He seeks to be what the Stoics called a citizen of the world.

VII The problem of objectivity is not whether we have it at all, but how far and how flexibly we are prepared to extend it while holding on to our legitimate interests in concerns that are inalienably personal. If Heraclitus could join us today, he would find remarkable proof of our objective selves in the conduct, or at least the results, of scientific research. He would also note how erratic the application of objectivity is to such contexts as international relations, political dialogue, and decisionmaking, social co-operation and personal happiness. We continue to make wars, to quarrel over values and ideals, and to regard ‘I think’ or ‘I feel’ as the centre from which everything else radiates.²¹ Perhaps these are an inevitable aspect of being human. Or perhaps they are not inevitable but a reflection of what T. S. Eliot meant when he wrote in the first of his Four Quartets: ‘Human kind cannot bear very much reality.’ Eliot had Heraclitus in his sights, since he quotes two of his fragments as a preface to these poems: ‘Although the logos is shared, most people live as though their thinking were a private possession’ and ‘The way up and down is one and the same’. These are hard truths to grasp like many things that are near

²⁰ So Rutherford 1989, xix. Cf. Pascal in Levi 1995, 67: ‘In the end, what is humanity in nature? A nothingness compared to the infinite, everything compared to a nothingness, a midpoint between nothing and eternity.’ ²¹ At the time I was writing these pages the first Gulf War was being fought.

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      

to home. We have an objective self, but we are highly selective, or should I say subjective, in how we exercise it.

Postscript My comparison of Nagel’s ‘objective self ’ to notions in Heraclitus is helpfully discussed by Gill 2001, 172–80, who also refers to Marcus Aurelius. On what Plato and Aristotle failed to recognize in Heraclitus’ theory of knowledge, see Graham 2008, 174–5, 184.

2 Ancient Philosophy’s Hardest Question What to Make of Oneself?

The most extraordinary ambition of Greco-Roman philosophy was to make human life safe for long-term happiness. All the principal schools—Platonists, Aristotelians, Epicureans, and Stoics—contrast the pull of circumstances and human coercion with what persons can try to make of themselves if they focus their identity and values on their status as rational agents.¹ We have inherited from that project our folk psychology, as it is sometimes called: the preferential distinctions between mind and body, reason and passion, love and lust, consistency and vacillation, serenity and anxiety. This folk psychology goes so deeply into our cultural roots that we easily assume it to be natural. In fact, it too is a cultural artifact that was scarcely formulated before Plato. He and the succeeding Greek philosophers adopted it for the purpose of liberating the best life for oneself and one’s associates from external dependency. Although we still draw selectively on that ideal, we probably agree with Plato’s predecessors that happiness is far from being largely in our own power. How did that remarkable proposal emerge? I don’t think we yet have an adequate genealogy for ideas like Stoic freedom.² Here I attempt to sketch such a project by bringing in a broader range of cultural data than is customary in introductory studies of Greek ethics and moral psychology.

I The question of my title is deliberately ambiguous: ‘What to make of oneself?’ meaning ‘What should I take myself to be?’; and second, ‘What to make of oneself ’, meaning ‘What should I fashion myself into’? The first question is cognitive, asking, ‘Where do I fit within the ontology of things?’ The second

This chapter is a lightly modified version of the text I delivered as Faculty Research Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, on March 7, 2000. ¹ Cooper 2012 gives a splendid survey of the ancient philosophers’ treatment of reason’s guidance in their accounts of the best ways of life. ² See especially Epictetus, Discourses 4.1, where freedom is construed in exclusively ethical terms, as the capacity ‘to live as one wills’, unconstrained in one’s emotional affect by any external contingency. Epictetus treats philosophical enlightenment as liberation from the only slavery (false judgement) that is necessarily inimical to happiness: 2.16.40–2. See Long 2018.

Selfhood and Rationality in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Heraclitus to Plotinus. A. A. Long, Oxford University Press. © A. A. Long 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198803393.003.0003

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question is practical or ethical, asking, ‘What shape or goal should I give to my life?’ However, the ambiguity of the question also makes the philosophical point that ‘What to make of oneself?’ combines the cognitive with the practical. You can hardly undertake to fashion yourself without some preconception of what you are or could be, and you can hardly have a preconception of that without also having some strong motivation or purpose. I shall call this question of my title the selfmodel question. The self-model question has been implicitly asked and answered at every human time and place. For it is embedded in the very idea of a culture or society. Family, clan or community, status, role, gender, race, topography, myth, tradition, religion—all these and much more have been and continue to be ubiquitous instruments for telling people what to make of themselves. ‘Who are you and where do you come from?’ is the stock Homeric question to a male stranger, and it is standardly answered in terms of name, lineage, and native place. The question takes on a quite different register when it is asked explicitly and critically. In Plato’s Phaedrus Socrates does this by way of explaining why he has no time to waste on the interpretation of myths: I can’t yet know myself, as the inscription at Delphi enjoins; and so long as that ignorance remains it seems to me ridiculous to inquire into extraneous matters. Consequently, I direct my inquiries . . . rather to myself, to discover whether I am a more convoluted beast and more steamed up than Typhon, or a gentler and simpler creature, whose natural allotment is something divine and unsteamed up.³

Socrates is not inquiring into his local identity as an Athenian citizen. He is asking what to make of himself innately, as the human being that he is. The word ‘natural’ (phusei) marks his inquiry as a philosophical quest: What is it to be human, with the implication: What will a true answer to that question tell me about how I should live my life? ‘Know yourself ’ was the famous Delphic injunction. This Platonic text is one of the earliest places where that commandment is explicitly enrolled in the service of philosophy. By tradition it had meant ‘know your limits’ or ‘know that you are not a god’. Socrates, in striking contrast, interprets the precept as an invitation to ask an extraordinary disjunctive question: Is it my nature to be bestial and violent or godlike and peaceable? ³ Phaedrus 230a. (Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.) Typhon was a hundredheaded dragon, born to the primeval divinities Earth and Tartarus, after Zeus had defeated the Titans and the last great challenge to the Olympian gods’ sovereignty (see Hesiod, Theogony 819–68). By Plato’s time Typhon was identified with the volcanic force under Mt. Etna. My translation ‘un-steamed up’ seeks to capture Plato’s pun on the name Typhon and the word atuphos, which signifies the negation of tuphos, meaning delusory arrogance.

  ’   

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The classical Greek world or mentality was full of gods. Nothing is harder than this for us moderns to grasp when we visit that world. The difficulty is not primarily one of engaging with the complexities of polytheism and alien rituals. Rather, it is a difficulty that arises out of the radical differences and inconsistencies attaching to the gods according to speaker and context. Typhon, though bestial in form and attributes, was divine. So, when Socrates positions himself between Typhon and a more divine and peaceable nature, he is advancing his own and not a standard paradigm of divinity. The unqualified benevolence of god(s), as proposed by Plato, was an outlandish thesis in its day, a thesis that he urges against the lies of mythology.⁴ The relevance of this to my theme is twofold. When Greek philosophers began to ask the self-model question, they were pushing at an open door. Moreover, fluidity in the concept and connotations of the divine provided philosophers with the opportunity to formulate theologies that turned divine attributes into human ideals and terms of self-definition. Hence Plato’s extraordinary answer to the selfmodel question in several of his dialogues: ‘Make yourself as like as possible to god.’⁵ When Stoic philosophers looked to divinity as the only foundation of real freedom, the rationale for what they were doing had a great deal to do with this Platonic recommendation.⁶ In other words, the Stoics’ outlook involved a selfmodel that was as much theological as it was psychological. Speaking broadly, we can say that the leading ancient philosophers, notwithstanding their numerous differences, answered Socrates’ question by proposing that we have it in us to aspire to divinity (whatever that precisely means) at one extreme and to become bestial at the other. We are taken to be composite creatures, embodied souls or minds, and what we make of ourselves depends crucially on how we negotiate this complex structure. The body, so the theory goes, gets its life from our souls, and since our souls give us our identity as sentient and purposive beings, whatever is good or bad for our souls is better or worse respectively than anything that merely benefits or harms our bodies.

II Stepping back from these thoughts, we should remind ourselves of how very ancient they are. We can find a modern word-for-word translation of them, but a translation is not a genealogy. In my opening paragraph I described our relation ⁴ See especially Republic 2. 379b–c, and ch. 8 below. ⁵ Theaetetus 176a, Timaeus 90b–d, Republic 10. 613a. In all these passages ‘likeness to god’ involves the inter-entailment of happiness, virtue, and rationality: see Annas 1999, 53, Sedley1999, and ch. 3 below. ⁶ See Epictetus, 2.14.13: ‘If the divinity is free, he [the would-be philosopher] must be free . . . And so in everything he says and does he must act as an imitator of god.’

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to Greek philosophy by the familiar metaphor of ‘cultural roots’, but I am far from wedded to it. Roots generate predictable crops, but what we cull from the Greeks constantly shifts according to our perceptions, interests, and prejudices. I prefer the model of a house, fashioned out of ‘crooked timber’ (to borrow Isaiah Berlin’s arresting phrase) and containing hundreds of rooms, and levels, and passages with extensions and demolitions occurring regularly and randomly.⁷ We Westerners have taken over a huge wing of this house, which we tinker with; but we also have the run of numerous distant rooms, including the classical room, some of them totally begrimed and neglected and others less so. We visit these rooms from time to time, picking up bits and pieces that take our fancy, and sometimes we try to take them back to our own part of the house. But that’s a long distance, and on the way those ancient artifacts become so incrusted with the dust from nearer rooms and corridors that we have a huge job as historians to see them for what they once were. We tend to fit them into our regular cupboards instead of cleaning them and building a special cabinet for them. So it is, I want to suggest, with our appropriation of ancient self-models. Up to a point we intuitively understand ideas like Stoic freedom and Socrates’ positioning himself between the bestial and the divine. But that understanding is difficult to detach from all the incrustations that alienate us from ancient Greece, such as monotheism or agnosticism, human rights, social welfare, and so forth. How did Plato come to pose the terms of Socrates’ self-model question? What was psychologically, ethically, and socially at stake in his day? By writing ‘In doubt to deem himself a god or beast’, Alexander Pope echoed Plato in his Essay on Man composed two thousand years later. But the echo is too bland to capture the rhetorical effect of the original Greek context. I called Socrates’ self-model question disjunctive, but despite its either/or form, the question is also wildly optimistic; for it entertains the possibility that human nature includes, or can aspire to, what is objectively best in the world. As I have remarked, the connotations and particularities of Greek divinity could vary greatly according to context, but as a generalizing verbal sign theos (god) connoted extraordinary power, authority, status, beauty, bliss, and immortality.⁸ In addition, the Olympian gods as a collective, and Zeus in particular, were traditionally believed to sanction certain ethical rules and to be angered by human breaches of these. When Plato makes Socrates wonder if his nature includes a divine portion, a contemporary reader would be challenged to ask what selection of divine attributes could be humanly applicable, especially with gentle and peaceable as Socrates’ gloss on the divine nature; for in numerous preceding texts or contexts

⁷ From the title of his book, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, itself derived from a phrase penned by Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin 1910–), vol. 8, 23. ⁸ For further discussion, see Long 2015, ch. 2.

  ’   

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that nature had been construed as anything but well-disposed in its relation to persons. Plato in the Phaedo advanced elaborate arguments to prove the immortality of the human soul. If their conclusion were sound, it would follow that human beings are like gods in respect to the very attribute that had traditionally been the strongest marker of difference between them. From Homer onward (and no doubt for centuries earlier) Greek gods are ‘the deathless ones’ (athanatoi) and human beings are ‘mortals’ (brotoi or thnêtoi): these terms virtually function as proper names, markers of generic identity and difference. Plato was not the first Greek thinker to challenge this radical distinction between the divine and the human, only the most illustrious and thorough.⁹ Actually, as an item in answering the self-model question, literal or personal immortality turned out to be too much for Aristotle, Stoics, and Epicureans to attribute to human beings. But this limitation did not inhibit them from treating godlike activity or likeness to god (however these are to be understood) as the highest goal that human beings should aspire to in their embodied lives, if they are to make the most of themselves. Did the pre-philosophical tradition offer them any prototype for these audacious expressions? Yes and no. Homeric heroes, both Achaeans and Trojans, are sometimes called ‘godlike’ (isotheos). This word marks them out from the mass of people, calling attention to their resplendent beauty and prowess. When the philosophers appropriate the idea of ‘likeness to god’, they trade heavily on this pair of properties, which were also signified in the Athenian male ideal of being kalos kai agathos, literally ‘beautiful and good’. But the philosophers’ linguistic conservatism accentuates their conceptual innovations in at least two respects. First, the beauty and prowess that they propose as aspirations and potentialities become qualities of the mind and character, strictly and entirely. Second, these qualities and the likeness to god that they involve are presumed to be available in principle to everyone with the aptitude and determination to shape themselves accordingly; these things are not contingent gifts to a few socially privileged individuals, but projects or goals built into human nature as such. The philosophers’ goal of happiness is an equally striking instance of linguistic conservatism combined with conceptual innovation. Human flourishing had been traditionally linked to divine support; hence the standard word for happy, eudaimôn, which brings both ideas together. The word literally means ‘divinely favoured’, but because divine favour was so hard to assure and predict, happiness was tantamount to good luck.¹⁰ For even though there were acknowledged ways of trying to please this goddess and avoid displeasing that god, Greek myths and ⁹ Plato’s Greek precursors include Pythagoras probably, and Heraclitus and Empedocles certainly. See Long 2015, ch. 2. ¹⁰ For further discussion, see ch. 3 below.

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      

Greek experience constantly underlined the precariousness of happiness as conceived in terms of material prosperity. This outlook is brilliantly captured by the historian Herodotus when he imagines the Athenian Solon warning Croesus, the fabulously rich and complacent King of Lydia, to heed the following answer to the self-model question: ‘The human being is entirely sumphora’—which one could translate weakly by the word ‘chance’ but more tellingly by ‘disaster’, because Croesus would soon find Solon’s words validated by his own total ruin.¹¹ If long-term happiness was to be a real and reasonable human aspiration, it had to be redefined with corresponding revision not only to people’s theologies but also to their self-models. The decisive step, as usual, was taken by Plato. What he proposed, in brief, was that we shall be divinely favoured and therefore capable of achieving eudaimonia if we submit ourselves to the rule of reason: reason can function for us as our ‘internal divinity’ (Timaeus 90a–c), making our lives safe for long-term happiness and excellence. The expression ‘rule of reason’ slips easily over the tongue. Like ‘enslavement to passion’ (another innovative Platonic metaphor), it is one of those dusty items from our cultural house that we have put in our own cupboard without close scrutiny. Focus on the words ‘rule’ and ‘enslavement’, and we are transported back to the world of Athenian politics—except that Plato’s politics is psychological. He politicizes the mind, to express the previously unimagined idea of self-government—an idea that divides each of us into a natural ruler, reason, and a set of natural subjects, consisting in our drives and appetites. Upset the proper hierarchy, and we become like an anarchic state, tyrannized by passions.¹² This psychological model has become so hackneyed and contentious that it requires a real effort to pretend that we are hearing it for the first time—hearing it as novel and more importantly, as empowering.¹³ We need to interrogate the proposal that reason is our ‘internal divinity’. What can that possibly mean? How did Plato come to link reason with divinity? What does that linkage imply about his understanding of a well-integrated mind? Where does it push the issue of what to make of oneself? To show how much turns on these questions, I select from claims that subsequent Greek philosophers made under Plato’s influence. For Aristotle, our intellect is ‘something divine’—our most powerful and precious possession— and the basis for a life that is both quintessentially human and yet more than

¹¹ Herodotus 1.32.4: pan esti anthrôpos sumphorê; the last word is the Ionic equivalent of the Attic form sumphora. ¹² For further discussion, see Long 2015, ch. 4. ¹³ Nietzsche grasped this point, and he also anticipated my methodological strategy of looking for the cultural antecedents of the Greek philosophers’ emphasis on self-mastery and the rule of reason. For Nietzsche, Socrates was inspired by the will to power, but he turned reason into a domineering master, ‘decadently’ attenuating the complexity of all other natural impulses. See Nehamas 1998, 136–41, for references and discussion.

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merely human.¹⁴ The understanding of nature and values possessed by expert Epicurean hedonists equips them to ‘live like a god’, and to be happy even on the rack.¹⁵ Epictetus tells his students that they are never alone because they have a divinity within them, vested in their rationality: his project, as teacher, is to help them to so identify with this divinity that they become like god, or even become gods.¹⁶ These are not the remarks of wild spiritualists or magicians. The philosophers who voiced them were hard-headed reasoners, who valued empirical evidence, proof, and clarity. They were committed to advancing practicable recipes for human happiness, recipes that put this goal securely, or at least maximally, in our individual power. But the grandiosity of their project becomes especially clear when we recognize that it amounts to the denial that some human lives are bound to be tragic. That denial flies smack in the face of a literary tradition that had generated unsurpassed representations of suffering. What is Achilles to make of himself when he discovers that his angry withdrawal from the Achaean host has brought about the death of Patroclus? What is Medea to make of herself when she discovers Jason’s perfidy? What is Oedipus to make of himself when he discovers that he has committed incest and parricide? We all identify with these questions and the wondrous pathos by which they are voiced; we do not find them obscured by the cultural dust of succeeding centuries. Surely Homer, Sophocles, and Euripides are close to us, and certainly closer than Plato’s stipulations about divine reason or Stoic venting about mental freedom? So Bernard Williams 1993 powerfully argued.¹⁷ I sympathize. But the issue I am airing here is not what we moderns choose to take out of the cultural cupboard, from time to time, but an exploration of why the ancient philosophical tradition, with the exception of Aristotle, had the audacity, or insensitivity, to occlude tragedy.¹⁸ For that is what in the main the ancient philosophers’ answers to the self-model question come to. Nietzsche was certainly wrong to explain the demise of Attic tragedy by the emergence of Socrates and Plato, but he was correct to note the incompatibility of Greek philosophy with a tragic Weltanschauung.¹⁹

¹⁴ Aristotle, NE 10.1177a13–17; 1177b26–1178a2. See further ch. 11 below. ¹⁵ Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus 135 and DL 10.118. ¹⁶ Epictetus 1.24.18–19. ¹⁷ 1993, 166: ‘In important ways, we are, in our ethical situation, more like human beings in antiquity than any Western people have been in the meantime. More particularly, we are like those who, from the fifth century and earlier, have left us traces of a consciousness that had not yet been touched by Plato’s and Aristotle’s attempts to make our ethical relations to the world fully intelligible.’ Williams’ immediate context is the question of how we, as persons ‘who know that the world was not made for us, or we for the world’, respond to Greek tragedy. I have discussed Williams’ thesis in Long 2007. ¹⁸ See Nussbaum 1986 and my comments on her argument in Long 1988, 361–70. ¹⁹ See Nietzsche 1956, 88: ‘Consider the consequences of the Socratic maxims: “Virtue is knowledge; all sins arise from ignorance; only the virtuous are happy”—these three basic formulations of optimism spell the death of tragedy.’ Here Nietzsche is referring to tragedy as art, but later, when he deplores ‘scientific optimism’, he extends his critique to the demise of ‘the tragic world view’, 104.

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      

Oedipus, of course, was the supreme example of fated and therefore involuntary suffering, but the Stoics do not shrink from quoting the Theban King’s shattering moment of self-discovery, ‘O Kithaeron’ [the place where Oedipus had inadvertently slain his father], and commenting, as Marcus Aurelius does: ‘Even those who say “O Kithaeron” endure.’²⁰ Or as Epictetus says, in recommending Stoicism: The kings begin from a position of prosperity: ‘Festoon the palace’; then about the third or fourth act comes ‘O Kithaeron, why did you receive me?’ Slave, where are your crowns, where is your diadem? Your henchmen are no help to you now. When you approach one of those types, remember that you are approaching a tragic character, not the actor, but Oedipus himself—a man who thinks he must be really blessed because he’s walking around with many followers.²¹

We can hear the echo of Solon to Croesus, but Epictetus reduces tragedy to a faulty mindset, a failure of reason’s rule, a vain identification of one’s self with the outward accoutrements of power. Even Aristotle, who included external goods in his specification of happiness and defended the aesthetic value of tragic drama, argued that a genuinely excellent or rationally guided man would not be reduced to misery, even supposing, like King Priam, he lost his fifty sons and daughters.²² I still need to clarify the godlike rationality and control that can save us from tragedy. But whatever it should turn out to be, we should not be surprised that ancient philosophers, drawing on their cultural inheritance, called that saving faculty divine. Their tradition also offered them in Odysseus the paradigm of a great and sagacious survivor, adaptable to every obstacle, and favoured by Athena herself, the goddess of wisdom. Here is the way Epictetus (3.26.33–5) turns Odysseus into a Stoic sage: When he was shipwrecked, did the difficulty weaken or shatter him? Consider how he approached the girls to beg for necessities, which is conventionally regarded as a disgrace . . . ‘like a mountain-reared lion’.²³ What did he trust in? Not in reputation or money or status but his own strength—that is to say, his own judgments about the things under our control and the things that are not. For these judgments are the only things that make people free and unimpeded.

Epictetus (1.12.3) even parallels Odysseus with Socrates, because of their treating themselves as always subject to a god’s supervision, which Epictetus takes to mean the guidance of reason. This homely Stoic comparison scarcely casts light on

²⁰ Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 11.6, quoting Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus 1391. ²¹ Epictetus 1.24.16–18. ²² Aristotle, NE 1.10.1100b35–1101a8. ²³ Epictetus alludes to Homer’s description of Odysseus when the naked and hungry hero approaches Nausicaa and her maids, Homer, Odyssey 5.130.

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philosophical rationality. Yet, it is an illuminating strand for my genealogical investigation. One of the main tasks of philosophy is to articulate questions whose implications have been previously overlooked even though a culture’s framework offers some implicit answers to them. A philosopher’s answer to the self-model question may well, as it does with Plato, include radical new proposals, but those proposals will be quite ineffective unless they contact some ideas already in play. ‘What to make of oneself?’ was ancient philosophy’s hardest question because it was first asked within a culture that was bewilderingly pluralist in its implicit understanding of human identity and potentiality, and its understanding of divinity. If we privilege certain texts, especially texts of Greek tragedy, we get the impression that human happiness and autonomy and the rewards for justice are a snare and delusion. Yet, that pessimistic perspective, far from tempering an ideology that valued competition, achievement, and social solidarity, was really the flipside of this very same coin. Greek literature, and to judge from the historians, real Greek mentality could veer rapidly between upbeat and downbeat, reasonable and passionate, generous and cruel. It is a modern (though fully understandable) fashion to emphasize the tragedians over Aristophanes and the dark Iliad over the brilliant Odyssey. By choosing Odysseus as a mythological paradigm for their perfected philosopher, the Stoics were saying in effect: our philosophy is an updating of one of Greece’s greatest and most positive cultural archetypes. Plato, or maybe the historical Socrates, took the same point; for at the end of the Apology Socrates expresses the hope of meeting Odysseus in an afterlife and conversing with him and with Homer and other heroes. Those of us who teach ancient philosophy, especially ancient ethics, need constantly to remind ourselves that Plato and the thinkers who followed him were not writing for some academic conference but for a society that was shaped by turbulent politics, male domination, ethnic superiority, slavery, and superstition, a society deeply uncertain about the divine or human foundations for justice and mutual security, but as receptive to comedy as to tragedy and accustomed to valuing conduct as well as art on the basis of its beauty and good order (kosmos). Against this background, I return to my questions about rationality’s salvific power and its connections with divinity.

III The Greek for reason is logos: whence we get logic and the names for many of our academic disciplines—zoology, psychology and so forth. St. John connects logos with God in the first sentence of his Gospel, ‘In the beginning was the logos’, but that theological connection is too complex and remote to help my genealogical inquiry into the Greek philosophical linkage between reason and divinity. John, as

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      

a Hellenistic Jew, may be gesturing towards the concept of divine logos that Stoic philosophers had been propagating for several centuries, but he also draws on Old Testament allusions to the ‘word’ of God. Why did the original Stoics choose logos as a designation for their divine creative agent? Logos is a notoriously multivalent term. It often signifies meaningful speech, but it is derived from a verb that includes the following among its most basic senses: collect, select, recount, and account. Logos became the standard Greek word for speech because all discourse involves such activities as collecting, accounting, explaining, and so forth. Apart from talking then, logos acquired all the connotations we today associate with thinking. This, though, was a gradual but momentous process—nothing less than the evolution of rationality, both as an explicit concept and as an explicit marker of the difference between human faculties and the features of other animals.²⁴ In the earliest Greek philosophers (before Plato) we can observe this evolution taking place, and in none of them more seminally than Heraclitus. That remarkable thinker speaks by hint and paradox rather than discursively, but his notorious obscurity does not extend to the following points.²⁵ Heraclitus pioneered the notion that nature is a law-governed system, a system of regular changes that conform to determinate measures and proportions. He advances an account or logos of this system, but the system and his account of it are two aspects of the same thing. He accounts in words for the logos or formula that is nature. We may say, to make Heraclitus comprehensible to our modern selves, that he gives a rational account of a rationally structured world. But, as I said before, ‘rational’ slips very easily over our scientifically educated tongues. Heraclitus cannot appeal to explicit concepts of rationality; for there are none at this date. What he does have available to him are such concepts as structure, measure, proportion, balance, rhythm, ratio. His logos is all of these, and because it is all of these it comprises a great deal that we associate with rationality. However, Heraclitus was not defining rationality, but discovering it, and helping himself to it via the best term available to him—logos. In addition, he associates the logos with divinity. Heraclitus’ divinity governs the world by governing itself according to determinate measures and proportions. This is the first clear example in Greek of cosmic and divine rationality.²⁶ What we have here is an amazing set of ideas that will be enormously potent for the future of ancient philosophy, and of course for all the cultures that it has influenced. We find, first, the connection between the human faculty of articulate speech and the physical universe as an orderly system; second, the selection of balance, order, and proportion as markers of rationality; and third—what I was

²⁴ Once logos has acquired the connotation of rationality, non-human animals are standardly described in Greek as aloga zôia, non-rational creatures, in contrast with humans who are logikoi. ²⁵ See the fine study by Hussey 1999 and ch. 4 below. ²⁶ See ch. 4 below.

  ’   

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primarily looking for—the linkage between the rule of reason and divinity. In Heraclitus’ philosophy, logos is both a global force and a mental power. His proto-physics is also proto-psychology. Anticipating Plato’s Socrates, Heraclitus says: ‘I went in search of [or inquired into] myself.’²⁷ The cosmic order that he discovered—a universe governed by divine logos—offered itself as a startlingly new paradigm for what to make of oneself: a microcosm of psychological balance, self-measurement, internal control, and beauty. Rationality’s godlike capacity to govern the self is a thought that took root in consequence of the idea that the world itself is a cosmos, an orderly structure governed by a superhuman, and therefore, divine mind. Yet, outside the heady air of Presocratic science it was obvious that logos often spoke with the voice of Typhon, Socrates’ steamed-up beast. We are not yet in a culture accustomed to hearing that human beings or divinity have a rational faculty as such. The sophist Gorgias, Plato’s elder contemporary, agreed that logos is a great power, capable of producing ‘the most divine products’. But what Gorgias means by these products is the effects of persuasive speech on a malleable audience. In the analysis of logos, which Gorgias offered in defence of Helen’s adultery with Paris, human beings are so susceptible to the charms of eloquence that they can be persuaded into anything.²⁸ By contrast with Plato’s deeply structured self-model (which is still on the horizon), Gorgias trades on the notion that we are essentially passive and pliable recipients of words, especially words that work on our passions and make us feel good.²⁹ Gorgias was a brilliant exponent of the psychology assumed by every media operative or crowd pleaser. The self-model he attributes to the recipients of logos is one that lacks any framework or internal structure or autonomy. Listeners, he implies, cannot take charge of anything, least of all their own happiness, because they have nothing to take charge with. They are ruled by external logos, that is, words imposed upon them; they have no internal guardianship, consisting of their own logos; no rationality. They are, in sum, as powerless to resist the contemporary demagogue as the archaic Greeks had been to resist their arbitrary gods. Herodotus offers us an extraordinary illustration of this kind of self-model, or rather non-self-model, in his account of how Xerxes decided (if that is the word) to invade Greece.³⁰ He presents Xerxes as initially reluctant to undertake this expedition. But under the influence of his aggressive cousin, Xerxes was persuaded to do so. First, though, he invites his advisers to give their opinion. The aggressive cousin reiterates the case for invasion. Then Xerxes’ uncle speaks on the opposite side. Xerxes responds to him with intense anger. A bit later, Xerxes ponders his uncle’s words, and finds them sensible after all. He goes to bed and has a dream which tells him he was wrong to change his mind. However, on waking he took no ²⁷ Heraclitus in DK 22 B101. ²⁸ Gorgias, Praise of Helen in DK 82B. ²⁹ See Long 2015, ch. 3. ³⁰ History 7.8–18.

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      

account (logos) of this dream and told his counsellors that he will follow his uncle’s advice after all. The second night, the same dream figure returns to him, and tells him that if he renounces the campaign, he will fall from power as quickly as he rose. Xerxes summons his uncle and says to him: ‘I can’t take your good advice, much though I would like to do so’, and offers his dream as the reason. But instead of leaving matters there, Xerxes says to his uncle: ‘Get into my clothes, sit on my throne, sleep in my bed; if a god sent the dream and wishes me to invade Greece, he will send you the same dream.’ The uncle, a half-hearted rationalist, hedges his bets. At first, he reacts to Xerxes’ extraordinary instructions by telling him that dreams are merely figments of one’s waking concerns, with nothing divine about them. Still, he adds (in my paraphrase), ‘the divine origin of your dream cannot be completely excluded. Let’s see if it appears to me too—but forget about this idea of my putting on your clothes. The dream isn’t going to think that I am you simply because I wear your clothes and sleep in your bed. But if that’s what you insist on, I will do it.’ Xerxes’ dream then appears to the uncle impersonating the king, sees through the assumed identity, and terrifies him. At once, the uncle reneges on his own cautious advice, accepts the dream’s prediction that Xerxes will conquer Greece, and switches to gung-ho enthusiasm for what will turn out to be a disastrous venture, just like Croesus had previously experienced. Perhaps this is a tongue-in-cheek story laced with pro-Hellenic propaganda. But it rings completely true as an illustration of the completely volatile and pliable self—a self that can make nothing consistent of itself because it lacks any structure or capacity to go in a direction different from the way someone else’s words persuade it to go. Gorgias must have loved Herodotus’ account of Xerxes’ manipulation. How did Plato react to Gorgias?

IV We know because Plato wrote his own dialogue Gorgias. There Plato contrasts the freedom and excellence of a self-scrutinizing soul, ruled by reason, with enslavement to political rhetoric and lust for political power. As before, we need to recognize the startling novelty of these ideas in this context. Through a series of oppositions—soul versus body, mental health versus bodily health, proof versus rhetorical persuasion, truth versus illusion—Plato generates the constituents of a self-model premised on the thesis that happiness, justice, affection, and community all depend on internal balance and order. Long before Plato, the Greeks had the word, sôphrosynê, literally ‘safe-thinking’, which they mainly used to express compliance with external authority. Sôphrosynê is often translated by self-control. That translation, however, intrudes on the very idea that Plato in the Gorgias was probably the first to formulate explicitly—the remarkable idea

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of conceptualizing the self in terms of a ruling principle (reason) and a set of otherwise unruly parts.³¹ We saw how Heraclitus pioneered the concepts of cosmology and rationality. Plato draws on that legacy in the dialogue in order to press his claims for the supreme value of internal balance and self-regulation. To Callicles, an ambitious believer in the natural right of the strong to dominate the weak, Plato’s Socrates says (508a): Wise people say that heaven and earth, and gods and humans, are held together by community, affection, order, sôphrosynê, and justice; that is why they call this universe a kosmos [a beautiful structure], and not disorder or intemperance.

Socrates follows this striking observation on the harmony of nature, with a still more arresting statement: You haven’t noticed, Callicles, that geometrical proportionality (isotês) is very powerful among gods and humans; your idea that you have to try to grab more for yourself is due to your neglect of geometry.

In the context of the Gorgias, neglect of geometry turns out to be an explanation for why the likes of Callicles don’t really know what to make of themselves. So far in this chapter I have avoided mentioning the word ‘morality’. I can no longer do so, because, as we have just seen, Plato connects his concepts of internal balance, self-control, and the rule of reason, with community, affection, and justice. Plato’s main project in the Gorgias is to prove that injustice does not pay. He makes Socrates argue that injustice presupposes ignorance about happiness, that is, one’s own good, because injustice involves a disorderly and uncontrolled self, and only a regulated self with no interest in disproportion can be happy. Is Plato’s recourse to geometry here simply a metaphor? Hardly. In his philosophy, mathematics is the constant paradigm of rationality; it was the staple of his educational programme in the Academy. The self-model that Plato offers his students requires their thinking of themselves as would-be mathematicians whose skill in that exact discipline will facilitate the rule of reason over all aspects of their lives. And because mathematics includes the field of astronomy, where divine order conspicuously reigns, it is an exercise of the divine dispensation allotted to human nature.

³¹ For further discussion, see my study ‘Hellenistic Ethics and Philosophical Power’ in Long 2006a. Note too that Plato finds sôphrosynê apt for expressing such ideas as self-knowledge (Alcibiades I, 131a– b), reflexive or second-order knowledge (‘knowing what one knows and what one does not know’, Charmides 167a), and agreement to the rule of reason by all parts of the soul (Republic 4.442d).

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      

This is not the place to explore Plato’s mathematics. What matters about it, for my theme, is the fact (as we have just seen) that he credits geometrical proportionality ‘with great power’. The question I have been addressing all along is the Greek genealogy of the ideas of autonomy, self-control, ruling oneself, modelling oneself on a peaceful divinity and not on Typhon. If we are to make any sense of ancient philosophy’s claim that reason can secure lasting happiness (even on the rack, if you are a Stoic or an Epicurean) and equally safeguard morality, we had better detach morality from all those incrustations it has acquired during its subsequent and tattered history. As construed by the ancient philosophers, morality is not obedience to God as distinct from following one’s own inclinations. Nor is it doing one’s duty, as prescribed by cultural norms. Nor is it respecting human rights, or sacrificing oneself for some greater cause. What the ancient philosophers in general take morality to be is the self-imposed rule of good reasoning—called orthos logos by Aristotle and the Stoics, and best translated to catch its ancient nuance, as correct ratio, or correct proportion. The morality of ancient philosophy is a kind of mathematics—a calculus of making what is good for ourselves balance what is good for others. A self that prizes its rational autonomy is taken to be crucial to this enterprise because, the thought goes, you can be no good for your community unless you care for yourself with an understanding of what it is in your best nature to be. Could the morality of mathematics really enable one to be happy on the rack, or to tell the tyrant, with Epictetus (1.1.23): ‘You can fetter my foot but not me’? In the culture where ancient philosophers first posed their self-model questions, rationality in general and mathematics struck their discoverers and users as ‘great powers’, just as Plato says. Rationality’s power, or the rule of reason, was a supremely normative concept for Plato and his successors and, moreover, a concept of that which is good per se. As such, it was taken to be supremely desirable and therefore capable of motivating the will. David Hume famously objected that reason ‘is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them’.³² For Hume, our volitions are entirely grounded in our passions or impulses, and reasoning is demoted to a purely instrumental and subservient role. Plato by contrast, at the beginning of the philosophical tradition, viewed reason as that part of the self that is best and most quintessentially human, and is endowed with its own unique desires and pleasures.³³ Cosmic balance and beauty, mathematics, body/soul dualism, medicine, and politics as sources of metaphors for mental health, authority and subordination, ³² A Treatise of Human Nature, part 3, section 3. Hume calls ‘talk of the combat of passion and reason’ and the obligation ‘for every rational creature . . . to regulate his actions by reason’ the ‘fallacious method of thinking’ on which ‘the greatest part of moral philosophy, ancient and modern, seems to be founded’. ³³ Plato, Republic 9.580d ff. For an illuminating discussion of normative reason’s rule in Plato and in Greek philosophical concepts of self more generally, see Gill 1996.

  ’   

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aspiration to a quasi-divine identity—all of these are scattered around in that distant room of our cultural house, contributors to the genealogy of self-control, internal freedom, personal integrity, making the best of oneself. Homer’s heroic age, if it had ever been, was long over. But the heroic ideal survived, as it always does. With the advent of ancient philosophy and a more complex and inquisitive society, the self-model question offered itself as a challenge comparable to our exploration of outer space. To those who had known Socrates at first hand, he was a new kind of hero, able to lie in the arms of Alcibiades all night and remain impervious to erotic arousal.³⁴ Or, to take another example, Epicurus—racked with bodily pain on the last day of his life, and writing to a friend: The joy in my soul at the memory of our past discussions was enough to counterbalance [note the mathematics] all this pain. I ask you, as befits your lifelong companionship with me and with philosophy: take care of the children of Metrodorus.³⁵

V Philosophical power and heroism in the service of personal happiness and social concern: it was an extraordinary project—to secure human life, one’s own and other people’s, from tragedy. What, if anything, can we make of this idea from our perspectives? Here are some closing thoughts and questions. As answers to the question ‘What to make of oneself?’ the philosophies I have been sketching must have a familiar resonance for some readers, while striking others as strange, unworkable, and even perhaps repellent. On the one hand, you have only to read Emerson or Thoreau to hear strong echoes of Stoic self-reliance and liberty. On the other hand, genetics, anthropology, and shades of Darwin, Marx, and Freud, together with the whole gamut of socio-economic reality and personal relationships—all these promote the thought that human identities are primarily constructed by numerous factors external to a person’s control, and therefore our happiness is extremely dependent on what those external factors deliver or don’t deliver to us. In fact all the philosophies I have been discussing were highly sensitive to the effects that cultural forces exercise on fashioning people’s identities. Their educational ambitions, far from ignoring social context, were a critical and very deliberate reaction to the power of conventional ideologies to shape values and motivations without remainder. A Platonist or an Aristotelian or a Stoic or an Epicurean would agree with Clifford Geertz 1973 that ‘we are . . . incomplete . . . animals who

³⁴ Plato, Symposium 219d–e.

³⁵ Epicurus in DL 10.22.

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      

complete . . . ourselves through culture.’³⁶ What these schools propose, each in their distinctive way, is that humans have the option of choosing a comprehensive philosophy of life as their culture rather than accepting the socially given, so that they shape themselves by its norms rather than being manufactured by mere tradition or stereotypes about power and the dolce vita.³⁷ However, ancient philosophy was scarcely political in the sense of directly influencing or changing the principal institutions of government or economic and social conditions. It was the practice of a tiny minority, who might include slaves and women, but were primarily well-to-do and politically free males. Notwithstanding Plato’s and Aristotle’s elaborate political theories, ancient philosophers chiefly focused their attention on what individuals should do to secure their own and their friends’ happiness rather than on what a state could do to maximize its citizens’ opportunities for a good life. Ancient philosophers emphasized personal autonomy because they wanted to give individuals a framework for turning adversity as well as prosperity to good use, with trickle-down benefits to family and friends from their association with internally just and well-balanced persons. Modern ideals of redistributive justice, egalitarianism, and social welfare have heavily implicated government in our basic conceptions of the determinants of a happy life. And so today, liberal democracies think that it is the job of laws and state institutions to protect people not only from injustice but also from economic and social and environmental tragedy. Our Western world has converted ancient philosophy’s ideal of internal autonomy and balance and the rule of divine reason, into the would-be fair apparatus of a free and mutually beneficial social system. If that goes reasonably well, it seems to undercut the rationale of a philosophy like Stoicism. Of course, this apparatus often fails, or it holds, but you are still left groping on your own. Then, the self-model question must be faced, as we are witnessing in the popularity of movements like Stoicism Today. Ancient philosophy tries to persuade us that those who look to reason and excellence of character as the foundation of their identity and freedom and social relationships are never bereft of the fundamental ingredients of happiness. If we find this far too much or far too little, is it because we think long-term happiness is too subjective and impenetrable to be secured by any theory, or because we think it primarily depends on the way the world treats us, or is it because we have not been faced with the sinister knock at the door in the middle of the night and had to make something of ourselves in the violation of home and person? I leave these as questions for my readers to ponder.³⁸

³⁶ Geertz 1973, 49. ³⁷ Reflections on the extraordinary figure of Socrates were a prime stimulus to such self-fashioning; see Nehamas 1998. ³⁸ These last two paragraphs stand largely as they were written in the year 2000. I could not have imagined that Europe and the United States, twenty years later, would find themselves grappling with what Timothy Garton Ash has aptly called ‘illiberal democracy’ (New York Review of Books 64.1 (January 19, 2017), 26).

3 Eudaimonism, Divinity, and Rationality in Greek Ethics I Greek philosophical ethics may be much harder for us to appreciate, historically and conceptually, than we tend to make it appear to be.¹ Modern interest in virtue ethics, and related dissatisfaction with the Kantian and Utilitarian alternatives, have provided strong incentives to ask whether the ancient eudaimonist tradition might offer insights and strategies that are still viable. No one has pursued this project with greater vigour than Julia Annas. Like everyone else, I have benefited from reading her massive book, The Morality of Happiness (1993). It is the kind of study that keeps our subject vibrant and stimulating. Yet, despite that, and while admiring her treatment of numerous details, I do not think she fully establishes her conclusion that ‘the ancient theories are not theories of some alien mode of thought, but theories of morality [in any intuitive understanding of morality] in the same sense that Kant’s and Mill’s theories are’ (p. 452). My purpose in this chapter is not to discuss this thesis by directly questioning the affinity Annas finds between ancient ethics and modern ‘morality’. That project would require investigating whether ancient ethics includes such concepts as a special kind of moral value, obligatoriness as such, purely disinterested concern for another’s good, and conflicts of rational motivation.² My aim is largely limited to asking the following question: How should we understand the inherent connotations of eudaimonia in its philosophical usage as the term that specifies the goal of life? I will argue that we need to connect eudaimonia with theological presuppositions that are, in fact, quite alien to our modern modes of thought. Where that argument leaves us, as interpreters of ancient ethics, is a question that I shall touch on but hardly attempt to settle at the end.

¹ I first presented this chapter at Brown University in April 2003, and later to audiences in Helsinki, Budapest, Yale University, and Cambridge, England. I am grateful for the comments I received on these occasions. I also thank Brad Inwood for kindly reading and responding to my first draft, and to Istvan Bodnar for his written comments. ² See for instance, Williams 1985, with whose views on salient differences between ancient and modern ethics I largely agree. Those views in turn have been questioned in detail by White 2002. See also Cooper 1999, ch. 20, and Striker 1996, ch. 8.

Selfhood and Rationality in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Heraclitus to Plotinus. A. A. Long, Oxford University Press. © A. A. Long 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198803393.003.0004

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      

I start with points that Annas repeatedly makes concerning the ancient philosophical notion of happiness, which is her translation of eudaimonia. She acknowledges, quite correctly and standardly, that in ancient philosophy eudaimonia does not signify ‘our notion of happiness . . . to describe temporary and even very short-lived states or feelings of a person’ (p. 45). Equally correctly, she observes that the term does imply a positive view of one’s life as a whole. My disagreements begin with her insistence that ‘the ancient [i.e. philosophical] concept of happiness was an extremely weak and unspecific one . . . In saying that the final good is happiness we are thus adding very little: [giving] the final end a handy name’ (p. 46). It is this notion of a final end or good that, according to Annas, gives ancient ethics its crucial questions, rather than the ‘uninformative description of [the final good] as happiness’ (p. 47). And she continues (p. 47): ‘The most important question about my final end is the question “What is the place of virtue?”’ In asking that question, she claims, the ancients were doing something importantly similar to what we are doing when we seek to determine ‘the place of morality in one’s life’. By treating eudaimonia as a weak and unspecific name for the final good, Annas clears the ground for this thesis. Yet in doing so, it seems to me, she has stripped ancient eudaimonism of one of its most distinctive and powerful features. We can completely agree with her that the specific content of eudaimonia varies according to the definitions of the final good; hence arise the salient differences between the ancient philosophical schools. But the fact that, for instance, Stoics disagree fundamentally with Epicureans concerning the specific content of eudaimonia does not imply that they disagree about what it means, in general, for someone to be eudaimôn. For both schools, as for all ancient philosophers (except the Cyrenaic hedonists, who identified the goal of life with occurrent pleasure),³ eudaimonia connotes the best possible life—flourishing, prospering, doing supremely well, possessing what is unequivocally good in the long term, having all or most of one’s reasonable desires fulfilled. What makes ancient ethics so intriguing is the fact that eudaimonia retains all these connotations even in Stoicism where virtue is its only essential condition. Annas takes this point to confirm her proposal that eudaimonia is a thin and vague notion because Stoic theory is so distant from ordinary notions of happiness in terms of worldly success or subjective enjoyment. My response is that the Stoics’ profound distance from such notions confirms their acceptance of the connotations of eudaimonia as ideal prosperity. They want to argue that this wonderful state—what everyone naturally desires—is precisely what virtue and only virtue can deliver. Ancient ethics is not about the morality of happiness; it is about the happiness of ‘morality’, or, as I would prefer to say to avoid anachronism, human excellence.

³ See DL 2.37–8 and Annas 1993, 230.

, ,     

43

At the end of her book (p. 453) Annas writes: [Our] notion of happiness is more bound to the notions of felt pleasure than the ancient concept is. And thus the modern concept is more rigid. Not only is it paradoxical, for us, to hold that the virtuous person on the wheel is happy, the paradox persists until we interpret happiness in a more indeterminate and flexible way than we are used to. The Stoic thesis remains paradoxical for us, given our rigid concept of happiness.

Now I agree, of course, that it is paradoxical to say that anyone on the rack could be happy. But the Stoics themselves rejoiced in the paradox. It arises not because they avail themselves of a loose concept of eudaimonia but because, conversely, they stick to the word’s standard connotations for signifying the ideally prosperous human condition, and then claim that virtue is sufficient to make one ideally prosperous under all external and bodily circumstances. They try to make their case for Stoic virtue not by re-orienting their opponents’ eudaimonistic goals but by arguing that they are totally mistaken about what those very goals involve. If eudaimonia were the thin and flexible notion proposed by Annas, Greek philosophers, especially Stoics, would be guilty of ignoratio elenchi: they would be telling people who already want to live in the Isles of the Blessed that they will be better off by settling in the wastes of Siberia. That observation brings me to the theological points I want to inject into our approach to ancient ethics. The proposal I make is that, in order to understand ancient philosophical usage of eudaimonia, we need to attend, as the Greek philosophers themselves did, to the word’s etymology and its implicit reference to goodness conjoined with divinity or daimôn. Whether or not we opt for happiness as our approximate translation of eudaimonia, we miss a fundamental aspect of Greek ethics unless we acknowledge that the final good that the different schools all propose (the universal objective of life in the Isles of the Blessed, as it were) is a state of godlikeness, which we can achieve only by cultivating that which actually is divine or quasi-divine in us—that is to say, our rational faculty. Annas herself, in her later book, Platonic Ethics Old and New (1999), has excellently discussed the theme of ‘Becoming like God’ in Plato and Platonism. This essay will be more of a sequel to Sedley 1999b, where, while also focusing on Plato, he finds the concept of godlikeness also crucial to Aristotelian and later ancient ethics in general.

II In archaic Greek culture the concept of divinity is frequently invoked to mark off the ephemeral and feeble status of human beings. The anthropomorphic

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      

Olympian gods are immortal, far-seeing, and live easy lives; mortals struggle and know nothing.⁴ Divine powers wilfully control human fortunes. While Zeus sanctions justice, his dispensations are difficult to square with a positive and intelligible reward for those who heed his ordinances. The best human beings can do is to keep their heads down and try as best they may to avoid offending these dangerous divinities, who resent human success as trespass on their own prerogatives. A thoroughly prosperous life, so far from being up to us, is characteristically perceived to be a divine and largely arbitrary allotment. Greek philosophy from Socrates onward, but with some significant Presocratic adumbrations, radically changes this outlook.⁵ We typically and correctly identify this shift with the emergence of internal goodness—excellence of character and devotion to reason—as the new criterion of authentic human success. Under this conception, prosperity no longer depends primarily on external well-being and the dispensations of fortune but on our own values and on what we make of our characters and intellects. This monumental shift of outlook is not simply ethical; it is also theological. The internal goods that the philosophers ask people to cultivate include ones that divinity, newly configured as rational and non-threatening, is presumed to approve or at least instantiate. In cultivating these goods, we radically reduce the gap between our human selves and divinity. Likeness to the divine starts to be advanced as a feasible, albeit utterly demanding, aspiration for persons who seek to live as well as possible. It takes on the status of a prescription for fully authentic self-definition. The best and most successful human life, in other words, involves transcending one’s ordinary, unphilosophical humanity. It is this remarkable idea, I suggest, that we need to ponder as the starting point for understanding philosophical uses of eudaimonia. The project of Greek ethics is both conservative and revolutionary. It is conservative in the sense that it retains the traditional belief that long-term prosperity presupposes divine approval or a condition of godlikeness. But, instead of treating such prosperity as the unpredictable gift of fickle deities, it overturns that conception by proposing that eudaimonia is largely or entirely up to us. This is a remarkable change from the archaic conception of human helplessness as compared with divinity; and the ⁴ The following text from Pindar is emblematic in its complexity as an instance of traditional thought. Note the way it combines the ideas of common human and divine ancestry with separation in power and ‘yet some likeness’: A single race of humans and gods. We both take breath from a single mother. But power in its entirety keeps them separated, so the former is nothing, while the latter always has brazen heaven as its secure seat. Yet we do have some likeness to immortals in mighty mind or nature, even though neither by day nor by night do we know what line fate has drawn for us to run. (Nemean Odes 6.1–11) ⁵ By ‘Presocratic adumbrations’ I chiefly have in mind Pythagorean eschatology, as reflected (I presume) in Empedocles’ account of the primal offence and ultimate salvation of the human daimôn, and the vicissitudes of the human psychê as described in Pindar’s second Oympian ode. Yet, as Sedley 1999b, 310, observes, the ideal of godlikeness in Plato and later ancient philosophy ‘falls strictly within the confines of an incarnate life’.

, ,     

45

change is underlined by the still more remarkable move of invoking divinity in specifying what a human life can and should be at its best. ‘Likeness to god’ is Plato’s repeated expression in his later dialogues for a mental disposition ruled by reason, and virtuous accordingly.⁶ For him that disposition is the necessary if not the sufficient condition for eudaimonia. Aristotle, almost certainly with Plato in mind, identifies ‘complete’ eudaimonia with the contemplative life of nous, i.e. ‘the excellent activity of what is best in us, whether itself being something divine, or the most divine of the things in us’ (Nicomachean Ethics 10.1177a14–18); and he probably alludes to the daimôn constituent of eudaimonia where he says, in recommending ‘assimilation to the divine as far as possible’, that the life of nous is the ‘quintessential human being and therefore happiest (eudaimonestatos)’ (NE 10.1178a7).⁷ Epicurus says that a perfected Epicurean will live like a god among human beings; and his followers reverenced him as a god, viewing him as both a paradigm of eudaimonia and wisdom, and as a saviour.⁸ The Stoic Epictetus tells his students that Zeus made human beings with a view to their eudaimonia (Discourses 3.24.2). He also tells them that, in virtue of their rational faculty, they are carrying god around in themselves, an endowment which registers their status as ‘children’ of god (1.3.1). Interpretation of such striking claims requires close attention to the specific cosmologies, theologies, and psychologies of these different philosophers. What they all agree on is that divinity, however they construe it, is the paradigm of excellence, and therefore the ultimate standard for construing eudaimonia as such. Now, someone might retort that such talk of godlikeness may be little more than a trope or rhetorical gesture. Associating the best human condition with divinity enables the philosophers to catch the attention of their audience by praising their human ideal in striking language; yet, it does not or need not have significant bearing on the content or structure of their ethics or on the centrality they accord to virtue as a constituent of eudaimonia: we do not need to pay heed to the talk of godlikeness in order to grasp the essence of these theories as contributions to ‘moral’ thought as such. I strongly resist such a rejoinder, for two independent reasons. First, it is surely not right to say, as Annas [1993] does, that ‘happy feelings and moods are not relevant’ (p. 332) to philosophical eudaimonia. While the ancient Greek philosophers disagree concerning the role that pleasure plays in their conceptions of the best life, they all agree that the disposition that generates eudaimonia is emotionally robust, wonderfully stable, and even joyous. When we approach Greek ethics ⁶ Theaetetus 176a5–c3; Republic 10.613a–b; Phaedrus 252c–253c; Timaeus 90a–d; Laws 4.716d. ⁷ Sedley 1999b shows that Aristotle, in this context of NE 10, closely recalls Plato, Timaeus 90a–d. However, I differ from Sedley in not finding in the Timaeus passage an unfavourable contrast between moral and intellectual virtue. See Betegh 2003, 293 n. 42. ⁸ See Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus 135 and Lucretius 5.1–12.

46

      

from the perspective of modern morality, we are bound to wonder about the emphasis the ancients set on tranquillity, stability, self-sufficiency, and complete, or at least partial, invulnerability as a concomitant of their concern for virtue or human excellence. What does morality have to do with tranquillity and invulnerability? Nothing, it may seem conceptually; but the ancient philosophers associate these latter dispositions with their concept of virtue, linking them all together by the tie of godlikeness, which presupposes traditional attributes of the gods’ (especially Zeus’s) august, trouble-free, and supremely effective lives. Second, reference to godlikeness helps us to see why ancient ethical theories are so demanding in their appeal to an ideally wise paradigm. They presuppose human perfectibility, whether this is construed in terms of the inter-entailment of all virtues, or as complete fulfilment of one’s natural or normative potentiality. The theories make room, of course, for progressive improvement, but the telos they propose is absolute, and thus again quite remote from modern morality. Godlikeness helps us to understand this absolutism. This is all very well, one might say, as regards Plato, Epicurus, and Stoicism; but Aristotle fits my emphasis on godlikeness only in his brief treatment of intellectual excellence and transcendent eudaimonia at the end of Nicomachean Ethics, which I cited above. He goes out of his way to describe that life as ‘superior to’ human life, as he has construed it in most of his lengthy work; and the excellence that it involves is virtue of intellect, not of ethical character. Moreover, this life is godlike precisely because, qua pure intellect, the Aristotelian divinity is beyond virtues of character. Yet already in book 1 of the work Aristotle strongly associates eudaimonia with divinity, describing it as something precious, complete, beyond praise, and pertaining to the gods and the most godlike human beings.⁹ He calls it, whether or not it is a divine gift, ‘the most divine of things’ (1099b16), and ‘superior to justice’ (1101b27), even after he has made ethically virtuous activity its principal constituent; and he anticipates Stoicism in claiming that the eudaimôn person who encounters Priam’s misfortunes can never become wretched (athlios, 1101b6–8), though he will not be sublimely happy (makarios).¹⁰ Aristotle’s reticence about divinity throughout most of Nicomachean Ethics should not mislead us into making him a significant exception to my claim about the general importance of godlikeness to the ancient philosophical tradition of eudaimonia.¹¹ It is likely, ⁹ 1101b21–1102a4. For excellent comments on what Aristotle achieves ‘by equating the chief human good with happiness’, see Broadie in Broadie/Rowe, 2002, 14–16. She emphasizes the traditional association between divinity and happiness, and she also finds that Aristotle’s emphasis on completeness and self-sufficiency in NE 1 prepares the ground for his account of godlike intellectual happiness in NE 10. For further discussion see ch. 11 below. ¹⁰ At the end of book 8 of the Eudemian Ethics Aristotle makes contemplation of god the normative standard for choosing and getting natural goods. ¹¹ This point is well brought out by Celano 1985. I think he is right to argue that what makaria in NE adds to eudaimonia is ‘divine’ independence from the vicissitudes of fortune (a condition that contemplative persons may enjoy for a time); but he agrees (205) that eudaimonia as such ‘implies an element of divine favour, that is, being well directed by a spiritual being (daimon)’. See Sextus

, ,     

47

however, that the enormous attention we give to that Aristotelian work has helped to make ancient ethics in general appear closer to secular morality than it really is. To recapitulate, then, I am suggesting that philosophical eudaimonia derives essential parts of its content from the closely related idea of godlikeness. This idea is not simply a trope. Rather, it helps to generate the concept of ideal human prosperity, an ideal that is godlike because of the associations regularly drawn between divinity, self-sufficiency, serenity, and perfection. Those divine associations, I need hardly add, can be multiplied when we consider the mental empowerment and emotional strength that philosophical eudaimonia is presumed to include. In order to pursue that theme, I need first to give a little space to explaining the meaning and history of the term daimôn. I shall then turn to Plato and Stoic philosophers with a view to showing how they emphatically exploit the etymology of eudaimonia in their conception of human prosperity as conditional on the guidance of divine rationality. My argument will be guided by the following hypothesis: these philosophers were attracted to the term daimôn because it traditionally had three principal connotations—divinity, fate or lot, and protective or monitoring spirit. To these Plato and the Stoics will explicitly and most importantly add the proper functioning of reason or wisdom.

III Daimôn is defined as follows in the Greek Lexicon of Liddle/Scott/Jones: I (1) individual god or goddess, but more frequently the Divine power, i.e. Destiny; (2) the power controlling the destiny of individuals, hence one’s lot or fortune; personified as the good or evil genius of a family or person; II in plural: (1)

souls of men of the golden age, acting as tutelary deities . . .

(2)

generally, spiritual or semi-divine being, inferior to the Gods;

(3)

the Good genius to whom a toast was drunk after dinner.

Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicos 9.47 (LS 23F): ‘According to them [Epicureans] eudaimonia was a divine (daimonia) and godly nature, and the word eudaimôn was applied to someone who had his daimôn disposed well.’ See p. 51 on Plato, Timaeus 90c.

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      

We do not get the impression from this article that there is any clear conceptual or semantic connection between these definitions. Yet, Plato and the Stoics, I will argue, have all these senses in mind when they apply the term daimôn to the soul of individual persons, and correspondingly to their analysis of eudaimonia. Our best point of entry into pre-Platonic usage of daimôn and the term’s connections with human lot or fortune is Hesiod’s celebrated account of the men of the Golden Age (Works and Days 122–5). Hesiod does not call them eudaimones (the word’s first attested occurrences are from the fifth century), but he does describe them in ways that fit standard connotations of that word: during their lifetime, they lived ‘like gods’, free from pain and suffering, and endowed with ‘all good things’. When they died: because of the plans of mighty Zeus, they are good daimones, earth-dwelling, guardians of mortal men . . . givers of wealth; for they had this royal prerogative.

These post-mortem daimôns dispense good fortune to deserving humans, but not unconditionally; for in two lines that precede the words ‘givers of wealth’, the MSS say: They keep watch over [court] judgements (dikas) and wrongful acts, clad in mist, roaming all over the earth.¹²

Hesiod’s fortune-dispensing but ethically attentive daimôns adumbrate the idea that prosperity depends on refraining from wrongdoing. They also connect the sense of daimôn, meaning divine and tutelary deity, with human lot or destiny. Any later Greek, with access to the word eudaimonia, would take Hesiod to be saying that ‘having a good daimôn’ signifies divinely allotted and ethically merited prosperity. Hesiod’s daimôns, though human in origin, are fully independent divinities. However, his conception of a divine monitoring spirit would prove extremely suggestive to Plato and the Stoics.¹³ The big step they took, as we shall shortly see in detail, was to internalize Hesiod’s divine monitoring spirit by interpreting it as the normative functioning of human reason, and hence as the determining condition of eudaimonia. We can study this development by reviewing some fifth-century material. ¹² These two lines are repeated at WD 254–5 where they are preceded by Hesiod’s statement that the gods do not overlook wrongdoing, ‘because there are thrice ten thousand immortals on the earth, guardians of mortal men, who keep watch’. ¹³ According to the doxographical tradition (SVF 2.1103), the Stoics like Plato, Pythagoras, and Xenocrates, posited the existence of independently existing daimôns, superior to us in strength and power. We are also told that the Stoics posited daimôns who have sympatheia with human beings, ‘watchers over human affairs’ (epoptai, DL 7.151), which is a clear reminiscence of the Hesiodic passage.

, ,     

49

In that period we already encounter the idea of a daimôn pertaining to individual persons. The most famous instance is Heraclitus’s cryptic saying: êthos anthrôpôi daimôn (DK 22 B119). Taking êthos as the subject of the sentence, as I think we should, Heraclitus appears to be saying at the least, that character is the determining cause of one’s fortune; but he is also probably hinting in the word daimôn to the divine logos in which everyone (wittingly or not) participates.¹⁴ Most importantly, Heraclitus makes daimôn internal to the person. This suits his characteristic concern to challenge the traditional distinction between mortal humans and immortal gods.¹⁵ Another text with possibly similar purport is a fragmentary line from a play by Euripides, of which we unfortunately lack all context: The nous belonging to us is in each person (a) daimôn. (fr. 1007)

Cicero, the source of this line (Tusculan Disputations 1.65), glosses it as follows: The mind is, as I say divine; as Euripides dares to say, God.

Pindar, near the end of the third Pythian Ode (107–8) reflects on the troubles of his patron Hieron, and sings: I shall be small in small things, great in great things. I shall always wholeheartedly cultivate the accompanying daimôn, serving it with all my resources.

Here daimôn seems to stand for external fortune, with Pindar, in proto-Stoic way, saying that he will adapt himself resolutely to every god-given circumstance. Nothing here is implied about a protective, internal spirit; but we have an intriguing first-person perspective, which foreshadows the idea of seeking to become master of one’s own fate. Empedocles uses the daimôn to stand for the entire ego or subject that migrates from one body to another, as punishment for primal sin (DK 31 B115). Here we may seem to be at the opposite spectrum from Hesiod’s blissful divine spirits, but not entirely. Empedocles’ migrating spirits have enjoyed bliss. They have forfeited it, however, through their blood guilt. In undergoing their self-caused transmigrations they also make their own fate, according to what Empedocles calls the decree of destiny. Long-lived, if not actually immortal in virtue of their divinity,

¹⁴ See ch. 4 below. ¹⁵ See Long 2015, 81–5. In another fragment (DK 22 B73) Heraclitus cryptically speaks of certain unknown subjects ‘arising and becoming guardians of the living and the dead’. This clear reminiscence of Hesiod’s Golden Age daimôns shows that his description of these beings was pressed into philosophical service from an early date.

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      

they also inhabit mortal bodies, and thus make a strong contribution to the idea that there is something godlike, or potentially godlike, in the human person. Finally we should note Democritus DK 68 B171: Eudaimoniê (the Ionic form) does not dwell in livestock nor in gold; soul is the daimôn’s habitation.

If this text (cited by Stobaeus) is authentic, it is our earliest explicit linkage by etymology between daimôn and eudaimonia. It is also the earliest explicit connection between one’s lot and the state of one’s soul.¹⁶

IV The Platonic material on daimôns is far too rich and complex to be discussed completely.¹⁷ Rather than treating Plato’s mythical and eschatalogical contexts, I will focus on passages that connect daimôn with the idea of rational guardianship and which most clearly prefigure the Stoics. In Cratylus 397d–398c Socrates quotes and interprets Hesiod’s passage on the Golden Age daimôns (with minor verbal differences from the Hesiodic MSS tradition).¹⁸ He begins by taking ‘golden’ to mean ‘excellent’ (agathon te kai kalon), and then equates ‘excellent’ with ‘wise’ (phronimoi). He offers daêmones, a plural participle meaning ‘knowing’, as the etymology of daimones, and says: Hesiod and the other poets are right, who say that, when a good man dies, he has a great dispensation (moira) and honour, and becomes a daimôn, on the etymology daêmones, Accordingly, I myself propose that every good man is daimôn, whether dead or alive, and rightly called a daimôn.

The Hesiodic passage provides Plato with a suggestive link between divinity and prosperity on the one hand, and human excellence and rationality on the other hand. In the Republic (5.469a) dead guardians of the ideal state are to be honoured as daimôns after death. While that honour corresponds to Hesiod’s post-mortem status for the Golden Age figures, Plato’s persons have earned it by their civic guardianship during their lives. In the Symposium, where we first find eudaimonia formally specified as human life’s goal (205a), this theme is prefaced with seminal observations on eudaimôn ¹⁶ Note the preceding sentence in DK 68 B170, where Stobaeus attributes the following to Democritus: ‘Eudaimoniê is a property of soul (psychê) just like kakodaimoniê (having a bad daimôn)’. ¹⁷ For a short survey of Plato’s usage of daimôn, see Long 2012, 152–4. ¹⁸ See Sedley 2003, 92–3.

, ,     

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being the condition of all gods in as much as they possess ‘good and beautiful’ things (202c). Our procreative drive, as human beings, is then represented by Socrates’ wise woman, Diotima, as a daimôn that seeks eudaimonia as its own blessed condition in the form of enduring, quasi-immortal, and godlike possession of what’s good and beautiful.¹⁹ I come now to the most significant Platonic passage. Towards the end of the Timaeus 90a–d Plato sums up the teleological implications of the human being’s tripartite psychic constitution with the proposal that it provides the means of training oneself to live a maximally rational life. To that end, we need to exercise all three of our psychic motions in proper proportion to one another: As regards the most authoritative form of soul present in us (par’ hémin) we should think of it thus: that god has given it to each person as a daimôn, that thing which we say dwells at the top of our body and elevates us from earth to our celestial kinship, since, to speak quite correctly, we are not a terrestrial creature but a celestial one . . . Now one who is fashioned on desires and competitive ambitions and devotes his energies to these is bound to have only mortal opinions engendered in himself . . . But one devoted to learning and true thinking, who has trained himself in that part of himself above all [as distinct from appetite and ambition], is completely bound, I think, to have immortal and divine thoughts, if he grasps truth, and to lack no share in immortality, to the extent that this is possible for human nature; and because he is always ministering to the divine component (to theion) and keeping the daimôn itself that cohabits with him well tended (eu kekosmêmenon), he must he supremely prosperous (eudaimôn). There is only one way of ministering to anything, and that is to give it its proper nutriment and motions. The motions akin to the divine in us are the thoughts and revolutions of the universe; therefore we each need to attend to these.²⁰

This powerful passage recalls the famous Republic (9.588c–d) image of the human being as a three-fold composite of human being, lion, and many-headed beast. But there, the ‘human being’, though requiring proper nurture like the Timaeus daimôn, in order to exercise command in the soul and generate eudaimonia, is not given this exalted name. In the Timaeus context, the word daimôn reminds us that the rational form of soul is a construction and gift of the demiurge himself, who had told the lesser gods that human beings ‘should be endowed with something properly called immortal and divine, to serve as guide of those willing to always follow justice and yourselves’ (41c). Plato again recalls Hesiod’s Golden ¹⁹ 207c–209e, on which see Sedley 1999b, 310, who calls this passage ‘Plato’s first serious brush with the idea’ of godlikeness. ²⁰ Sedley 1999b, 317–318, makes a strong case for interpreting the circularity of thought literally.

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      

Age daimôns. (We should also give due weight to Plato’s frequent use of daimôn to signify an intermediary between the fully divine and the human domain, as in Symposium 202e–303a.) The daimôn endowment of the Timaeus equips persons to rise above their strictly mortal components. Plato’s language in this passage is very carefully chosen. Yet, it leaves scope for, and demands, interpretation. Archer-Hind 1888 in his commentary on the passage writes: ‘Plato gives us to understand that the true daimon is our own mind: we are to look for guidance not to any external source, but to ourselves, to the divinest part of our nature.’ And Taylor 1928 in his commentary says: ‘Timaeus is expressing the view that a man’s attendant daimon is his “rational self”.’ These statements are certainly right in connecting the daimôn with what Plato elsewhere calls rationality (to logistikon), but they do not do full justice to his theological language. The passage asks us to ‘minister to’ (therapeuein) the ‘divine component’ (to theion), and to keep the cohabiting daimôn ‘well tended’.²¹ The outcome of that tending is supreme eudaimonia, a conclusion that Plato expresses by etymologizing eudaimona as the consequence of ‘tending one’s daimôn well’. We become eudaimôn as a result of keeping our psychic daimôn in excellent condition.²² These instructions complicate the status of our daimôn. If Plato were using the word simply figuratively, his observation would be virtually tautological: we become prosperous by making ourselves prosperous. But we should take daimôn literally, giving the word its full theological charge. The daimôn is ours, in as much as it is given to us as our responsibility; rather than prosperity being the dispensation of an external fortune over which we lack any control, it is taken to be a strictly internal condition, synonymous with the good condition and rule of our rational faculty. Plato is also saying, I take it, that our individual daimôn has an objective identity: it is not simply ours, but a divinity bestowed on us—a share of divinity as such (anticipating Stoic doctrine)—and it retains that status even if we fail to cultivate it accordingly. In addition, proper cultivation of it requires us to look outside ourselves to the motions of the heavens, which are caused by the divine world soul. By doing so, presumably, we are enabled to recognize our god-given affinity to divine rationality as such. That recognition is possible because our daimôn endows us with a celestial genealogy, connecting us even in our psychologically tripartite and embodied condition with the divine author of our rationality. Plato acknowledged that we can misuse rationality, putting it to purely instrumental use as the servant of ambition or appetite. But in that case, to follow ²¹ Note Pindar’s use of therapeuonta in reference to cultivating one’s daimôn in the passage from Pythian 3 cited above. ²² This punning etymology is evident in Xenocrates’ formulation of eudaimonia: ‘eudaimôn is the one who has a virtuous soul; for this is each man’s daimôn’ (Aristotle, Topics 112a36–8). Sedley 1999b, 322 n.18, takes Xenocrates to be ‘reinterpreting the etymology of Timaeus 90c, so as to equate eudaimonia with the good ordering of the entire soul, not just of its intellectual part’.

, ,     

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up the language of this passage, we fail to pay due honour to the divinity entrusted to us. In as much as rationality is something divine, it cannot of itself lead us astray. In its nature it is normative and properly guiding. By conceptualizing our rational self as a cohabiting daimôn, Plato endows human beings with a normative and objective identity that can transcend the limitations and subjectivity imposed by embodiment. Does the word in this passage retain any connotations of fate? I think it does: not in the sense that our daimôn predetermines how we actually negotiate our complex psychology. That is up to us. Yet, we are emphatically told that those who have devoted themselves to cultivating rationality and their divine component, if they grasp truth, are bound to have divine and immortal thoughts, to achieve such immortality as human beings may achieve, and to be supremely prosperous. We can easily supply the inevitable consequences for those who act otherwise. The daimôn endowment, in other words—or what we do with it—is as determining for how we fare as are the symbolical and non-normative daimôns that disembodied souls choose in the Republic’s myth of Er (10.617e). Neither here, nor anywhere else, does Plato explicitly specify who or what the ‘I’ is, I mean the identity of the subject whose task it is to negotiate this psychic complexity. Perhaps the most we can say is that the three parts of the soul present themselves to consciousness as multiple voices, at worst a competing and discordant trio, with appetite drowning out the voice of the daimôn, and at best a harmonious choir, with the voice of the daimôn unifying the whole complex.²³ Rather than charging Plato with the unsatisfactory model of three homunculi, I think we should say that the ‘I’ is the soul in its entirety, with its identity or voice(s) fixed by its structure and priorities. There is no ‘I’ over and above the voice of one or more of the parts, but when the daimôn ‘I’ is in charge, what we hear is also the voice of god. I have said nothing about the most famous such voice—the Socratic divine sign (daimonion). That special mark of Socrates raises many questions that would distract us from my main concerns in this chapter.²⁴ Plato never associates the Socratic daimonion with the contexts I have been examining here; he prefers to treat it as one of Socrates’ peculiarities, marking him off from people in general. As an intermittently prohibitive voice, it seems to have an identity separate from Socrates himself rather than being located within him. That is how Plutarch, probably rightly, interprets the daimonion in his De genio Socratis. In its protective, albeit consistently prohibitive function, it recalls the Hesiodic daimons. We are presumably not to think of the daimonion as an instance of the way the demiurge confers a daimôn on all human beings; for that would reduce Socrates to everyone’s level. He is credited with an especially hot line to the divine. However, reflection on Socrates, who consistently heeded his daimonion and claimed that ²³ For further discussion, see ch. 9 below. ²⁴ For my detailed suggestions about it, see ch. 7 below.

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      

no harm can ever come to the good person, has almost certainly influenced Plato’s mature psychology, and helped to motivate his conception of the rational faculty as divine, upward guiding, and the source of authentic happiness.

V There are clear affinities between the Stoics’ conception of the soul’s divine portion and the eudaimonism of Plato’s Timaeus. Here are three telling passages from the Roman Stoics: A holy spirit resides within us, watching and guarding our boons and banes; this spirit treats us in just the way we treat it. Without god, no man can be good.²⁵ [Zeus] has presented to each person an individual daimôn as a guardian, and committed the person’s safekeeping to this trustee, who does not sleep, and can never be misled . . . So when you close your doors and make it dark inside, remember never to say you are alone, because you are not: god is inside and your own daimôn too.²⁶ ‘Live with the gods’. One lives with the gods who continuously exhibits his soul to them, contented with the things assigned, and doing what the daimôn wants, which Zeus has given to each person as guardian and guide, an offshoot of himself. This daimôn is each person’s mind and reason.²⁷

Plato and these Stoics agree on three big points: (i) that the human mind is a divine gift, (ii) that it is a monitoring and guardian spirit (daimôn or spiritus), and (iii) that prosperity (eudaimonia) depends on our adherence to this spirit, which is equivalent to the normative guidance of reason. Echoes of Plato’s Timaeus are equally evident in the earlier Stoics, Posidonius and Chrysippus. I take Posidonius first because, with his tripartite psychology, he follows Plato more closely than Chrysippus did:²⁸ The cause of the passions, that is, of inconsistency and of the unhappy (kakodaimôn) life, is not to follow in everything the daimôn in oneself, which is akin and similar in nature to the one that governs the whole universe, but at times to deviate and be swept along with what is worse and beastlike. (Posidonius F187 Edelstein-Kidd)

²⁵ Seneca, Letter 41.2. Seneca’s theme in this letter is the godlike status of the Stoic wise man. ²⁶ Epictetus, 1.14.12–14. For discussion of this and other Epictetan texts on the ‘god within’, see Long 2002, 163–8. ²⁷ Marcus Aurelius 5.27. For detailed discussion, see ch. 13 below. ²⁸ See the illuminating discussion by Betegh 2003, 286–96, and the bibliography he cites.

, ,     

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In the reported sequel to this passage Posidonius criticizes Chrysippus for failing to account adequately for emotional disturbance, and then continues: For they (the followers of Chrysippus) do not see that the foremost thing in prosperity (eudaimonia) is to be led in no way by what is irrational and unfortunate (kakodaimonos), that is, what is godless in the soul.

Just like Plato, Posidonius in this quotation by Galen construes eudaimonia as a condition of godlikeness, and he follows Plato in positing the guidance of one’s rational faculty (daimôn) as the way to achieve it using the now characteristic play on these two words. Posidonius’ prescription also echoes Aristotle’s penultimate sentence of Eudemian Ethics book 8: ‘The best standard for the soul is to be minimally aware of its non-rational part.’²⁹ Given what we know of Posidonius’ psychology, we can identify ‘what is worse, beastlike, and godless’ with the soul’s non-rational faculties, which he treated along essentially Platonic lines. Like Plato, Posidonius pictures the self or person as an ‘ego’ (the whole soul) confronted by divine and non-divine faculties, drives, or guides. The ‘ego’ has the task of bringing all these into harmony by subordinating its godless psychic components to its rational daimôn guide.³⁰ Daimôn and eudaimôn occur together in a passage that reports the views of Chrysippus in explaining why the goal of life is ‘living according to experience of nature’s happenings’. He continues (D.L. 7.87–8): Our own natures are parts of the nature of the universe. Therefore, living in agreement with nature comes to be the goal [of human life], which is in accordance with the nature of oneself and that of the universe, engaging in no activity wont to be forbidden by the universal law, which is the correct reason, pervading everything, and identical to Zeus, who governs all beings. This very thing constitutes the virtue and smooth flow of the eudaimôn life, when everything is done in harmonious agreement between the individual’s daimôn and the will of the universe’s director.³¹

I shall have to pass over many details of this dense text.³² Its chief point is to identify consistent obedience to prescriptive reason, as instantiated in Zeus (the universe’s active principle), with the virtue and prosperity of the individual. If Chrysippus’ point were to equate such obedience with acting in accordance with one’s daimôn, he would be using this word’s etymological connection with ²⁹ This sentence follows immediately on Aristotle’s remarkable observation that any types of choice that prevent us from serving and contemplating god are worthless. ³⁰ See ch. 9 below, p. 157. ³¹ This translation is basically that of LS63C, modified by consultation with Mensch 2018. ³² For recent discussion see Betegh 2003, 286–8.

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      

eudaimonia, just like Plato and Posidonius. Instead, Chrysippus seems to envision a personal daimôn or guardian spirit that needs to be brought into harmony with the cosmic divinity in order to achieve prosperity.³³ If that is right, Chrysippus’ daimôn is not normative rationality as such—the best part of a complex soul and an inherently correct guide—but rather the whole person or mind, which can be in step with normative rationality but can also be out of step. Chrysippus, I think, would say that the daimôn we are innately given in our rational faculty is naturally protective and normative, but because we are imperfectly rational, owing to our unstable characters, we typically misuse the faculty. To put that another way, we typically misuse our own natures, our own true selves. We should also allow Chrysippus’ daimôn to include the traditional connotation of fate or causality; for, if our daimôn is our entire mind, it must include our delegated powers of assent and impulse.³⁴ Harmony of those powers with the will of Zeus formulates the classic Stoic doctrine of adjusting one’s own mind and character to the predetermined course of external events.³⁵ Returning to the Roman Stoics, I think it is important to recognize their commitment to a type of body–soul dualism.³⁶ They do not treat the mind or rational faculty as immortal and incorporeal, but they typically treat the ethical project as one of transcending the body or the flesh, much as Socrates does in the Phaedo. Body and mind are in competition for the person’s self-identification, with the body treated as animal-like and earthy and the mind as divine and celestial. This dualism, I suggest, is the main basis for interpreting the Roman Stoics’ conceptions of daimôn. Heeding this, as in Plato, is to pursue eudaimonia by identifying oneself entirely with the rationality that we potentially share with divinity.

VI In conclusion, we may ask what the theological dimensions of ancient Greek ethics and moral psychology contribute to their eudaimonism, taking this notion to postulate the happiness of morality? I have said little in this chapter about virtue and virtuous action, which are of course central concepts, as Annas 1993 rightly insists. Yet, those concepts have been implicit throughout my discussion because ³³ So I have argued in Long 2002, 163–5. ³⁴ For discussion of these powers and the notion of self that they underline, see Long 1996, chs 10–12, and Long 2015, 186–95. ³⁵ Rist 1969, 263, takes Chrysippus’ daimôn to be an independently existing guardian spirit, largely on the grounds that our text describes this entity not as being ‘in’ each person but ‘present with’ each (par’ hêmin). ‘In each’, Rist says, ‘would be Platonism’, and inappropriate to Chrysippus. Yet Plato in Timaeus 90a uses para with the dative, just like Chrysippus. So I take it that the Chrysippean daimôn is one’s entire self or hêgemonikon. ³⁶ See Long 2017.

, ,     

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they are consistently treated in our texts as dispositions to follow the dictates of good reasoning, which is both the normative condition of the human soul and the fundamental ingredient in living well. Ancient ethics is also completely uniform in identifying the principal threat to virtue with irrationality, which issues in false judgements of value and consequential passions. As moderns, we take good reasoning in ethics to include such things as figuring out what we should do all things considered, grasping what is incumbent on us in our obligations and commitments, placing ourselves in the position of other persons, choosing the best means to achieve a worthy end, and so forth. The ancient philosophers do not dissent from any of that. But good reasoning, as so illustrated, has nothing directly to do with modern notions of happiness or with what I have called the standard connotations of eudaimonia as ingredients of prosperity. In order to grasp the ancient philosophical tie between eudaimonia and good reasoning, we need to subscribe to an essentialist conception of the human good, as Aristotle does when he posits rational activity as the normative function of human nature (NE 1.7). To be eudaimôn, accordingly, requires that one fulfil this function. Good moral reasoning, as we moderns construe it, is fallible, accommodating to goodness of intention and to ignorance of relevant circumstances. The ancient philosophers, by contrast, upheld an ideal of quasi-mathematical correctness, getting things right in the way that a completely wise person would get them right. Hence we have, at the extreme, the Stoic conception of the infallible sage, and the absolutism of which I spoke in the early part of this chapter. What gives Stoicism its confidence that a human life can, and ideally should, strive for such correctness of reasoning and prosper accordingly? The answer I have proposed is the idea of godlikeness as the standard for eudaimonia, with godlikeness pictured not as a vague ideal of excellence or prosperity but a precise ideal of rationality. The archaic gods were not rational beings. Rationality became a divine attribute only when cosmology started to be configured as the workings of a superhuman, but supposedly accessible, intelligence, as it conspicuously does in Plato’s Timaeus and Laws. With that momentous step once taken, cosmic order becomes the paradigm of rationality, and not only that. In Plato, Stoicism, and (less stridently) in Aristotle, cosmic order becomes the paradigm of divinely purposed intelligence and excellence. The Epicureans do not fit this cosmological model, to be sure; yet their remote and wonderfully tranquil gods are also conceived as the proper object of human contemplation and emulation.³⁷ Plato and the Stoics (e.g. Cicero, De natura deorum 2.13–16, 153) looked to cosmic order and especially astronomy as models of divine rationality, or rather,

³⁷ See Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus 123–4 and Lucretius 6.68–79.

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      

as models of rationality as such. They ask us to reflect on these models, not only as evidence of divine teleology, but also and especially as analogies for the correctness and consistency of our own reasoning. The rationality of the cosmos is its guarantee of excellence and prosperity. Our human function is to try to replicate such order in ourselves.³⁸ The feasibility of this project is equally guaranteed because we have had the divine spirit of rationality delegated to our own minds. In that respect we and divinity really are akin. As moderns, we are naturally uncomfortable with this symbiosis of theological and ethical perspectives. Yet, if we elide it from our approach to ancient ethics, we shall not only misrepresent one of its most basic features; we shall also fail to understand why ancient philosophers were so absolute in their claims about the power of reason to guide human life and to deliver prosperity.

³⁸ This close affinity between Plato and the Stoics does not betoken identical conceptions of divine rationality and goodness: while Plato looks to mathematical structure the Stoics focus on providential causality and coherence; see Betegh 2003, 296–300, and ch. 10 below.

4 Heraclitus on Measure and the Explicit Emergence of Rationality I Heraclitus made remarkable contributions to the idea and the ideal of rationality. In particular, he prefigured many of the distinctive ways by which Plato and subsequent Greek philosophers conceptualized this notion. These are the two propositions I intend to substantiate in this chapter. No one, I presume, needs to be persuaded that Heraclitus’ logos involves rationality in some sense or senses of that word.¹ The interest of the inquiry turns entirely on what Heraclitus himself was seeking to express with the term logos and on why, in recounting his own logos, he uses such words as metron, nomos, harmoniê, kosmos, dikê, gnômê, sôphrosunê, xunos, and homologein;² for I assume that Heraclitus, rather than invoking any pre-existing concept of rationality connoted by the word logos, found himself largely in the process of discovering that very thing. This is not to say that he created it from nothing. He had available to him, as we see from the inherent meanings of logos, such concepts as meaningful discourse, account, ratio, and reckoning; and he also had available, as we see from the other Greek terms

This chapter began its life as a contribution to the discussions of Heraclitus which took place in the summer of 2005 as part of the Symposium Philosophiae Antiquae Quintum, organized by Apostolos Pierris at Kusadasi close to Ephesus. I am most grateful for his invitation to participate, and to Dorothea Frede for giving me the opportunity to present my views at the 2007 Hamburg conference on Leib und Seele in der antiken Philosophie. I also thank Andrea Nightingale and Chiara Robbiano for their written comments and my discussants at Yale University in 2008. ¹ I intend this generalization to encompass both the minimalist interpretations of logos, favoured by West 1971, 124–9 and Barnes 1982, 59 (for both of whom logos is simply Heraclitus’ account, without metaphysical and theological connotations) and interpretations represented by Kirk 1954, 65–71, 188–9, which take the term’s referents to include divine law. I side with Kirk (see Long 1996c) in thinking that Heraclitus adumbrated the Stoics’ conception of a universal causal principle, which is not to say that he anticipated their notion of a benevolently designing and ruling deity. Actually, even Barnes (ad loc.) allows that DK 22 B1 ‘makes it clear that his “account” must include or embody something like a general “law of nature” ’. From the copious literature, I select the following as particularly helpful programmatic statements concerning the Heraclitean logos: Kahn 1979, 102, ‘rationality as a phenomenal property manifested in intelligent behavior’, and Hussey, ‘Heraclitus’ in Long 1999a, 93, who says of the ‘authority that the logos enjoys . . . It can be none other than the impersonal kind of authority that is intrinsic to reason or rationality.’ See also Dilcher 1995, ch. 2. ² To which one could add taxis if DK 22 A 5 line 15 (fr. xliiiB Kahn), derived from Theophrastus, was a word Heraclitus, following Anaximander, applied to the temporal determinacy of cosmic changes. See below p. 62 for Plato’s use of the same word at Gorgias 503e ff.

Selfhood and Rationality in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Heraclitus to Plotinus. A. A. Long, Oxford University Press. © A. A. Long 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198803393.003.0005

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      

I have listed, such further concepts as measure, proportion, balance, law, structure, order, arrangement, judgement, plan, moderation, commonality, and coherence. His logos is or has or bespeaks all these notions, and accordingly it comprises much that we moderns associate with rationality. My thesis, in essence, is that Heraclitus discovered an idea and ideal of rationality by incorporating such notions in his logos, something that no one, to the best of our knowledge, had done before. If there is a single term that captures the essence of rationality, as Heraclitus conceived of it, we should opt for metron, measure. His focus on the conceptual relations and implications of ‘measure’, whether for cosmology or mind or ethics, was his most salient contribution to providing an explicit formulation of rationality. I emphasize explicit, to avoid giving the impression that Greeks before Heraclitus lacked rationality or rational practices. The metrical form and structure of Homeric epic, Hesiod’s catalogues of divine genealogy, social practices for settling disputes by means of witnesses and the citation of evidence, the political convention of making speeches pro and contra, counting and measuring—all of these, like human language as such, are implicit manifestations of rationality. Long before Heraclitus, too, the Greeks had an intuitive understanding that behaviour is normative (sôphronein) precisely to the extent that it is sensible or moderate or orderly (kata kosmon or kata moiran). What Heraclitus discovered, so I propose, was not how to make this explicit, but how to articulate rationality in terms of measured or proportional processes both in non-animate nature (including, specifically, the unity of opposites) and in mental disposition and conduct. Notice, too, that what I am attributing to Heraclitus is an idea, not a complete account, much less an analysis, of rationality. Rationality comprises much more than we find in Heraclitus, including, for instance, formal proof, rules of logic, or the best means to achieve a given end. It also involves procedures, such as reductionism and economy of explanation, which he uses but which are probably not presupposed by his explicit interest in measure and proportion. His conceptualization of rationality, nevertheless, had a profound influence on Greek philosophy.³ It also articulated and helped to propagate the pre-philosophical notion that order and moderation are essential to the proper functioning of things, whether human or divine. When we do the history of philosophy, we generally proceed by asking how thinkers position themselves in relation to their predecessors. Heraclitus himself requires us to do this because he alludes so pointedly and critically to the older authorities Homer, Hesiod, Pythagoras, Hecataeus, and Xenophanes.⁴ Important

³ Plato, Aristotle, and Stoics frequently signify the normative sense of rationality with the expression orthos logos. Translators typically render this phrase by ‘right reason’ or ‘correct rule’, but they would do better, in my opinion, to opt for ‘correct ratio’ or ‘right proportion’, in line with Heraclitus. ⁴ B17, 40, 42, 57, 67.

      

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though this background is, what we can learn from it is severely limited by the huge gaps in our knowledge. What, for instance, was it about Pythagoras that irked Heraclitus so much? If Pythagoras had the interests in musical ratios attributed to him by the later tradition, Heraclitus should, it would seem, have counted him an important ally in his own pursuit of rationality and cosmic harmony. Thus Kahn 1979, 204, suggests that Heraclitus’ conception of cosmic order in terms of logos and harmoniê should be seen as a generalization of the Pythagorean notion of musical ratios. That could be right. But I find it hard to square with Heraclitus’ polemic against Pythagoras as ‘the prince of swindlers’ (B81). It is tempting to think that Anaximander escaped Heraclitus’ censure precisely because the latter sympathized with some of his Milesian predecessor’s ideas. The two thinkers shared an interest in measurement, balance, and cosmic justice.⁵ These notions are fundamental components of Heraclitean rationality. A papyrus of Anaximander’s book might show us even greater affinity to Heraclitus than we are able to state from our meagre documentation. But one thing I very much doubt that it would reveal is an interest in human psychology, ethics, and politics.⁶ We have every reason to suppose that Anaximander, like his fellow Milesians, was primarily a cosmologist, albeit one whose interests were broad enough to include the origins of life and geography. Heraclitus had the much more complex ambition of integrating cosmology with ethics, psychology, epistemology, and politics.⁷ It is that integration, so I think, that makes him a seminal figure for understanding the evolution of rationality in subsequent Greek philosophy. Rather than starting from Heraclitus’ own words or from his relation to his predecessors, I want initially to study his idea of rationality through what I take to be its afterlife. An obvious way to do that would take us forward to the Stoics, who drew so much inspiration from reflection on Heraclitus. As I have argued elsewhere, they interpreted Heraclitus with great skill and insight.⁸ In the Stoic conception of a causally coherent world, pervaded and guided by the divine and fiery logos (of which we human beings are integral parts), the resonance of Heraclitus is obvious, as it also is in the Stoic project of a ‘life in agreement with nature’. Here, however, instead of looking to the Stoics, I propose to approach Heraclitus from basic constituents of rationality that Plato elaborated. It is Plato who retrospectively provides the best conceptual threads, so to speak, for stitching together the disparate components of Heraclitean rationality. ⁵ Should we detect a criticism of Anaximander in B80 where Heraclitus identifies justice with strife? Hussey 1999, 110 n. 5, takes Heraclitus to be making an implicit ‘correction’ of Anaximander here, but he also (89) thinks it ‘may be significant that Heraclitus does not attack any of the Milesians by name’. ⁶ For a very different view of Anaximander’s primary interests, see Naddaf 2005, 92–112, whose highly political interpretation of Anaximander is hardly grounded in firm evidence. ⁷ Hence the doxographical claim (DL 9.5) that his discourse On nature treated three subjects—the universe, politics, and theology. ⁸ Long 1996c, ch. 2.

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      

II Plato and Heraclitus on Sôphrosynê and Measure When scholars pair Plato and Heraclitus, they generally do so to contrast them. ‘For Plato,’ writes Kahn 1979, 4, ‘Heraclitus is the theorist of universal flux.’ This is quite right as a report on Plato’s statements about Heraclitus in the Cratylus and Theaetetus. According to those dialogues, Heraclitean flux excludes knowledge. I do not doubt that Plato interpreted Heraclitus accordingly, and that, as Aristotle says (Metaph. 1, 987a32–4), Heraclitean flux strongly motivated Plato’s theory of changeless Forms. I also think, like many scholars, that Plato’s and Aristotle’s interpretation of Heraclitus as a proto-sceptic was quite mistaken.⁹ Why, then, turn to Plato, to elucidate Heraclitus’ idea of rationality? I do not propose that Plato read Heraclitus as a theorist of rationality. My strategy, rather, is to look to Plato for an idea of rationality that seems too similar to Heraclitus’ notions to be accidental. What matters, so far as I am concerned, is not Plato’s actual interpretation of Heraclitus or the direct influence of Heraclitus on Plato, but the congruity of two great minds operating in the same cultural milieu.¹⁰ According to B112 Heraclitus identified the ‘greatest excellence’ (aretê) and wisdom with sôphronein.¹¹ Keeping that statement in mind, let us turn to Plato Gorgias 507e6–508a8. The context is Socrates’ refutation of Callicles’ undiscriminating hedonism. Here is a summary of his immediately preceding argument (503d–507c): 1. Every craftsman imposes organization (taxis) and order (kosmos) on the materials with which he works. 2. As with artifacts, so too with bodies and souls. 3. The name for organization and order in the soul is nomos, which is equivalent to justice and sôphrosynê. 4. The excellence of anything is a function of taxis and kosmos. 5. Therefore it is the sôphrôn soul that is excellent. Having proved that psychic excellence consists in order and sôphrosynê, Socrates continues: The wise say, Callicles, that heaven and earth and gods and humans, are bound together by community and friendship and order and moderation and justice. ⁹ See ch. 1 above for a defence of this view. ¹⁰ See Wardy 2002, who argues that Plato makes consistently positive use of Heraclitean perspectives in the Symposium. ¹¹ Cited by Stobaeus 3.1.178. Doubts about the authenticity of this fragment are well answered by Kahn 1979, 120.

      

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That is why they call this universe (kosmos) order, and not disorder and immoderation . . . I think you are not applying your mind to these things but are failing to see that geometrical equality [or ‘proportion’] has great power among both gods and humans. You think you should practice getting more (pleonexia) because you neglect geometry. (507e–508a)

In this passage Plato invokes cosmic order as a universal binding force, glossing that force as community, friendship, order, sôphrosynê, justice, and finally, as geometrical equality or proportion. He also exploits a pun, in the manner of Heraclitus, on kosmos and kosmios. Echoes of Heraclitus are unmistakable, not only in the shared terminology, including the shared reproach concerning lack of understanding (Heraclitus B1 λανθάνει, Plato λέληθεν) but most importantly in the macrocosm/microcosm analogy. I am thinking particularly of B114: Those who speak with intelligence (xun noôi) must rely on what is common to all things (xunos) as a city relies on its law, and still more resolutely; for all human laws are nourished by one law, the divine one. For it has all the power it wants, and suffices and more than suffices for all.

Just like Socrates in the Gorgias, Heraclitus grounds his ethics in a cosmological model, treating the world order itself as just or law-governed. He does not use the phrase ‘geometrical equality’ in the extant fragments, but proportionality is central to his conception of the balance that governs natural processes. He insists (B94) that justice governs the measured behaviour of the sun. And, just as Socrates stresses the power of geometrical equality, so Heraclitus emphasizes the universal control exercised by divine law. We shall hardly go wrong if we connect his grounds for the excellence of sôphronein with the thought, which Socrates advances here, that appropriate human norms are validated by their correspondence to the cosmic order. Commentators on the Gorgias often look to Pythagoreanism as Plato’s inspiration in this passage. I do not exclude that as part of the background. Plato is often indebted to multiple predecessors. In this context, with its allusion to cosmic friendship and community, Empedocles also comes to mind. But I am encouraged that Terence Irwin also refers to Heraclitus B114 in his commentary on the Gorgias passage 1979, 226, where he observes that Plato’s ‘interest may be no more in Pythagoreanism than in Presocratic theory in general.’ Heraclitus is the first Greek philosopher who quite certainly used the word kosmos in reference to the universe (B30). There is good reason to credit him with being the prime mover of many of the ideas that Plato presents here.¹² ¹² With Grg. 492e10–493a3 (Plato’s citation of Euripides, ‘Who knows if living is being dead, and being dead is living?’ and the sôma/sêma identification), cf. Sextus Empiricus, PH 3.230, who attributes something very similar to Heraclitus, as noted by Dodds 1959, ad loc.

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      

What may we infer from the Gorgias concerning Plato’s idea of rationality? Socrates in the dialogue has argued that injustice presupposes ignorance about one’s own good because injustice involves a disorderly and uncontrolled self; a self that is to flourish, on this view, needs to be regulated and duly proportioned. By appealing to geometrical equality and connecting it with sôphrosynê, Plato implies (1) that this quality consists in a measured, balanced, and moderated mentality; (2) that that mentality is an essential condition of happiness; and (3) that it is equivalent to wisdom and the application of intelligence. Thus the Gorgias adumbrates the great teaching programme of the Republic whose would-be guardians need mathematical training in order to facilitate the rule of reason over their lives and those of their fellow citizens. In this mathematical agenda Plato went far beyond anything proposed by Heraclitus. Yet, we may wonder what it was that authorized Plato to suppose that mathematics has an intrinsic connection with morality.¹³ Outside the Greek context this connection is likely to appear quite bizarre. What did these two domains (so different from one another from our modern perspective) have in common, in Plato’s eyes? The answer suggested in numerous Platonic contexts is proportion or measure. In the myth of divine judgement with which Plato concludes the Gorgias, Socrates offers a graphic description of a tyrant’s soul (524e–525a): [The divine judge] saw nothing healthy in the soul, but that it was . . . filled with scars from false oaths and injustice . . . and everything crooked from lying and deception, and nothing straight, from being reared without truth. And he saw that, from power and luxury and excess and failure to control actions, this soul was brimming over with disproportion [asummetria] and ugliness.

We are so accustomed to Plato’s pairing of truth and beauty that it is tempting to accept this association without reflecting on its conceptual assumptions. Yet it clamours for elucidation. Truth in the sense of mere fact is often ugly. What makes truth beautiful, according to the passage I have just quoted, is to be sought from the following cluster of ideas—health, honesty, justice, moderation, straightness, control, and proportion. The truth of something, according to this model, is normative. Just as lying falls outside the norms of proper discourse, so truth also characterizes the way something should actually be if it is functioning optimally, where that condition involves proper measure. Hence Plato’s liking for musical and mathematical illustrations of truth. A harmonious sound is true to the relevant ratios of the tetrachord. A well-constructed square is true to the principle that its four sides are completely equal and subtend four right angles.

¹³ See Burnyeat 2000 for brilliant suggestions in response to this question.

      

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The beauty of truth, then, is a highly theoretical notion, grounded on ideas of symmetry and balance. This notion, as we see in the Gorgias, enables Plato to represent a tyrannical soul as devoid of truth precisely because it is given to excess, and therefore ugly. Such a soul fails to impose a proper ratio on itself and its actions. Like irrationals in mathematics, which defy whole number ratio relationships, a disorderly soul is irrational, and irrational by virtue of its lack of proportion. Accordingly, when Plato talks about the beauty of truth he is not saying that the content of any true statement (or fact) must be beautiful. The beauty of truth picks out the relation that anything with a purchase on truth (whether a soul or an action or a statement) has to the norms of straightness and due measure. Hence we can see why Plato could regard truth-telling itself as beautiful, in as much as it corresponds and coheres with what is the case. There is much more one could say about Plato’s conceptualization of rationality in terms of measure and proportion. This cluster of ideas is especially prominent in the Philebus, where it is measure that heads the classification of goods (66a). What I have said, however, should suffice to provide a Platonic perspective or retrospective on Heraclitus, to whose homily on sôphronein (B112) I now return: Sôphronein is the greatest virtue and wisdom: to speak and do things that are true, understanding them in accordance with their nature. σωφρονεῖν ἀρετὴ μεγίστη καὶ σοφίη, ἀληθέα λέγειν καὶ ποιεῖν κατὰ φύσιν ἐπαΐοντας.

Like Kahn 1979, ad loc, I punctuate the fragment after sophiê, and thus make the entire text a comment on good sense or practical wisdom. This punctuation, rather than the placing of a comma after μεγίστη, suits the sense and rhythm of the passage, with its division into three cola. The last colon echoes Heraclitus’ programmatic statements in B1, where he presents himself as the spokesman of nature’s logos, setting forth an account of the way things are according to nature.¹⁴ His audience, as he regretfully says there, continually fails to heed his account, because they retreat into their private worlds. Here, in B112, he asks us to take the message of B1 to constitute the essence of sôphronein, glossing that virtue as speaking and doing things that are true. What does he mean by ‘doing things that are true’? Kahn 1979,122, puzzles over this curious and seemingly unparalleled expression. He suggests that Heraclitus wants to say that ‘the man whose thinking is sound will not hide the truth but signify it in his actions as in his words.’ This suggestion does not go far enough, in my opinion. Taking our lead from Plato, we shall hardly go wrong if we endow

¹⁴ I fail to see why Kirk 1954, 390, characterizes B112 as ‘a banal paraphrase’.

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      

Heraclitus’ alêthea with connotations of straightness, balance, and proportion. Thus his ‘truths’, as the context of B112 requires, are norms of properly measured action as much as they are norms of thought and speech. Plato regularly couples ‘balanced’ (metrios) with such commendatory words as sôphrôn, kalos, katharos, aristos, and bebaios.¹⁵ In the Republic (3, 412a5) the most harmonious persons are those who best combine physical and musical education and apply them to their souls in the most measured way (metriôtata). The mark of an unmusical and unshapely soul is ametria (6, 486d5). These contexts are in line with the passage I already discussed from the Gorgias, but the Republic proposes still more precise connections between rationality and balance or proportion. Reviewing the newly formulated community, Socrates invites his interlocutors to agree that it could be called sôphrôn and ‘master of itself ’ if its better constituent rules over its worse one (4, 431b–c). He continues: You would also find especially among its children and women and slaves . . . a multitude of all kinds of desires and pleasures and pains . . . but simple and moderate ones, which are guided by logismos in association with intellect and correct opinion—these you would encounter only among a few people, ones with the best natural constitution and the best education.

Moderate or balanced emotions are the outcomes of reason’s rule, or to be more precise, the rule of calculation. Logismos is the disposition or faculty in virtue of which a soul has the capacity to rule itself—that is to say, impose order and balance on its emotions and desires through subjecting them to appropriate calculation or measurement or proportion.¹⁶ The same cluster of ideas recurs like a leitmotif throughout the Republic. Truth, Socrates proposes, is akin to proportion (emmetria, 6, 486d7). Therefore, he infers, persons who are naturally suited to grasp the truths of reality (i.e. potential philosophers) require an emmetros mentality. In the dialogue’s final book Socrates offers measuring, counting, and weighing as the activities that correct optical and other illusions generated by the senses (10, 602d). These, he says, are the function of the soul’s calculative (logistikon) part, which is its best part precisely because it puts its trust in measure and calculation. The message of these passages can, of course, be amplified by reference to other parts of the Platonic corpus. In the Protagoras (356d–357d) Socrates proposes that it is the ‘measuring craft’ (metrêtikê technê) which will prevent people from making mistakes in determining what is good for themselves, where goodness is

¹⁵ e.g. Rep. 339b8 σωφρόνως τε καὶ μετρίως; 5, 466b6 μέτριος καὶ βέβαιος καὶ ἄριστος; Phd. 86c2 καλῶς καὶ μετρίως; 108c3 καθαρῶς τε καὶ μετρίως. ¹⁶ See Long 2015, ch. 4, on Plato’s ‘politicized soul and the rule of reason’.

      

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construed as achieving a preponderance of pleasure over pain.¹⁷ Similarly in the Philebus (55e, cf. 25e, 26a, and 65a) all true crafts require measure and such calculative methods as weighing and counting. The final Platonic passage I offer as retrospective to Heraclitus comes from the Laws (4.715e7–716b5), where the Athenian Stranger imagines himself addressing the colonists of the newly founded community, and preaches to them as follows: God, so the ancient account (logos) tells us, holds the beginning, the end, and the middle of all beings and proceeds without deviation in his natural (kata phusin) revolution. He is always accompanied by justice, which punishes those who forsake the divine law (theios nomos). One who intends to flourish sticks to justice and is compliant and well ordered, but the person puffed up by arrogance . . . who thinks he needs no ruler or guide . . . is abandoned by god . . . and utterly ruins himself, his household and his city.¹⁸

The moral of the story is that human beings should align themselves with god. How so?¹⁹ There is only one way so to act, and only one account thereof, viz. the ancient logos that like is friend to like, provided that they conform to measure; things that do not conform to measure, on the other hand, are friend neither to themselves nor to those that do conform. For us it is god who must pre-eminently be the ‘measure of all things,’ much more so than any human being, as they say. To become befriended to one of this sort, it is necessary to become as like to it as possible, and that means according to this logos that whoever of us is sôphrôn is god’s friend, because such a one is like god.

This passage is replete with intertextuality. It corrects Protagoras, who had said that man is the measure of all things, and it also strongly recalls Hesiod’s Zeus whose rule over mortals in the Works and Days (256–85) is assisted by his daughter Justice and her inexorable attention to human conduct. But Plato is not simply parroting Hesiod. His divinity in this passage (as in book 10 of the Laws, the Timaeus, and the Philebus) is characterized in language that resonates with scientific overtones. Plato seems to identify divinity with the world’s natural revolutions; and the idea of divinity as the principle of cosmic order is reinforced ¹⁷ Note also Prt. 326b on the educational need for εὐρυθμία and εὐαρμοστία. ¹⁸ Plato echoes Heraclitus linguistically. On the authority of the scholiast and Eusebius, England 1921, ad loc., identifies Plato’s ancient logos with an Orphic saying: ‘Zeus is beginning, Zeus middle, and from Zeus are all things accomplished, Zeus foundation of earth and starry heaven.’ Plato clearly had a hallowed statement in mind, but we should not assume that he cited the ancient logos as being specifically Orphic. The sentiment that Zeus encompasses all things occurs in Greek tragedy (cf. Aesch. Ag. 160 ff., and Soph. Tr. 1278) and Heraclitus gives his own expression to it in B67. ¹⁹ Timaeus 90a–c is similar in thought and expression; see ch. 3 above.

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      

by the focus on measure. With all this leading on to the characterization of the person who is sophrôn we are within a conceptual context that clearly recalls Heraclitus and his prescription to follow the divine law.

III The Measures of Heraclitus Plato repeatedly spells out intrinsic connections between measure or proportion, calculation, balance, law, intelligence, and sôphrosynê. Heraclitus largely requires us to make those connections for ourselves. I now pursue more of the relevant connections, with Plato’s cosmological passage from the Laws serving as a guideline. We may start from unequivocal certainties. As envisioned by Heraclitus, the world is: 1. An everlasting process of the balanced, measured, and proportional changes of fire. (B30) 2. The world, in its diurnal, seasonal, and annual cycle, is god. (B67) 3. All things are steered by (divine) intellect. (B41) 4. Cosmic order is an expression of divine justice. (B94) In these statements we see Heraclitus giving his own expression to the Platonic idea that cosmic order is a process and system of measure constituted by divinity. No less Platonically, he associates cosmic order and divinity with the principle of justice. What this signifies in both philosophers is a notion of ‘natural law’, meaning that norms of conduct and retribution for misconduct are not simply human institutions but mandated by the structure of reality. Hence Heraclitus, just like Plato, finds it appropriate to apply propositions about the world’s orderly structure to the human domain, as he does in: 5. Human law is nurtured by divine law. (B114), and 6. One should fight for law as one does for a city wall. (B44) Also note the following aphorisms: 7. Of prime importance is the control of hubris. (B43) 8. Anger causes psychological damage. (B85) 9. Justice seizing liars and false witnesses is inevitable. (B28) And recall: 10. Sôphronein is the prime excellence and wisdom. (B112)

      

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I propose that we call these ten propositions ‘measures’, trading on the multiple senses of the English word to signify the following range of meanings: (i) determinate quantity; (ii) proportion or ratio; (iii) moderation; (iv) limit; (v) rule or standard; and (vi) political or judicial decision. Heraclitus applies metron to the world’s constantly balanced changes (B30), to the sun’s due and regular behaviour (B94), and, in its verbal form, to the equivalence in quantity of the change from sea water to earth and back again (B31). These are instances of measure in the sense of (i) determinate quantity; (ii) proportion or ratio; and (iv) limit. For measure in the sense of (iii) moderation we have sôphrosynê; for (v) rule or standard nomos; and for (vi) judicial decision dikê. Should we, then, use measure as our translation of the Heraclitean logos? At least one scholar has done so, but that translation, tempting though it is, does not capture Heraclitus’ creative use of the term in his most programmatic passages.²⁰ He did not discover the importance of measure as a criterion for acting appropriately. That notion was already present in his culture. His great innovation was to take measure as the key to understanding structure, balance, and good order. Perhaps the best English word to translate his logos is rationale. As such, it incorporates the measures of language and thought, if these are deployed objectively in the interests of truth. I now review Heraclitus’ programmatic statement (B1): Of this rationale that is so always people are heedless, both before hearing it and after they have first heard it. τοῦ δὲ λόγου τοῦδ᾿ ἐόντος ἀεὶ ἀξύνετοι γίνονται ἄνθρωποι καὶ πρόσθεν ἢ ἀκοῦσαι καὶ ἀκούσαντες τὸ πρῶτον.

His audience, as he says in B2, lives in a private world, unheeding of the common logos. By calling the logos common, Heraclitus is saying that it is publicly available; it is not his personal account, and his audience are to listen not to him but to it (B50).²¹ The objectivity of the logos is registered in its everlasting validity. Heraclitus continues: For although all things come to pass in accordance with this rationale, human beings resemble those without experience even though they experience such

²⁰ Kirk 1954, 39 finds ‘measure the most common meaning, judged purely by statistical criteria in the extant fragments.’ Referring to Freeman 1956, 116, he writes ‘[She] has well stressed that the concept of measure is implicit in the Logos of Heraclitus,’ but rightly observes that it ‘makes but little sense to translate it thus in fr. 1,’ as Freeman does. Kirk himself favours ‘formula’ for B1, 2, and 50. Other translations he surveys include ‘word’ (Burnet), ‘meaning of Heraclitus’ teaching’ (Snell), ‘argument’ (Verdenius), and ‘account(ing)’ (Minar). ²¹ The single MS of Hippolytus (the source of B50) was ‘unsure whether δόγματος οr λόγος was correct in the quotation.’ So Kirk 1954, 66, who gives compelling reasons for accepting the latter reading.

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The rationale that Heraclitus states equips him both to account for all happenings and to provide a taxonomy of particular things. With his insights into measure, proportion, and balance as the key to understanding the world Heraclitus arrives at an idea of rationality that includes the following attributes—objectivity, impersonality, law-like authority, coherence, generality, intelligibility, and accountability. Also, by emphasizing the commonality of the logos and berating people for failing to heed it, Heraclitus implies that rationality is essential to an authentic and excellent human life—a life that one lives awake and fully cognizant of nature’s workings. Did Heraclitus connect the measures that constitute the world’s rationale with his ideas about the soul? Two fragments bear on this question: You would not discover the boundaries of the soul by going, traversing every route; so deep is the logos that it has. ψυχῆς πείρατα ἰὼν οὐκ ἂν ἐξεύροιο, πᾶσαν ἐπιπορευόμενος ὁδόν· οὕτω βαθὺν λόγον ἔχει. (Β 45) Soul has a self-increasing logos. ψυχῆς ἐστι λόγος ἑαυτὸν αὔξων. (B115)

If, contrary to the first of these texts, the soul was limited in its range, would it be capable in principle of understanding the structure of the everlasting Heraclitean world? What we seem to learn here and in the second passage is that the soul is potentially boundless. I take that to mean that it is unlimited in its capacity to measure or understand nature’s rationale. The more the soul expands, as it were, the more it is capable of putting itself in touch with the common logos.²²

IV Antecedent and Contemporary Ramifications No more than Parmenides, Empedocles, or even Plato, did Heraclitus express his revolutionary philosophy by coining new terminology. The idea of rationality that ²² Cf. Kahn 1979, 130: ‘A logos so profound and limitless can scarcely be distinct from the universal logos, according to which all things come to pass.’

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I have attributed to him draws on language that is as old as Homer and Hesiod. His originality is conceptual not linguistic; it consists in his meanings and the contexts in which he uses these words. In the next part of this essay I give a short linguistic survey as background for viewing his innovations.

Logos In its epic usage, logos, far from connoting rationality, pertains to discourse that is deceptive rather than true, as in the formula haimulioi logoi. Calypso tries to ‘soothe’ Odysseus with such ‘beguiling words’ (Od. 1.56), a usage that looks forward to the enchanting powers of logos advanced by Gorgias in the Encomium of Helen. Pindar, by contrast, tends to associate logos with such attributes as ‘true’ (alêthês) and ‘not false’ (ou pseudês).²³ His usage suggests that, though logos has begun to acquire normative connotations, its truth or correctness needs to be spelled out, as in Herodotus 2.17.1 where orthos logos refers to the ‘correct reckoning’ concerning the flooding of the Nile.²⁴ The tally of logos in Presocratic philosophers other than Heraclitus is surprisingly meagre. Setting aside instances where the term means simply ‘what is said’ or the familiar antithesis of logos/ergon, the only instances worth reporting are Parmenides B7.5 κρῖναι λόγῳ and Leucippus B2 οὐδὲν χρῆμα μάτην γίνεται, ἀλλὰ πάντα ἐκ λόγου τε καὶ ὑπ᾿ ἀνάγκης (‘Nothing occurs at random but all things from logos and by necessity’).²⁵ If this latter citation is authentic, it would represent the closest parallel to Heraclitus’ conception of the world’s rationale or determinate measure. There seems to be no fifth-century parallel for Parmenides’ instrumental dative.²⁶ In its context, the command ‘judge by logos’ is intended to detach his audience from reliance on their senses. What they are to judge is the goddess’s ‘contentious elenchos’. Taking elenchos to mean ‘proof ’, it is tempting to interpret the command as the requirement to assess the goddess’s argument by discussing it. Parmenides gives an extraordinary demonstration of rationality in action, so to speak. He offers nothing comparable to Heraclitus on the conceptual connections between logos, metron, sôphrosynê, and so forth. The later Presocratics, according to our record, had still less to say. Metron The world of Homer and Hesiod conforms to measure. We may think, for instance, of the five scenes represented on the Shield of Achilles (Ιl. 18. 478 ff.), ²³ e.g. Pi. O. 1.28, 4.21, 7.68, P. 1.68. ²⁴ Guthrie 1962, 420–4, gives numerous examples of the usage of logos, but most of them are from authors much later than Heraclitus. ²⁵ I discount instances of logos from ethical fragments attributed to Democritus, both on grounds of lateness and from doubts about their authenticity. ²⁶ Peter Kingsley in conversation suggests emending λόγῳ to λόγου, taking it with ἔλεγχον.

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especially the first scene depicting earth, sea, and heavens, or the equidistance from earth of sky and Tartarus (Theog. 719). The expanse of the sea is conveyed by the word metra (e.g. WD 648). As the world at large is a measured or balanced structure, so in the human domain the concept of measure or due proportion serves archaic thought as its principal ethical norm. Thus Hesiod tells his farmers to ‘preserve measures’ (metra phulassesthai), glossing his injunction by saying that kairos (proportion) is best in everything (WD 694).²⁷ Here we have a classic statement of the ethics of sôphrosynê. Homer characterizes the recalcitrant Thersites as someone unmeasured in his speech (ametroepês), uttering ‘disorderly words’ (epea akosma) and acting ou kata kosmon (Il. 2.212–14). We would hardly call Thersites irrational for his speaking out of line. But the semantic connections between kosmos and metron facilitated the application of these words to marking intelligence. For an instructive instance, I cite Pindar, I. 6.71–2, where the poet praises Lampon for ‘pursuing measures in his judgement, and for keeping to measures [sc. in his actions?], with a tongue that does not exceed good sense’: μέτρα μὲν γνώμᾳ διώκων, μέτρα δὲ καὶ κατέχων· γλῶσσα δ᾿ οὐκ ἔξω φρενῶν.²⁸ Heraclitus’ audience was familiar with the general idea of a measured and moderate mentality, captured in the maxim ‘nothing in excess’. What makes his thought so challenging is the relationship he suggests between this traditional norm and a world whose structure explicitly conforms to measure(s). Does any earlier text have a bearing on these Heraclitean propositions? The answer is to be found in an elegiac couplet of Solon (fr. 16 West), cited by two Christian authors, who interpreted the lines as a ‘very wise statement about God’: ‘It is very difficult to know the obscure measure of intelligence, which alone holds the limits of all things’ (γνωμοσύνης δ᾿ ἀφανὲς χαλεπώτατόν ἐστι νοῆσαι|μέτρον, ὃ δὴ πάντων πείρατα μοῦνον ἔχει). In the absence of any context, we must interpret the lines from other statements by Solon. In his longest surviving poem (fr. 1), after praying for justly gained prosperity, Solon reflects on the justice of Zeus. The god ‘sees the end of all things’ (line 17), but, sure though he is in his punishments, wrongdoers may be punished through their innocent children. Human beings are unable to discern the fairness or logic of Zeus’ punishments. They have their own mentalities and ambitions, overconfident that they will succeed. The future is unpredictable, for we are in no position to know in advance the fortunes gods will dispense to us. In a further isolated line (fr. 17), Solon reiterates the ‘obscurity’ of the all-encompassing intelligence (gnômosynê), saying: ‘The mind of the immortals is completely obscure to human beings’ (πάντῃ δ᾿ ἀθανάτων ἀφανὴς νόος ἀνθρώποισιν). The ²⁷ According to a fragment of the Melampodia (Strabo 14.1.27), Hesiod used a word for ‘true’, ἐτήτυμος, in cοnnection with the numerical calculation of a μέτρον. ²⁸ Note also Solon fr. 13. 52 (West) on the craftsman who knows the ‘measure’ of lovely wisdom.

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Christian source says that here Solon follows Hesiod, probably with reference to Works and Days 483–4: ‘The mind of Zeus is different at different times and hard for mortal men to know.’ There can be little doubt that Solon’s gnômosynê alludes to a divine intelligence or plan. How, then, should we interpret his text? The intriguing words are metron and pantôn peirata. Solon postulates a bounded universe which conforms to the measure of cosmic intelligence. With these thoughts he seems to anticipate Heraclitus so closely that one is tempted to regard the latter as directly alluding to him, especially if we compare Heraclitus B41 on the wisdom of knowing the gnômê that ‘steers everything through everything’ with Solon’s cosmic gnômosynê which holds the limits of everything. But the allusion is also highly critical. While Heraclitus and Solon agree in taking the world to be intelligently governed according to measure, they disagree on the implications of that fact for human beings. According to Solon human beings have no access to any logos that makes the divine measure accountable. For Heraclitus, by contrast, the ‘obscurity’ of nature (B123) and the superiority of its ‘non-evident structure’ (B54) are challenges to the human intellect’s powers of discovery. Thanks to the commonality of logos, human beings have the capacity to engage in science and thus close some of the traditional gap between the mortal and the immortal.

V Giving a Measured Account/Rationale of All Things As early as Homer and Hesiod the Greeks showed their awareness that the physical world is an orderly system. They did not then call it a kosmos, but they envisioned it as a limited and tripartite structure of heaven, earth and seas, and underworld, with each of these three domains under its own divine manager.²⁹ They also envisioned the world and its inhabitants as a regulated system, with its regulation sometimes assigned to Zeus and sometimes to Moira. Without sharply distinguishing these regulative powers from one another, in referring to Zeus, they emphasized foresight and intelligence, while their references to Moira implied necessity and an embryonic sense of causal connectedness. This conception of the world, though imprecise in its details, was rationalistic in supposing that events are not just arbitrary or random. Myth and religion provided explanations, albeit personalist ones, such as the anger of Zeus or the resentment of Poseidon, or invoked vaguely impersonal agencies, such as fate. The conception was also rationalistic in the prudential sense reflected in the value of ²⁹ Cf. Il. 15.187–9, the division of the world into three domains for Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades; and Hesiod, Theog. 720, which makes heaven as high above earth as the underworld is below earth.

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sôphrosynê, especially regarding the appropriate attitude to the controlling divinities. What this archaic outlook completely lacked, so far as one can see, was the idea that human intelligence might be able to enter the orderly cosmos it already intuited and discover laws of nature for itself, thus gaining some authentic access to the operations of the divine mentality. Hence the epistemological pessimism we find in Hesiod, Solon, and Xenophanes. All three authors agreed that, while the supreme divinity itself is ‘far seeing’ and controlling, human beings can achieve no ‘likeness to god’ in these respects or gain a reliable measure of intellectual control over their own lives. Heraclitus, by contrast, thought that human beings not only could but should acquire insight into nature (physis); for without that insight, they could not live wakeful, authentic, and intelligent lives.³⁰ Thus, probably with strong stimulus from Milesian cosmology, he set ancient philosophy on an epistemological course quite opposite to archaic pessimism. He intuited the unifying power of structure, measure, and proportion in the world’s physical processes; took these to be instantiated in the operation of divine intelligence; and, in his greatest and most far-reaching innovation, posited human capacity to think and speak commensurately—i.e. in accordance with nature, and therefore rationally, thus prefiguring his Stoic successors. In this chapter I have investigated the conceptual constituents of his idea of rationality, focusing on measure, proportion, and structure. I could also have explored his techniques for rousing his audience from their epistemological slumbers, such as his challenges to common sense distinctions between day and night, up and down, mortal and immortal, or his polemics against recognized authorities. These techniques, no less than the material I have discussed, were a crucial part of his contribution to rational inquiry, but they are less directly relevant to the idea of rationality in the way it was pursued by Plato and later philosophers. Given how little of Heraclitus we possess in sheer number of words, the challenge he presents to interpretation is remarkable. As is also the case with Parmenides there is always something else for a commentator to add. Hitherto I have said nothing about his cryptic and aphoristic style. For anyone who finds these traditional marks of Heraclitus’ obscurity an impediment to my main argument, I respond as follows. Obscurity for its own sake is the enemy of reason, and clarity is a philosopher’s principal virtue. But there are no grounds for thinking that Heraclitus is ever obscure for the sake of mystification. When he is quite mysterious—as for instance ³⁰ ‘The difference between the gods and humanity, traditionally almost unbridgeable, is for Heraclitus inessential,’ Hussey 1999, 103. As Hussey observes (1999, 104), in reference to such fragments as B78–9, which contrast the divine and the human: this ‘is a matter of character not of nature . . . That human nature is perfectly capable of achieving real understanding is shown by . . . B113 and B116.’

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in B62, ‘Immortal mortals, mortal immortals . . .’ the riddle is philosophically motivated. He takes on the role of the Delphic oracle in order to challenge his audience to come up with their own interpretations of his remarks, so as to rethink the traditional disjunction between mortal and immortal beings. In this latter respect, Heraclitus was the precursor of Plato’s Socrates. Both thinkers require the persons they engage with to follow their respective logos wherever it leads. Like Socrates again, Heraclitus revels in paradoxes. His riddling statements, in their balanced structure, are a representation of the rationality he finds at work in the cosmos and in himself as the spokesman of its logos.

5 Parmenides on Thinking Being I At the end of one of his studies of Parmenides Heidegger wrote: ‘The dialogue with Parmenides never comes to an end, not only because so much in the preserved fragments of his “Didactic Poem” still remains obscure, but also because what is said there continually deserves more thought.’¹ Heidegger’s diagnosis of the reasons for this unending dialogue is instructive—Parmenides’ obscurity, on the one hand, and secondly, the merit of his words as a provocation of thought. The first reason alerts us to the difficulty of understanding what Parmenides is saying. Although modern scholars have made numerous attempts, some of them very sophisticated, to elucidate his meaning, controversy among them includes disagreements over basic philology and translation. An author whose interpreters cannot agree at this level cannot fail to be obscure. Before we begin even to translate Parmenides, we need a conception of his project, but how do we conceive of that? To make intelligent guesses about it, we can hardly focus exclusively on his own text, because so much of its meaning is in doubt. We need also to take account of how earlier Greek thinkers to whom he may have been responding used terms that he uses, and of how the later Greek thinkers who first responded to him understood his words and argument, and who certainly made assumptions that he may have made too. This extraneous material can be only an approximate translation device for a thinker as difficult and as original as Parmenides, but it must provide some control on the identification of his project.² We shall see, as I proceed, that the philosophy of Parmenides’ immediate historical context furnishes some neglected clues as to what he himself was about. But, to begin, what do we learn non-controversially from his text about his project? We can confidently state that Parmenides is talking about truth/

¹ Heidegger 1984, 100–1. The German original was published in Vorträge und Aufsätze, ed. 3 (Pfullingen, 1967). ² Owen 1960, 101, set the stage for detaching Parmenides from ‘the [cosmological] tradition that he sought to demolish’, famously characterizing him as ‘a philosophical pioneer of the first water’. One may agree with this assessment and with Owen’s insistence on not ‘surrendering’ Parmenides ‘to the didadoche-writers’ (ad loc.). But it strains credulity to suppose that Parmenides was immune to influence from the tradition he criticized; cf. Kahn 1968/9, 702–3, and Coxon 1986, 17–19.

Selfhood and Rationality in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Heraclitus to Plotinus. A. A. Long, Oxford University Press. © A. A. Long 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198803393.003.0006

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reality/being, thought and knowledge, language or meaning, valid reasoning and error. In some way, too, he is concerned with elucidating connections between all these things. His project, then, involves what we today call metaphysics, mind, semantics, and logic.³ But to say this is more than a little question-begging as a description of what Parmenides took himself to be doing. The only one of these four headings that could apply to him historically is mind, referring not, of course, to mind as distinct from body, but to cognitive capacity in general.⁴ For mind, let me substitute the activity of thinking (noein) and what is thinkable (noêtos) or the object of thought (noêma). In this chapter I want to elucidate Parmenides’ project on the assumption that we should approach him as a philosopher whose primary concern was to explore the activity of veridical thinking, and to identify its subject and object. Heidegger’s second reason for the ‘unending dialogue with Parmenides’ was that the contents of his poem ‘continually deserve more thought’. I take Heidegger’s point to be not, or not merely, that our exegesis of Parmenides’ thought is inexhaustible, but that what Parmenides says is a continuous challenge to our own thinking about thinking. Drawing upon his own philosophy, Heidegger offered suggestions—some of them intriguing, others perverse—about the way Parmenides took thinking to relate to Being. If I understand Heidegger, he tried to get inside the mind at work in Parmenides’ poem, with a view to showing what it is like to think Being with Parmenides. My argument, though it is totally different from Heidegger’s in method and findings, has that much in common with his.⁵ I propose that Parmenides’ first call on us is not to think about Being but to think about thinking being.⁶ In modern jargon, Parmenides’ project is a second-order inquiry. He was not purely or primarily a metaphysician. He was investigating mind, from the starting point that something is there—Being or truth—for mind to think. ³ It is fashionable today to regard Parmenides as the pioneer metaphysician: see Barnes 1982, 176, who calls him ‘the first full-blooded metaphysician’. In some contexts the appellation would be innocuous, but its potentiality to mislead and prejudge are great. Thus it may seem to imply that, because Parmenides seeks to deduce properties of ‘what is’ by formal reasoning, he is not talking about the (physical) world. Perhaps he was not, but that point cannot be assumed ab initio. ⁴ When I came to revise this chapter, I realized that my approach to Parmenides has a superficial affinity to that of Kahn 1968/9, who (706) defines ‘Parmenides’ problem in general terms as the problem of knowledge’. However, while I agree with Kahn’s interpretation of many details, our main findings are very different, as I will indicate in some of my later notes. ⁵ What I take from Heidegger 1984 is restricted to two points—to try to read Parmenides with as little anachronism as possible, and to try to interpret him from inside, by internalizing the direction of his thought. ⁶ My practice in this chapter, following Coxon 1986, 20, is to use ‘Being’ or ‘what is’ to translate (to) eon, the nominal expression Parmenides forms from einai, or its inferred usage as the subject of esti and ‘being’ or ‘to be’ to render the infinitive. Burnet 1930, 178, wrote: ‘Parmenides does not say a word about “Being” anywhere . . . to eon is “what is”.’ This stipulation is arbitrary; see The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, sv Being, def. 4 ‘That which exists or is conceived as existing 1628.’ Capitalized, or uncapitalized, the word ‘being’ is good English for rendering the substantive (to) eon because, according to Parmenides, that expression names the necessary ontological state of ‘what is’.

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II Before I attempt to justify this proposal, I should explain why the issue of Parmenides’ project (mind versus metaphysics) is worth exploring. I would certainly like to dissolve some of the disagreements that infect the study of Parmenides, but my principal concern is a belief that work on those early Greek philosophers whose own words survive has yet to take proper measure of their attention to philosophical methodology, second-order inquiry, mind, and the relation of the knower to the known. Interpretation of these thinkers—Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, and Anaxagoras—is still overly influenced by the cosmological presuppositions of Aristotle and Theophrastus. For our access to the Milesians, who are the earliest Presocratics, we are almost entirely dependent on the dialectical and doxographical tradition developed by the Peripatetics. As is well known, they interpreted early Greek philosophy according to their own preconceptions such as material causality, ‘principles’ and ‘elements’, monism vs pluralism, etc. Still more distorting, however, than the imposition of these anachronistic categories are three doxographical points often overlooked in modern scholarship: first, the Peripatetics’ lack of exegetical interest in the early Greek philosophers’ statements about the divine;⁷ second, their presumption that the early philosophers assimilated thinking/mind to sense perception, which explains many of the distortions of Theophrastus’ De sensibus; and third, their assumption that the early philosophers took themselves to be observing and describing a physical world external to themselves, a world that did not include the observer in the materials studied. Modern interpreters often approach the early Greek philosophers in similar ways, as if these thinkers were fumbling empiricists whose main objective was to account for the origins of the observable world from a position of epistemic detachment. Indeed, our very concept of Presocratic is largely derived from the belief that a ‘philosophie engagée’, a philosophy that placed human concerns at its centre, was Socrates’ special creation. It is striking that this approach to early Greek philosophy, to the extent that it applies at all, works best with the Milesians, who are the earliest of the tradition and the ones whom we know almost entirely through the doxographical tradition. The approach signally fails with Pythagoras; it hardly works for Xenophanes; and it does not fit more than a fraction of Empedocles, Heraclitus, and Parmenides. Xenophanes posits an everlastingly motionless divinity (DK21 B26) who effortlessly activates all things by his thought (B25). This ‘single god, greatest among gods and human beings . . . sees and thinks and hears as a whole’ (B23–4). There is no reason to suppose that the god’s ‘thinking’ is a redundant addition to its ⁷ Note for instance Aristotle’s obscure and dismissive reference to Xenophanes at Metaphysics A 5. 986b21–5.

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sensory perception; ‘thinking’ as well as perceiving is the way the divine mind controls all things.⁸ Xenophanes contributes to philosophical methodology by his use of counterfactuals, as in his celebrated lines about the way different animals, were they able to draw, would represent the gods in their own image (B15). His interest in the knower and the known emerges from the contrast he draws between the immediacy (and presumably infallibility) of divine knowledge, and the impossibility for human beings to achieve more than conjecture (B34–5). Xenophanes does not simply describe or theorize about things; he also reflects on cognition in a manner we can call ‘second order’ because it provokes thought about thought and about grounds for belief. As for the point about the detached observer, it seems clear that Xenophanes regards human beings including himself as constituents of ‘all things’, i.e. as subjects who are included in the inquiry and whose outlook is unavoidably shaped by the way they are disposed to the world. The same posture is evident in Heraclitus. Self-scrutiny—‘I inquired into myself ’ (DK22 B101)—and reflections on language and thought (e.g. his critique of hallowed authorities and ordinary sleepwalkers alike) were at the forefront of his interests. The plan of nature embodied in the divine logos (B1, 41), the relation he posits between wisdom and fieriness (B118), the unlimited depths of the psychê (B45)—with points such as these Heraclitus indicates an intrinsic relation between the processes of nature and human intelligence. While detachment from the ‘common’ logos (B2) is his assessment of the unenlightened majority, he takes all human beings in principle to be capable of accessing and conforming to the world’s mind-governed system. Cognition, as Heraclitus understands it, is not the activation of a tabula rasa, but attuning oneself to patterns of thought already inherent in the law-governed workings of nature. Whether or not Heraclitus and Parmenides knew each other’s ideas, they shared a common interest in the relation of the knower to the known, in the second-order question of inquiry into inquiry, and in criticizing naïve reliance of sense perception. I pass on to the two earliest thinkers who first responded critically to Parmenides—Empedocles and Anaxagoras. Modern scholars are clearly correct in stating that both accepted the Eleatic axiom that nothing that ‘is’ can either begin or cease to be. There are notorious problems about deciding on the wholeheartedness of these philosophers’ endorsement of other parts of Parmenides’ argument—how, for instance, do we assess their introduction of plural beings and motion?—but their partial commitment to Parmenides’ Way of Truth is clear and explicit. That having been granted, what do we make of Anaxagoras’ Nous, of the divinity (and therefore life) of Empedocles’ four ‘roots’, of his polar agents Love and Strife, and of the life and divinity that Empedocles

⁸ See Lesher 1994, 7–8.

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conferred on the ‘Sphere’, when everything in the world is harmoniously united (B28–9)? The point of my questions is this. Anaxagoras most forcefully and Empedocles more obliquely treat intelligent life as basic to reality. Could Anaxagoras and Parmenides have regarded themselves as relatively Parmenidean (as they clearly did) if they had taken his Being, in contrast with their own, to be devoid of mind and life? If Parmenides’ pluralist successors interpreted Parmenides’ Being as devoid of nous, they made an extraordinarily botched response to their predecessor. This argument does not prove that his Being is or has nous, but it convinces me that his immediate philosophical respondents read him as presuming so. Let us turn now, then, to Parmenides’ text and its interpretive possibilities. The question before us is his construal of ‘the relation between thinking and Being’—the question that Heidegger describes as animating ‘all Western reflection’.⁹

III There are two places in Parmenides’ poem where the philosopher seems to take an explicit stand on this question. First, in DK28 B3, taking esti in its most obvious sense as copula, the words to auto, ‘the same’, are either predicated of the infinitives noein and einai, ‘to think’ and ‘to be’, or both infinitives are predicated of ‘the same’ as subject. Either way, the relation to one another of ‘to think’ and ‘to be’ is stated to be identity.¹⁰ From the time of Hegel, German scholars have generally given the following translation (I cite Diels-Kranz): ‘Dasselbe ist Denken und Sein’, i.e. ‘It is the same thing to think and to be’. Since noein is an active infinitive, this translation posits a tie of sameness between cognition—actively thinking/knowing—and being/ reality; it says, or appears to say, that mind is being and that being is mind. I will call this translation the mind/being identity reading of Parmenides.¹¹

⁹ Heidegger 1984, 79. ¹⁰ In using ‘identity’ here, as my gloss on ‘the same’, I postpone the question of how exactly identity is to be construed. Later, I will argue that Parmenides does not accept a strict or type identity of being and thinking, with the implication that what it is to be is the same in essence or definition as what it is to think, but holds, rather, that they are coextensive types, such that their tokens are identical: that is to say, every instance of being is an instance of thinking, and vice versa. I am grateful to my anonymous referee for advice on this formulation. ¹¹ Some of those who defend this translation reject its apparent implication that being is identical with mind. See Mansfeld 1964, 67: ‘Man kann die Bedeutung, “das Subjekt des Denkens ist mit dem Subjekt des Seins identisch” ohne weiteres ausschliessen. Denn dächte ja das Seiende selbst, es wäre ein Nous, ein Geist. Dass das Seiende ein Geist sei, erhellt aber sonst nirgendwo aus dem Lehrgedicht.’ To avoid that implication of B3, Mansfeld (68) interprets: ‘It is one and the same thing to think and to think that it is’; but that is not what the Greek says. Kahn 1968/9, 721, who translates the passage by ‘knowing and being are the same’, finds this ‘the obvious rendering’, but he takes ‘the identification of Mind and Being’ to be non-transitive, signifying only ‘the “identification of cognition (or thought) with its object”. Thus he writes (723–4): ‘It is worth noting . . . that both in Parmenides and in Aristotle the

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Starting with Zeller, a different translation of the line has been canvassed, especially by Anglo-American scholars: in German, ‘Dasselbe kann gedacht werden und sein’, or in English: ‘It is the same thing that can be thought and can be.’¹² On this construal, the text posits identity not between thinking and being—with the implication that being itself is or has a mind—but identity between what is thinkable and what is capable of being. From this translation, it follows that one cannot think of what cannot be, and it also follows that what can be is thinkable; but it does not follow that being itself is cognitive. The second translation differs from the first in two ways; it construes esti modally with the infinitives, ‘The same thing is for thinking and being’, and it treats the active infinitive noein as a virtual passive, so that ‘is for thinking’ amounts to ‘is capable of being thought’.¹³ Strictly speaking, this interpretation of B3 is uncommitted on the question of the relation of being to thinking; for it neither implies that they are the same nor excludes that. We can be certain, however, that Parmenides’ position on the question was unequivocal because he never allows a disjunction to remain unresolved. Parmenides must have supposed that being and thinking are either the same or not the same. Since the supporters of this second reading of B3 regularly favour it precisely because it does not commit Parmenides to identifying being with thinking, I shall call it the ‘mind/being non-identity’ reading. One of the more scrupulous defenders of this reading acknowledges that it is less natural than the other.¹⁴ Why then has it found such favour outside Germany? Because, its defenders say, the first reading—mind/being identity—foists anachronistic idealism on to Parmenides. Plotinus, they point out, read Parmenides identity is characterized by a curious asymmetry: it is always nous or noein which is identified with—or reduced to—its object, never conversely. Parmenides never says that Being is thinking (or beingthought).’ Much of my chapter is devoted to proving that Parmenides’ Being is a mind; but I also resist the proposal that Parmenides ‘reduces’ thinking to its object. See also Phillips 1955, 549, who insists that the Diels-Kranz translation is ‘the natural rendering’, but grants ‘the difficulty for common sense of identifying being and thought’. ¹² Zeller 1892, 558 n. 1. Most modern scholars writing in English have endorsed Zeller; see Guthrie 1965, 14, and Mourelatos 1970, 75 n. 4, who renders the Greek: ‘The same is there to be thought of and to be.’ ¹³ Cf. Guthrie 1965, 14. Although Coxon 1986, 180, interprets the grammar of B3 ( = fr. 4 in his edition) similarly, he takes it to ‘assert that only what is such as to have essential being has an identity which can be apprehended by reason’. For Coxon, to say that ‘the same thing is for conceiving as is for being’ (his translation of B3) is tantamount to saying that we cannot make genuine mental contact with anything that is unreal. With this Parmenidean inference (as distinct from Coxon’s translation) I fully agree. It is time to stop supposing that our capacity to ‘think of ’ non-existent objects like unicorns, has any critical bearing on Parmenides (contrast Guthrie 1965, 17). His use of noein deals exclusively with what we can find intelligible in contrast with our everyday use of ‘think of ’ to signify imagine, picture, suppose, recall etc.; cf. Kahn 1968, 703, n. 4. Although Coxon adopts what I have called the ‘mind/being non-identity’ reading of B3, in his commentary on the line (1986, 181) he writes: ‘Though fr. 4 ( = Diels-Kranz B3) asserts simply the identity of what can be conceived with what has essential being, the neoplatonic belief that P. identified Being with Mind was well-founded.’ Coxon scarcely argues for this claim, but he adduces several telling points that I cite below. ¹⁴ Tarán 1965, 41–4. He attacks the ‘mind/being identity’ reading at length (195–201). How does he know, I wonder, that ‘Parmenides’ conception of Being has nothing to do either with Xenophanes or with the Pythagoreans’ (201)?

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in this way, but Plato did not and Aristotle did not.¹⁵ Thus Cornford wrote: ‘I cannot believe that Parmenides meant: “to think is the same thing as to be”. He nowhere suggests that his One Being thinks, and no Greek of his date or for long afterwards would have seen anything but nonsense in the statement that “A exists means the same thing as A thinks” ’.¹⁶ Cornford’s first statement, ‘He nowhere suggests that his One Being thinks’ begs the question. His second statement, that the mind/being identity reading implies that ‘exists means the same as thinks’—commits the fallacy of ignoratio elenchi. ‘X is the same as Y’ may indeed signify that X and Y are synonyms, but there is no reason to suppose that Parmenides, on the mind/being identity reading, is making that claim. There are many ways of construing ‘is the same as’ that permit the terms on both sides of the equation to carry their own independent meanings. Cornford’s peremptory rejection of the mind/being identity reading is rather typical of the quality of argument its detractors adduce. But let that pass. Apart from the worry of making Parmenides a proto-idealist, supporters of the mind/ being non-identity reading of B3 furnish themselves with a position that they find easy and acceptable. In B2 Parmenides argues that inquiry cannot get under way from the postulate that ‘It is not: for you could not know what is not . . . nor could you signify it.’ Parmenides, then, is plainly committed to the thought that what is not is not thinkable (i.e. is not intelligible). Since the way of inquiry postulating that ‘It is and cannot not be’ is presented as the only alternative at this stage to the way postulating that ‘It is not and needs must not be’, and since this latter has been excluded because it postulates ‘what is not thinkable’ Parmenides appears to presume that ‘The way that it is . . .’ is thinkable.¹⁷ Not mere presumption, but explicit justification for this claim can then be extracted from the mind/being nonidentity reading of B3: ‘What can be thought and what can be are the same.’ Actually, however, Parmenides does not need the uncertainly positioned B3, as so construed, to secure this justification. He provides a fuller and more effective justification in the first two lines of B6 if they are construed as saying: ‘What is for speaking and thinking must be. For it can be, but nothing cannot.’ Here Parmenides proves that a tie of necessity links what is thinkable to being. But even if B3 on either reading is detached from the immediate contexts of B2

¹⁵ For Plotinus, see Enn. III.8.8, which includes a paraphrase of B3, and Enn. III.1.8 which quotes the line verbatim. B3 is also attested by Clement and Proclus (for references see Coxon 1986, 54), but not by Simplicius, our principal source for Parmenides. Whether B3 originally followed directly on B2, where it fits metrically, is quite uncertain. ¹⁶ Cornford 1939, 30 n. 2. He is cited approvingly by Guthrie 1965, 42 n. 2. ¹⁷ Like most scholars I assume that the argument of B2 does not anticipate the third way of B6 4–9— conflating and distinguishing being and not-being. Cf. also B6 1–2, where on any construal of these difficult lines, necessity ties noein to ‘what is’ (eon). This close parallel to B3 convinces me that Parmenides is not merely at this stage arguing against the false way(s), but also providing positive proof of the one true way.

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and 6, when construed as identifying being and thinking, it not only makes that extremely significant point but also strongly reinforces the tie between ‘what is’ and ‘what is thinkable’. For if ‘what is not’ is not thinkable, in the requisite sense of not being available to be thought (or known), and if ‘what is’ and the activity of thinking as well as the object of thought are the same, it follows that being qua thinking must think ‘what is’. On the mind/being identity reading, there can be no gap between being qua thinking subject and being qua thought object. Still, defenders of the mind/being non-identity reading will say: linking being to what is thinkable is a clear and intelligible idea. We cannot think (i.e. wrap our minds around) what is manifestly false, unreal, or imaginary. Further, they will say, Parmenides goes on to show in detail why various properties humans have attributed to Being—such as ‘becoming’ and ‘perishing—actually import notbeing, and are thus inconceivable as Being’s attributes. He does not say, they will add, that mind is adduced as one of his Being’s attributes. And what indeed could it mean to say that Parmenides’ Being is not only thinkable but also thinking? That is the key challenge for the mind/being identity reading. It appears easier as a translation of B3, but harder as a clear and justified idea. The mind/being nonidentity reading is the less obvious translation of B3, but it disinfects Parmenides from the alleged taint of idealism, and provides him with a starting point—the inconceivability of the non-real—that is attractive to common sense. The discrepancy between the two readings is not confined to B3. At B8 34–6 the Greek reads: tauton d’ esti noein te kai houneken esti noêma. ou gar aneu tou eontos, en hôi pephatismenon estin, heurêseis to noein. Parmenides says, according to the translation I find syntactically simplest and clearest: ‘Thinking and that which prompts thought are the same. For in what has been said (i.e. the preceding arguments) you will not find thinking separate from being.’¹⁸ This translation does give explicit testimony for the mind/being identity reading within the deductions of B8: it identifies the source and object of thought (Being) with thinking. Those who treat Parmenides as not identifying mind with Being read these lines in such a way as: ‘The same thing is there to be thought and is why there is thought. For you will not find thinking without what is, in all that has been said.’¹⁹ In this latter rendering, thinking implies Being (‘what is’) as its object and

¹⁸ Sedley 1999a, 120, slightly modified. He is not primarily concerned with the issues I explore in this chapter, but we are in considerable agreement concerning what I call the mind/being identity reading. Kahn 1968/9, 721, understands the syntax similarly, but he takes his rendering, ‘Knowing and the goal [or aim or motive] of knowledge are the same’, to exclude identification of the object of knowing (Being) with knowing; see n. 14 above. On B8 35–6 Coxon 1986, 210, comments: ‘His monism precludes him from ascribing any reality to conceiving, unless this may be regarded as in the strictest sense identifying the individual’s mind with the one Being.’ ¹⁹ Kirk/Raven/Schofield 1983, 252. In this reading, as in the ‘mind/being non-identity’ reading of B3, the active infinitive noein on its first occurrence (but apparently not on its second) is again construed as

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is caused by Being, but Being per se does not imply a thinking subject. In the non-identity rendering Being itself is devoid of mind.²⁰ A decision between these two readings cannot be made purely on the basis of the texts I have discussed so far; for I would not wish to say, as some have done, that the mind/being non-identity reading, with its passive construal of noein in B3, is linguistically unacceptable. But before turning to other considerations, let us look back again at the goddess’s methodological remarks, in which she enjoins our hearing ‘what are the only ways of inquiry for thinking’. The Greek that lies behind the translation I adopt is haiper hodoi mounai dizêsios eisi noêsai. As Coxon 1986, 174 explains: when tenses of einai are followed by a transitive infinitive, the grammatical object of that infinitive is sometimes to be understood from the grammatical subject of the relevant form of einai: i.e. ‘Ways of inquiry are for thinking’ means ‘thinking ways of inquiry is (available)’. The goddess, then, undertakes to explain the only ways of inquiry that are available to thinking. She presumes, at this stage of her argument, that thinking ways of inquiry is (available). Actively thinking something is what she starts from, her foundation.²¹ Does she tell us what her inquiry is into? Grammatically speaking, she does not. But, given the importance her ensuing argument will attach to the relation between thinking (including the cognate gnoiês at B2.7), the thinkable, and truth, it is plausible to suppose that what the goddess undertakes to speak about are the only ways of inquiry into veridical thinking that are available to veridical thinking. a passive. The anonymous commentator on the first version of this chapter was inclined to prefer the passive construal, on the ground that ‘it suggests a causal theory of cognition, much as we find in other Presocratic authors, identifying the object of thought with the cause of that thought. An active construal, in contrast, requires that each episode of thinking is identical with the cause of that episode, i.e. thinking is always self-caused, a strange doctrine.’ To this I respond that because the relevant self, on my interpretation, is a being that thinks, and on any interpretation is the only being, the grounds of its thinking cannot be other than reflexive. As to a passive construal of noein at B8 34, if it is possible here (which I doubt), it certainly clashes uncomfortably with what appears to be its clearly active sense at B8 36. ²⁰ Both the translations I have cited give causal force to houneken; cf. also Burnet 1930, 176, ‘The thing that can be thought and that for the sake of which the thought exists is the same’. Some, however, less plausibly, treat houneken as equivalent to hoti; e.g. ‘Thinking and the thought that it is are one and the same. For you will not find thought apart from what is, in respect of which thought is uttered’ (Cornford 1939, 43). Cf. Tarán 1965, 121–3. ²¹ Again I must complain about the prevailing tendency to turn the active infinitive of noein (in this case the form noêsai) into a virtual passive, yielding such translations as ‘the only ways of search that can be thought of ’. For related complaints, see Kahn 1968/9, 703 n. 4. Consider the difference between active and passive in the following expressions: ‘This vehicle is available to drive’ and ‘This vehicle is available to be driven.’ The second expression is compatible with chauffering, but the first implies that the addressee will drive themself. Parmenides’ goddess, as I understand her, is not telling the knowing man (B1 3) simply what ways of inquiry are conceivable but what ways of inquiry he can actively engage in thinking. Although I accept for B2 2 (eisi noêsai) the same syntax that supporters of the nonidentity reading of B3 invoke for this line, I do not agree with Guthrie 1965, 14 that the constructions are ‘exactly parallel’. For, in the case of B3, as Mansfeld 1964, 63–4 points out, the proposed syntax involves a zeugma (the combination of noein construed passively with einai) that is very grammatically strained.

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It is true, in any case, that each of the two ways is identified by its pronoun as ‘A way of inquiry that is putatively available to thinking’. The goddess’s immediate subject-matter here is neither Being nor Not-being, but (1) ‘the way of inquiry available to thinking, that (it) is’ (esti) and must be’, and (2) ‘the way of inquiry available to thinking, that (it) is not (ouk esti) and must not be’. She proffers two antithetical propositions as the content of the two ways respectively: (1) that necessarily esti . . . and (2) that necesssarily ouk esti . . . The goddess enquires into thinking, i.e. veridical thinking, and she finds that it has Being as its propositional content and that it excludes Not-being. Not-being, as she asserts, is not thinkable. But if thinking has only Being as its propositional content, and if Being includes all that there is (as she will repeatedly ram home later), must not Being include thinking? By focusing on the fact that the two ways of inquiry—the two ways available to thinking—are the goddess’s subject matter in B2, we have a strong reason for preferring to read Parmenides as endorsing the reciprocal identity of mind and being. For if being has been established as intrinsic to thinking, and if thinking is the starting point of the inquiry, the passive reading of noein in B3, with its implication that all Parmenides is there concerned with is the tie between ‘what is’ and ‘what is thinkable’ is very weak. Parmenides’ inquiry will be much stronger if it starts not from what ‘can be thought’, but from ‘what must be thought’ given the fact that there is thinking. If thinking and being are the same— the mind/being identity reading of B3—and if all thinking must be of ‘what is’, which is the only Being, then thinking must think Being, and Being must think itself.²² Nearly seventy years ago, Gregory Vlastos briefly arrived at a similar conclusion. In the course of reviewing the book L’école éléate by J. Zafiropulo, Gregory Vlastos (1953) dissented from the author’s claim that ‘Greek thinkers, down to and including Plato, are all, in spite of superficial differences, animists.’ Vlastos sympathized, however, with Zafiropulo’s desire to make Parmenides’ Being ‘a living mind’. He supported the mind/being identity reading of B3 and B8.34, and found indirect confirmation ‘from the consideration that the thought which knows being could hardly be denied existence. If it exists at all, it is at least a partial being, since ‘nothing exists or will exist beside Being’ (fr. 8.36–7);²³ and since being

²² I have added the conditional, ‘if all thinking must be of what is, which is the only being’, in response to a very fair challenge from an anonymous referee. That person pointed out that ‘a panpsychist might permit thoughts of not-beings, thus holding that while thinking is coextensive with being, the thinkable is not’; and, further, that the inference I draw is valid only if there is just one being that thinks. My addition is clearly justified by the arguments of B6 and B8, and in making it here I assume those arguments. Towards the end of the chapter I will consider the implications for human ‘thought if there is just one being that thinks’. Phillips 1955, 558, also infers that ‘Being can think of nothing but itself ’, and that ‘the whole of Being thinks of the whole of itself ’. ²³ A more accurate translation of parex tou eontos, B8 37, would be ‘without’ or ‘outside of ’ Being.

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is ‘all alike’ (fr. 8.22), if thought is any part of being, all being must be thought.²⁴ I see no reasonable avenue of escape from this conclusion, in spite of the anxiety of many scholars to find one’. Vlastos’ argument is suggestive, but it hardly suffices to establish unchallengeable credentials for the mind/being identity reading. A determined defender of the alternative reading could retort that Vlastos’ main premise, ‘The thought that knows being could hardly be denied existence’, is circular and question-begging. From Parmenides’ arguments about the homogeneity and uniqueness of Being, it does follow, as Vlastos says, that if thought exists at all, all Being must be thought. But can we be sure that Parmenides himself endorsed the proposition that ‘thought exists’ and, if he did endorse it, that he also drew the inference Vlastos attributes to him? Could it not be that, while Parmenides starts from what I called ‘the fact that there is thinking’, he brackets that fact, as it were, treating it as ancillary to his formal inferences about Being? Parmenides (or rather his goddess) cannot avoid using language and thought as the vehicle for travelling on the road to reality, but we are not entitled to assume that the conveyance (thinking) is (part of) the destination—Being. Parmenides, after all, does not shirk paradox. In order to think and speak about Being, he has to operate as though thinking and speaking exist. But he would have to do so, even if, as the mind/being non-identity reading holds, Being itself is lifeless and mindless. We are not entitled to assume a priori that he anticipated Descartes in tying a subject’s thinking to its own indubitable existence. Perhaps Parmenides regarded thinking as merely an (epi)phenomenon, not existent as such, but a mere effect that Being has upon mortal minds which, in any event, seem to fall right outside the confines of reality and truth. From what I have already said about the mind/being identity reading, it will be clear that I do not endorse this challenge. We must, to be sure, grant Parmenides his large share of paradox, but if we detach the activity of thinking from belonging to Being as its own property, his entire methodology becomes incoherent. Nonetheless, the presumption that his Being is mindless and lifeless is so widespread that counter argument needs more than an appeal to the implications of his own logic, such as Vlastos cogently provided. As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, we need to include factors extraneous to Parmenides’ text as guides to its interpretation.

²⁴ Vlastos 1953 seems to assume that the homogeneity and all-inclusiveness of Being must entail that thinking and being are identical as types rather than simply as tokens or as being coextensive. I try to show later that Parmenides opted for the second alternative. Owen 1960, n. 54, criticizes Vlastos’ statement, to which this footnote number is cued, on the ground that Plato (Soph. 244c-d, 248d-49a) implies that Parmenides has not ‘faced squarely the question “Is thinking of being a part of being?” ’ I do not think that we are entitled to use these comments by the Eleatic Stranger as having any historical value for our interpretation of Parmenides’ argument.

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IV No Greek philosopher prior to and immediately posterior to Parmenides treated reality as lifeless and mindless.²⁵ In earlier remarks on this issue I referred to Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Empedocles, and Anaxagoras, but the list is actually much longer. The Milesians Anaximander and Anaximenes treated the primary stuff of the world as divine, and Thales is reputed to have said that the world is full of gods. Subsequent to Parmenides, Diogenes of Apollonia attributed divinity and intelligence to the air that he regarded as the world’s basic entity. We have to proceed to the atomists in order to find thinkers who explicitly denied that mind and life are basic properties of being. The atomists explained mind and life as emergent properties from the random compounds that individual atoms can form. Such an explanation is clearly excluded for Parmenides. Could he, none the less, have anticipated their mechanistic model of reality to the extent of positing a Being with spatial properties, albeit one that lacks motion and life? Disconfirmation for the mindlessness of Parmenides’ Being is to be found, as a few scholars have noticed, in Melissus’ version of his predecessor’s arguments.²⁶ Melissus, of course, offers a less paradoxical set of arguments than Parmenides does. Melissus’ being is spatially and temporally infinite, not ‘limited’, as Parmenides had inferred, and it is explicitly incorporeal. In DK 30 B7 Melissus advances a proof that what-is is changeless, writing: ‘And it could neither lose anything nor become larger nor be rearranged, nor does it suffer pain or grief.’ In denying that ‘what-is’ suffers physical or mental pain, Melissus implies not only that it is ‘a living mind’ (so Vlastos 1953, 168), but also that it is ‘being assimilated to a deity’ (so Sedley 1999a, 128). We understand why, in the doxographical tradition, Melissus (and Zeno too) are said to have held that ‘the One and the all are god’ (DK 29 A30). Earlier, I argued that Empedocles and Anaxagoras probably attributed divine mind to Parmenides’ Being. It now appears that his direct follower, Melissus, did so too. Absence of physical and mental pain are defining characteristics of the divine in Greek thought, and one can hardly refer to something mindless and lifeless in this way. In all likelihood, Melissus was endorsing the ‘wholeness’ of life and intelligence that Xenophanes much earlier had attributed to his (probably) spherical divinity, and also echoing Xenophanes’ claim that the divinity governs the world ‘without pain or effort’ (Xenophanes B25).²⁷ At this point our resolute opponents of the mind/being identity reading of Parmenides should have been thoroughly discomposed. But they could still retort

²⁵ Cf. Phillips 1955, 556, who briefly observes that the thesis that everything is in some sense alive ‘seems to be believed in some form or other by most pre-Socratics’. ²⁶ See Vlastos 1953, 167–8. ²⁷ I have not seen anyone else make this connexion between Melissus and Xenophanes.

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that such external considerations as I have just adduced are insufficient to refute them. Melissus and all the other near-contemporary thinkers save the atomists, they might say, were too conventional to appreciate Parmenides. They read their own presuppositions into him. I have still not justified the mind/being identity reading beyond all reasonable doubt: Parmenides’ Being may still be completely mindless and distant from divinity. I come now, then, to a cardinal point that is intrinsic to Parmenides’ text. In his prologue ‘the man who knows’ is conveyed through the gates of Day and Night to encounter the goddess. She tells him that he has the good fortune to have reached a road far from the path of human beings. Now he is ‘to learn/inquire into all things, both the still/untroubled heart of persuasive truth, and the opinions of mortals, in which there is no true credence’ (B1.28–30). To mortals belong unreliable opinions, to truth belongs an untroubled heart (atremes êtor).²⁸ These two polar expressions are exactly parallel. To learn mortals’ opinions is to learn what mortals believe; that promise is fulfilled in the second part of the poem. What does the goddess mean with her first promise—learning/inquiring into truth’s heart? Scholars generally say nothing about the word ‘heart’ here (êtor). Presumably they regard it as a metaphor, as we might say ‘you shall learn the heart of the matter’. In his splendid edition of Parmenides Coxon 1986, 168 comments: ‘The heart of reality’ is an expression to which there is no parallel in the extant fragments, for êtor is never used in Greek except of a human or divine person, of whom it refers to the heart or inner self as the seat of emotion, virtue or life, and it must be so used here too. P.’s phrase does not distinguish reality from its heart but characterises it as living; the sense is ‘the unchanging and persuasive living reality’.

The word êtor is one of Homer’s standard terms for naming the seat of life, emotion, and (as Coxon could have added) thought or mind. We have every reason to suppose that Parmenides, who models his language so directly on Homer, is using the word in just that way here. But apart from that, there is no evidence, as Coxon says, that êtor is used differently in any other author of ancient Greek. To interpret it metaphorically here, we must regard Parmenides’ usage as completely anomalous. And what could êtor mean as a metaphor, given its vitalist and mental connotations? Placed as it is, in parallel to doxas, êtor must contrast ²⁸ For an excellent treatment of this line, cf. Mourelatos 1970, 154–8. He makes a good case in favour of eupeitheos over the variant eukukleos, and he is fully alive to the fact that êtor signifies ‘heart, spirit, soul, mind, temper’. But he stops short of crediting truth with mind, referring to ‘psychological imagery’. Lesher 1994, 32, takes the ‘heart of truth’ to characterize ‘the knowledge the youth will achieve in terms of his heart’s unwavering acceptance of a fully persuasive truth’. I do not think that the Greek and the context could allow this construal.

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the mind of ‘truth’ with the ‘opinions’ of mortals. Truth, on the better reading here, is characterized as ‘persuasive’. That epithet is wholly appropriate to a mindendowed reality, but a mindless reality is not something to be described as persuasive. Coxon 1986, 181 is also the only modern scholar, to the best of my knowledge, who has stated that: ‘The neoplatonic belief that P. identified Being with Mind was well-founded.’ Although Coxon did not argue the point at length, he adduced, in support of it (ad loc.), not only his clearly correct interpretation of êtor, but found confirmation in Anaxagoras’ description of nous as ‘all alone by itself and all alike’ (B12), which exactly echoes Parmenides’ description of Being as ‘unique . . . by itself . . . all alike’ (B8 5, 22, 29). Coxon also observed: Xenophanes’ account of God as a mind transcending human minds in its power (fr. 23–5), since it is the immediate pattern for part of P.’s account of Being (B8, 27–8), may also be regarded as suggesting that P. envisaged Being as Intelligence.

The lines telling us about what the ‘knowing man’ is to learn (first the ‘heart of truth’, and then mortal opinions) were probably the conclusion of the prologue, to be followed immediately by the goddess’s announcement of ‘the only ways of inquiry for thinking’ (B2). This, the beginning of the Way of Truth, tells us that ‘the one way of inquiry for thinking, that “(it) is” . . . is the way of persuasion, for it accompanies truth’. The goddess marks her completion of this way in the lines that run: ‘At this point I end my reliable discourse and thought about truth; next learn mortal opinions, listening to the deceitful arrangement of my words’. (B8 50–52)

Both in the prologue then, and at the beginning and end of thought’s inquiry on the way ‘that (it) is’, we are told that Parmenides’ primary project is to learn about truth. By attending to the significance of truth’s ‘heart’, we can see that ‘learning about truth’ is not like learning something that exists external to mind. Parmenides’ truth has a mind, which is to say that his truth constitutes cognition or true thinking. As Parmenides’ readers, we are being invited to learn to think correctly by assimilating our minds to the knowledge and thought that pertain to truth as such. Parmenides’ truth is the necessary (grammatical) subject of ‘is’: it is Being, because genuine thought can think only truth, and only ‘what is’ can be true.²⁹ The attributes of Being that the goddess deduces include ‘ungenerated and ²⁹ I take it, with many scholars, that alêtheia in Parmenides has the same reference as (to) eon; cf. especially B2 4 and B8 51.

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indestructible, single whole, stable, and complete’. These attributes are apt for a conception of truth as ‘that which is necessarily the case’ in an unqualified and unalterable way, utterly indifferent to time or place or point of view. I have little doubt that Parmenides’ deductions are intended to apply to truth (or what is knowable) in this ‘what is necessarily the case’ sense. But, as many interpreters point out, we should not restrict his usage of the term alêtheia to logical ‘truth’, nor should we restrict his usage of the verb esti and its other forms to one meaning, whether veridical, existential, or copulative. Parmenides’ alêtheia is truth and Being and also, if I am right, a thinking and knowing mind. Some interpreters have taken Parmenides’ Being to be literally, and not metaphorically, spherical. He certainly describes it in unequivocally spatial language: For it must not be any larger or smaller here than there . . . equal to itself on all sides, it has equal being within its limits (B8 44–9).

Nor does he say (B8 43) that ‘it is like a sphere’, but rather that ‘it is like a ball’.³⁰ As David Sedley remarked to me, what can be like a ball except a sphere? My argument thus far may seem to have gone in a direction quite different from this physicalist, or at least geometrical, reading. But that would be a modernist preconception because nothing that I have said is incompatible with Parmenides’ supposing that thinking and being are spatially extended. Let us toy with the thought that Parmenides’ Being has the shape of a sphere.³¹ Given the reciprocal identity I have postulated between true thinking and Being, it should follow that true thinking is also spherical or circular in some meaningful way. Far from shirking this inference, Parmenides appears to endorse it. He says: It is all the same to me whence I begin, for to that place I shall come back again. (B5)

And in another passage, he says: Gaze in thought equally upon absent things as firmly present. For thought will not split off that which is from clinging to that which is. (B4)

The Homeric nous was capable of traversing huge distances in an instant (cf. Iliad 15.80–3). Similarly Parmenides may be taken to say that anything that ‘is’ will be immediately present to thought. That idea is excellently conveyed by supposing that true thinking, like a sphere, admits of no internal boundaries. As to the earlier passage, about the indifference of any particular starting point for thought, ³⁰ Cf. the translation of Coxon 1986, 74, ‘like the volume of a spherical ball’. ³¹ As is proposed by Sedley 1999, 117–18. Cf. Phillips 1955, 557, who takes it that ‘Parmenides’ Being’ has the ‘empirical properties of being extended in space and persistent in time’.

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Proclus (Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides 708) did indeed associate it with the unity of Parmenides’ Being and his image of the sphere. Coxon 1986, 171 objects to Proclus’ interpretation, on the ground that Parmenides’ own arguments are not circular. The point is fair, but not decisive. If only ‘Being’ can be thought, then all true thought must be of ‘Being’. Parmenides would be quite consistent in holding that, while his own argument has a beginning and an end, all he needs to start from is any thought that ‘it is’. From that thought, whatever it is, he will get to Being, since Being is the only thought that is actually thinkable. The shape of Parmenides’ Being, if it does have shape, is a subject too complex to be treated adequately here. I allude to the issue only because a defender of the mind/being non-identity reading might adduce it as an argument against my own preference for making Parmenides uphold the identity of mind and Being. The points I have just made show that the sphericity of Being is no impediment to Being’s including mind. I incline, in fact, to think that the sphericity of Being strengthens the case. For if Parmenides treats the whole of reality as a sphere imbued with thinking, any genuine thinking (including that which mortals can exercise) is internal to the sphere of Being. There can be no gap between thinker and thought since thinking is internal to and bounded by Being.

V In conclusion I want to broach but hardly settle two issues—first, how does the mind/being identity reading affect our general understanding of Parmenides? Second, how does it affect our view of his position in Greek philosophy? A weakness of the reading, it may seem, is its reducing his arguments to a tautology. The non-identity reading allows ‘what is’ to be independent of ‘what thinks’. Hence the attributes of Being are sui generis; they do not apply to mind as such. By thinking Being with Parmenides we learn truths about a reality that exists quite independently of our thinking about it. In response, I would say, first, that I do not take the mind/being identity reading to involve tautology. When Parmenides talks about ‘thinking’ (veridical thinking, I mean), his words refer to cognition; and when he talks about Being or what-is, his words refer to reality, the true state of everything. ‘Thinking’ and ‘being’ carry their own independent meanings. In identifying their referents, he is neither reducing thinking to being nor reducing being to thinking; he is saying that veridical thinking and reality are coextensive: thinking is the life or heart of Being, and Being characterizes the ontological and veridical status of thinking.³²

³² Phillips 1955, 560, also suggests that for Parmenides ‘thought and existence’ should be ‘coextensive’; but he does not offer this suggestion as a logically defensible step. Rather (557–8), he accuses Parmenides of confusing ‘a general definition of being with the unique individual which he called “Being” ’, and so failing ‘to distinguish between the subject and the object of experience’.

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Does this distinction in types between being and thinking violate the unity and homogeneity of ‘what-is’? That would be a crucial challenge if Parmenides were a neo-Platonist, in which case he would not even be allowed to combine ‘being’ with unequivocal ‘one’. But the challenge is no more problematic for my thesis than for the undeniable and uncontested attribution of ‘thinkable’ to Parmenides’ Being. Parmenides’ argument would be vacuous if he did not attach independent semantic value to ‘thinkable’ and to each of the other attributes of Being (ungenerated, indestructible, etc.), thus allowing Being to admit of many predications. I take Being to be unitary and homogeneous in the sense that it is (1) all-encompassing and (2) such that nothing can relate to or pertain to it which does not do so wholly and completely. There is all the more reason, then, for Parmenides to take Being to include thinking through and through. Parmenides seems to suggest that by thinking his Way of Truth, i.e. by exercising our own cognitive powers under the directions mandated by his goddess, we become assimilated to the heart/mind of Being. This is not what is normally meant by idealism. As I construe Parmenides, he does not privilege mind over being, much less does he treat being as constructed by thought. Capitalized Being—or Truth—is there, whether we as mortals attend to it or not. Not only is Being there to be thought (with that the mind/being non-identity reading agrees), Being is also there as mind. Ordinary mortal nous has no cognizance of this mind/being identity because it assimilates being and notbeing, vainly attempting to think the unthinkable. Hence Parmenides tries to position himself and his readers into a timeless realm from whence not-being is so firmly banished that no disjunction can occur between thinking and being, because they are coextensive. In a difficult excerpt (B16) from The Way of Seeming, Parmenides appears to identify human nous with the body’s moment-by-moment constitution. ‘That which predominates’ (or, on a different construal, ‘is full’), he says, ‘is their thought’.³³ This passage is entirely appropriate to the ‘wandering mind’ of ‘twoheaded mortals’—those who confuse and conflate being and not-being (B6 4–9). But, as Coxon 1986, 251 remarks: ‘It is prima facie unlikely that P. employs the terms nous and noêma in these lines in a sense incompatible with that which they bear in his account of the journey of persuasion.’ I agree, and I would make the further point that it is unlikely that these lines tell us nothing about ‘the mind of truth’. Parmenides’ Being does not admit of

³³ Coxon 1986, 250, rightly in my view, takes to pleon to mean ‘the preponderant’. For a defence of its meaning ‘the full’, see Laks 1990. The source of this passage is Theophrastus, Sens. 3. In his comments on the four lines that he quotes, Theophrastus attributes to Parmenides the thesis that ‘absolutely all being possesses some cognition’. Stein 1968/9, 731, cites this passage in his comments on Kahn 1968/9, and puts the question: ‘If this remark is reliable, by the way, doesn’t it count somewhat against your [i.e. Kahn’s] statement that “Parmenides never says that Being is thinking”?’ If my thesis is sound, Theophrastus gives endorsement to what we know without his help.

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anything ‘predominating’, since it is all alike. On the mind/being identity reading, we can conjecture that, just as normal (i.e. delusory) human nous corresponds to the state of a person’s bodily constitution, so Being’s thought corresponds to its constitution—wholeness, stability, homogeneity, equipoise, etc. And if, as I have argued, Being’s thought is the only genuine thinking, it should follow that when we are thinking Being with Parmenides we are (in) Being and at least momentarily lose our phenomenal identities as ‘two-headed mortals’. Thus the mind/being identity reading provides a basis (the only basis, as far as I can see) for integrating human inquiry and the human subject with The Way of Truth. The mind/being non-identity reading, by contrast, excludes the thinker and therefore thinking from Being. Still worse, it saddles Parmenides with the most egregious selfcontradiction. If Being does not include thinking, then thinking does not exist; hence it follows that Being, contrary to Parmenides’ initial postulate, is not thinkable.

VI Finally, I append a few words about how the mind/being identity reading affects our view of Parmenides’ position in Greek philosophy. I need not repeat what I have already said about the general tendency of his predecessors and immediate successors to make life, mind, and divinity basic to reality. But Xenophanes in particular merits a further remark. According to a Hellenistic tradition, this wandering poet-scholar spent time at Elea. It is simplistic to regard him as the founder of what came to be regarded as ‘Eleatic monism’, but I find it implausible that Parmenides ignored him. In a careful discussion, Guthrie (1962, 382) concluded: ‘For Xenophanes the cosmos was a spherical body, living, conscious, and divine.’ Xenophanes describes this divinity as ‘motionless’. He also describes its cognitive powers operating ‘as a whole’ and emphasizes its unlikeness to mortals both in body and mind. Parmenides’ Being has much in common with Xenophanes’ cosmic divinity— sphericity, life and mind (probably), immobility and wholeness (certainly). But Xenophanes was a proto-sceptic. He denied any similarity between the divine and the human mind, and he relegated human cognition to mere opinion, saying that ‘even if someone should succeed in saying what is true, he himself does not know it’ (B34). For Xenophanes, human beings are always and necessarily in the position of Parmenides’ ‘mortals’, trapped in a world of doxa. Parmenides thought otherwise. He granted the infiltration of error in human beings’ normal exercise of nous, but he diagnosed the reasons for it by his reflections on their failure to detach their nous from what-is not. He rejected Xenophanes’ view of the total dissimilarity between the divine and the human mind. For Parmenides, thought— genuine thought—is univocal and indissolubly attached to truth, knowledge, and

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reality. By presenting his arguments as the gift of a divine revelation, Parmenides presumes that human beings can (at least momentarily) think the thoughts that the divine thinks. In myth and religious tradition the mind of Zeus had been inscrutable to humans. The earliest Greek philosophers, with the exception of Xenophanes, challenged that limitation. Thought, human thought, they assumed, could have access to the fundamental workings of the universe, and they pictured those workings not on the model of lifeless physics, but as hylozoism—material endowed with divine intelligence. Heraclitus, Parmenides’ near contemporary, seeks to tell us what it is like to achieve a god’s eye view of the world, in which the oppositions of ordinary consciousness are unified and transcended. His philosophy is an attempt to think the thoughts of the divine logos/fire.³⁴ Despite his difference from Heraclitus regarding the changelessness of reality, Parmenides, as I read him, is recognizably similar. Parmenides’ philosophy is an attempt to think the thoughts of unqualified Being. It was the atomists who first dissented from the mind/being identity that I have been presenting. In them we find clear endorsement of the thesis that what is ultimately thinkable—the atomic structure of reality—is itself mindless and lifeless. And what about Plato? It has been objected that the mind/being identity I attribute to Parmenides is explicitly rejected by Plato. Thus, the Eleatic Stranger insists that ‘the plenitude of being must include mind, life, soul, and motion’ (cf. Soph. 249a), all of which he takes to be excluded from Eleatic Being. I would be troubled by this passage if I thought that Plato was offering a scholarly exegesis of Parmenides’ text, but the Eleatic Stranger’s inferences depend upon an implausibly strict reading of Parmenides’ alleged monism (cf. Soph. 244b–245d). For Plato, the possession of life and mind implies motion. By contrast, Xenophanes’ god thinks without moving, and so does Aristotle’s. The linkage, then, between thinking and mobility, plausible though it may seem to us, was not a necessary one for Greek philosophers to make. Hence I do not regard Plato’s remarks as a serious challenge to the mind/being identity in Parmenides that I have canvassed.³⁵

Postscript This chapter has been treated at length by Rosen 1998 and Wedin 2014, 203–20. It is also discussed by Crystal 2002, Kahn 2009, 13, and Palmer 2009, 121 n. 31, 346. A powerful defence of Parmenides’ mind/being identity reading, from modern perspectives, has been given by I. Kimhi 2018.

³⁴ See ch. 1 above. ³⁵ In preparing the first draft of this chapter, I was helped by suggestions from John Ferrari, Andrea Nightingale, and David Sedley. In making further revisions, I have greatly benefited from the comments of an anonymous referee.

6 Socratic Idiosyncrasy and Cynic Exhibitionism I Many people’s visual image of Socrates comes from Jacques-Louis David’s celebrated representation of the philosopher’s final day, painted in 1787, two years before the outbreak of the French Revolution, and now in the Metropolitan Museum. We see Socrates seated on a couch, bare-chested, half facing the viewer with his left hand crooked, the index finger pointing upwards, and the right hand about to seize the cup containing the hemlock. David’s Socrates makes an immensely powerful impression of resolution and inner strength. That effect is accentuated by the contrast between the philosopher’s confident gestures and expression and the grief-stricken heads of his companions. This Socrates is not exactly an exhibitionist, but his pose and demeanour are riveting, posed, and thoroughly theatrical.¹ The historical figure spent his life in an Athenian culture that was probably more permeated with the theatre than any subsequent milieu has been. Aristophanes put Socrates on stage in The Clouds, his travesty of contemporary intellectuals, while Plato himself was so brilliant a dramatist that some of his dialogues have been effectively adapted for the theatre in modern times.² David, working from Plato’s graphic scene-setting in the Phaedo, captures this theatrical atmosphere. His painting fixes the most memorable moment in all of Plato’s dialogues, when Socrates, after conversing with his friends on the soul’s immortality, is about to drink the paralysing potion. If we take philosophy to be a purely intellectual inquiry, as it largely is in modern academe, the less theatrical, it may seem, the better its practice will be. The modern philosopher’s ideal toolkit comprises unimpassioned discourse, consummate clarity, speculative virtuosity, and rigorous argument. If, on the other hand we look to philosophy for practical wisdom (as the word implies in such expressions as ‘philosophy of life’, or taking things ‘philosophically’),

¹ I presented this chapter as the Gregory Vlastos Memorial Lecturer at Queen’s University, Ontario, in October 2013 and later as Harry J. Carroll Memorial Lecturer at Pomona College, California. ² For instance at the Edinburgh Festival. Plato was reputed to have had the youthful ambition to compete in the Athenian dramatic festivals, see DL 3.5.

Selfhood and Rationality in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Heraclitus to Plotinus. A. A. Long, Oxford University Press. © A. A. Long 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198803393.003.0007

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effective philosophers will also need the personality to capture attention both by the urgency of their voice and the example of their conduct. The historical Socrates struck his contemporary admirers as precisely that. For classical antiquity he set the standard of someone who lived and died for philosophy. As Epictetus said: Even if you are not yet Socrates, you should live like someone who at least wants to be a Socrates. (Encheiridion 51.3)

The previous sentence runs: ‘Socrates apotelesthê in this way—by attending to nothing except reason in everything that befell him.’ The verb apoteleô is only rarely found, as here, in the passive voice. When used actively, it means to complete in full or perfect or accomplish. W. A. Oldfather, the translator of Epictetus in the Loeb Classical Library, nicely renders the verb’s passive use here: ‘This is the way [i.e. acting always on the guidance of reason] Socrates became what he was.’ We could also translate: ‘This is the way Socrates came to completion’, like a work of art, recalling the artist David’s painted Socrates. Socrates was Epictetus’ favourite moral paradigm and methodological model, as he had been from the beginning of the Stoic school’s existence.³ Stoic students were constantly told about salient moments of Socrates’ life, including his courage in battle, his refusing to comply with an order to arrest an innocent man, his stalwart behaviour at his trial, and his total confidence in the face of death.⁴ However, Epictetus was quite silent about the quirkier aspects of Socrates’ conduct and personality (as reported by Plato, especially in the Symposium). He says nothing concerning Socrates’ satyr-like face, his eye for beautiful boys, his capacity to drink everyone else under the table, his going around barefoot, and so forth. Epictetus makes Socrates into an ideal father and husband, and even a model of cleanliness, tacitly correcting the rarely bathed Socrates of the earliest record.⁵ To fashion yourself on Epictetus’ Socrates, you try to subject all your experience and motivations to Socratic questioning and reasoning. You are not required to dress or look like Socrates or imitate his personality. Socrates has become a sanitized and sanctified figure. Epictetus’ lack of interest in the appearance and personality of Socrates matches his contempt for the external trappings of the wandering and begging Cynic. Addressing someone who was thinking of taking up the Cynic way of life, Epictetus responds (3.22.10):

³ For the anecdotal tradition on Zeno’s original attachment to Socrates, see Long 2018, 257–61, and for Socrates’ presence in Epictetus, see Long 2002. ⁴ See Cicero, Tusc. 1.71, 1.97; Seneca Ep. Mor. 24.4, 28.8, 104.27 (Socrates’ life); 13.14, 67.7 (Socrates’ death). ⁵ Discourses 3.26.23; 4.11.19.

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You need to reflect carefully about the matter; it’s not the way you think it is— wearing a rough cloak, sleeping on a hard bed, carrying a backpack and stick, begging and insulting people if you see them getting rid of surplus hair, or getting a fancy hairstyle, or walking around in bright red clothes.

According to Epictetus, the authentic Cynic is distinctive entirely by his internal disposition and philanthropic mission. He is a model of autonomy and indifference to everything to do with the body. He has the special status of being a kind of evangelist—a divinely sent messenger to tell people how to mend their ways and learn to become impervious to changes of fortune.⁶ Epictetus was teaching five centuries after the death of Socrates and the period of the original Cynics. By his date philosophy had long been parcelled out into rival sects, each of them offering its own programme of dominant values. Affluent Romans at this time—the reign of the emperor Hadrian—were prone to have at least a smattering of philosophy, a fact that is registered on images and coins by the emperor’s beard and by the unshaven fashion that it newly set.⁷ Epictetus, in spite of his professed indifference to all appearances, expects the philosopher to be bearded (3.1.24), saying that he himself would refuse to shave even if the price were death (1.2.29). His criticism of those who assume the mere trappings of the Cynic presupposes a society that has domesticated philosophy to the point of worrying about, or joking about, the differences between sham thinkers and genuine practitioners. During Socrates’ life, philosophy, far from being domesticated, had not yet become the name for a specific practice, let alone the name of a cultural institution or sect.⁸ The word philosophos probably postdates the death of Socrates in its usage to describe a person’s intellectual identity or quasi-profession. Before that, it simply means someone who is educated or refined in a general way, as when Pericles in his funeral speech (Thucydides 2. 40) says that ‘we Athenians cultivate our minds (philosophoumen) without effeminacy’. Plato, or some other close associate, may have been the first to call Socrates a ‘philosopher’ in the word’s literal sense, making ‘lover of wisdom’, not ‘expert’ (sophos), a particularly apt description of the man himself and what his followers took him to stand for. By purchasing a house for the purpose of teaching in the Athenian public park known as the Academy early in the second decade of the fourth century BC, Plato institutionalized philosophy as an educational pursuit. By memorializing Socrates in dialogue form (not anecdotally, as in much of Xenophon’s Memorabilia), Plato provided his fellow citizens with iconic representations of the philosopher as a distinctive intellectual and ethical type. Henceforth, for the subsequent history of ancient philosophy, Socrates became the standard defining name. All those ⁶ Discourses 3.1.36–7, 3.22.23–5. For detailed discussion, see Ierodiakonou 2007. ⁷ See Zanker 1995, ch. 5. ⁸ See Nightingale 1995, ch. 1.

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philosophers who came after him were post-Socratics, even when, like the Epicureans and Pyrrhonists, they explicitly repudiated him.⁹ Before Socrates came the Vorsokratiker or Presocratics, an entirely modern term of art, which reveals our own difficulty in finding a better collective name for the likes of Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Empedocles. Socrates’ post-Socratic identity as philosopher par excellence invites the question of how the historical figure construed himself in Athens, which he appears to have left only during his military service. Can we situate the personality of Socrates, as described by Plato, within the social context of fifth-century Athens? Did Socrates set out to stage himself? As someone preoccupied with the project of self-examination and search for self-knowledge, how did Socrates behave? Can we make progress with these questions by comparing the peculiarities of Socrates with the outrageous exhibitionism of Diogenes, the original Cynic, who was some seven decades younger, and whose model probably included Antisthenes, one of Socrates’ closest companions?

II Our access to near contemporary descriptions of Socrates reaches us through only three sources—the farce presented by Aristophanes and the often-divergent representations published by Plato and by Xenophon.¹⁰ Neither Aristophanes nor Xenophon, unlike Plato, singles Socrates out with the word philosophos.¹¹ Still more surprising, perhaps, neither of them dwells on peculiarities of behaviour that we know from Plato, such as Socrates’ tendency to stand stock still absorbed in thought, and to benumb the people he engages in conversation with his seemingly naive questions and ironic disclaimers. Plato’s Socrates, taking the early dialogues as a whole, is the most highly individuated figure in Greek literature of any period, so much so that it was probably Socrates’ life, as represented by Plato, that shaped the beginning of ancient literary biography.¹² Thanks to Plato’s genius we feel we know Socrates warts and all. As first-time readers of the early dialogues find, Socrates can make an annoying and arrogant impression. Plato, while eulogizing Socrates, also lets us see why he became so unpopular with some Athenians that they wanted to get rid of him. ⁹ Thus Diogenes Laertius, writing in about AD 200, uses Socrates as a pivotal figure in drafting the succession of Ionian philosophers that supposedly began with Anaximander and ended with the postSocratic Academics, Cynics, Stoics, and Peripatetics. ¹⁰ Aristophanes’ Socrates has a superficial resemblance to Plato’s figure in his initial appearance in Clouds as a preoccupied intellectual and in his interrogative manner. But he is a hollow caricature without anything we could call a personality. ¹¹ For Xenophon’s unmarked use of philosophein and its cognate words, see Nightingale 1995, 16–17. ¹² See Momigliano 1971.

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Xenophon’s Socrates, though neither meek nor mild, would never have got into the trouble that the historical figure did. Plato was not only responsible for publicizing Socrates as the earliest so-called philosopher, he also transmitted our most memorable images of Socrates as gad-fly, obsessive pederast, Silenus faced, poorly clad, bare footed, and so forth. The accuracy of Plato’s portrayal of Socrates’ satyr-like face is confirmed by the fact that the earliest portrait of Socrates, dating from ten or twenty years after his death, showed him in this guise.¹³ Xenophon also refers to it, with one of his characters saying that if he were not more beautiful than Socrates he would be the ugliest Silenus of any satyr play (Symp. 4.19). Unlike Plato, however, Xenophon does not turn Socrates’ ugliness into a foil for his inner beauty, as Alcibiades so memorably does at the end of Plato’s Symposium when he drunkenly bursts in on the party and tells how he tried in vain to get Socrates to have sex with him. Did Socrates himself deliberately cultivate a quite new personal style, perhaps exploiting, as Plato does on his behalf, the contrast between inner beauty of soul and unattractive face and body? The likelihood that Socrates did so is strongly suggested by the striking contrast between Xenophon’s often tediously conventional Socrates and Plato’s challengingly strange figure. Xenophon, probably writing with his eye on some of Plato’s early dialogues, plays down Socrates’ idiosyncrasy in the interest of making him a model citizen (kalos kai agathos) and a mentor of just that gentlemanly style.¹⁴ Xenophon’s Socrates does not profess ignorance, nor does he claim to have a mission to convert the Athenians into practitioners of a self-examined life. He accepts the title of teacher and expert.¹⁵ The self-fashioning that Xenophon’s Socrates embodies is largely confined to ‘self-mastery’ or enkrateia, training himself into being the hardiest of men in regard to food and drink, hot and cold weather, and sexual desire.¹⁶ Xenophon defends Socrates by making him a model and exceptionally pious Athenian citizen. But that is simply incredible. Xenophon’s Socrates would never have been put on trial for being subversive of the state’s religion and a threat to the morals and manners of its youth. Plato, by contrast, went out of his way to emphasize Socrates’ oddities. His Socrates is always interesting, often amusing, and occasionally infuriating. Plato took the risk of making Socrates peculiar and disturbing. As we can see especially clearly at the beginning of the Phaedo (David’s inspiration for his painting), Socrates stands for a radically new way of being, which challenges the ¹³ See Zanker 1995, 12, 32. ¹⁴ Mem. 1.2.17. For the social connotations of kalos kai agathos, see Dover 1974, 42–5. ¹⁵ See Dorion 2006, 94–5. ¹⁶ Mem. 1.2.1with further references and discussion in Dorion 2006, 96–100. Under the influence of Socrates’ posthumous renown, the ‘self-mastery’ he was believed to incorporate became a dominant ideal of Hellenistic ethics (see Long 2006, ch. 1). I don’t treat the topic here because, despite its importance for the Socratic tradition, we can hardly know whether Socrates self-consciously publicized enkrateia as a dominant feature of his identity.

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conventional values of pleasure, power and wealth—living the ‘philosophical life’ by ‘practising death’, which means cultivating intellectual and psychological goods and the greatest possible detachment from the body.¹⁷ At a conference where I first presented a version of this chapter, Alan Shapiro, the organizer, declared his wish to explore ‘the cultural, intellectual, and societal context that gave rise to the phenomenon of self-fashioning in the course of the Classical period’.¹⁸ By comparison with such flamboyant figures as Alcibiades and the tragedian Agathon does it make sense, he asked, to situate Plato’s Socrates within this specific Athenian context and include him as a particular instance, however distinctive, of a contemporary trend? I found this an intriguingly fresh question, not one that scholars of ancient philosophy are accustomed to ask. It is certainly striking that Alcibiades and Agathon are principal characters and speakers in Plato’s Symposium. Other figures who are there, apart from Socrates of course, include Aristophanes himself and the pompous physician Eryximachus. In his caricatures Plato drew brilliantly on these figures’ professional expertise. Even Xenophon’s much tamer Symposium includes bantering, joviality, and selfmockery.¹⁹ The symposium as an Athenian institution clearly encouraged exhibitionism along with uninhibited drinking and eroticism.²⁰ It would be nice to think that Plato’s gallery of highly individualized symposiasts tells us something about the actual self-presentation of Athenian participants in such gatherings. For the present, though, I turn to the persona that Plato confers on Socrates in the Apology. If we have any resource for identifying Socrates’ self-fashioning as a historical datum, it must be this work. Its general reliability is supported, if not guaranteed, by the fact that Plato claims to have been present in the court when Socrates delivered his defence (38b).

III In the first part of the Apology Socrates identifies himself by a series of negations. He is neither an orator nor someone experienced in the law (17b–d). He is not a ‘clever man’ (sophos anêr), someone with dangerous scientific or rhetorical expertise, as he has for many years been called, thanks to the image bestowed on him in Aristophanes’ Clouds (18b). He is not a high fee-charging, travelling teacher like Gorgias, Prodicus, and Hippias (19e). Socrates only starts to ¹⁷ Phd. 61c–d, 62c, 64e3, 65c11, 66b2. ¹⁸ The conference took place as a Langford seminar at Florida State University, Tallahassee, in November 2005. ¹⁹ Xenophon’s and Plato’s symposiasts, other than Socrates, are all different. For Xenophon’s borrowings from Plato, notwithstanding, see Dover 1965. ²⁰ See Murray 1990.

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characterize himself positively when he refers to the question his now deceased friend Chaerephon had posed to the Delphic oracle, ‘Is anyone wiser than Socrates?’, to which the oracle had responded ‘No’. Convinced of his total lack of wisdom (‘great or small’), and therefore mystified by this oracular response, but equally reluctant to disbelieve the oracular god Apollo, Socrates decided to become an investigator (zêtêtês) of the god’s meaning (21b).²¹ From this point, ‘Serving the god’, as he puts it, becomes Socrates’ principal line of defence.²² He asks the jury to regard his ‘wandering’ (planê) about Athens and cajoling random people as actions of someone labouring on the oracle’s behalf to ensure that its message concerning his wisdom not be left untested (22a). The oracle has appropriated his name, he urges, to signify the worthlessness of human wisdom (23b). Like Euripides’ Ion, the temple acolyte of Apollo in the play of that name (lines 124, 129), Socrates describes himself as someone in servitude (latreia) to the god (23c1). Being more obligated, as he says, to the divine than to the human (29d), he has become poor as well as misunderstood in this service (31c). He emphasizes his lack of worldly ambition, instancing his unconcern not only for money-making but also for household matters and for high military or political office (36b). The most prominent mark of his peculiar nature is the intermittent and unpredictable tendency to experience his daimonion, or ‘divine sign’. This is not a vision but, rather, a voice—a supernatural warning that has sometimes checked him, ever since childhood, from doing something he had intended to do, but has never told him positively what to do. Plato mentions this uniquely Socratic feature in several dialogues, most fully and emphatically in the Apology. Here Socrates adduces it both as something that stopped him from entering politics (31c), and by its absence on this day, as an indication that he has acted well in all that he has said and done during the trial (39e).²³ No careful reader of the Apology can miss Socrates’ claims that he stands in a special relation to divinity (theos), which is actually the last word of Plato’s text, where it refers to the notion that god alone knows what happens to us when we die.²⁴ The oracular response to his friend Chaerephon, Socrates’ mission to interpret and serve the god, the intermittent visitations of his protective daimonion, and his professed conviction that no harm can come to the good man, in life or after death—all of these are de facto rebuttals of the indictment of undermining the state’s religion and corrupting the youth. The mentions of divinity also indicate how and why Socrates is such a singular instance of self-fashioning. In order to live well, so he claims, you need to turn inward to your soul, i.e. care how

²¹ Athens employed an official group of so-called zêtêtai, ‘detectives’, to investigate offences on the city’s behalf. ²² I count seventeen mentions of the oracle or commitment to the god in the Apology. ²³ See ch. 7 below. ²⁴ See ch. 8 below.

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you fashion your internal essence (30a). As the self-described and divinely sent gadfly to the Athenian citizenry, Socrates also professes to be the model of someone who cares for his self, meaning someone who elevates spiritual values over material goods, and knows himself to owe higher obligations to the divine domain than to the secular world. Plato’s Socrates is not generally so rhetorical and solemn as he is in the Apology, nor is he generally so assured and insistent over his ministerial and devotional identity. In the playful dialogue Phaedrus, uniquely situated outside the city boundary, Plato has Socrates say (230a):²⁵ I can’t as yet know myself, as the inscription at Delphi enjoins; and as long as that ignorance remains it seems to me ridiculous to inquire into extraneous matters. Consequently I . . . direct my inquiries . . . rather to myself, to discover whether I am a more convoluted beast and more steamed-up than Typhon, or a gentler creature, whose natural allotment is something divine and un-steamed up.

Here we encounter a very different Socrates from the religiously insistent and commanding figure of the Apology. To be sure, every Platonic dialogue that includes Socrates shows him in a somewhat different guise from every other dialogue, whether it is the highly erotic Socrates of the Lysis, the sting ray of the Meno, the midwife of the Theaetetus, the possibly ‘one true statesman’ of the Gorgias (521d6), and so forth.²⁶ Plato must have been deeply concerned to vary his publicized images of Socrates. He changes details of Socrates’ persona as he shifts between contexts and characters. But all the while his Socrates retains enough consistency to represent a single, singular, and credible figure, a figure, moreover, who is self-aware and enjoys making bold and self-mocking impressions. As readers and teachers of Plato, we typically start with the Apology. What happens to Socrates if instead we view him in mid life, as it were, in the contexts of the Protagoras, Meno, and Gorgias? Do we here encounter the divinely mandated civic agitator of the Apology? Hardly. In the defence speech Socrates presents himself as both a tireless and aggressive interrogator of persons with pretensions to moral knowledge and as a persistent sermonizer, preaching the need to perfect one’s intellectual and ethical self. Plato sometimes give us echoes of this kind of Socrates elsewhere, especially in the Clitopho and also in the myth of post-mortem judgement that concludes the Gorgias; but the Apology’s Socrates is a far cry from the more approachable and engaging figure whom Plato tends to present elsewhere, the witty and tough-minded debater, annoyingly persistent perhaps, but no preacher.

²⁵ See ch. 2 above, p. 26.

²⁶ See Long 1998.

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Rather than someone you might encounter wandering around and bugging individuals in the Athenian agora, Plato’s Socrates is typically, as the religious fanatic Euthyphro says (Euth. 2a), to be found in the Lyceum, or at a wrestling school, or in the house of a wealthy figure like Callias or Cephalus.²⁷ Some of his conversation partners, for instance Euthyphro and Meno, are devastatingly refuted, but that would be a misleading description of Socrates, taking Plato’s dialogues generally. Judging simply from the Apology, one would have no idea of Socrates’ popularity with famous members of the Athenian elite, except for Plato and his family, or of his apparent enjoyment at conversing with the sophists. By 399 BC many of the great sophists were dead, as were Alcibiades and Plato’s second cousin Critias, to whose youthful associations with Socrates Xenophon attributes the unpopularity that brought Socrates to trial (Memorabilia 1.2. 12–26). If we set aside the works of Plato that we call ‘the last days of Socrates’, the remainder of the Socratic dialogues are largely set in the carefree Athens of the years 440–31. The Apology is both a declamatory masterpiece, and Plato’s least typical representation of Socrates, by its being a monologue. While we should assign some of the work’s rhetoric to Plato’s pen, we can plausibly suppose that the historical Socrates did play up his religious and philanthropic identity at his trial because it was his best and most obvious line of defence. This does not make his presentation insincere or incompatible with his private self; what it makes it is incomplete. As Burnet observes in his commentary on the Apology, Socrates appears to have been known as a sophos by the age of thirty ‘and even earlier. It is wrong, therefore, to regard his self-professed mission to the Athenians (on which he lays such stress in his defence speech) as the whole of his activity.’²⁸ The young Socrates seems to have associated with many intellectuals. These included not only the famous sophists, with whom Plato presents him conversing in his dialogues, but also Archelaus, the only homegrown philosopher from Athens prior to Socrates himself, and allegedly a follower of Anaxagoras.²⁹ In Phaedo 97b–98b Socrates reports his early enthusiasm for Anaxagoras’ cosmology and his subsequent disappointment when Anaxagoras failed to fulfil his hopes of learning from him why it is good for the world to be the way it is. If we presume that the young Socrates had had interests in the scientific pursuits practiced by Anaxagoras and Archelaus, we can surmise that one important motivation for his subsequent selffashioning was in strong reaction against their brand of empirical investigation.³⁰ ²⁷ Callias’s house, the scene of the Protagoras, is also the setting of Xenophon’s Symposium. ²⁸ Burnet 1924, 91. ²⁹ DL 2.19. See Betegh 2016. ³⁰ Xenophon, however, gives the impression that Socrates had always been contemptuous of empirical science as a waste of time (Mem. 4.7.5–8). According to the meagre ancient evidence (DL 2.16), Archelaus was also interested in ethics, but that may be a retrojection onto him of the philosophical field that Socrates was famously reputed to have pioneered.

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More seminal, I surmise, for the development of Socrates’ persona was his still stronger reaction against the expensive training for political success offered by the likes of Protagoras. Plato’s dialogue of that name shows us a Socrates aged a little under forty encountering the considerably older and more renowned Protagoras at the house of Callias, and meeting Hippias and Prodicus there as well. As many readers notice, while Plato satirizes the sophists themselves he does not let Socrates come off entirely well either. In his conversations with Protagoras Socrates uses some egregiously fallacious arguments and behaves as much like a prima donna as the sophist does. I think Plato wants us to see a mature Socrates still in the making here—someone trying to contrast himself with the sophists by his question-and-answer methodology but not yet doing so with complete confidence and conviction. Interestingly, no sophists are present either at Plato’s or Xenophon’s Symposiums. Xenophon, however, (1.5) alludes to the fees Callias the host has paid out to Protagoras, Gorgias, and Prodicus. This reads like an inter-textual allusion to Plato’s Protagoras. By omitting the sophists from these gatherings, both authors let Socrates reveal his idiosyncratic persona without any counterpoint from his most obvious intellectual rivals. Socrates had been accused of being an impious sophist and a danger to the state’s established ideology. Both Plato and Xenophon, despite their considerable differences in tone and substance, defended Socrates posthumously by emphasizing his religiosity and his distance from rhetoric and scientific speculation. Up to a point, then, we can situate Socrates’ self-presentation within his Athenian social context; but it must have had at least as much to do with his innate genius as with anything we can try to explain in terms of cultural tendencies or deliberate contrivance. The complexity of his persona is mirrored in the divergent and partial ways his leading associates carried forward and interpreted his intellectual and social legacy. In Plato himself, and in Aristippus and Antisthenes (the other leading acolytes of Socrates), we see instances of a new kind of self-fashioning for the Greek world—modelling one’s life, or at least one’s values and ideals, on the example of a great teacher, as we saw with Epictetus at the beginning of this chapter. In conclusion I will focus on Antisthenes and his presumed influence on Diogenes and the Cynic tradition.

IV Plato, who was a bit younger than Antisthenes, mentions his being present with Socrates on the final day (Phd. 59b), and that is all. But Xenophon, who alludes only once to Plato (Mem. 3.6.1), gives Antisthenes a major role in his Symposium and seemingly makes him Socrates’ favourite follower in that setting. When each member of the party is asked to state what his special brand of wisdom consists in,

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Antisthenes (4.34) nominates wealth, by which he means, paradoxically, poverty: through practising disdain for money and property, he actually possesses wealth and also leisure (like an Athenian gentleman) thanks to self-sufficiency, contentment, and frugality. There is no evidence that Antisthenes went around Athens with the later Cynic’s begging bowl and blanket, or slept rough (he seems to have had a regular address); and no reason to think that he went out of his way to provoke and insult people, as Diogenes became notorious for doing. Yet while Antisthenes was probably encouraged in his austerity by the example of Socrates (DL 6.2), he appears to have made a fetish of it in a way that Socrates himself did not. For all Socrates’ idiosyncrasy, he remained a family man, with still very young sons at his death aged seventy. He did not go out of his way to shock his fellow citizens. It is hard to imagine Plato’s Socrates saying, as Xenophon makes Antisthenes say: ‘If my body feels the need for sexual intercourse I am so content with what is available that any women I approach welcome me with open arms, because nobody else will go near them’ (Symp. 4.38). If this is not exhibitionism, it is clearly an inversion of standard Athenian etiquette. While Diogenes may never have met Antisthenes, his hippy lifestyle and contempt for convention must have been strongly inspired by Antisthenes’ cult of poverty and self-sufficiency.³¹ Plato is supposed to have described Diogenes as ‘Socrates gone mad’ (DL 6.54). One would like this clever saying to be true, but it may be simply a product of the media circus that surrounded Diogenes. We have no way of securely sifting the authentic anecdotes from those that were simply invented because people liked to imagine Diogenes as a comic-strip figure like superman. What we can affirm is Diogenes’ brilliant use of exhibitionism to enact his slogan of ‘defacing the currency’, by such attention-grabbing moments as eating raw meat, going around with a lantern during daytime ‘to look for a (real) man’, masturbating in public, and so forth. Rather than positioning himself in relation to Socrates, Diogenes preferred to liken himself to mythological models, such as Homer’s beggarly but resourceful Odysseus and the monster slaying Heracles.³² With his clowning and sarcasm Diogenes poked fun at social norms. He also promulgated a so-called ‘natural’, yet rational, life liberated from cultural constraints. In these respects he not only set the tone for Crates and the ensuing Cynic tradition, but also shaped the radical utopianism of early Stoicism.³³

³¹ On Antisthenes and Diogenes, see Long 1996e, Long 1999, 623–29, and Prince 2006. Romm 1996, 131–2, looks to ‘the satirical barbarian figures of archaic Greek ethnography and travel literature’ (e.g. Anacharsis) as pre-Cynic models for Antisthenes and Diogenes. The principal philosophical butts of fourth-century Attic comedy are roaming bare-footed, dirty, vegetarian Pythagoreans, on whom see the texts of Middle Comedy excerpted at DK 58E. ³² DL 6.50. See Hoistad 1949. ³³ On Crates and his influence on Zeno, founder of Stoicism, see Long 1996, 41–5, 1999, 629–3, and 2018b.

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There is a welcome tendency in recent scholarship to identify a serious philosophy of life that underlay Diogenes’ exhibitionism.³⁴ Taking that to be well established and in no need of amplification here, I want to ask in conclusion what Diogenes’ exhibitionism may tell us concerning the possibilities and circumstances of self-fashioning in mid fourth-century Athens, a few decades after the deaths of Socrates and Alcibiades. Diogenes, a native of Sinope on the Black Sea, is reputed to have visited Corinth, Sparta, and Olympia (DL 6.60), but he made Athens his second home and became a huge celebrity there. Rather than getting him into trouble, his rude rebukes and drop-out lifestyle seem to have endeared him to the community. Could one imagine Diogenes at Athens a century earlier, and could he have gotten away with it if he had been a native Athenian? Any answers to these questions are obviously speculative, but I incline to respond negatively to them. Being a legal alien at Athens, a professed ‘cosmopolitan’ (meaning ‘a citizen of no community’) and seemingly a loner, living on the margins of a highly socialized community, Diogenes fell outside the social structures within which Socrates had lived his controversial but thoroughly Athenian life.³⁵ Diogenes played the role of the intriguing and outrageous outsider. Apart from that, there are three further ways in which Diogenes comes across as an early Hellenistic rather than a classical Greek personality. One of these ways is his acknowledged status, however way-out, as a ‘philosopher’. This is evident in his positioning himself as a critic of other philosophers, especially Plato (DL 6.24–5, 40, 53), and in his influence on those who came to be called Cynics after him. He mocked Plato’s most famous theory, that of abstract and paradigmatic forms, by saying: ‘I can see table, and wine cup’, but not tablehood and winecupness’ (DL 6.53). Still better, when Plato defined man as a two-legged and featherless animal, Diogenes supposedly plucked a hen, brought it into the classroom, and said: ‘Here is Plato’s man.’ The second early Hellenistic feature of Diogenes is his paradoxical status as a ‘king’, who professes his role to be one of ‘ruling over men’ (DL 6.29). In rejecting all external appurtenances of wealth and power and rank, while insisting on his freedom and autonomy, Diogenes secured his status among Cynics as the only true king. That striking inversion of literal kingship would hardly have occurred in Periclean Athens. Even if our record exaggerates the encounters between Diogenes and Alexander the Great, Diogenes’ name is also linked to those of other contemporary kings, including Philip and Perdiccas of Macedon (DL 6.43–4). While the handsome Alcibiades was Plato’s antithetical lover of Socrates, the Cynic tradition made Alexander the Great Diogenes’ most striking opposite, supposedly having

³⁴ See especially Wildberg 2019. ³⁵ On Diogenes’ contribution to the idea of cosmopolitanism, see Long 2008.

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Alexander say that he would have chosen to be Diogenes if he could not have been Alexander. The third feature I find anticipatory of Hellenistic Greece is Diogenes’ selfconsciously theatrical and literary stance, by which I mean not just his exhibitionism but also his supposed authorship of seven tragedies and his drawing upon tragedy to identify himself, as in these anonymously cited lines (DL 6.38): ‘cityless, homeless, without a native land, beggar, vagrant, who lives by the day’. His follower Crates, like some other Hellenistic figures with Cynic affinity, parodied Homer for philosophical purposes.³⁶ We don’t hear about this kind of bookishness in Socrates’ day. In one respect, though, Diogenes looks strongly back to the Greece of Socrates’ own day—his partial affinity to the sophists. The Socrates of Plato and Xenophon had deep theological commitments, but our best evidence for Diogenes makes him an entirely secular figure. His contempt for convention probably extended to all forms of religious worship—to anything, in fact, that owed its authority to merely local as distinct from ‘natural’ norms. In this regard Diogenes was heir to the attention-grabbing sophists. It was they, not Socrates, who had challenged laws and conventions in the name of nature, and Diogenes, in his flagrantly exhibitionist way, followed suit by pitting physis against nomos. While Epictetus gave Cynics the theological role of being God’s reforming messenger, that was a scarcely convincing effort by later Roman Stoics to domesticate and incorporate them into the Stoic camp. Unlike Socrates, with his Delphic mission and daimonion, Diogenes probably sympathized with Protagoras’ radical agnosticism as to the existence or non-existence of gods. In any case we can be sure that Diogenes was less threatening to Athenian religiosity than Socrates with his convictions that divinity is accessible not in temple and ritual but in the voice of reason and obedience to moral norms.³⁷ Diogenes, as I have readily acknowledged, offered an impressive and influential challenge to Greek social and ethical conventions. We can interpret his exhibitionism as instrumental to that end, but was it effective, and was it an essential accompaniment of his intellectual iconoclasm? Unlike Socrates’ idiosyncrasy, Diogenes’ buffoonery seems to have been marginal to the impact that his ideas, as distinct from his lifestyle, exerted on Zeno and the early Stoic tradition. The more Diogenes exposed himself as the authentically natural man, the more he may have looked like a play-it-safe exhibitionist and joker rather than a radical reformer and innovator. One can see why it was the uncompromising Socrates who ran into serious trouble.

³⁶ As did most strikingly Timon the Pyrrhonist; see Long 2006, ch. 4. ³⁷ See ch. 8 below, p. 141.

7 Socrates’ Divine Sign One of the strangest features of Socrates’ personality was his claim to experience the warnings of a daimonion, a divine voice or sign, that came to him privately and unpredictably, generally when he was about to perform some action. It has often been supposed that it was Socrates’ divine sign that instigated his indictment for impiety and theological innovation.¹ However that may be, the daimonion strongly contributed to the general sense of Socrates’ strangeness even among those who did not see him as a threat to religious tradition. In this chapter I ask what we should make of Socrates’ daemonic experience. How does it comport with his professed commitment to live a self-examined life, acting always and only on the basis of what he finds, on careful reflection, to be the best of reasons?

I Socrates was raised in a polytheistic society whose religious practices were grounded in ritual, ceremony, and sacrifice. Divinities were believed, through their statues, to be visibly accessible by inhabiting the temples dedicated to them, and to deliver signs of their favour or disfavour through auspices, dreams, and oracles. Interpretation of such signs was the profession of priests and necromancers. The Delphic priestess was presumed to be directly inspired by Apollo and thus have exceptional access to a divine mind. Ordinary persons, unlike Socrates, did not hear or expect to hear the voice of a divinity. How did Socrates position himself in regard to this religious culture? On the one hand, as we can see in Plato’s Euthyphro, he was strongly opposed to an uncritical acceptance of traditional stories concerning the Olympian deities. Rather than viewing these gods as erratic and competing superpowers, Socrates appears to have had a conception of divinity as always benevolent, truthful, authoritative, and wise.² In his notion of the divine, a god never lies or cheats or acts for any purpose other than the best. How could Socrates be convinced of a theological outlook that was so different from that of his society in general? The answer seems to be that he took divinity to operate according to the highest standards of rationality: if we, by the use of our own intellects, could figure out the ¹ See Plato, Euth. 3b5 and Xenophon, Mem. 1.1.2. Against this supposition, see ch. 8, p. 141 below. ² See Xenophon, Mem. 4.3.10–14, Plato, Rep. 2.382e6.

Selfhood and Rationality in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Heraclitus to Plotinus. A. A. Long, Oxford University Press. © A. A. Long 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198803393.003.0008

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right thing to do or to believe with compelling reasons, we would have reliable grounds for invoking divinity’s approval. On the other hand, Socrates’ rationalistic posture did not lead him to reject traditional beliefs in divine communication through dreams and oracles. Plato represents him, at the beginning of the Phaedo (60e), ‘making music’ in obedience to a type of dream he has often had, a dream he takes to have a divine origin; and in the Apology (21b) Socrates emphatically declares that his reason for going around Athens and interrogating people was to try to understand why the oracular response delivered to his friend Chaerephon had declared no one to be wiser than himself. The oracle had puzzled Socrates, because he was convinced that he lacked authentic wisdom; rather than dismiss it, he supposed that the god could not lie, and therefore it was incumbent on him to uncover the obscure truth in the divine words. Neither Plato nor Xenophon offers us much by way of psychological commentary on Socrates’ daemonic experience. They are consistent, however, in describing it as the intermittent voice or sign from a god, and Plato sometimes has Socrates refer to it as ‘the customary divine sign’ (Eud. 272e4, Phdr. 242b9). Plato’s fullest account of it (Ap. 31c–d) occurs in the context of Socrates’ explaining to the jurors at his trial why he has lived a strictly private life: The reason for this is something you have heard me frequently mention in different places—namely, the fact that I experience something divine and daemonic, as Meletus has inscribed in his indictment, by way of mockery. It started in my childhood, the occurrence of a particular voice. Whenever it occurs, it always deters me from the course of action I was intending to engage in, but it never gives me positive advice.³ It is this that has opposed my practising politics, and I think its doing so has been absolutely fine.

Socrates then gives the members of the jury an explicit justification for the correctness of the sign’s warning him not to pursue a political life. His reported order of events is as follows: first, Socrates thought he should enter politics; next, the sign told him not to do so; next, he obeyed the sign by refraining from politics; finally and retrospectively he figured out why the sign’s prohibition has proven correct. Typically, Plato’s Socrates says that the opposition of the daimonion occurs immediately after he has formed an intention to do the opposite of what the divine voice subsequently prohibits. The implication is that Socrates is told not to do

³ According to Xenophon (Mem. 1.1.4), the sign gave Socrates explicitly positive as well as negative injunctions, and did so not only for himself but also for his friends. I shall say nothing about this difference from Plato’s reports (setting aside the probably inauthentic Theages 128d1, according to which the sign did give Socrates admonitions concerning friends).

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what he previously thought he had good reason to do. We can observe the emphasis on his checked intention in Plato Phdr. 242b9 and Eud. 272e1. Socrates also takes the sign’s absence and silence to give him a positive endorsement of what he is doing (Plato, Ap. 40a4).⁴ Socrates, of course, was far from unique in hearing prohibitive or prescriptive voices that impact the mind without the mediation of uttered speech. St. Paul and St. Joan are two powerful figures who also laid claim to having such paranormal visitations. There must be a large psychological literature on such experiences. I have not made use of it, but I shall assume that in the saintly and Socratic instances we are not dealing with shamming, derangement, or simple selfdeception. We should credit Socrates and the others with experiences that were not dream-like but palpable, vivid, and endowed with sufficient semantic content to be understood, or at least representable to consciousness, in ordinary language.

II We can study Socrates’ daimonion from several perspectives. First and foremost, by pursuing the clues presented by Plato and Xenophon, we can ask, in a purely psychological and non-historical way, what kind of experience Socrates attributed to the divine sign’s mediation, and how this experience impacted his consciousness. In other words, we can ask what seems to have been going on in Socrates’ head, or what he understood to be going on in his head, when he described himself as hearing the daemonic voice. Secondly, we can ask whether Socrates’ reports of this experience and his responses to it cohere with the philosophical and theological commitments that, according to Plato, systematically guided his life. Such commitments would include (1) his trust in the truth of the Delphic oracle; (2) his respect for dreams and other forms of divination; and (3) his practice of elenctic argument by question and answer, with a view to examining his own and his interlocutors’ opinions concerning the virtues and the best way to live one’s life. Thirdly, we can pursue a strictly historical inquiry into the cultural context pertaining to the daimonion, by which I include the presumptions that Plato, Xenophon, and Plutarch made in guiding their readers’ interpretations of Socrates’ experience. We today probably suppose that people who claim regularly to hear a divine voice are simply insane or seriously deluded. Yet, none of Socrates’ contemporaries or later interpreters, apparently, took him to be mad, though they found him distinctly peculiar in this respect as in many other ways. From this perspective, we can ask whether readers in antiquity supposed Socrates to be ⁴ For further texts that refer to Socrates’ divine sign, see Plato, Tht. 151a3, Rep. 6.496c4, Alc. 1. 103a, and Xenophon, Mem. 4.8.1, 4.8.6, Symp. 8.5, Ap. 4.4 and 13.6.

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literally ‘out of his mind’, when he claimed to have these experiences, or, rather, to be in his mind but not in it in a way that would be inter-subjectively accessible to other people. In the next part of this chapter, I will focus on the second perspective, the coherence of Socrates’ sign experience with his professed philosophical methodology. This is the issue that has most concerned modern scholars, and therefore warrants particular attention. I shall then proceed to the first and third perspectives, on Socrates’ subjective experience and its cultural context, with a discussion of Plutarch’s essay On Socrates’ divine sign in the collection of his Moralia. At the end I will bring all three perspectives together. The value of distinguishing them should become clear after I outline the main points of modern debate.

III According to Vlastos 1991, 167, Socrates must have regarded the daimonion, just like dreams, as communicating to him through ‘extra-rational channels’ unlike elenctic argumentation by question and answer. Vlastos supports this proposal by citing Apology 33c. There Socrates says: ‘The practice of interrogating those who think they are wise, but actually are not, has been commanded to me, as I maintain, by the god through divinations and through dreams and every other means through which divine apportionment has ever commanded anyone to do anything.’ With this passage, which has as its context Socrates’ response to the Delphic oracle reported to him by Charephon, Vlastos juxtaposes (157) the following text, spoken by Socrates to Crito in the dialogue of that name (45b): ‘Not now for the first time, but always, I am the sort of man who is persuaded by nothing in me except the proposition (logos) which appears to me to be the best when I reason (logizómenôi) about it.’ Vlastos then asks whether we can reconcile these seemingly divergent and equally unconditional commitments—on the one hand to follow ‘critical reason’ wherever it may lead and, on the other hand, to obey commands issued through supernatural, extra-rational signs (171). Taking Socrates to view his sign experience in the way he assesses other instances of divination, where the diviner is ‘out of his mind’, Vlastos rejects the idea that Socrates took himself to have ‘two distinct systems of justified belief ’. We should not suppose that Socrates ‘would look to the intimations of his daimonion as a source of moral knowledge apart from reason and superior to it, yielding the certainty which is conspicuously lacking in the findings of his elenctic searches?’ (167). There need be no conflict between Socrates’ commitments to obey the divine sign and to engage in the elenchus ‘because only by the use of his own critical reason can Socrates determine the true meaning of any of these signs’ (171). Vlastos justifies this interpretation by privileging the Crito passage for exclusive evidence of Socrates’ notion of

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reason—namely, as that which can be submitted to the strictly fallible procedure of elenctic testing. Accordingly Socrates cannot have consistently regarded mere occurrences of the daimonion as rational and reliable sources of moral knowledge. The most that he could get from it is ‘subjective reassurance’ supplementary to, but never capable of challenging, his own reasoning (Smith and Woodruff 2000, 191). McPherran 1996, 189 follows Vlastos in characterizing the daimonion as an ‘extra-rational’ phenomenon. He also goes part way toward Vlastos’ position in proposing that, whenever possible, Socrates subjects the sign to ‘rational confirmation’ (187). The sign, according to McPherran, does not provide Socrates with ‘expert’ moral knowledge, but, contra Vlastos, we should view it as an ‘extrarational’ source ‘for the construction of particular moral knowledge claims that are themselves rationally grounded, if not wholly rational in origin’ (191).⁵ Unlike Vlastos, however, McPherran credits the sign with sufficient epistemic significance to challenge the ‘exclusive authority of secular reason’ (194). Not unfairly, he says that for Vlastos the sign is taken to be no more than a ‘hunch’ (191). My own sympathies are largely with McPherran. In particular, I agree with his writing (195) that Vlastos was not warranted in assimilating the status of Socrates’ sign consciousness to the ‘out of the mind’ condition he accords to dreams and other prophecies. Moreover, by calling the sign’s effects on Socrates ‘reassurance’, Vlastos reverses the order of events because the sign, when it occurs, does not reassure Socrates about any of his prior beliefs but abruptly checks his prior intentions. What the daimonion gives to Socrates is not the kind of generalized true belief about moral concepts that Socrates sought by reasoning with his interlocutors but intuitive certainty concerning the incorrectness of a quite particular action he was contemplating. This intuitive certainty is something quite different from the full-blooded moral knowledge that Socrates consistently disclaimed having. Hence, I don’t think Vlastos need have worried about the sign’s conflicting with Socrates’ practice of the elenchus. Even McPherran, however, concedes too much to Vlastos in supposing that the sign should be called an ‘extra-rational’ phenomenon. If, of course, we take the extra-rational to include anything that has an allegedly divine source, or anything that is not established by discursive reasoning, that description would be correct. However, its correctness seems to me to be highly questionable, for two considerations, one historical and the other philosophical. The historical consideration is

⁵ McPherran 1996, 188, refers to Ap. 33c7–8 where Socrates says that his mission to engage in elenctic testing has been warranted ‘by the god and from prophecies and dreams and in every way by which a divine dispensation to do anything has been appointed to a human being to do’, and adds that such commands are both ‘true and well-grounded (euelencta)’. It may seem as if the daimonion must be included among such commands, but we should note that Socrates’ statement explicitly refers to positive commands and not to negative injunctions, which are the only province of the divine sign’s work in Plato’s dialogues.

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that Plato believed, and very likely Socrates believed, that the divine voice is quintessentially rational and that human rationality is itself a divine gift.⁶ The philosophical objection is that the divine sign or voice appears to deliver messages with semantic, if not fully propositional, content. Indeed Vlastos accepts that the sign tells Socrates not to do this or that in Greek words he can understand (Smith and Woodruff 2000, 185). Plato does not represent Socrates as taking the voice of the daimonion to be analogous to a mere hunch or feeling; rather, what it delivers to him is something of the form ‘Don’t do what you had thought of doing’, or, as Brickhouse and Smith say (1994), ‘Stop here and now’, or perhaps better than either of these formulations—to do justice to Socrates’ sometimes associating the sign with prophecy—we should hypothesize its form as that of a conditional: ‘If you do what you are minded on doing, you will not act rightly, or, you will fail to fare well.’ If Socrates was as committed to rationality as Vlastos proposes, it becomes very hard to see how he could honour this commitment unless he regarded the voice of the daimonion, which he always instantly obeys, as rationally sourced and grounded. We may worry, as Vlastos does, about the lack of any accompanying explanations; and we should distinguish (as Brickhouse and Smith 2005 carefully do (194–5)) between Socrates’ own ratiocinations and the peremptory voice of the daimonion. But it seems arbitrary to regard its prohibitions as simply falling within the domain of the extra-rational. I sympathize with Brickhouse and Smith (2005) where they say (193) ‘we must not simply assume that Socrates would consider the monitions of his daimonion as non-rational signs’, and I equally sympathize with their allowing such monitions to count as giving him a reason to be persuaded of something.⁷ Thus far, then, I have confirmed my initial proposal that Socrates took his rationality and religiosity to be fully consistent with one another. What Vlastos and his critics leave quite undetermined, however, is the psychological nature of Socrates’ divine sign experience and the channels of communication by which the divine voice reaches him. For suggestions about these matters I turn to Plutarch, writing some four hundred and fifty years after Plato and Xenophon.

IV In his work De genio Socratis, Plutarch offers accounts of Socrates’ experience that run the gamut from reductive rationalization to other worldly revelation.⁸ We are ⁶ Xenophon has Socrates, in answer to a question about the daimonion, say that ‘the human soul partakes of divinity’ (Mem. 4.3.14). ⁷ For further details of the issues debated between Vlastos, McPherran, and Smith and Brickhouse, see Smith and Woodruff 2000. ⁸ The best text of this work is the Loeb edition of Einarson/De Lacy 1959.

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not obliged to find anything that Plutarch says authoritative since he was in no better position than we are to make sense of the divine sign. Nonetheless, Plutarch’s essay is not only of great interest historically and conceptually. It also anticipates the modern debate I have summarized concerning the question of whether Socrates’ rationality and interrogative (or elenctic) practice is compatible with his according independent authority to the divine sign. Socrates’ divine sign provides Plutarch with his essay’s title, but this theme is actually ancillary to the work as a whole.⁹ Composed largely as a dialogue between numerous persons, including the Simmias of Plato’s Phaedo, its main frame is a report at Athens of a Theban conspiracy that liberated the city from Spartan rule in 379 . Soon after we first encounter the conspirators, they start to discuss mysterious findings at the excavation of a tomb. They then learn that an Italian Pythagorean is about to arrive, on a mission inspired by dreams and apparitions, to collect the remains of a certain Lysis, from that person’s tomb, ‘unless forbidden by some daimonion in the night’ (579F). On hearing this, one of the company, called Galaxidorus, protests about the prevalence of superstition and more especially about the tendency for prominent persons to give a bogus veneer of sanctity to what are, in reality, their quite ordinary thoughts. Authentic philosophy, he says, relies exclusively on reason for its ethical teaching. Witness Socrates’ devotion to unadorned truth (580A–B). To the objection that he is supporting Meletus’ indictment against Socrates, Galaxidorus responds by saying that Socrates was no atheist. But, unlike the ravings of Pythagoras and Empedocles, he relied entirely on ‘sober reasoning’. This rationalistic retort provokes his interlocutor to ask about Socrates’ divine sign, which he claims to have observed giving a salutary warning to Socrates when he was engaged in discussion with Euthyphro (580C). Galaxidorus responds scornfully (580F): ‘Do you really think that Socrates’ daimonion had some special and extraordinary power?’ He proposes that the sign, though quite trivial in itself, enabled Socrates to act in the context of matters too obscure for reason to decide, just as a sneeze or chance remark, in the case of a strongminded person, may turn the balance of two equally strong opposing reasons.¹⁰ On this account, Socrates’ sign was no more than a hunch, supplementing his normal ratiocinations when he had to deal with matters intractable to them. We may call Galaxidorus a proto-Vlastos interpreter, since he clearly takes the sign to be an extrarational phenomenon, though not necessarily a supernatural occurrence. Not surprisingly, this highly reductive account of the sign is challenged, on the ground that it puts Socrates in the same position as ordinary people who only

⁹ Among the works I have consulted on De genio, the most useful are Corlu 1970 and Babut 1988. ¹⁰ Plutarch was probably influenced by Xenophon, who says (Mem. 1.1.9) that Socrates recommended learning what is accessible to us, and seeking to discover what is not ‘clear’ to humans through divination.

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resort to chance events when deciding between trivial alternatives (581F). Galaxidorus defends his claim, but he concedes the need to say why Socrates gave the sign such an exalted name. The basic point about the sign, he says, is not that Socrates was wrong to call it daimonion (rather than a sneeze), but that it was merely an instrument used by the sign-giver (582C). Galaxidorus now, apparently, accepts or concedes the sign’s divine origin, but sticks to his claim that it presented itself as a mere hunch and not as a thought with semantic content. We may infer that he would have agreed with Vlastos that the sign demands from Socrates his own interpretation of its full meaning and truth value. Galaxidorus does not leave matters there. He is ready to listen to Simmias, who is better informed about what people at Athens have said about Socrates’ sign. After many pages, during which discussion returns to the conspiracy, Simmias gives his account (chapter 20) as a report of a much earlier discussion concerning the sign that he had had with others, who purport to have included Socrates’ immediate circle (588C–D).

V I now summarize Simmias’ account, and interpose my own comments. 1. Socrates offered no answer as to the essential nature of the sign (588B–C). In light of his regular dismissal of people’s reports of having had visual encounters with the divine, and his strong interest in those who claimed to hear a (special) voice, Simmias and his friends tentatively concluded as follows: Socrates’ daimonion was not a vision, but the perception of a voice or the intuition (noêsis) of a discourse (logos) that made contact with him (synaptomenos) in a strange way (588C–D). The Greek words I have highlighted are repeated throughout Simmias’ account. There are three main points: logos, which is the sign itself (or voice); its contact or conversation with Socrates; and his apprehension of its content. 2. Next, Simmias explains the strangeness of the sign’s communication with Socrates, on the presumption that he did not literally hear a divine voice. When dreaming, people may imagine they are hearing because they get semblances (doxai) and intuitions (noêseis) of certain discourses; for without hearing actual utterances, dreamers get the sense of statements included in their dream experience. Ordinary people, when awake, are too distracted and emotional to focus their minds on the significations (dêloumenois) that may be communicated to them ‘from superior powers’, as they may be able to do during sleep. ‘But Socrates, thanks to his having a nous that was pure (katharos) and free from passion (apathês, and to his minimal involvement with his bodily needs, was easy to contact (euaphês) and sufficiently sensitive (leptos) to respond immediately to what he experienced’ (588D–E). Simmias conjectures that what Socrates

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experienced was a voiceless daimôn’s reason (logos) that made contact with his noetic faculty ‘just by its signification’ (dêloumenon).¹¹ I shall not pursue questions about Plutarch’s sources for this account.¹² What I find chiefly interesting about it is its attempt to give a plausibly naturalistic interpretation to Socrates’ sign experience, while also acknowledging its divine source. No doubt we want to interpolate the qualification, ‘what Socrates and Simmias take to be its divine source’, and no doubt we also want to question the presumption concerning communicative superior powers. But neither Vlastos nor Galaxidorus questions Socrates’ good faith in such beliefs; and it would not be useful for us to do so. Socrates was notorious for his ascetic lifestyle, and we had better accept the fact that he, like other ascetics, was subject to certain paranormal experiences. It is quite reasonable for Simmias to credit Socrates with an exceptionally sensitive mentality and to look to it as an explanatory factor of his allegedly divine visitations. At the same time, Simmias does a good job in demystifying the psychological features of Socrates’ experience. It had something in common with the way we receive and apprehend voiceless statements in dreams, but with the difference that Socrates’ sign could reach him when he was fully awake. Simmias wisely refrains from speculating about what kind of semantic content the sign communicated to Socrates. He was no less wise, in my opinion, to refrain from asking how we should reconcile Socrates’ obedience to the intermittent sign with his elenctic practice and disavowals of knowledge. It is better to bracket those questions. Instead, we may follow Galaxidorus in supposing that the sign manifested itself to Socrates in moments when he found himself seriously divided over the right course of action to follow (having second thoughts, as it were) or found himself checked in executing an intention, whether it was something as weighty as the question of entering political life or as marginal as that of crossing the Ilissus river (Phdr. 242b9). Simmias’ story is helpful because it rejects the notion that the sign was a mere hunch. He credits it with semantic content, unlike Galaxidorus. Yet, far from seeing it as an extra-rational source of information, he views it as a fully intelligible and intelligent message, impinging directly on Socrates’ intellect. We again will be inclined to say that the messenger must have been Socrates’ subconscious or something purely internal to himself. Socrates, on the other hand, like the saints I have mentioned, presumably took its deliverances to have an authority and source that distinguished them from his ordinary states of consciousness. Thus far I have outlined only the preamble of Simmias’ account. The fresh points that he makes underline the rationality of the sign and the rationality of the ¹¹ Cicero, De div. 1.121 already makes the point about Socrates’ purity of soul enabling him to experience his daimonion when awake. Whether via Plutarch, or some other source, Calcidius repeats the entire gist of Simmias’ account in his Timaeus commentary; see Einarson and DeLacy 1959, 451 note. ¹² For assessment of the conflicting proposals scholars have canvassed, see Corlu 1970, 57–9.

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mind receiving it. In ordinary conversation, Simmias tells us, we are constrained to listen to the logos that we receive through our ears (588E). But in the case of an exceptional individual, like Socrates, communication from the divine source occurs without constraint. Such a recipient’s intellect is not impacted by vocalized sounds but simply ‘touched’ by the thought that is being transmitted. Undisturbed by passion, the exceptional soul allows itself to be freely ‘relaxed or tensed’ by the superior intellect’s intervention. Simmias offers homely physical analogies for the way a slight force can modify the motion of a large body. He then draws on the famous model of the soul presented in book 1 of Plato’s Laws (644d–645b) where the soul is likened to a puppet to which numerous strings are attached. The strings stand for our motivations (pathê), which tend to conflict with one another. One of these strings, and only one, is golden—the string of reasoning (logismos), adherence to which is equivalent to being guided by law. Because this string is gentle and not constraining, its guidance requires assistance, to prevent the other strings from dominating. That assistance, Plato seems to propose, must be something the whole self contributes if it has the appropriate structure; in which case we achieve the selfmastery that the puppet model is introduced to explicate. Plutarch echoes Plato’s terminology in his use of such words as spaô, helkô, and neura. He has Simmias characterize the human soul as something strung with numerous cords. These make it the most sensitive of instruments ‘if one contacts it according to reason (logos)’ (588F); by getting a slight impulse (rhopê), the soul moves towards the intuited object (noêthen). Simmias echoes Plato’s statement that the mind, with its lyre-like cords, is the starting point of passions and motivations. But, instead of specifying Plato’s golden cord of reasoning and its proper guidance of the soul, Simmias focuses on the cords’ ability to transmit motion to the entire embodied person. Why does he do this? The answer, as we read on, is to consolidate his earlier suggestion concerning the human intellect’s capacity to be readily contacted by what he calls ‘a superior intellect’, without the mediation of spoken words. If an ordinary thought, without being voiced, can move our bodily mass, we should suppose, a fortiori, that the unvoiced thoughts and logos of divine beings can make direct contact with persons’ souls. With echoes of Aristotle’s active intellect, Simmias likens this process to light generating a reflection (589B). Rather than regard the divine beings’ communications as too obscure to be accepted without interpretation, he treats them as being actually more luminous than thoughts expressed through nouns and verbs.¹³ ¹³ I am grateful to Michael White (who commented on my chapter at a conference in the University of Arizona) for observing that Pietro Pomponazzi (late fifteenth/early sixteenth century) interpreted Aristotle’s ‘active intellect’ as an understanding in which ‘neither discursive thought nor composition nor any other sort of motion is lodged’. On that view, with which, of course, Plotinus would sympathize, it is not discursive or propositional information that represents the norm with respect to rationality.

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As to the physics of divine communication, Simmias suggests that it is not essentially different from the way ordinary verbal sounds are transmitted (589C). In both cases air is the medium of transmission. The difference is that, in human intercommunication, the air has to be changed into language in order to convey thought to the listener. For divine beings, however, and the recipients of their messages, the air is immediately charged with daimonic thoughts, and these convey their meaning directly. Simmias’ account is replete with fantasy at this point. What is striking, none the less, is his effort to give a quasi-naturalistic interpretation to Socrates’ sign experience. While acknowledging Socrates’ exceptional mentality, he grounds his account in the general thesis that thoughts with semantic content can occur to people, not only without the mediation of spoken language but even without the mediation of sentence structure. The first claim is trivially true, whereas the second must be at least highly controversial. Still, we should want our psychology to accommodate mental states that we call inspiration or flashes of insight and intuition—meaningful thoughts that seem to come out of nowhere and yet carry complete authority. Perhaps Socrates’ sign experience was like that. In any case, whatever we make of Simmias’ account, it is salutary in its resistance to treating Socrates’ experience as something extra-rational. He ends, very intriguingly, with an anecdote to illustrate the internal harmony that enabled Socrates to receive daimonic messages when he was awake. The story went that Socrates’ father was told by an oracle to let the boy do ‘whatever came into his mind and not to constrain or divert his motivations but let them be’, and simply pray to Zeus of the Agora and the Muses (589E). Simmias takes this anecdote to imply that Socrates ‘had a better guide for life within himself than countless teachers’. Presumably the relevance of the oracle story is the statement that Socrates’ father should refrain from diverting his son’s motivations: if Socrates needs to rethink any of his intentions, he will do so for himself thanks to the daimonion. Simmias’ interpretation of the story may seem curious in light of his earlier account of the superior power’s externality (thurathen, 589B). But in a certain sense, of course, Socrates was following himself in being obedient to his daimonion. The voice or sign that he claimed to experience was internal to him; what was external was its source, or was it? Galaxidorus and Simmias assume so, as Socrates himself appears to have done. However, Plutarch’s essay has a third suggestion to report: an oracular revelation to a certain Timarchus, who had sought to learn about the nature of Socrates’ sign by incubating in a temple (590A–592E). Partly modelled on the myth with which Plato concludes the Phaedo, this passage also draws on the tripartite psychology Plato sets out in Timaeus 90a–d,

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where the rational faculty is called a daimôn.¹⁴ By applying that conception to the elucidation of Socrates’ sign, Plutarch implies that what Socrates obeyed, in adhering to his daimonion, was not a message from a quite independently existing divinity but his own nous. Socrates, we are to understand, thanks to his adherence to the rule of reason, has set his life under the direction of this daimôn, which (inhabiting a bright star!), constitutes his essential self. Plutarch represents this account, which is packed with other-worldly motifs, as a myth, and seems to give his own credence to the more naturalistic explanation of Simmias (593A). I make just two comments on the mythical account. First, it shows that one ancient line of interpretation sought to bring Socrates’ sign experience into line with Plato’s mature psychology and eschatology. Though we would hardly follow suit, this approach reminds us that Socrates’ culture, like that of Plutarch, readily invoked divinity in describing human beings and their attributes—witness the use of daimonios as a polite term of address in the expression ‘O daimonie’, which might be appropriately rendered in English by ‘You heavenly creature’. Hence my second point. While the ancients certainly took Socrates’ divine sign to be something remarkable, Socrates was remarkable and knew himself to be so. What was remarkable, in Greek culture, typically fell within the divine domain. Calling it a daimonion does not imply that he himself regarded it as a supernatural or extra-rational visitation, with all the connotations we moderns naturally attach to such a claim.

VI I conclude by returning to Vlastos and his concern to minimize the cognitive content and significance of the daimonion. That imputes to Socrates an unduly restrictive understanding of what it means to act on the basis of a compelling reason. Plato leads us to supposes that the mere occurrence of the divine voice was sufficient to make Socrates stop dead in his intended tracks. Can we make sense of that? I think we can, especially if we take note of the fact that Plato has placed the most striking references to the daimonion in the Apology, where it stops Socrates from entering politics and does not oppose his defence speech.¹⁵ Socrates is on trial for his life. He has experienced the daimonion ever since childhood. When it first occurred, presumably, it puzzled him, and he must have ¹⁴ See p. 51 above. ¹⁵ I am grateful for discussion with Michael Morgan concerning the importance of Socrates’ references to the daimonion in the context of the Apology.

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reflected a good deal on the occasions when it issued its admonitory voice. We can presume that he frequently asked himself why it inhibited his intended actions, and what it was about those intentions that needed admonition. Gradually, through experience and questioning, he became convinced that its warnings were always completely on target. The certitude that he vested in it were thus inductively warranted, like what we might call instant obedience to one’s conscience. The daimonion was not, like God commanding Abraham to sacrifice Isaac (Vlastos’ example, Smith and Woodruff 2000, 197), a voice that came once out of the blue. It was, as Plato says, a customary voice. We can presume that Socrates had learned through experience to accord it complete authority and truth, according to his conception of divinity. The daimonion did not provide him with reasons that could be formulated in terms of categorical imperatives, binding on other persons. Rather, its reliability for him was what made it rational.¹⁶ By addressing Socrates in his existential identity, it gave him, simply by its occurrence, sufficient reason to refrain from what he had been minded to do, and stimulus to figure out the grounds for its admonitions.

¹⁶ See Brickhouse and Smith 1994 for a full and convincing argument along these lines.

8 Politics and Divinity in Plato’s Republic The Form of the Good

I Plato’s dialogues engage with perennial topics. Among the most prominent of these are politics and divinity. How do these two topics, so unrelated from our modern Western perspective, fit together in his oeuvre? A third constant in most of Plato’s works is the person of Socrates. What is the importance of Socrates to Plato’s treatment of politics and divinity? In asking these two questions, I will focus on Plato’s most celebrated dialogue, Politeia in Greek, standardly and misleadingly translated as ‘Republic’ (from the Latin expression for the Roman state, ‘res publica’), but better rendered by ‘political constitution’. This translation helps us to see how Plato can move seamlessly from talking about politics to discussing the human mental and moral constitution (psychê), and vice versa. Plato’s psychology is also a politics and ethics, and his politics and ethics move back and forth into psychology.¹ Besides the Republic, set in Athens and narrated by Socrates to one or more unnamed persons (could these include the always anonymous author himself?), late in his life Plato wrote two further dialogues on politics from which he omits Socrates as an interlocutor. One of these works, entitled Statesman, sketches out the notion of the rule of law, while the other, actually called Laws and written last of all the dialogues, treats the same theme at enormous length. Plato did not write any work on theology specifically, but all three dialogues—Republic, Statesman, ¹ I am extremely grateful to Dr Fiona Leigh and her philosophy colleagues for inviting me to give this essay as the Keeling Lecture at University College London, on 18 May 2017. As a UCL graduate and former faculty member, I have special reasons to value the honour of returning to my London academic home in this way. For this published version of the lecture, I have largely retained the style of oral delivery because my aim was to make my argument accessible to a broad audience, and that continues to be my goal. Much that I say is drawn directly from Plato’s text and needs little by way of further commentary or nuance. Controversy, however, pertains and is bound to pertain to the divine status that I accord to the Form of the Good in the Republic. To set this thesis in its historical context, and to extend my argument for it beyond the limits of the lecture, I have appended a freshly written conclusion. I have benefited from comments by the Keeling audience in the Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre of UCL, and also by comments I received a week later when, as Michael Frede Memorial Lecturer, I spoke on the same topic at the British School at Athens. Andrea Nightingale, John Ferrari, Christopher Rowe, and David Sedley kindly read earlier drafts. I have gratefully attended to their responses in preparing the lecture for publication and to comments from the press reader for the 2021 collection of Keeling lectures.

Selfhood and Rationality in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Heraclitus to Plotinus. A. A. Long, Oxford University Press. © A. A. Long 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198803393.003.0009

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and Laws—draw on god, gods, or divinity generically, in their approaches to politics.² The key question for Greek political theorists was who or what should rule? In the Republic, Socrates makes access to a divine and ultimate principle (called The Form of the Good) the pinnacle of education for the philosopher rulers of his ideal community. What should rule, according to the Republic, is goodness or divinity as such, transmitted and prescribed to the community in the knowledge constitutive of philosophy. I will call this theological function, which is central to my argument, ‘metaphysical and axiological’. In the Statesman, divinity is primarily present in a fantastic story that contrasts a Golden Age of divinely governed and pre-political life with the present era in which expert statesmen and laws compensate for the absence of direct divine governance. I will call the theological function in this dialogue ‘allegorical/mythical’. In the Laws, Plato assigns gods their traditional role as the focus of community worship, but he also (in book 10) grafts on to these ritual functions elaborate and original proofs of divine causality based on the orderly motion of the heavens, as well as an ancillary proof concerning divine providence. I will call this theological function ‘religious and cosmological’. These various functions of divinity are broadly consistent with one another in the ways in which Plato uses them, and one dialogue may feature all five (as the Republic does), but they are not what we would expect from an author with completely hard and fast, or doctrinal, ideas about god. Divinity in Plato is always authoritative and absolute in what it signifies. But Plato was flexible, exploratory, and creative in the use to which he put divinity in different contexts. While he can write in the manner of a systematic philosophical theologian, as he does at the end of the Laws, or in the manner of a divine creationist, as he does in the immensely influential cosmological dialogue Timaeus, his ways of presenting and using divinity are, overall, suggestive rather than definitive. They speak to philosophical issues and address distinct philosophical contexts rather than being dogmatic and immediately imperative. I make these points because Plato’s theological creativity and audacity have been under-emphasized in recent work. Scholars write excellent studies of Plato’s conception of god or gods, but they rarely ask where he is coming from and where he is situating himself in the polytheistic and superstitious culture of Athens.³ We also need to detach ourselves from standard theological concepts (especially the essential goodness or personhood of god) in order to grasp the freshness that his divine attributes had before they were assimilated into the cultures he has profoundly influenced. Let me explain. ² The bibliography on Plato’s treatment of god(s) and divinity is much too extensive to be surveyed fully here. Works that I have found particularly helpful in writing this chapter include Benitez 1995, Bordt 2006, Broadie 2011, Johansen 2004, McPherran 1986, Menn 1992, Rowe 2013, and Sedley 1999b and 2007b. ³ Notable exceptions include Morgan 1990 and McPherran 2006.

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In all the political dialogues (and in Plato generally), divinity has three fundamental and inter-entailing attributes: (1) it instantiates what is essentially good in itself; (2) it identifies the ultimate cause of order and beauty in the universe at large; and (3) it authorizes the rule of the reasoning that Plato takes to be essential to personal and political wellbeing. Plato’s political dialogues incorporate divinity because they seek to dramatize and establish policies and rulers that are as excellent as humanly possible. These works tell us who or what (whether philosophy or expert statesmanship or law) should have supreme authority in a city or a state, for the sake of the collective happiness, wellbeing, and virtue of citizens. To that end, Plato has recourse to divinity as the standard and paradigm for the philosophical ruler of the Republic, for the statesman of the dialogue of that name, and for the legislator of the Laws. Plato was vitriolic about the failings of the political systems of his own time— whether oligarchy, democracy, or absolute rule (‘tyranny’ in Greek)—but his dialogues (unlike Aristotle’s Politics, where divinity and traditional gods barely appear) do not analyse the ways in which Greek communities actually governed themselves. The primary project of Plato’s politics was not a descriptive and dispassionate analysis of the social world as he found it, but a radical exploration of how to make civic arrangements as good as possible for all concerned. Athens, as he saw it, had erred appallingly in trying and executing Socrates for alleged impiety and corruption.⁴ Many of what we take to be Plato’s earliest writings defend Socrates’ idiosyncratic patriotism and present him in the guise of an intensely involved critic of political rhetoric, with the bitterly ironic claim to be ‘Athens’ only true student and practitioner of politics’ (Gorgias 521d). As to divinity itself, on the basis of words that Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates, he was not only determined to expose the travesty of the charges of irreligion but also to publicize the actual piety of Socrates by representing him as fervently committed to divinity, as we see in the following passages: T1 Socrates calls his public role as questioner, gadfly, and moral reformer a lifelong service to the god: Apology 30a–e.⁵ T2 Socrates concludes his defence by asserting that ‘a good man cannot be harmed in life or in death, and that his affairs are not neglected by gods’ (plural theoi, without a definite article, not ‘by the gods’, as the word is normally translated): Apology 41d. His final words (Apology 42a) declare that only ‘the god’

⁴ The official charges against Socrates at his trial were ‘corrupting the young, and not believing in (nomizein) the gods (theoi) in whom the city believes but in other new [or strange] divinities (kaina daimonia)’: Apology 24b. ⁵ The use of the singular theos makes it likely that the reference is to Apollo, as it is explicitly at Phaedo 58b, 61a5, and 85b7. But see Burnyeat 1997 for the view that Socrates’ not naming ‘the god’ in the Apology context is tantamount to his rejection of Athenian civic religion.

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(singular) knows ‘which of us [whether he himself or the members of the jury] face the better lot’. T3 Socrates ends his conversation on piety with the religious zealot Euthyphro by expressing disappointment at not acquiring wisdom from him concerning ‘divine things’ (ta theia): Euthyphro 15e–16a. T4 Socrates declines to escape from prison, as urged by his friend Crito, and concludes their conversation with the words: ‘Let us act in the way I have proposed, since this is the way the god (theos, singular) is leading us’: Crito 54d. T5 Socrates’ final words before dying: ‘Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius; make this offering [all of you] without fail’: Phaedo 118a. As we see in these texts representing Socrates’ last days, Plato has him sometimes speak of ‘the god’ (singular), or ‘gods’ (plural), or of ‘divine things’. He does not have Socrates specify any leading divine name, such as Zeus, or Athena, or even Apollo, although he does credit Socrates with invoking, in his final words before the hemlock prevented further speech, the recently established medical deity Asclepius. We are probably to take the singular god of the Apology to be Apollo of the Delphic oracle, but Plato may be deliberate in not naming Apollo there (see n. 5, above). In any case, readers raised in monotheistic cultures are bound to be puzzled by the way in which plural and singular nouns frequently alternate in Plato’s references to god(s) in these passages.⁶ That is one reason why I use the word ‘divinity’, instead of god or gods, in this chapter’s title. But there are also much deeper reasons. As we find in the text from the Euthyphro, Socrates speaks there of ‘divine things’, using the neuter plural of the adjective, which signifies ‘divine’ quite generally, leaving the term open as to its referents. Many things besides Olympian deities can have the theios attribute in Greek literature, including exceptional human beings and abstract entities such as nature or fortune. Theios also admits of degrees, such that something may be more or may be most divine, and sometimes in ordinary Greek, the word is used hyperbolically, as we may say of something delightful, ‘how divine!’ it is. In using ‘divinity’ instead of god, I seek to capture this breadth of reference, and I especially want to caution against automatically thinking that anything divine in Greek must signify a being with the mind and intentions of a person. Plato calls the metaphysical Forms of the Republic and elsewhere divine (theia): they are emphatically not persons but perfect exemplars of such qualities as justice and beauty, and they are headed by one very special Form, the Form of the Good, which I will discuss in detail below.⁷ ⁶ On Plato’s alternation between singular and plural theos, see Bordt 2006, 79–95 and Rowe 2013, 326–7. ⁷ Plato uses the adjective theios some thirty times in the Republic. He applies it to exceptional human beings, including the guardians of the ideal state (331e6, 368a4, 383c4, 469a5); the universe as

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In asking about the connection between divinity and politics in Plato, I aim to avoid standard connotations of our modern and Western usage of the word ‘god’, and especially that of ‘God’ with a capital G. Plato was not a monotheist, but he often invokes a singular deity that is supreme, a deity who is superior to other divine beings, calling it King or Overseer or Measure of all Things, or just ‘the god’. When he writes ‘the gods’, he generally leaves the plural reference vague. Contemporary readers may have taken him to be gesturing to the Olympian gods of popular religion, but these figures were not Plato’s divinity at the deepest level of his thought. Where he mentions Zeus or some lesser god by name, he is using the language of myth and religious convention, not philosophy.⁸

II Plato begins and ends the Republic with divinity. The celebrated first sentence (327a), spoken by Socrates, runs: T6 ‘I went down to the Piraeus yesterday with Glaucon the son of Ariston, to offer a prayer to the goddess, and I also wanted to see how they would manage the festival since they were celebrating it for the first time’.⁹ The final book, hundreds of pages later, presents the amazing story of the warrior Er, whose soul left his supposedly dead body, witnessed the future fate and life choices of other recently deceased persons, and returned to bring him back to earthly life. After recounting Er’s out-of-the body experience of the postmortem destinies of souls, Socrates concludes the dialogue (621c) by recommending that he himself and his fellow discussants should believe in the soul’s immortality and in the unflinching practice of justice: T7 ‘If you go along with me in believing that the soul is immortal, and able to endure every contingency good or bad, we will always stick to the high road and practice justice accompanied by reason (phronêsis) in every way. Then we will be pleasing to ourselves and the gods, both while we remain here, and when we carry

comprising both the human and the divine (368a4); the divine as distinct from the human (497c2); the rational component of the soul (416e5, 589e4, 590d1); and the paradigm for the ideal state (500e3). The most abstract instances of the word, corresponding to English ‘the divine’ or ‘divinity as such’, are theia phusis (366c7), to daimonion te kai theion (382e6), and contexts from the Republic’s central books where discussion focuses on the Forms (see 500c9, 517d4, 532c1). For a comprehensive survey of Plato’s use of theios, see van Camp 1956. ⁸ On ancient philosophy’s gestures in the direction of monotheism, see Frede 1999 and Bordt 2006, 79–85. ⁹ The goddess not named here is later (354a) identified with the Moon divinity Bendis, whose nocturnal cult had recently been inaugurated in Attica.

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off the prizes of justice, like parading victors in the games. That way we will fare well both here and on the millennial journey that we have described.’ Divinity, then, frames the entire Republic from beginning to end, but its context shifts from Socrates’ participation in a nocturnal religious festival to a projected life or sequence of many lives under divine supervision. Socrates’ downward journey to the Piraeus, often interpreted as anticipating the middle of the dialogue’s Cave allegory, is matched at the end of book 10 with what he calls ‘sticking to the high road’. The imagery of low and high, and down and up, is central to the dialogue’s most radical political proposal—that the goodness essential to philosophical rule requires a mental ascent from the muddle and vicissitudes of ordinary life to the understanding and modelling of suprasensible or ideal goodness. The fact that divinity frames the entire Republic invites extensive interpretation. How does it contribute to the investigation of justice, the work’s ostensible purpose, and the political and psychological contexts that occupy so much space? If I am right in thinking that the seemingly impersonal Form of the Good is the Republic’s principal divinity, why does Plato not say so clearly when Socrates broaches this crucial topic in texts I will shortly review? In such dialogues as the Timaeus, with its creative and beneficent Demiurge, or the Statesman with its myth of Kronos and Zeus, or the Laws with its celestial rulers and ‘divine cosmic supervisor’, Plato does present his readers with explicit and personalized divinity. There too he attributes ‘nous’—reason, or intelligence, or mind—to his supreme divinity, or perhaps identifies the divinity accordingly. If these attributes are absent from the Form of the Good, or at least kept silent, why is that? And can it be right to call the Form of the Good the dialogue’s supreme divinity? I propose to approach these questions as if we were reading the Republic for the first time, from beginning to end, without reference to what we think Plato has written about gods or divinity before, or what he will write about them later. And, as I proceed, I would like to reiterate and emphasize two of my preliminary points: first, Socrates’ fervent commitment to an essentially benevolent deity or deities; and second, the staggering novelty, as I take it to be, of incorporating divinity, conceptualized as supremely good, into massive and radical works on politics. We may draw a contrast with Thucydides, whom Plato certainly read very closely.¹⁰ Both men were profound diagnosticians of contemporary politics and they were equally ruthless in exposing the failings of Athenian democracy. Unlike Plato, however, Thucydides analyses political events and political players in a completely secular manner, focusing on ordinary human fears, ambitions, misjudgements, and insecurities. Thucydides rarely moralizes, and—my main point ¹⁰ On Plato and Thucydides, see Schofield 2006, Shanske 2007, and Farrar 2013. The History of Herodotus, of course, is full of gods. But they are neither political nor beneficent.

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of contrast here—he assigns no causal role to divinity, either as a superhuman agent of events or as an ethical sanction and model, although he does acknowledge that superstition is a factor in the minds of ordinary people. Plato, who was still more pessimistic than Thucydides in his political expectations, looks to divine authority in formulating his alternative politics no matter how utopian their practical prospects might be. In his longer dialogues, Plato characteristically situates the theme that is of central importance to his argument in or near the middle. That is conspicuously true of the Republic, as the narrative ascends from the nocturnal scene of everyday life in the Piraeus, first to the imaginary construction of an ideal ‘city in words’, and then to the sun-like Form of the Good. Having begun his narrative with a visit to a religious festival, Socrates draws further attention to conventional religion by taking us to the house of the elderly businessman Cephalus, who had been conducting a private sacrifice. This event sets the stage for the entire Republic. Cephalus explains that he has been troubled by fear of being required after death to atone for wrongdoing in the life he has already lived (330d–331b). As we have just seen (T7), at the end of the Republic, Socrates concludes with an afterlife myth of rewards and penalties that confirms Cephalus’ reasons to be anxious about divine justice. In the next sequence of discussion, Socrates gets his amoral sparring partner, Thrasymachus, who had identified justice with the interest of rulers as distinct from subjects, to grudgingly concede that the gods are just and that an unjust man (such as Thrasymachus had praised) is at enmity with them (352a11). Did Athenians at this date, however, generally share Socrates’ endorsement of divine sanctions as supportive of justice. Not if they were hardheaded realists like Thucydides. To underline the sceptical posture that was widespread at the time, the second book of the Republic presents Socrates with challenges that anticipate Reformation worries about Papal indulgences and the like. Perhaps the gods actually are, as experience suggests, erratic in their dispensation of good or bad fortune; perhaps they can be influenced by sacrifices and incantations so as to favour wrongdoers and neglect the virtuous (364b). Socrates is asked to prove that just persons are incomparably better off than unjust persons here and now, irrespective of what happens to them in the afterlife, of whether anyone, divine or human, will ever know, and or whether or not justice reaps rewards for its practitioners in the end (367b–e). In order to discover the nature of justice, Socrates begins by imagining how it would emerge in a city that is designed to promote internal peace and external security for its people. The educational curriculum, he proposes for a start, will need to be corrected so as to present children only with appropriate role models. To that end, first and foremost, storytelling must be strictly controlled by expurgating the unsuitable representations of gods and heroes featured in Homer and other poetic books:

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T8 Socrates:

‘It behooves the city’s founders to know the marks (tupoi)

on which the poets should model their stories [about gods] [ . . . ]’ Adeimantus: ‘Quite right; but as to this very point, the marks for describing divinity (theologia), what should they be?’ Socrates:

‘Something like this—the poets should always represent

what (the) god is really like [ . . . ]’ (379a) Appropriate stories must adhere to two primary marks of divinity: first, they must show it in its true nature as absolutely good, meaning always beneficent and never harmful; and second, they must show it as immutable, simple, true, and never deceptive.¹¹ This is one of the rare Platonic contexts in which a speaker posits defining attributes of divinity, and it is distinctive in stating them in formalist or essentialist terms. Plato uses the singular ‘god’ throughout the treatment of the ‘good’ mark (379b–e), and likewise in his initial characterization of the second mark of immutability, simplicity, and truth (380d–381c). The poetic texts that Socrates proposes for expurgation allude to individual gods (Kronos, Zeus, Hera, Ares, etc.), but his proposed reformation of the poetic tradition focuses upon the nature of divinity as such. A few pre-Platonic authors, most notably the poet philosopher Xenophanes, had already expressed reformist attributes of divinity, including the immutability of a supreme deity. But the idea that goodness, signifying unqualified beneficence, is divinity’s primary hallmark appears to have few, if any, parallels in texts that are older than Plato or Xenophon, in whose writings Socrates’ imprint is evident. Even in this context, our present passage is unique in its formal manner of expression. I emphasize this point because I think Plato is preparing his readers here for the Form of the Good.¹² That difficult notion is still a hundred pages distant, but I take its coming to be carefully anticipated here. The causative and immutable Good (to call it so) will be the climactic point of the Republic’s educational curriculum and the metaphysical foundation of its utopian political agenda. Here, at the beginning of Socrates’ educational reforms, Plato gives his readers an anticipatory glimpse of what will prove to be the dialogue’s ultimate and most profound thoughts about divinity. Before reaching this peak, however, Socrates introduces the tripartite class structure for the incipient community by playfully infusing politics with mythical

¹¹ Plato combines tupoi with nomoi in referring back to the patterns or delineations that poets should use in their descriptions of divinity (380c, 383c). Hence, some scholars translate tupoi by ‘norms’ or ‘rules’; see Burnyeat 1999, 259 and Bordt 2006, 50. ¹² This point is central to the interpretation of Plato’s theology in the Republic developed at length by Bordt 2006.

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theology (Republic 413b–417b). According to Athenian tradition, the original citizens of Athens were autochthonous, literally ‘born of the [Attic] land’.¹³ Patriotic myths sprang up around this notion, including the story that Athena fostered the Attic soil’s nurslings by giving them the olive. Having described primary education for the Republic’s emerging citizens, Socrates now proposes that they be told a ‘noble falsehood’, to the effect that they not only sprang fully armed from mother earth, but were even constituted by a god, out of gold, silver, and bronze, thus endowing the populace genetically with three distinct aptitudes (414c1–415c). This passage always attracts attention. What I want to focus on here is not the standard worry that Socrates plays fast and loose with truth and initiates his utopia with flagrantly alternative facts. As he himself acknowledges, the literal details of the myth are incredible on first hearing, like Hesiod’s sequence of human degeneration from gold to iron (Works and Days 109–201), which was clearly in Plato’s mind. What stands out above the metallic allegory is the origination of this community in divine genetics, linking politics to divinity by stamping a god’s necessarily excellent craftsmanship on the make-up of the first citizens. Here we should note the stark difference between Socrates’ divinized ideology and the celebrated speech that Thucydides (2.34–46) put into the mouth of Pericles to commemorate the Athenian soldiers killed early in the Peloponnesian War. Unlike Plato Thucydides gives Pericles no word about gods or literal autochthony, although he does make much of the Athenians’ indigenous origins and ancestral glory. Plato marked his disagreement by writing in the Menexenus a funeral speech that is both a pastiche and a correction of Thucydides’ Periclean oration, for in the Platonic version much is made of autochthony and divine support for Athens.¹⁴ This is a striking instance of how Thucydides’ secular history differs from Plato’s normative politics, in which the presence of divinity plays a central role. At this point in the Republic, a first-time reader may have forgotten the highly abstract delineations of divinity (T8) with which Socrates prefaced his prescriptions for the educators of his utopia’s citizens. The bland religiosity of the autochthony passage with its myth of metals seems to be confirmed when, some pages later, Socrates declares, on the following grounds, that the rituals of the emerging ‘city in words’ should be left to Apollo’s Delphic oracle: T9 ‘We have no knowledge of these things, and in establishing our city, if we have any sense, we won’t be persuaded to trust them to anyone other than the ancestral authority.’ (427b)

¹³ See Loraux 1993, part 1.1 ‘Autochthony: An Athenian Topic’.

¹⁴ 237b–238b.

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Where is Plato taking his readers at this juncture, with the rudiments of the utopia now in place, buttressed seemingly by uncritical religious conservatism?¹⁵ Actually, between here in book 4 and the beginning of book 10, god as an individual or gods as a collective largely disappear from the discussion. What we find instead, as Socrates expounds the character and virtues of philosophers, are occurrences of the adjective for ‘divine’ (theios) applied to philosophers and to the ideal objects (Forms) that are philosophy’s special study.¹⁶ Philosophy, not mythical or conventional theology, will now become the dialogue’s route to divinity.

III Uttering the Republic’s most famous political paradox, Socrates declares that the only recipe for private and public wellbeing is for philosophers to become rulers or for rulers to become philosophers, meaning persons who are ‘lovers and spectators of truth’ (475c–e) as distinct from being lovers of sights and sounds. ‘Truth’ here stands for the domain of what Plato famously calls Forms or Ideas, stable and knowable realities as distinct from everyday phenomena, which are too multiform and changeable to be the objects of knowledge.¹⁷ The claim amounts to the proposition that philosophers are uniquely qualified to rule because they alone can distinguish mere appearances and changeable instances of justice, beauty, and goodness from the perfect paradigms of justice itself, beauty itself, and goodness itself.¹⁸ Thus they will be equipped to reproduce the human likeness of these paradigms and so safeguard the city’s laws and pursuits (484d). With this allusion to suprasensible Forms or Ideas, Socrates moves the discussion from the utopian politics of communal property and gender equality to an account of ‘a philosophical nature’, and its contrast with the myopic and selfseeking nature of power-hungry politicians (book 6). Prior to this point, Socrates’ tone as the leading discussant has been good humoured and even light-hearted, but now in this central part of the dialogue the tone becomes dark and bitter, in allusion to recent Athenian politics, only lightening up to delineate the ¹⁵ Although the Delphic oracle figures prominently in the legislative proposals of the Laws, I find it hard to credit Plato’s sincere trust in an institution that had been so frequently discredited and manipulated. Socrates, however, advocates consultation of Apollo concerning the obsequies of those of the utopia’s ‘divine’ guardians who die on military service (Rep. 469a). For further references in the dialogue to traditional religious practices, see the passages cited under ‘religion’ in Ferrari 2000. ¹⁶ See 500c9, 517d4, 518e2, 532c1, 540c2. ¹⁷ See Woolf 2009. ¹⁸ The Forms that Socrates first instances as objects of the philosopher’s knowledge are beauty, justice, goodness, and their opposites (476a), doubtless because these are the most essential as models for public policy and administration. Taken at face value, this passage posits the existence of negative Forms—of ugliness, injustice, and badness. If that were Socrates’ point, it would completely wreck the normative nature of Platonic Forms. So I take Socrates to be saying that the ugly, unjust, or bad (i.e. anything so qualified) is what it is by virtue of being contrary to the beautiful, just, and good.

     ’  

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philosopher and the miracle that would have to occur if such a figure were vouchsafed to find a community that would tolerate and foster philosophical rule. Socrates specifies the philosophical nature as the absolute antithesis of ‘smallmindedness’, using the unusual word mikrologia (486a), which harks back to his indictment of those who are only keen on sights and sounds. Expressed positively, the philosophical mentality is always focused on ‘aspiring to grasp the totality of things, both divine and human’. Dwelling on this synoptic aspiration, Socrates asks, expecting and getting a negative answer, whether such a capacious mentality, with its ‘visualization (theôria) of all time and all existence (ousia) will regard human life as a big deal’? The question is worrying since what we thought we were after was precisely how to make human life and society as good as possible. What the divine (as distinct from the human) comprises here is ‘the existence that persists forever and is not made to wander by coming to be and passing away’ (485b). The philosopher, Socrates says, longs to know that whole, and to know all of it. One of Socrates’ earlier ‘marks’ of divinity was immutability (380d). It was not fully clear in that context, expurgating Homer and so forth, why Socrates should be so insistent on this attribute. Now, with the knowable and changeless Forms on the agenda for the first time in the Republic, we see that they satisfy this condition. Stepping outside the dialogue, we should also recognize that, in applying the notion of divinity to metaphysical beings as distinct from personalized gods and goddesses, Plato is stretching its range of application far beyond conventional usage. Are we to suppose that the Forms also satisfy Socrates’ primary divine attribute, that of being essentially good? We are not being asked at this stage of the discussion to take them in aggregate to be good, in the sense of being beneficent or doing good. But we are being asked to take them to be supremely desirable as objects of knowledge, and as knowable precisely because they are unitary, stable, perfect, and everlasting, as we have already been told that divine beings must be.¹⁹ The divinity of the Forms is not the only focus of theology in this central part of the Republic. Divinity also applies to philosophers themselves, or at least it would apply to them if their philosophical potentiality were able to realize itself in an appropriate environment: T10 ‘If the philosopher’s nature, as we posited it, obtains appropriate learning, it must develop into and reach every virtue. But if it is sown in an inappropriate place and that is where it grows and is nourished, it will turn out the opposite except with the help of some god.’ (492a)

¹⁹ The divinity of the Forms is particularly prominent in the palinode of the Phaedrus (cf. 246d–e, 249c) where they are represented as higher in status than the traditional gods. See Nightingale 2021.

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In the former case and under the best political arrangements: T11 ‘The philosopher’s nature will show itself to be in reality a divine thing (theion), while all other natures and pursuits are merely human.’ (497c) As noted above, the word theios can be used as a way of saying that something is really great, splendid, or special. That is clearly one of the associations of the word here, but it is far from all that Plato seeks to convey. Drawing on the causality of like’s attraction to like, Socrates goes on to characterize the philosopher’s mental association with the Forms: T12 Socrates: ‘As he observes and studies things that are organized and always in the same state [i.e. the Forms], that neither do wrong to one another nor suffer wrong from one another, all being in a rational and harmonious order, he imitates them and becomes as like them as anyone can.²⁰ Or do you think that there is any way for someone to consort with anything he admires and not to imitate it?’ Adeimantus: ‘No, that would be impossible.’ Socrates: ‘So the philosopher, by consorting with what is harmonious and divine, becomes as harmonious and divine as is humanly possible.’ (500c) Does Plato envision a possible continuum between human and divine, rather than a division, with mere humanity at the bottom and perfect divinity at the top? Approximation to divinity and comparative divinity are difficult ideas to accommodate. Let me just say that the qualification ‘divine as far as humanly possible’ represents an aspirational hybrid, not the metamorphosis of shedding humanity and literally turning into a deity. The philosopher’s harmony and rational order recall Socrates’ earlier proof that the individual’s justice is a harmonious state of soul under the rule of reason (book 4, 443d). Here, that central doctrine of the Republic acquires massive reinforcement from the just person’s godlikeness, mediated by affinity between a rationally structured philosophical disposition and the divinely structured cosmic order. In the Timaeus, Plato imagines the principal divinity as a cosmological craftsman (demiurge) whose exemplary goodness displays itself in making the best possible physical world out of chaotically moving material, on the pattern of the ideal Forms (28c–30c). In our present context Plato gives Socrates an analogous account of philosophical rulers, who use the divine paradigm of cosmic order so as

²⁰ We are accustomed, unlike Plotinus, to interpret Plato’s Forms as inanimate and mindless beings, but that interpretation is difficult to accommodate to the denial of their wrongdoing or suffering wrong. Perhaps the ethical language is inadvertent or simply rhetorical, but I find it more probably motivated by the Forms’ divine status. The philosopher’s admiration and imitation of a mindless paradigm is an uncomfortable thought and not one that Plato advertises in the Republic.

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to become the ‘craftsman’ (demiurge again) of moderation and justice and all public (demotic) virtue, not only for themselves but also for their community at large (500d). Taking utopianism to its limit, Socrates envisions philosophers as artists painting a picture of a brand-new community on a canvas from which they have scrubbed off all previous images of people and institutions. Using the ideal virtues as their model, the philosophers are to compare with them the human character-type they are trying to produce from the new constitution, mixing colours, adding here and erasing there, until they come up à la Homer, with a ‘godlike form and likeness’ (501b). The rhetoric is beguiling. But a reader could be forgiven for regarding all the divinity talk thus far as a mere trope, like the phrase just quoted from Homer, with no secure purchase on theological reality or any reality. As if in response, Socrates startles his interlocutors by abruptly telling them that they have omitted to discuss the most important topic of study, which he names the Form of the Good. How is this an omission, and how does it bear on our understanding of divinity in Plato’s politics? T13 ‘You have often heard me say that the most important thing to learn is the Form of the Good; it is by relating to that Form that just things and everything else become useful and beneficial.²¹ You certainly know that this is what I am going to say, and you know, besides, that our knowledge of it is inadequate. But you know that without this knowledge, if we lack it, however much we know other things none of them is any more benefit to us than possessing something without the good.’ (505a) Let us recall how Socrates previously posited goodness and immutability as the twin ‘marks’ of divinity. Since then, his primary focus has been on the nature of justice. Under questioning, he had stated that justice is a good ‘of the finest and most beautiful kind’ (358a), meaning that it is to be valued both for its own sake and for its consequences, but he has not yet elucidated in what ways justice is useful and beautiful. What do its utility and beauty consist in exactly? Moreover, people disagree about goodness. Many identify goodness with pleasure, while a much smaller number take it to be knowledge (505b). If we don’t know the nature of goodness, or if we do not think that there is such a thing, are we in a position to know why it is beneficial to be just? This is the question that launched the entire project of the Republic, and it must resonate for anyone who believes in human progress and betterment. If philosopher rulers cannot answer it accurately or at least convincingly, how can they organize and govern the state in an optimal manner? At this point Socrates voices one of the dialogue’s most profound and optimistic statements, while also tinged with the melancholy characteristic of the authentic voice of Plato: ²¹ ‘Relating to’ is my translation of the rather surprising word proschrêsamena, which most literally means ‘using in addition’. It could also be translated by ‘accessing’ or ‘depending on’.

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T14 ‘Isn’t it clear that in the case of justice and beauty many people opt for semblances of them, and even if things aren’t really just or beautiful, they choose their actions, acquisitions, and beliefs accordingly. But when it comes to goods, no one is content to own only their semblances. Everyone [not just philosophers] is after the realities (ta onta) and has no regard for the mere semblances. Every soul is in pursuit of the real good and does everything for its sake. The soul has a divine intuition (apomanteuomenê) that good really exists, but it is at a loss (aporousa) and unable to grasp adequately what it is or apply to it the stable belief it has about other things, and so it misses out on any benefit it might derive from them.’ (505e) This passage recalls other Socratic contexts with its claim that all people desire good things or the things that they genuinely believe to be good.²² But the passage also contains significant novelties in its claims first that there is a real good that motivates everyone at all times, however dimly they perceive it, and, second, that most people are unable to achieve the goods they desire, because of false beliefs about the nature of their desired goods, anticipating the shadowy consciousness of the prisoners in the allegory of the cave. A further novelty occurs in the word apomanteuomenê, for which I borrow Tom Griffith’s happy translation, ‘divine intuition’.²³ Plato probably coined this very rare word for just this context, and he repeats it a little later, near the beginning of book 7 (516d). The underlying thought is again Socratic in its notion that people in general have latent and unarticulated true beliefs about the virtues. However, Plato has, if I am right, added to this the notion that you do not have to be a philosopher to have glimmers of rational understanding. It is the human condition to possess, what Plato later calls, the golden chain of rationality (Laws 605a) that connects us directly with divinity and, therefore, with the possibility of genuine understanding of truths.²⁴ That rational endowment undergirds the philosopher’s quest for unconditional knowledge of goodness in the upcoming section of the Republic. In light of this universal human yearning for the good, divinity promises to make being human a big deal after all. And so I come at last to this essay’s principal thesis and relative novelty—the claim that we should interpret the Form of the Good as Plato’s divinity par excellence in the Republic.

IV With a great display of diffidence, Socrates offers his dialogical partners three analogies or images (Sun, Divided Line, and Cave) to help elucidate the Form of the Good as the prime object and ground of all philosophical knowledge and the ²² See Rep. 438a, Gorg. 468a, Prot. 358d, Symp. 206a. ²⁴ See also Plt. 309c on the soul’s ‘divine bond’.

²³ In Ferrari 2000, 211.

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source of all value. In the interests of brevity and clarity, I will focus here only on the Sun. This particular analogy should suffice to show why I am convinced that Plato wants his readers to identify the Good as the Republic’s supreme divinity. Socrates introduces the Sun analogy by prefacing it as an account not of the Good as such, but only of the Good’s ‘offspring’ (506e–507a).²⁵ The analogy works with the following equivalences: sun = the Good; visible things = intelligible things (Forms); light = truth; and eye = intellect. The sun’s light preeminently gives us the ability to see and makes things visible to sight by means of the eye. The eye’s ability to see is served with this ability (note the metaphor of stewardship) as an overflow (epirruton) from the sun:²⁶ T15 ‘In the domain of thought the Good stands in the same relation to intellect and intelligible things as the sun, in the visible realm, stands in relation to sight and things that are seen.’ (508c) Socrates develops the analogy by likening the mind’s variable range of its understanding of the Good to the eye’s variable range of vision in its relation to sun/ light. T16 ‘When the soul concentrates on the region where truth and reality shine forth, it thinks and knows and clearly has understanding (nous), but when it focuses on the region mixed with obscurity, on what is subject to becoming and ceasing, it resorts to opinion and loses its keen vision, and its opinions fluctuate, and it seems like something without understanding.’ (508d) Next, taking vision and light to be ‘sun-like’ but secondary and derivative in relation to the sun itself, Socrates makes the corresponding move for the Good: knowledge and truth are ‘good-like’ but secondary and derivative in relation to the Good itself (509a). Where does goodness figure in the Sun analogy, in addition to the obvious benefit of providing illumination? The answer brings us to two further points of the analogy, which underscore its relevance to politics. First, the sun as the ‘celestial god that has authority over light’ (508a) is ruler in the heavens (509d), and, second, the sun is the cause of the biological cycle of birth and growth and of nutriment (509b). Correspondingly, the Good rules over the intelligible realm (509d), and, second, it bestows ‘existence and being’ on the Forms that are that realm’s constituents (509b). We hardly need to be reminded that discovering the

²⁵ In representing the Good as a benevolent father, Plato anticipates his description of the demiurge at Timaeus 37c. ²⁶ The metaphor of overflow influenced Plotinus’ doctrine of the Forms as emanations from the Good or One. See Rist 1967, chapters 3, 5, and 6.

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source of beneficial rule is central to Plato’s politics, and that it is the nature of divinity (to theion) to rule.²⁷ As exemplary beings, the Forms of justice and so forth owe their existence and excellence to the Good just as fauna and flora owe their origin and development to the sun’s light and heat. We will also be true to the spirit of the text if we correlate the sun’s visible regularity and order with the systematic structure that Socrates attributes to the domain of ideal Forms. Socrates, as we have just seen, calls the sun a god. It would be strangely perverse for Plato to have Socrates attribute divinity to the sun, the foil of the analogy, and resist its assignment to the Good, which is clearly the superior item in the analogy. In fact, as I read Socrates’ ensuing discussion with Glaucon, we are meant to regard the Good not as a particular god (theos), but rather as divinity in the highest degree or as the very essence of divinity: T17 Socrates: and truth.’ Glaucon:

‘The Good is to be honoured²⁸ still more highly than knowledge

‘That’s an incredible beauty you are describing, if it is the cause of

knowledge and truth, but surpasses them itself in beauty. You are not referring to pleasure, are you?’ Socrates: ‘Be quiet!²⁹ Take a closer look at the analogy. You will agree, I think, that the sun not only grants the things we see their capacity to be seen, but also grants them their coming to be (‘genesis’), growth and nurture, though it is not itself (a) coming to be. So you should say that things that are known not only owe their being known to the Good, but also depend on it for their very existence and being (ousia), though the Good is not (a) being but still beyond being and exceeding it in dignity (presbeia) and power (dunamis).’³⁰ Glaucon says with a laugh: Socrates:

‘By Apollo, what divine (daimonios) superiority!’

‘Well it’s all your fault for forcing me to give my opinion of it.’

(509a)

The next two analogies (the Line and Cave) elaborate on the unique status and power of the Good, characterizing it in the Line as the absolute ground or primary ²⁷ See Phd. 80a3, where the context concerns the role of the soul as that which should rule the body because of its likeness to ‘the divine’. ²⁸ ‘To be honoured’ (timêteon) is a condition that pertains particularly to the reverence due to divine beings. ²⁹ ‘Be quiet’ (euphêmei) as Ferrari 2000 notes, ‘refers to the silence of religious rites’. ³⁰ Discussion of the metaphysical transcendence attributed to the Good in this sentence would take me far afield from this chapter’s main theme. I note here only that Proclus, in his Commentary on Republic excursus 11, takes Plato to posit three goods: the transcendent Form of the Good, the ordinary Form of good, and the good in us. Socrates, Proclus says, does not fully reveal the transcendent Form of the Good, keeping it a mystery and identifying it with the primary god. The point I take from the passage translated in the main text (509a) is the theological resonance of the words presbeia and dunamis. Note that in Laws 896b the Athenian Stranger characterizes soul’s status, in his proof of its divinity, as presbutatê.

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principle of all reality (Forms), and in the ascent from the Cave, by analogy with the sun again, as the most mentally dazzling and illuminating object and source of understanding. Then Socrates tells Glaucon, in explaining the Cave: T18 ‘Whether it is really true, only god (theos) knows, but here are my thoughts about it. In the intelligible realm the Form of the Good is the last thing to be seen and only with difficulty, but once it has been seen we must conclude that it is the cause of all that is correct and fine in everything, since it gives birth to both light and the lord of light in the visible realm, and is in the intelligible realm lord (kuria) and author of truth and understanding (nous); and it follows, accordingly, that whoever intends to act intelligently in private or in public must see it.’ (517b–c) To which Glaucon responds, ‘O I do agree, at least as best I can follow!’ Here Socrates presents the Good as supreme, not only in the intelligible realm (designated here as ‘divine things (ta theia), 517d) but as the source of the sun itself, and, hence, of the cosmos as a whole. The passage is, of course, replete with metaphor, but I do not think that the agency attributed to the Good in ‘giving birth’ and ‘authoring’ and ‘illuminating’ is mere metaphor. To read Plato thus would totally miss the spirit of the text. We are conceptually very close to the cosmic Demiurge of the Timaeus, the creator craftsman god, explicitly so named, who is not only good and wanting everything to be as good as possible, but is actually ‘the very best of the eternal, intelligible beings’ (Timaeus 37a). Here, in the Republic, the focus is on the human world of politics, not the make-up of the cosmos as such. And if readers are still wondering why Plato never applies the word theos to the Good, they can take comfort from Socrates’ description of it as the most blessed part of reality (eudaimonestaton tou ontos, 526e), language that can only connote divinity par excellence.³¹ It has not been generally noticed, to consolidate this identification, that in the so-called digression of the Theaetetus (which echoes or anticipates this part of the Republic very closely) Socrates repeats or anticipates this phrase, ‘most blessed part of reality’, when he speaks of the ‘divine and eudaimonestatos paradigm that exists in reality’ (176e; cf. Rep. 500c–d). In the Theaetetus, the context is explicitly about assimilating oneself to unnamed god (theos singular) by becoming as just as possible (176c).³² Here in the Republic, that assimilation is the culmination of the training Socrates assigns to apprentice philosopher rulers after their thirty years of study, military service, and political administration: ³¹ See Adam 1902 ad loc. The singular theos, maker of Forms in the painter passage of Republic 10 (597b), has sometimes been identified with the Good; see Adam 1902 ad loc. [reprinted 1921] for such proposals in nineteenth-century scholarship. Proposals of this kind have since gone out of fashion, see Denyer 2007, 287, and the question of this god’s identity remains. I am grateful to Tim Clarke for prompting me to mention this passage. ³² See Mahoney 2004.

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T19 ‘When they are fifty years old, those who have survived and fully excelled in their functions and studies are to be brought to the culmination of their service. They are required to lift up their mind’s eye and focus it unswervingly on the absolute source of illumination to everything,³³ and after seeing the Good itself, they are to use it as their model (paradeigma) in regulating the community, its individuals and themselves, each of them in turn for the rest of their lives.’ (540a–b) And then, when they die, they depart to the Islands of the Blest, memorialized in their community as divinities (daimones) themselves ‘if the Pythian priestess consents’, or at least as ‘blessed and divine’ (eudaimones te kai theioi).³⁴

V If the Form of the Good is the Republic’s principal divinity, as I have argued, what does that tell us about Plato’s politics in this work? To put the question most challengingly, do Socrates’ philosopher rulers abandon the rule of reason for theocracy? If, by theocracy, we mean something like a political system administered by a priestly college with authority derived from a supernatural power or a sacred text, the answer is a categorical negative. Plato, we may say to the contrary, has secularized theocracy, making it tantamount to the rule of philosophical reason. The Good in the Republic has the standard Greek attributes of supreme divinity—power, beauty, and immortality—but it is not a god, in the sense of a supernatural being or a being essentially beyond human understanding. We might, rather, call it hyper-natural.³⁵ The Good’s beneficial influence on the world and on human life is evident in visible nature (as witnessed by the role of the sun). As to its special status as the supremely transcendent Form, this ultimate principle, unlike an Olympian god, is accessible to minds that have run the full gamut of mathematical and philosophical training and who are predisposed to see it because of their own excellence and devotion to the common good. Much can be conjectured concerning the Good’s bearing on Plato’s metaphysics (see my conclusion, below), but here I return to my main brief concerning the Good’s divinity by asking the following question. Is it the extraordinary notion ³³ Plato’s language becomes elevated here, as I try to bring out in my translation. ‘Look up to’ seeks to capture both the literal sense of apoblepein and its metaphorical sense of ‘admire’ and ‘depend upon’ (cf. Phdr. 240b on beloved and lover). ‘Auto’, the neuter pronoun meaning ‘itself ’, occurs both with ‘the source of light’ and with ‘the Good’ to intensify the status of this special Form. ³⁴ I take this reference to conventional religion to be a strong confirmation that the description of the guardians’ final vision of the Good is entirely consonant with standard theistic language. ³⁵ I have been asked why Plato doesn’t mention the Good’s divinity explicitly. I respond that he does not need to because, as the culmination of Socrates’ earlier discussion of the attributes (including divinity) of the other Forms, it follows a fortiori that the Good as a Form and the cause of Forms must be incomparably divine. David Sedley has suggested to me in conversation that we should perhaps regard the Good as the Form of Forms.

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that philosophers can in principle access and assimilate absolute goodness that restrained Plato from explicitly calling the Good a god or the god, even though we are plainly to think of its divinity or to think of it as divinity?³⁶ Mark McPherran, in a fine study of Platonic religion, has written: ‘We are encouraged to think of the Good as a god in several ways’, but after enumerating these ways he pulls back, saying the Good ‘cannot be a mind, a nous, that knows anything’ and so ‘cannot be a god’.³⁷ What inhibits McPherran is the Good’s transcendent status, which he takes to exclude its having intelligence, unlike representations of god as a superhuman intellect or nous in the Timaeus and Philebus. Yet nothing in the text of the Republic prevents us from crediting the Good with intellect, as many ancient Platonists did, and from treating it as the forebear of what Aristotle calls ‘Nous and god’ or ‘the good and nous’.³⁸ However, I do not think the Good’s divinity should be decided on the basis of its having or being or needing intellect. Its divinity is not represented in the Republic as a set of thoughts or rational processes serving a creationist agenda, like those of the Demiurge of the Timaeus, but as eternal and changeless excellence in being the world’s supreme source of order and harmony and intelligibility. In the Phaedo (probably written shortly before the Republic), Plato made my essential point by having Socrates look to ‘the good’ as such (to agathon, without calling it ‘Form’) as the world’s ‘divine binding power and [teleological] cause’, leaving the details of its agency unexplained.³⁹ Plato could represent divinity in the polytheistic ways of traditional religion, with its presumed effects on the material circumstances of human life—fertility, weather, wealth, national success, and so forth, whether for good or ill. He lets some of his characters voice such beliefs. He is also an amazing theological mythmaker, as we have seen in parts of the Republic surveyed above. But early in the work, as we have also seen, he makes Socrates strike out in a momentously different direction, first by positing god or divinity to ³⁶ See Gerson 1990, 62: ‘Although Plato does not call the Form of the Good “god”, he does ascribe to it an elevated status, as in 509b9–10, which would not make the use of that term particularly puzzling’; and Nettleship 1898, 233: ‘Plato has assigned to a form or principle the position and function which might be assigned to God, but he still speaks of it as a form or principle. With this reserve, we may say that the easiest way to give Plato’s conception a meaning is to compare it with certain conceptions of the divine nature, for example with the conception of the “light of the world” ’. ³⁷ McPherran 2006, 252–3. ³⁸ See NE 1096a24, EE 1217b31, and Metaph. 1072b14–1073a13, on which cf. Menn 1992. Broadie 2011, 81, writing of the Platonic Good, as distinct from the ‘world-making intellect’ of the demiurge, wonders whether ‘the Good is an intellect and the quiddities [the other Forms, I presume] are in it’. The comparison of the Good to the sun highlights not only the illumination that both divinities generate (anticipating the notion of a final cause) but also their creativity (efficient causation), which in the case of the Good, comprises the entire domain of other Forms. ³⁹ Socrates complains that contemporary thinkers seek explanation of nature in terms of a physical force rather than searching out and positing some ‘divine power’ (daimonia ischus) that disposes things ‘in the best way possible, because they do not believe that what binds and holds things together is the truly good and binding’ (Phd. 99c). For Plato’s omission of the explicit Form of the Good from this dialogue, see Bluck 1955,15–16. Socrates does name ‘the good itself ’ along with ‘the beautiful’, ‘the just’, and ‘the holy’ at Phd. 75c.

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be essentially and immutably good, and then by making the Good itself the foundation of human virtues and the world’s supreme cause. The representation of the Good as sun-like in brilliance and life-enhancement is a striking image, but the imagery does not make the Good itself a myth. On the contrary, Plato endows it with attributes that anticipate familiar post-Platonic attributes of god, such as transcendent, supreme, the ground of being, absolutely beneficent, and describable not in itself but by its effects. How the Good was to be pictured beyond these great attributes was not relevant to Plato’s purpose in the Republic, was in any case hardly answerable by human beings, and was also, perhaps, a hubristic question. What a philosopher could try to do, using the tools of rigorous argument, was to develop the intuition that there is such a thing as objective and absolute and efficacious goodness, and to advocate for its discovery and implementation in human virtues and social wellbeing. This observation brings me back to Socrates, and his bearing on divinity in Plato’s politics. Plato studies in modern times have been strongly marked by questions about the author’s intellectual development and the roles that he assigns to his leading character Socrates. Many scholars have treated the Republic as essentially Platonic and only nominally Socratic, but there is a welcome tendency today to read the work as deeply Socratic in its ethical and religious presuppositions.⁴⁰ Socrates was not a philosopher king, but Plato, when sketching that extraordinary figure, makes his Socrates character mention the peril such a person would likely encounter in real life. In doing so, he clearly alludes to Socrates’ own recent trial and execution, and vindicates Socrates’ unacknowledged political benefactions and piety.⁴¹ There is nothing like this in Plato’s later works on politics, in which he replaces Socrates with the Eleatic stranger in the Statesman and the anonymous Athenian in the Laws. The Good, too, has completely vanished from these dialogues, where the goodness of divinity is either represented through myth and dogmatic postulates or through the evidence from the celestial motions of divine reason at work. The Laws, unlike the Republic, ends with something like an official theocracy, a nocturnal council that will administer severe penalties for atheism, the very charge that had gotten Socrates into trouble and had helped to launch Plato’s philosophical career half a century earlier (although he perhaps gestures to the Good in the Philebus, where he brings Socrates back and has him offer measure, beauty, and truth as ‘a unified form’ (idea) of goodness).⁴² Did Plato get the Form of the Good from Socrates, by which I mean from his reflections on Socrates’ revolutionary innovations in ethical inquiry? The metaphysical status and luminosity of the Good, its primacy over all other beings, were entirely Plato’s invention, but the essential goodness of divinity was a notion that

⁴⁰ See Schofield 2006 and Rowe 2007.

⁴¹ Republic 496d; cf. 517a.

⁴² Philebus 64e–65a.

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he shared with and indeed learned from Socrates.⁴³ As the source and apex of the Platonic Forms, the Good was not anticipated by Socrates, but the way you get to it, or try to get to it, includes systematic question and answer, advancing and testing hypotheses in the search for irrefutable definitions of justice and other ethical notions.⁴⁴ That was the Socratic method as Plato had repeatedly presented it in earlier writings. This dialectic, as Plato calls it in the Republic, had gotten Socrates into deep trouble at Athens. We are told about this in Socrates’ own voice in Plato’s Apology, where we learn that powerful figures in the state found Socrates’ method, or professed to find it, deeply subversive. Plato’s defence of Socrates, as I mentioned earlier, is premised on Socrates’ claim that, in his interrogative pestering and exposure of the morally ignorant and confused, he is doing the god’s work, the work of an anonymous god in the singular case. So, let me end with the following question and recall the start of this chapter. Could it be that, behind the political charge against Socrates of introducing new divinities (kaina daimonia) and not worshipping the city’s gods, it is not Athenian worries about Socrates’ daimonion (his intermittently prohibitive divine sign), that we should detect, as is often implausibly assumed on the weak basis of Euthyphro 3b and Xenophon’s Memorabilia 1.2.⁴⁵ Might Socrates’ alleged impiety have been motivated by something immeasurably more dangerous than that, namely, the extraordinary idea that the world’s supreme divine power, did we but know it, is absolute goodness, and accessible, not in temple and ritual sacrifice, but by its divine offshoot in ourselves, our rational faculty and capacity to do philosophy?

Conclusion My main claim in this chapter is that divinity in the Republic (to theion) is paradigmatically represented by the Form of the Good. This principle, we are to understand, undergirds the intelligible structure of reality as such, granting it immutable excellence. The goal of a political philosopher is to achieve access to this divine order of things with a view to assimilating it intellectually and implementing its practical application for the social good. I acknowledge that Plato does not call the Good ‘god’ or ‘a god’, although he does apply the word theos to the sun, its visible analogue. Plato’s reticence, I suggest, is culturally and philosophically well

⁴³ See Sedley 2007b, 79–92, drawing on Xenophon as well as Plato, and concluding, in a comparison and contrast with Diogenes of Apollonia, that ‘divine intelligence, craftsmanship and power had all been emphasized by the preceding tradition, but it was left to Socrates to give comparable importance to divine goodness’, with the ‘essential goodness of god’ becoming a ‘recurrent motif of Plato’s Socratic dialogues’. ⁴⁴ See Republic 532–534c, which expounds the paradigm of the Divided Line. ⁴⁵ See Burnet 1924, 128, to the contrary.

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motivated—culturally, because the Good bears no resemblance to any god that Plato’s contemporaries could recognize; philosophically, because, as the text of the dialogue states (509a), the Good transcends description and surpasses the status of anything to which it could be likened in ordinary language. The Good, I propose, is neither a particular god nor is it God in the sense of the monotheist tradition. It is ‘the divine’ as such—the objective source and instantiation of absolute goodness, and the source of benefit to everything else, whether a Form or a particular, that can truly be called good. Hence, I call the Good not god but divinity. Platonists, philosophers who like the theory of Forms, and existentialist theologians in the mold of Paul Tillich should welcome this notion.⁴⁶ Nearly one hundred years ago, James Adam, whose commentary on the Republic is still unsurpassed in English scholarship, wrote: ‘The majority of interpreters are now agreed in identifying Plato’s idea of the Good with his philosophical conception of the Deity.’⁴⁷ Adam could have appealed to the authority of Zeller, whose arguments in his equally unsurpassed History of Greek Philosophy 1889 may be the best thing that has yet been written on the subject. Scholars writing in German and French continue to adopt the interpretation (for instance Neschker-Henschke 1995 and Bordt 2006), but it has long been out of fashion in the English-speaking ancient philosophy community. Why is that? For three principal reasons, I think. First, divinity (as I have characterized it) is not a concept that is amenable to philosophical analysis in our contemporary intellectual climate. Scholars are relatively comfortable in discussing the notion of a divine and beneficent creator, such as we find in Plato’s Timaeus, or the Stoic Logos named Zeus, or Aristotle’s Prime Unmoved Mover, construed as a super intellect and teleological cause. These notions can be understood as quasi-persons or as agents with minds that have at least some affinity to our own. The Form of the Good is completely unknowable in that way, and hence outside the scope of divinity, or at least particularized divinity, according to the historical and conceptual frames of reference of Anglo-American philosophy. A second and related reason for balking at this interpretation is the entrenched belief that it is ‘characteristic of the Platonic conception of deity’ to be or have nous,⁴⁸ as I noted above with reference to McPherran’s reluctance to treat the Good as a god.⁴⁹ Hackforth, in an earlier treatment of Plato’s divinity as nous, proposed that ‘Theism became part of Plato’s philosophy, as distinct from his religious belief, [only] at a later period than that of the Republic.’⁵⁰

⁴⁶ See Boys-Stones 2018, 163: ‘I assume that all Platonists identify the first god with the form of the good which in turn is identical with the form of beautiful’. Cf. Plotinus, Ennead 1.6.9. ⁴⁷ Adam 1902, vol. II, 51. ⁴⁸ So Cherniss 1944, 605. ⁴⁹ Menn 1995 is the most thorough presentation of this position. ⁵⁰ Hackforth 1936, 447. Shorey 1895 was an earlier supporter of Hackforth’s detachment of the Good from the theism of the Timaeus, Philebus, and Laws.

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Nothing in the Republic explicitly forbids us from endowing the Good with nous, but its apparent absence from all the later Platonic corpus is an important point in its own right. Did Plato drop the transcendent form of the Good from those works because he was unhappy with the obscurity for which it soon became notorious? Or, as I much prefer to think, did his later focus on the ‘mind of god’ develop in concert with his cosmological interests, letting the Good stand as a complementary but distinct theological venture, as the approach to divinity most pertinent to politics and ethics? My third suggested reason for the scholarly detachment of the Good from divinity is that its role as a super Form invokes concepts of harmony, proportion, and teleology that do not seem to depend on or betoken anything specifically divine.⁵¹ In other words, the divinity of the Good is redundant because it contributes nothing to its causality that is not already subsumed under these concepts and their mathematical applications. As a non-theist myself, I sympathize with this kind of thinking. But to foist it on Plato would be hopelessly anachronistic. Goodness, beauty, and stability are the essential attributes of divinity in his understanding of to theion throughout. They are paradigmatically instantiated in the Form of the Good: that is to say, harmony, proportion, teleology, and mathematical structure actually are Plato’s divinity in its highest manifestations.⁵²

⁵¹ For good suggestions along these lines, see Denyer 2007, Fine 1990, Miller 2007, Santas 1999, and Sedley 2007a. ⁵² Cairns et al. 2007 is replete with treatments of these notions, but the book’s introduction and fourteen contributions make no mention of god, gods, divine, or divinity.

9 Platonic Souls as Persons I The concept of psychê is central to Plato’s philosophy. If you doubt that, try to imagine subtracting psychê from his metaphysics, cosmology, epistemology, or ethics. The theory of Forms, the structure of the universe, the conditions of understanding, virtue, and happiness—all of these are intimately connected with Plato’s doctrine that rationality and desire for objective goodness are properties of the psychê at its best. In spite of its centrality, Plato’s generic concept of psychê is neither one of the most discussed nor one of the most admired features of his philosophy.¹ Two principal reasons, I think, account for this state of affairs. The first of these has to do with an apparent incoherence in the way Plato uses psychê. Thus I. M. Crombie specifies ‘four forces which pull upon the word psuche [sic] as Plato employs it’.² He identifies these by noting that Plato makes psychê responsible for the life of plants, the orderly movements of the heavenly bodies, the immortal feature of human beings, and everything mental. On Crombie’s assessment Plato has either succumbed to primitive animism, or, as Crombie prefers to think, he has unhappily combined personalist and non-personal functions in his concept of psychê. Referring only to Plato’s early dialogues, T. M. Robinson finds ‘soul . . . used in several distinguishable senses’, leading to an ambiguous notion of the ‘self ’.³ Doubts about the coherence of Plato’s concept of psychê do not arise simply from thinking that he uses the term multifariously and even inconsistently. They are more deeply influenced, I surmise, by a second reason for this scholarly verdict, which is the difficulty of finding an interpretative framework suitable for modern readers to apply to Plato. Crombie discusses the concept under the I have benefited from comments offered by those who have heard versions of this chapter in various places, including a very helpful and constructive response from Terry Irwin at Cornell and comments made by Ricardo Salles. ¹ I say ‘generic’ because there are numerous discussions of particular details of Plato’s psychology, especially the tripartite psychê of the Republic, which is strongly defended by Cooper 1984 as a fine contribution to the understanding of human motivation. ² Crombie 1962, vol. 1, 301. ³ Robinson 1995, 20. Apart from such objections, there are well-known difficulties about reconciling doctrines of the psychê that Plato advances in different dialogues, e.g. its unity versus its tripartition and its partial or complete immortality; see Robinson 1995, ix–x. The different psychic models are less disturbing if Plato, as I argue, was primarily concerned throughout his treatment of the concept with aspects of personhood as distinct from quasi-biological facts about human beings.

Selfhood and Rationality in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Heraclitus to Plotinus. A. A. Long, Oxford University Press. © A. A. Long 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198803393.003.0010

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heading ‘philosophy of mind’. But philosophy of mind is a relatively recent field of inquiry, indelibly coloured by Descartes and the sharp distinction he introduced between the physical and the mental. Inasmuch as Plato discusses such concepts as belief, desire, pleasure, action, and emotion, he can be brought into contact with what we call philosophy of mind. But the mind/body distinction, in the way it has preoccupied modern philosophy, has only partial bearing on the Platonic dualism of body and soul.⁴ If Plato’s concept of psychê does not fit neatly into the philosophy of mind, that may tell us no more than the truism that he was an ancient philosopher. The difficulty of translating Plato’s notion of psychê into modern terms should not prevent us from looking for some approximate notion in our own conceptual scheme. Even if we conclude that the Platonic psychê is not commensurable with anything we fully understand or accept, we shall have no proper access to it at all without some hypothesis concerning its scope. In this chapter I want to approach the notion as if it were primarily intended to elucidate what we today understand by the concept of a person. My project is not to prove that the term psychê in Plato has a significant overlap with the word ‘person’. That overlap is too obvious to need proving. My aim is rather to try to show that Plato in his ‘psychology’ (I will use this word for convenience) was strongly motivated by a wish to establish the credentials of a concept that we can liken to the concept of a person. Plato, of course, did not, and could not literally, ask the question, ‘What is a person?’ and offer his psychology as an answer to it. He does, however, regard it as the philosopher’s task to ask: ‘What a human being is, and what it is appropriate for such a nature to do or undergo that is different from other creatures?’ (Theaetetus 174b). Plato’s Socrates and Plato’s other leading interlocutors approach those questions by developing accounts of the human psychê. If there is a significant overlap between those accounts and much that we consider crucial to the concept of a person, that should help us to understand at least some of the aims of Plato’s psychology since we shall have a translation system, as it were, for converting them into a modern idiom. I hope to show that an assessment of Plato’s psychology from this perspective is particularly helpful not only for identifying the issues that primarily concerned him but also for mitigating the inconsistencies and ambiguities noted by Crombie and Robinson.⁵

⁴ See Everson 1991a, 8–9, on some of the differences between Plato and Descartes. ⁵ Given the breadth of the topic, and the requirements of clarity and brevity, I shall discuss only those details of Plato’s psychology which seem to be central for interpreting his concept of psychê at its most general level. It may be thought that these include, for instance, immortality, details about tripartition, reminiscence of pre-natal knowledge, and incorporeality. Here I want to argue that we may get a better grasp of Plato’s thought if we do not start from such properties of the psychê but interpret them as conditioned by his prior interest in understanding human identity from the viewpoint that we today would call the life of a person. For a wide-ranging study of ancient concepts of personhood, see Gill 1990. The chapters of his book that are most germane to my study are those by C. Rowe, on Plato’s Phaedrus, and A. W. Price, on Plato and Freud.

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By ‘translation’, I am not suggesting that psychê in Plato can consistently be rendered into English by ‘person’. That is sometimes possible, and sometimes not. When Plato’s Socrates undertakes to test someone’s psychê, we would say he is trying to find out what kind of a person his interlocutor is. The analysis of the psychai of the members of the different constitutions in Republic 8 tells us the type of person they are—what they desire, how they order their priorities, and the kind of life that they live. The psychai that are judged in Plato’s eschatological myths, after the end of their mortal life, retain the basic attributes of persons—life histories, characters, beliefs, and desires. In contexts such as these, person is a better translation than soul or mind. Soul has no agreed meaning in modern English, and mind, though plainly a central property of the Platonic psychê, is too restrictive a term to capture all the personal and ethical attributes that Plato’s concept implies. However, although Plato regularly identifies the essence of the human being with the psychê as such, or at least with its rational part, as at Republic 9.588d, he tends to follow the custom of his time in speaking of psychê as something that a human being has, rather than as what a human being is.⁶ Since Platonic human beings, during their earthly life, also have a body, it seems as if their psychê can be only a part of what they are. The concept of a person is not dualistic in this way. We cannot say that a human being has a body and a person. Our term person refers to all of a human being, the whole man or woman, including their bodily attributes, as when you read that no more than eight persons are permitted to travel in an elevator at the same time. This disanalogy between the modern term ‘person’, with its frequent bodily connotations, and Plato’s psychê may suggest that it is better, after all, to treat his concept as at least broadly similar in scope to mind: as we speak of body and mind (or body and soul), so Plato speaks of body and psychê. Yet, the fact that there are some linguistic discrepancies between person and psychê is less significant, I believe, than what the concepts have in common. Although embodiment goes along with being a person in our everyday experience, it is controversial whether embodiment is included in the concept of person. There are reputable philosophers who do not think that personhood entails having a body, or at least having the human body that a token person presently has.⁷ Actually, while embodiment is not an attribute of the Platonic psychê, that entity is always intermittently attached ⁶ But note the possibly spurious Alcibiades 1, 130c, where ‘human being’ (anthrôpos) is formally identified with psychê, as distinct from body or the complex of body and psychê. Note too that Plato frequently shifts without any apparent change of meaning from describing what a psychê does to what the human being (whose psychê it is) does. ⁷ For a subtle discussion, see Williams, ‘Are persons bodies?’ in Williams 1973. Although Williams argues that his question should be answered affirmatively, he does not attempt to show that it is impossible to conceive of disembodied persons. What he claims, correctly I think, is that ‘if we admit the possibility of persons previously embodied becoming disembodied, then we are committed to giving a Cartesian or dualistic account of those persons in their embodied state’ (p. 70).

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to a body of some kind (human, animal, or celestial); and Plato probably thought that one couldn’t be a human being unless either one at present has a human body, or in the past has had a human body, although a human being might exist without still having a human body, and a pre-embodied psychê might exist without yet acquiring the identity of human being (see Meno 86a). The theoretical possibility that persons are not confined to one body, and the certainty that Platonic psychai, during human life, are so connected, disarm the objection that person can, as Platonic psychê cannot, connote a human body. Moreover, the term person in many of its standard uses refers precisely to what someone is from a non-bodily viewpoint, as if I say: ‘So and so has a beautiful body, but I don’t care for them as a person.’ I will now make a case for the affinity between the Platonic psychê and the concept of a person, drawing on some modern thinking about the latter concept. In the remainder of the chapter, I will discuss ways Plato developed the personalist concept of psychê he inherited from his culture.

II What is a person? The first and most obvious use for the term is a human being under a particular description. When we characterize human beings as persons, we are not doing physiology or biochemistry.⁸ Persons are what we study in such fields as moral and political philosophy, law, theology, literature, anthropology, and history. The term ‘person’, said John Locke, ‘is a forensic term, appropriating actions and their merit; and so belongs only to intelligent agents, capable of a law, and happiness and misery’.⁹ In a splendidly lucid article Daniel Dennett advances six necessary conditions of personhood.¹⁰ They include rationality, intentionality (acting under the causal influence of beliefs and desires), adopting and reciprocating certain attitudes with respect to others, capacity for verbal communication, and, finally, self-consciousness. Dennett also refers approvingly to Harry Frankfurt’s influential thesis that persons, in the fullest sense, are beings who

⁸ As Wiggins 1987 has observed, 67, the concept of person is primitive in the sense that ‘it presents us with ourselves as we know ourselves’. Or, as he further observes: ‘Starting with person, one abstracts to the living body; and from that, one abstracts to an object whose processes can be subjected to biochemical and anatomical research.’ In describing the concept of person as ‘primitive’, Wiggins means that what we are primarily concerned with, when we refer to a person, is ‘a subject of consciousness’ and a ‘locus of value’. What a person may be, from the viewpoint of biology, cannot tell us what it is from the primary perspective of consciousness and value. ⁹ Locke continues: ‘This personality extends itself beyond present existence to what is past, only by consciousness—whereby it becomes concerned and accountable . . . all which is founded in a concern for happiness, the unavoidable concomitant of consciousness’ (Essays (5th edn, 1706) Book II, ch. xxvii). ¹⁰ Dennett 1976, 175–96. He does not claim that his six necessary conditions are jointly also sufficient conditions. His article is chiefly concerned with exploring the relation between ‘metaphysical’ personhood (roughly, ‘being human’) and ‘moral’ personhood.

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not only want to perform particular actions, but who also have ‘second-order volitions’.¹¹ For Dennett the reflective self-evaluation implicit in second-order volitions makes personhood ‘inescapably normative’. What he means by this is that life as a person is something to be aspired to, implying an ideal of morality. Frankfurt, in a similar vein, characterizes human beings who lack second-order volitions as ‘wantons’ rather than persons, exemplifying wantons by small children and mentally defective people. There are more charitable ways of making that point, but it seems clear that the modern concept of person strongly includes the normative aspect that Dennett maintains. When we consider what particular human beings are in terms of their attributes as individual persons, we are not primarily interested in their physical characteristics or financial position, or even their health, but their mental and moral qualities, their characters, and their personalities. And we cannot consider any of these things without, at the same time, evaluating them.¹² Plato’s passionate interest in the features of persons that I have enumerated is obvious throughout his dialogues. These are packed with arguments that seek to prove that reason, self-reflection, deliberation about life’s purposes, cultivating certain desires and repressing others, and justice are the normative dispositions or activities of a human psychê. Plato also seeks to prove that happiness has these dispositions or activities as its necessary and perhaps sufficient conditions. His psychology is in line with Locke’s observation about the connection between persons and intelligence, accountability, and happiness or misery. It is self-evident that actual persons are living beings. We might also clarify the concept of person by saying that what makes someone a person is a way of living, as specified by the kind of features Dennett picks out—rationality, selfconsciousness, intentionality, reflectiveness, and morality, with the important proviso that persons differ radically from one another in how and in how far

¹¹ Frankfurt 1971. Frankfurt uses the expression ‘second-order volitions’ to refer to ‘reflective selfevaluation’—wanting to live in a certain way, wanting to be someone who has a certain range of desires, wanting to persuade oneself to give up one pattern of behaviour in favour of another, etc. ¹² This obviously and very importantly does not imply that the health and welfare of persons qua persons are matters of indifference. We expect a good government to promote the health and welfare of all its citizens, precisely because their health and welfare are a primary good for them as persons; and we think it correct to impose strict penalties on anyone who deliberately damages a person’s body or health or welfare. The basis of these judgements, in the modem context, is our belief that persons (irrespective of their personal qualities, as cited above) have rights, which, in turn, help to establish norms of appropriate interaction between persons, and between governments and citizens. In this chapter I am not talking about the concept of a person as the bearer of rights which are inalienable and unaffected by the person’s conduct. The fact that a modern person’s rights are not a function of his or her personal qualities is sufficient to differentiate the political/legal domain of the former from the individualistic, psychological, and moral sphere of the latter. The same fact is also sufficient, I think, to make ‘person’, as the bearer of personal qualities, a concept with cross-cultural and diachronic applications that do not apply, at least in the same way, to ‘person’ as the bearer of legally assigned rights.

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they satisfy or seek to satisfy these conditions. I say that what makes someone a person is a certain way of living because that formulation, with its reference to life, enables us to see how Plato could use the term psychê as his way of identifying that which has the attributes of a person. What psychê primarily signified, in the ordinary language of Plato’s time, was that which makes embodied human beings alive as the individuals that they are. For Plato, I propose, what psychê gives to human beings is the capacities they need for living well as persons in the sense just explained.

III To contextualize these last points, it is important to recognize that Plato, notwithstanding his remarkable psychological innovations, inherited a strongly personalist notion of the human psychê from mainstream Greek culture. Human death in Homer, and in all later Greek culture, is explained by the departure of the psychê from the body. When someone faints in Homer, the psychê also leaves the body, but only temporarily. Since someone who has fainted is still alive, we should be cautious about treating the Homeric psychê as if it referred to an organic, or quasi-physical principle, of life. What the Homeric psychê constitutes can be inferred from the fact that it survives as a ghost after it leaves the body permanently. Homer’s bodyless psychai are what we could call ex-persons. By being given draughts of blood, they can talk; and what they reveal, under those conditions, is the identity and character corresponding to their formerly embodied existence.¹³ The Homeric psychê gives us an invaluable glimpse of the kind of life this term, in its earliest recorded Greek usage, was taken to confer—life as a conscious, desirous, purposive being. Some of Plato’s philosophical predecessors gave the psychê a material constituency—air, fire, or types of atom. But such theories, discrepant and recherché as they were, had no apparent effect on the standard understanding of the term. On the evidence of its usage in Greek poetry after Homer and before Plato, psychê regularly refers to or implies a human life as experienced in human consciousness. As such, it may stand for the whole person, as when Oedipus says, ‘My psychê [i.e. “I”] grieves for the city and myself ’ (Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus 64), or as Odysseus remarks: ‘It is not my habit to praise a stubborn psychê’ (Sophocles, Ajax 1361).¹⁴

¹³ All these points are wonderfully illustrated in Odyssey 11. See Long 2015, chs 1 and 2. ¹⁴ Claus 1981 has argued that the predominant sense of the term psychê before Plato was that of a powerful ‘life-force’ whose manifestations are both physical and psychological. I think that the term ‘life-force’ is seriously misleading. The Homeric psychê, as we have just seen, is an ex-person when it leaves the body at death. The psychê mentioned in the two Sophoclean texts is not a life-force but a

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Isocrates, Plato’s exact contemporary, expects his readers to agree with these remarks that he makes concerning ‘our nature’ (tên phusin hêmôn): [It consists] of body and psychê. And everyone would admit that, of these, the psychê is by nature the more authoritative constituent and the one of greater worth. This is so because it is the function (ergon) of the psychê to deliberate (bouleusasthai) on private and public affairs, whereas the body’s function is to minister to the decisions (gnôstheisin) of the psychê. (Antidosis, 180)

Isocrates goes on to explain that there are two corresponding branches of education—philosophy for the psychê which renders it more intelligent, and gymnastics for the body, to make it more serviceable. There is no reason to suppose that Isocrates is borrowing from Plato here. His opening remarks about body and psychê are foreshadowed in earlier Attic orators and in Democritus.¹⁵ Isocrates conceptualizes the relation between psychê and body on the model of master and slave. The psychê deliberates and takes decisions; the body’s function is to execute these as efficiently as possible. Isocrates’ brief remarks do not address the question of what psychê and body contribute respectively to the life of the composite human being, but we should note that he does not say that psychê gives deliberative power and intelligence to the human being. His point is, rather, that the psychê as such deliberates and takes decisions. The psychê is the intelligent agent that gets the body to do what it wants in the sphere of private and public life. Since that sphere is what we would call the ethical and social domain, Isocrates’ usage of the term has clear affinities with the concept of a person. This revealing passage shows that Plato’s dualistic treatment of psychê and body was by no means all his own invention. He was probably the first Greek philosopher to make the psychê explicitly incorporeal. But the popular belief of his times was already dualistic in the weaker sense that it regarded psychê as something other than the bodily complex of flesh, blood, and bones; in other words, Plato also shares with Isocrates the following propositions about body and psychê: first, that the latter is naturally authoritative over, and more valuable, than the body; second, that the body’s natural function is to be entirely instrumental to the psychê; third, that psychê and body require the different kinds of education Isocrates enumerates; and fourth, that psychê is by nature an intelligent

person. ‘Life-force’ treats the early Greek uses of psychê as if they picked out a biological principle. Claus, 163, finds it remarkable that Plato in his early dialogues makes ‘no direct reference to the traditional function of the psychê as animator familiar to ordinary Greek usage’. Plato’s psychology was undoubtedly revolutionary in many respects, but, if I am right, he inherited the view that the term primarily signifies life as a conscious, purposive agent. He did not shift his usage from the word’s ‘lifeforce’ functions because it did not have these in the way that Claus maintains. ¹⁵ See Lysias 24.3, Antiphon 5.93, and Democritus DK 68 B 31, 187.

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decision-maker. Keeping these points of agreement in mind, let us now consider what else Plato wants to say about psychê in his earlier dialogues.

IV We may start with a well-known passage from the Apology. In defending his mission to the citizens of Athens, Socrates tells the jury at his trial that he makes it his business to urge people to care above all for the perfection of their psychê (Ap. 29e–30b). What he means is brought out through a contrast between wisdom, truth, and virtue, on the one hand, and body, wealth, reputation, and honour, on the other hand. To perfect the psychê, it is clear, entails valuing and cultivating the former rather than the latter. This implies that the psychê is someone’s intellectual and moral self. There is a further implication. Those who value their body and property above their psychê are neglecting the essence of their human life. The equivalence between excellence of psychê and cultivation of wisdom, truth, and virtue specifies the conditions for living well. To live well, according to the Platonic Socrates, is to live justly. Socrates seeks to prove this proposition (Republic 1, 353a–354a) in an argument that is crucial for understanding Plato’s general conception of psychê and its virtue or excellence (aretê). The key to the argument, picked up later by Aristotle (in NE 1.6), is that the psychê has a specific and unique function (ergon). Things that have functions are for something, and what they are for tells us what they essentially are. Thus the eye is ‘for seeing’. Seeing is not only the eye’s function; it also specifies a scale of value in terms of which we can say whether an eye is satisfactory or not. We understand what an eye is by starting from its proper function—seeing—and this function tells us that an eye that sees badly is essentially defective. By analogy, we are invited to identify the proper function of the psychê and to specify what it and it alone can do. The answer Socrates proposes is that psychê is for doing such things as managing, ruling, and deliberating (which, of course, recalls Isocrates). ‘What about living?’, he asks his interlocutor. The answer is an emphatic affirmative. Socrates then draws a series of inferences: (1) the equivalent of seeing well, in the case of the psychê is ruling and so forth justly since justice is its specific excellence or aretê. (2) The just human being and the just psychê live well. (3) Living well is living happily. (4) The just human being is happy. Within its context in the Republic this argument is programmatic rather than conclusive. Its significance for my purpose here is the light it casts on Plato’s normative conception of the psychê. Just as the eye is for seeing well, so the psychê is for living morally well. Plato is saying, I think, that there is no such thing as an eye that merely sees or a psychê that merely gives life to a human being. The degree of goodness or badness with which the seeing or the living is done is an irreducible property of a particular eye or psychê. Living, as the function of the psychê, is not a

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value-neutral activity. To live at all, as an adult human being, is to act with a degree of goodness or badness. To put it another way, in order to understand the psychê we must start from what it is its nature to do well; we must start our analysis by identifying the proper function or excellence of psychê by discovering what the life that this constitutes is at its best. T. M. Robinson has argued that Plato, in this argument, equivocates between two incompatible functions of psychê—living (in a biological sense) and ‘managing, deliberating and ruling’.¹⁶ Since living well (where ‘well’ equals justly) could apply only to the latter set of activities, he charges Plato’s argument with incoherence. It is true that Plato’s Socrates cites ‘living’ as if it were a function of psychê additional to ‘managing, deliberating and ruling’. But I find it quite implausible to suppose that Plato does this because he treats human ‘living’ as something other than, or additional to, ‘managing, deliberating and ruling’. In this argument, ‘managing, deliberating and ruling’ are ways of specifying the normative lifefunctions of the psychê. Once we allow Plato to be talking about the life of persons or possible persons, it becomes clear that ‘life in the [purely] biological sense’ has no place in this argument. The way that Plato uses psychê here alerts us to the thought that a human life is ‘for’ something. In the rest of the Republic he will seek to prove that injustice is precisely what the life of psychê is not for. Plato, as we have seen, shares with Isocrates the notion that psychê is the source and subject of rational agency. What the two Platonic passages I have adduced add to Isocrates is the connection between excellence of psychê and justice or moral virtue. This connection, we have good reason to suppose, was Socrates’ special contribution—conceptualizing justice not as an external set of rules, or as a social convention, or even as a virtue that some people might acquire—but seeing it instead as intrinsic to any fully functioning human life. Socrates’, or at least Plato’s, way of expressing this point was to treat ethical virtue as the ‘health’ of the psychê. The medical model presupposes the functionalist conception. A normal body is a healthy body, just as a normal eye is good for seeing. If justice is essential to our psychic health, justice or morality offers itself as a standard for evaluating the quality of life someone is living. This Socratic and Platonic thought delivers a central component of Dennett’s conception of ‘full personhood’ as a moral notion that is ‘inescapably normative’. Further components of that conception come to light when we consider the Socratic and Platonic connections between the cognitive and ethical capacities of the psychê. In Isocrates’ model of the psychê its special excellence is characterized as intelligence or prudence (phronêsis). Isocrates does not clarify the relation between the deliberative function of the psychê and phronêsis, but I conjecture that he regarded phronêsis only instrumentally: that is, he supposed that the

¹⁶ Robinson 1995, 34–7.

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effectiveness of a psychê at deliberating and using its body would depend on its good use of reasoning. For Socrates and Plato, on the other hand, rationality and self-reflectiveness are intrinsic to the normative life of the psychê. Indeed, without them it lacks the understanding and desires essential to its living well. The points I have been making about psychê as a normative concept apply particularly clearly to the Gorgias. This dialogue enables us to see the main lines of Plato’s psychology in the making; these were lines from which he never significantly deviated, though they also help us to understand his later development. In addition, the Gorgias is interesting for comparison with Isocrates. The sophist Gorgias drew on psychê in his Encomium of Helen, where he takes an orator’s role to be manipulation of the psychai of his audience.¹⁷ In Plato’s Gorgias the figure of that name has nothing to say about psychê. Socrates is the only speaker whose conversation draws heavily on that concept. This must be Plato’s way of signalling the distinctiveness of the historical Socrates’ contribution. Socrates in the dialogue introduces psychê by distinguishing it from the body (Gorg. 464b–465d). Like Isocrates, he proposes that psychê is the body’s overseer, and, again like Isocrates, he takes no interest in biology. The body is of interest to Socrates mainly as an analogical model. It provides him with the means of arguing that psychê is like the body in the following respects: each can be healthy or diseased, and each can be well served or merely gratified. The body is made healthy and well served by doctors and trainers; by chefs and cosmeticians, on the other hand, the body is gratified without regard to its health. Correspondingly, the psychê is made just (acquires psychic health) by good government, but is merely flattered, at the expense of its good condition, by rhetoricians and sophists. A further comment on the body helps to clarify this last point. The body, Socrates says, has no power on its own to discriminate between truth and falsehood; its only criterion is pleasure. As the dialogue develops, we are invited to perceive rhetoricians or spurious politicians, and hedonists like Callicles, as defective persons because they identify themselves and their audiences with their bodies rather than with the normative condition of their psychê. The concept of a person, as Locke pointed out, is intimately connected with the attribution of happiness and misery. Today we think of persons as having the right to happiness, and as not having the right to cause misery to others. Plato does not have this modern notion of a ‘right’, but his concept of psychê, in as much as it specifies the normative life for persons, also establishes the essential conditions for authentic happiness and misery. Socrates spends much time in the Gorgias attempting to prove that happiness is measured by absence of disease in the psychê. Since disease of the psychê is to be cashed out in terms of ignorance and injustice, it is taken to follow that a healthy and well-functioning psychê—one that

¹⁷ See Gorgias DK 82 B11.8–10, and Long 2015, ch. 3.

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cultivates knowledge and justice—will be happy. Later in the dialogue Socrates offers a more positive account of what constitutes goodness of psychê. Goodness, he argues, can never arise randomly. It always depends upon taxis (504a). This term, which can refer to the good ordering of a battle line, is a Platonic metaphor for the structure of a well-functioning psychê. What it particularly generates in the psychê, Socrates says, is sôphrosynê.¹⁸ As used by Plato, sôphrosynê is a concept with some similarity to Frankfurt’s ‘second-order volitions’ or ‘reflective self-evaluation’. In the Charmides, Socrates explores the idea that sôphrosynê is ‘knowledge of knowledge’. In the Republic, where sôphrosynê is a virtue possessed by each class in the ideal state, it constitutes their consent to the specific functions assigned to themselves individually and collectively. Sôphrosynê implies both self-knowledge and self-control. In the Gorgias, it enters the discussion as the antidote to Callicles’ unrestrictive hedonism. Callicles presents himself as one of Frankfurt’s ‘wantons’, contemptuous of anything that interferes with the pleasure of the moment. He is interested in intelligence only as an instrument for satisfying every immediate desire. Socrates seeks to refute him by arguing that no one can live satisfactorily without at least restraining some desires and discriminating between pleasures. The ability to impose this kind of order on one’s life requires the self-knowledge and volition expressed by sôphrosynê. Plato makes Socrates emphasize this virtue at this point in the Gorgias because it sums up the rationality and selfreflectiveness he has been driving at in his refutation of Callicles. At the beginning of his response, Socrates declared his interest in any kind of discussion which could test the psychê concerning living correctly or otherwise (487a). By advancing the convictions he attributes to Socrates and by pitting these against those of Callicles, Plato juxtaposes two radically different conceptions of human values. The manner in which he does so is as important as the matter in regard to my thesis about Plato’s interest in the concept of a person. As Dennett points out, we expect a certain kind of consciousness and verbal communicativeness from persons. This is not to say that we expect persons to be philosophers or to engage in Socratic debate. Nonetheless, a strong belief in a particular lifestyle, a commitment to certain choices, and a capacity to defend these choices, if challenged—all of these are qualities we look for in human beings we respect. Plato’s focus on the normative life of persons is as sharp in the conversations that he stages as it is in his analyses of the features of the psychê. At the end of the Gorgias, Plato confirms his personalist conception of the psychê in the myth about its destiny after death. Separated from the body, which Socrates had previously likened to a tomb, each psychê is no longer identifiable by the former human being’s social position and family. It is, we might say, a ‘bare’

¹⁸ See ch. 4 above, p. 62.

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person, exposing those features of moral character, intellectual attitude, and lifestyle that concern us when we ask what a human being is like as a person, as distinct from that individual’s acquired roles or necessary identities in terms of gender, race, heredity, and so forth. Later Greek philosophers picked up this point when they distinguished between things to do with the body and ‘external’ things, and things to do with the psychê. The psychê judged at the end of the Gorgias is a human life stripped of its bodily and ‘external’ accompaniments.

V I now review some of Plato’s uses of psychê in his later philosophy. My proposal is that these become more intelligible and coherent when viewed from the perspective I have been advocating: i.e. psychê as the concept that specifies the necessary and sufficient conditions for living the excellent life of a person, and correspondingly, as the concept that can articulate deviations from that standard. Person, as I have repeatedly said, seems to be a normative concept. Once we allow Plato to have had a similar intuition, we can understand why he treats psychê not as a value-neutral principle of life but as something to be cared for, something that he approaches by first asking what it is like at its best. The paradigm psychê for Plato is a lover of truth and beauty. To the extent that a psychê falls short of these aspirations, it constitutes a life that degenerates from the ideal. That, as we shall see, has biological implications in Plato’s philosophy, but his biology is premised upon the normative functions of psychê. A comparison with Aristotle will make my point clear. Aristotle in De anima 2 approaches the question ‘What is psychê?’ by reviewing a series of vital functions. As the primary one of these, he selects the faculty responsible for nutrition and reproduction. This faculty is common to plants, non-human animals, and humankind. It is the minimal attribute of a living being. Aristotle, to be sure, regards human life with its complexity as immeasurably more valuable than the life of plants. But he starts his analysis of psychê at the bottom; his so-called psychology in the De anima starts as a contribution to the physical science of biology. Plato, by contrast, tends to start his analyses of psychê at the top. In the Phaedrus we are invited to regard psychê generically as an everlasting self-mover and as the source of all other motions (245c). It is the task of every psychê to associate itself with a body and to care for this. A star—in Plato’s mythical discourse—is a heavenly body which has a god as its psychê. This celestial psychology sets the context for a mythical account of the kind of psychê that becomes associated with a human body. I refer to the splendid image of the winged charioteer who drives a pair of horses, one white and one black. The charioteer, who stands for rationality and love of beauty, wants to drive his horses

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in order to get a view of the Forms. That means, he aspires to a vision of the truth. But the black horse, which stands for carnal desire, drags the charioteer and the honour-loving white horse down to earth. Such a psychê loses its wings and becomes embodied in human form. Plato’s account is an allegory. What it shows is his conviction that, to understand our psychic life we need to start from what such a life can be at its best—one in which we identify with the desire for truth and beauty, and have the ambition (the white horse) to pursue these as goals. This ideal has implications for biology since, according to the Phaedrus myth, embodiment in human form can happen only to a psychê which has previously glimpsed what is unequivocally true and beautiful. If such a psychê fails to make good use of its embodied life, it will be judged accordingly and reincarnated in a non-human body. A non-human body, then, is the habitation of a degenerate psychê. At its best, on the other hand, a psychê is associated with a celestial body and enjoys a life of uninterrupted communion with truth and beauty. We find the same kind of top-down analysis in the Timaeus. There the concepts of body and psychê are first applied to the construction of the physical world. The body of the world is endowed with a psychê that has the attributes of knowledge and true belief. As a secondary stage, the demiurge and the lesser gods create the kind of psychê which inhabits a human body. It has an immortal part, described as ‘ruling in those who are willing to follow justice’ (Tim. 41c), and mortal parts. Later in the dialogue, these mortal and immortal parts of the human psychê are given different locations within the human body. As in the Phaedrus, but in greater detail, non-human animals, including birds and fish, are seen as deriving from those human beings who failed to make proper use of their rational faculty. Doctrines such as these conclusively establish Plato’s normative conception of psychê. However, it may still seem that Plato has muddied the waters by extending psychê at one extreme to the universe and the stars and at the other extreme to non-human animals (and even plants).¹⁹ Neither extreme, it seems, can have any connection with the concept of a person. That seems to be Crombie’s verdict (as cited at the beginning of this chapter), but I think it is anachronistic as far as Plato is concerned. ‘Personal’, in Crombie’s discussion, implies personality and human individuality. Under this perspective it is self-evident that Plato was wildly wrong if he supposed there is anything personal about either a star or a non-human animal. But he plainly did not think of these as being respectively superhuman or subhuman personalities. What answers to person in Plato, I propose, is precisely a psychê that is or will ¹⁹ I find it curious that Crombie (n. 2 above) specifies ‘life’ simpliciter as the first ‘force’ influencing Plato’s use of the word psychê, and illustrates that from Timaeus 77b, where plants are called zöia and endowed with the appetitive part of psychê. This is the only context in Plato which extends psychê to plants, and Plato, unlike Empedocles, never includes plants as possible vehicles for the transmigrating psychê.

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be or has been associated with a human body. The special character of such a psychê is its capacity not only for rationality and ethical excellence, but also for choice and self-determination. As embodied, a human psychê cannot and should not ignore the needs of its associated body. For that reason, in his mature philosophy Plato attributed an appetitive faculty to the psychê—the desires and pleasures of eating, drinking, and sex. However, Plato (like Isocrates) regarded the body as only instrumental to a normative life, and he underlined that point by making the nature of the psychê non-bodily, or, as we might say, spiritual. The body is not what we are constituted to live for. Yet, although the psychê is metaphysically distinct from the body, it can become bodily rather than spiritual in its self-identification. In the Phaedo (80d–81e) Plato draws a sharp contrast between types of after-life. A psychê which has identified with the body yearns for that kind of life even after death; a psychê which achieves detachment from the body during human life is a person for whom spiritual values have become second nature. Because the psychê of Plato’s mature doctrine has a complex structure (the three parts comprising rationality, thûmos, and appetite), it manifests itself to consciousness in more than one voice, and its various voices can generate conflicting desires and a divided self. This fact presents human beings with their primary task: to decide with which voice or ordering of voices they will identify themselves. Someone who identifies with appetite or even with ambition (thûmos) at the expense of reason and justice is, in Plato’s estimate, living a quasi-animal life, and hence not the proper life of persons. The complexity of the psychê provides for different personae or selves—a spectrum of self-identifications for persons. As we might describe a person’s life as an achievement or as a waste, so Plato looks at the history of an individual psychê. The psychê of a star is not a superhuman person because it has no mortal body to contend with, and no corresponding choices to make. However, its life has a connection with that of persons because, in Plato’s view, the stars are models of intelligent action, motivated by consistent desires for the good.²⁰ A star life instantiates the order and discipline with which Plato in the Gorgias identifies the excellence of a human psychê. In this way, stars and non-human animals provide Plato with complementary models for conceptualizing the best and worst potentialities of the human psychê. Plato, we will say today, was unfair to non-human animals and too admiring of the stars. (The same criticism can be directed against Aristotle and the Stoics.) But since the feature of persons that he most valued was rationality and objectivity, we can see why (given the scientific climate of his day) he fell for the temptation of attributing the regular movements of the heavens to psychê. Our modem science ²⁰ The similarity with cosmic nous in Aristotle is obvious. However, by endowing the world and the stars with psychê rather than nous, Plato deliberately, I take it, opted for the more personalist term.

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obliges us to treat this celestial psychê as a hopeless mistake, but the mistake arose not from equivocation over the meaning of psychê but because Plato regarded cosmic order as analogous to the best life of persons.

VI At the beginning of this chapter I offered ‘person’ as an approximation for Plato’s concept of psychê. This would be useful, I suggested, if it helped us to discover the dominant impulses of his psychology and rendered them more coherent than they are often taken to be. The points I have particularly emphasized are the distance of the Platonic psychê from a biological principle, the constant focus on its normative activity, and the standard identification of psychê with the way human beings use their lives. These affinities with the concept of a person are not, of course, accidental; we are able to approach Plato in this way precisely because of his incalculably large influence on Western consciousness. Since approximations are illuminating for what they miss as well as for what they capture, I want, in concluding, to consider what our distance from Plato tells us about his conception of the psychê and its relevance, or non-relevance, to ourselves. The Platonic concept of psychê would not be a good model for drafting democratic constitutions. Liberal democracies, while making room for distinguishing between persons in terms of morality and achievement, grant everyone the right and freedom to choose their own values within the limits of the law. Plato, on the evidence of the Republic and Laws, has a dangerously impoverished conception of personal freedom. What I called his top-down analysis presupposes a divine origin for the psychê and its natural interest in transcendent values. Plato’s conviction about these things colours his assessments of how someone should live an embodied life. That kind of metaphysics and theology is remote from the modern context of persons, trying to organize their lives within families, professions, social institutions, market economy, and leisure practices. Person, we think, should be a thoroughly secular concept; otherwise it becomes tinged with prescriptivism and unjustified control. Immortality, non-essential embodiment, possible reincarnation or transmigration into other life forms—these properties of the Platonic psychê are also remote from anything we ordinarily associate with persons; and there is something more basic about modern persons that separates us from Plato. For us, persons are above all human individuals, and we value individuality for its own sake. This can be seen in our use of the term ‘personality’ (as well as in our concept of a person’s rights). In its original usage personality meant simply the quality of being a person. Today, it has a more restrictive application. Media figures are personalities because we find them interesting, and we tend to evaluate personality by such terms as vivid, dull, lively, placid, excitable, amusing, and the like. Listing features

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of personality is a typical way of characterizing an individual. We can even say some such thing as: Jack is a decent person but he has a boring personality, or Jill is a bad person but a really interesting human being. Thus our concept of a person, with its frequent moral connotations, is not coextensive with our concept of a character or personality. (It may be, however, that we are presently in the process of closing that gap, or even reversing priorities, as Nietzschean attributes like creativity and self-expression tend to be more admired than former virtues like piety or self-control.) Plato did not distinguish between the moral and the non-moral characteristics of a psychê. Everything human beings do, he thought, depends on the structure of their psychê and expresses their ethical character. Many of the features of personality widely admired in modern popular culture were viewed by Plato as an improper use of the psychê—socially pernicious displays of self-assertion or self-indulgence. Plato’s Socrates is an astonishingly individual figure. Yet Plato’s normative psychology, though clearly influenced by his interpretation of Socrates, accounts for only a fraction of the man. It explains Socrates’ moral character, his interest in converting others to philosophy, his fortitude in facing death, his tendency to become preoccupied with thought. It does not accommodate Socrates’ wit and irony, his delight in the landscape setting of the Phaedrus, his social graces, and his erotic obsessions with handsome young men. I do not mean to say that any of these Socratic characteristics is inconsistent with Plato’s normative psychology. My point is rather to underscore his lack of interest as a theoretician in human individuality for its own sake.²¹ That lack of interest is, of course, philosophically motivated. For Plato particularity as such is largely associated with the bodily, unstable, pluralistic, and imperfect features of the phenomenal world. What is best about persons, he thought, was their capacity to know themselves as beings with a ‘likeness to the divine’ (ὁμοίωσις θεῷ). This seems to translate for Plato, at the limit, into the cultivation of a self whose identity is defined by properties that it could, in principle, fully share with others, including the knowledge and love of truth and per se goodness. Such a self, it may seem, has lost all touch with the personal. But if we draw that conclusion, it is important to see that a wholesale rejection of Plato, on that score, threatens to miss much of what we are accustomed to value most about persons. Only a person could aspire to knowledge and love of goodness. If the pursuit of such goals is a proper end for persons, the concept of a person needs to accommodate ways of living that satisfy Platonic conditions of human excellence—transcending individuality, practising objectivity, going

²¹ See ch. 6 above. I am not questioning Plato’s theoretical interest in different human types, and I should note that any psychê is always an individual. Questions of how Plato construes personal individuation are excellently explored by McCabe 1994, in her chapter on the unity of persons.

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beyond the perspectives of here and now.²² As Thomas Nagel has argued, what it is to be human seems to include an impersonal way of being—he calls it ‘the objective self ’—along with the individual’s unique perspective.²³ Plato differs from Nagel in the value and limits of what both philosophers consider ‘the possibility of objective ascent’. What they share is a readiness to explore the paradox that persons are still (or, as Plato would say, are especially) themselves when they detach themselves from their individual viewpoint and try to think and act objectively. We cannot straightforwardly identify ourselves with a Platonic psychê. But we can draw on Plato to ask important questions about what makes us persons. If person is a normative concept, if human life is a project and a quest, if we cannot live well without living for something, if our identity has rational and irrational manifestations, if something inward (call it the supra-mundane or absolute) beckons to us, we can try conversing with a Platonic psychê. The result may be to make us question some or all of these conditionals, or at least Plato’s way of exploring their implications, but that can still be useful as a means of grasping where we find ourselves.

²² See Lovibond 1991 on Plato’s ‘ambiguous humanity’, and Clark 1990. ²³ Nagel 1986, which I discuss in ch. 1 above.

10 Cosmic Craftsmanship in Plato and Stoicism Greek conceptions of a supreme cosmic divinity and Greek notions of rationality matured in tandem.¹ Notions of rationality preceded the fully fledged idea of a world-crafting deity, but once this being was explicitly conceived to be a perfectly rational agent, its cosmological activities, as for instance its causal influence on astronomical regularities, influenced ideas and ideals of human rationality and a good society.² Plato pioneered the remarkable proposal that it is our human project to become as like as possible to God, presupposing a deep and quite novel connection between divine and human goodness.³ That connection underwrote the Platonic and subsequently Stoic idea that God’s macrocosmic rationality should serve as the model for an ideally well-ordered soul or person, whose undeviating adherence to the rule of reason would be a microcosmic reflection of the world’s order.

I Pre-Platonic Background The Greeks had many theological beliefs long before any explicit thoughts or expressions of rationality emerged. Those beliefs included the idea that the Olympian gods are responsible for the general workings of the world. As early as Homer and Hesiod, Zeus was represented as a supreme monarch and patriarch, whose virtually unchallengeable rule gives the world in general a more-or-less stable structure. The mind and justice of this archaic Zeus, vaguely conceived though they were, foreshadowed more articulate ideas of cosmic order; for

¹ The original audience for this chapter were the attendees of the conference ‘Plato’s Timaeus Today’, organized by Richard D. Mohr at the University of Champaigne-Urbana in 2007. I also presented versions at the following universities: Princeton, Toronto, Indiana, Texas at San Antonio, and Yale. I thank my audiences at these institutions for their comments, from which I have greatly benefited in writing this final version. ² No Greek philosopher was literally a monotheist, but the divine craftsman of Plato’s Timaeus is represented as the supreme deity, and likewise the Stoic Zeus; see Frede 1999. Hence I write God and Demiurge upper case when referring with one of these words to either of these deities, and I conform to ancient usage in referring to them with the masculine pronoun or possessive adjective. ³ For a selection of recent literature on this theme, see Annas 1999, Sedley 1999b, Betegh 2003, Armstrong 2004, Mahoney 2005, and ch. 3 above.

Selfhood and Rationality in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Heraclitus to Plotinus. A. A. Long, Oxford University Press. © A. A. Long 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198803393.003.0011

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subordinate gods as well as human beings could not overstep determinate boundaries without retribution.⁴ All theologies, whatever their truth may be, are human projections, psychologically speaking.⁵ What we project is primarily what we already know, and also what we would like to believe and approve, and what we possibly fear. Like all artefacts too, theologies involve analogy and model building, using the known (in the early Greek case monarchical and aristocratic social order) as a guide to the unknown. In the world as we observe it, many things, especially living things, have obvious beginnings and endings. Not surprisingly then, most cosmological myths picture the world itself as having a temporal origin, by analogy with our experience of birth. So too with the early Greek universe and its divinities. The world’s continuing existence, on the other hand, and the immortality of its gods are projections that overstep the obviously known. In the Greek mythological tradition, human beings and Olympian gods are anatomically and psychologically similar. The main distinguishing marks of the divine are immortality, freedom from such human vicissitudes as illness and aging, and uncanny motive power over the parts of the world that fall within the domain of each divinity. When the earliest Greek philosophers began to reflect on the origin and present structure of the world, they rejected the anthropomorphic features of the gods; but while demystifying their behaviour by relating it to empirical processes like heating and cooling, they retained immortality and motive power as properties of their new cosmic powers.⁶ These attributes remain basic attributes of the divine for Plato, Aristotle, and Stoics. But in these later philosophers perfection of mind or rationality is God’s primary attribute, making God the paradigm to which the human intellect should seek to conform itself. An early start in that direction might seem to have been made by Xenophanes, who credited his ‘greatest god’ with an intellect that is able ‘effortlessly to activate all things’ (DK 21 B 25). If, as some testimony maintains, Xenophanes identified this divinity with the heavens or even with the whole world, he will have been a forerunner of Stoic pantheism and may have influenced Plato’s conception in the Timaeus of a world that is ‘an ensouled and intelligent creature’ (30b7–8).⁷ However, Xenophanes manifested sceptical tendencies by characterizing his supreme god as ‘quite unlike mortals in body or in thought’ (B 23); and there is no evidence that he attributed any cosmogonical functions to this being. Enter the extraordinary thinker Heraclitus. Criticizing Xenophanes among other authorities (DK 22 B 40), Heraclitus pioneered the notion that nature is a

⁴ See Lloyd-Jones 1971, esp. 84–7, and Vernant 1982, 108–10. ⁵ Ludwig Feuerbach is the earliest modern thinker who gave currency to this proposition in Das Wesen des Christentums 1841, transl. by George Eliot as The Essence of Christianity (New York, 1957). ⁶ For general background, see Jaeger 1947; Lloyd 1987, chs 1–2; and Gerson 1990, ch. 1. ⁷ See Palmer 1998, 30–3.

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law-governed system of reciprocal changes between fire and other elements.⁸ His expression for this system is logos. This term would soon become the standard Greek word for reason and rationality, but at the time of Heraclitus the primary meanings of logos were ‘account’, ‘discourse’, and ‘ratio’. We may say, for ease of exposition, that Heraclitus sought to provide a rational account of a rationally structured world, but Heraclitus was not in a position to say that as straightforwardly as later Greek thinkers could express this thought. What Heraclitus did have available to him were such concepts as structure, measure, proportion, balance, and rhythm.⁹ His cosmic logos includes all of these ideas, and because of that it comprises much that we and the later Greek philosophers associate with rationality. In addition, and very importantly, Heraclitus associates the logos and his elemental fire with divinity. His fiery divinity governs the world by governing itself according to determinate measures and proportions. From our theological perspectives it is difficult to make sense of a divine governor who is not also, by virtue of that status, the world’s creator. Heraclitus, though, did not conceive of the world as the creation of a divine craftsman. He claimed emphatically that ‘this cosmos’ is an everlasting process of the measured changes of fire (B30). Where exactly, then, does divinity fit into this account? Heraclitus seems to construe god as a cosmic intelligence that manifests itself in the succession of diurnal and seasonal changes, the regularity of physical processes, and the unity of opposites (B32, 67, 102). In spite of the gap he set up between conventional human judgements and the divine perspective on things (‘to god all things are fair and just . . . ’), Heraclitus found in nature analogies to human artefacts (like bow and lyre) that involve balance, measure, and proportion. Because we understand these concepts in their human application, he takes us to be capable of discovering their operation in the divinely governed cosmos itself. Although Heraclitus did not prefigure divine craftsmanship and teleology, he did adumbrate a cluster of ideas that would become enormously potent in the later philosophical and theological tradition. These include first, the connection between the human faculty of rationality and the physical world as an orderly system; second, the selection of balance, measure, and proportion as key markers of rationality; and third, the ethical and psychological desirability of conforming one’s own mindset to the rhythms of the universe. In Heraclitus’ philosophy logos is both a global force and a mental power. The cosmic order that he discovered—a universe governed by divine proportionality—also provided a startlingly new paradigm of human excellence as a microcosm of psychological balance and ⁸ See ch. 4 above. I think it is a mistake to assimilate Anaximander’s celebrated conception of cosmic justice and retribution (dikê) to a notion of a law (nomos) of nature, as Heraclitus (uniquely among early Greek cosmologists) does (B114); see my discussion in Gagarin and Cohen 2005, 416–19. In this way Heraclitus inspired the Stoic Cleanthes’ cosmological Hymn to Zeus, see Long 1999, 47–8. ⁹ See ch. 4 above.

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internal control. All of these points foreshadow the linkage that Plato and the Stoics were to elaborate between the rule of reason and divinity. Looking back at his predecessors in his late dialogue Philebus (28c, 28d, 30d), Plato repeatedly makes Socrates say that all the wise or the men of old agree that the world is governed by nous, meaning intelligence or rationality. This can hardly mean that Plato took his predecessors to have anticipated his special theories concerning a divine craftsman or rational world soul. What Plato must mean here is that the Presocratic tradition in general took the world to be amenable to rational explanation because it is systematically structured as distinct from being random and chaotic. Such a claim fits Presocratic cosmology very well. What would not fit that tradition would be a claim that the world owes its rational structure to the deliberate acts of a constructive, personalist, and supremely benevolent intelligence. Anaxagoras (nicknamed Nous) went some way in that direction, as did Diogenes of Apollonia (DK 64 B 3) in the next generation.¹⁰ But their claims fell far short of what Plato took to be essential. Of his many theological and cosmological innovations, the biggest was his postulate that the world is governed by the purposive intelligence of a divine craftsman who is a supremely benevolent agent with personalist attributes—a divinity, in other words, more similar to the providential god of Judaism and Christianity than anything in the preceding Greek tradition.¹¹

II Plato’s Cosmic Teleology How similar, however, is more similar? To come closer to grips with Plato’s conception of divine craftsmanship and rationality, we need to consider two things that strongly distinguish his philosophical outlook from that of traditional Christianity as well as his Greek predecessors—strong body/soul dualism, and the hold that mathematics exercised on his philosophical imagination. Motive power, as we have seen, was a characteristic of the Olympian gods that the early Greek philosophers demystified when they identified their cosmic principles with such things as air or fire. Plato, however, taking air or fire to be lifeless (apsycha) phenomena could not accept their intrinsic properties as ¹⁰ For an excitingly original treatment of Anaxagoras, proposing that ‘teleological explanation started life in [his] doctrine of creationism’, see ch. 1 of Sedley 2007. Diogenes says (loc. cit.) that the world would not manifest ‘measures’ (seasonal regularities etc.) without ‘intelligence’ (noêsis), and that it is in general disposed ‘as beautifully as possible’. Do these propositions make him ‘the first Greek philosopher who was overtly a teleologist’, as Robinson 2001, 175, has claimed. I demur, see Long 2001, 476, and Sedley 2007, 75–8. ¹¹ Contrasting Plato’s Demiurge with the Zeus of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Vinctus, Vlastos 1975, 28, wrote: ‘The more beauty and goodness outside of him, the better his unenvious nature is pleased. This is the noblest image of the deity ever projected in classical antiquity.’

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sufficient to account for cosmic order.¹² Like modern theistic defenders of Intelligent Design, Plato refused to accept the idea that life could simply emerge from lifeless stuff. Physical elements, he proposed, behave as they are seen to do under the influence of a principle that, unlike them, is intrinsically self-moving. That principle he called soul, and he proposed that it pertains to the world in its entirety just as it pertains to all individual living beings (Laws 10, 892a–899d). World Soul is a concept so alien to our cosmological and theological ideas that we have great difficulty in approaching it as a serious contribution to making the universe rationally accessible and theologically satisfying. It looks at first glance to be an arbitrary imposition of animism, scientifically retrogressive by comparison with the mechanistic atomism of Plato’s older contemporary, Democritus. In fact, Plato situates his most detailed arguments in favour of the World Soul in a context where he is determined to prove, against the likes of Democritus, that physical elements cannot be the world’s first cause (Laws 10, 889a–d). His World Soul, so far as we can determine, was a largely original concept, intended by him as a major scientific breakthrough. Stoicism took the concept over from Plato, and while it is not a feature of Aristotelian cosmology, Aristotle followed Plato in attributing the movements of the heavenly bodies to souls associated with these beings.¹³ All these philosophers were convinced that celestial motions are regular and systematic precisely because they are goal-directed. Soul offered itself as an explanation for this goal-directedness by analogy with its assumed functions and powers in the human body. As the motor of human agency, soul causes the body to move according to its deliberations, emotions, and wishes. Absent a soul, a body is inert. This observation prompted the belief that souls are ontologically distinct from the bodies that they animate, and that soul as such is either immaterial or at least distinct from empirical matter. Human souls, of course, make mistakes and frequently fail to act rationally, but they offered Plato the model for a principle of cosmic activity that would instantiate perfect rationality as its motivation and motive power. Like the philosophers who followed his lead, he found seemingly incontrovertible evidence for such perfect rationality in the motions of the heavenly bodies, which never deviate from their circular course (even when they seem to do so, like the planets). More on this finding shortly. Plato was convinced that a soul’s rationality or lack thereof is the sure indication of its desires and values. Far from being value-neutral, rationality for Plato implies goodness and the desire to be in the best possible state. David Hume famously objected that reason ‘is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions’.¹⁴ Plato took exactly the opposite view. In his eyes, reason can only function properly when it is completely in charge of the passions, acting as desire’s unqualified motivation. His case for the World Soul in the Laws is largely based on the argument that the most rational motion is ¹² See especially Laws 10, 889b–d. ¹³ See De caelo 2.12, 292a20. ¹⁴ Treatise on Human Nature Part 3, section 3.

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circular, and therefore requires a supremely rational agent (soul) as its cause. In the Timaeus the Demiurge, at the beginning of his creative work, manufactures the circles of that dialogue’s World Soul according to an elaborate scheme of ratios (36a–d). These ratios generate the angles and speeds and proportions necessary to account for the uniform movements of the fixed stars and the deviant motions of the sun, moon, and planets. As moderns, we are bound to find incessantly circular motion a very curious paradigm of rationality and good intentionality. Everlasting uniformity is completely at odds with the spontaneity, imagination, and capacity for divergent thinking that mark the rationality of the most intellectually gifted humans, Plato conspicuously among them. I have nothing to say by way of toning down this huge discrepancy. But it is not hard to understand why Plato, in his culture and with his paradigms, saw things quite differently. First of all, there is the evaluative and metaphysical contrast, throughout his mature work, between the incorporeal realm of changeless, perfect, and intelligible reality, and the world of imperfect and changeable corporeality. Under this perspective, celestial movements, though properties of bodies, are the closest approximation to changeless reality because they are caused by incorporeal and purely rational souls. Secondly, in the mathematics and astronomy of his time he found a seemingly precise discourse for expressing the features of rationality I singled out when speaking of Heraclitus—ratio, balance, proportion, measure, harmony, and so forth. Plato, as we have seen, was indebted to earlier accounts of a rationally structured cosmos, but because his explanatory ambition, unlike theirs, was teleological through and through, his cosmology is no less fundamentally an ethics and even a politics.¹⁵ That teleological complexity, most conspicuously in the Timaeus and Laws, marks Plato as the world’s first fully fledged theologian. The details of his theology are carefully qualified by metaphors and numerous caveats, and they are the subject of innumerable scholarly controversies.¹⁶

¹⁵ These points are excellently made by Johansen 2004, see especially his remarks on pp. 22, 190–7. See also Broadie 2001, 1–28, esp. 16–21. ¹⁶ It would strain the limits of this chapter if I attempted to engage systematically with such classic questions as the relation between the World Soul of Laws 10 and the Timaean Demiurge. If pressed, Plato, I think, would identify the latter with the noetic faculty of the supremely virtuous and wise soul (Laws 10, 897b8–9), which I take him to refer to later in that dialogue as Demiurge (902e5, 903c6), king (904a6), and (implicitly) as caretaker (902a2, 7)); for these references and further discussion, cf. Mohr 2005, 198. In these later passages, the Athenian spokesman speaks of divinity in personalist terms, as is appropriate to his theodicy, and adopts the metaphorical language of the Timaeus rather than the austere language he has previously used in expounding the World Soul. I agree with Richard Mohr (thanks to his correspondence) that the World Soul of the Timaeus is ‘never viewed as a maker, builder, compositor’. But in the case of Laws 10, that dialogue’s World Soul is agreed to be ‘the cause of all things’ (896d8). We should note also the description of the world’s ‘cause’ as Demiurge in Philebus 27b1–2, as royal nous (ibid. 28c7), and, especially, as royally ensouled Zeus (30d1–3). I am not greatly impressed by the common objection (e.g. Hackforth 1965, 441) that the Laws’ World Soul is a ‘created

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Plato does not argue in the Timaeus from design to God, but from God to design. He starts from the premise that the observable world is as good as possible because it was made by an excellent divinity with precisely that intention (29e–30c). The questions Plato sets out to investigate are not the attributes of God but God’s creative plan and the initial conditions for his craftsmanship. Unlike the biblical divinity, Plato’s Demiurge does not say ‘Let there be light’, and so forth. He bases his blueprint for the world on the paradigmatic ‘intelligible living being’ (30c) that exists independently of himself. Nor does he manufacture the bodies of things out of nothing. Instead, he imposes geometrical structure on mindlessly moving and indeterminate ‘material’—the turbulent contents of the so-called ‘receptacle’ or space—that also exists independently of himself (53ab). Such is the Demiurge’s rationality, that he is able to ‘persuade’ this material, also called ‘necessity’, to play an accessory causal role to his benevolent intelligence—but only as far as possible (53b5). The preexistence of mobile material sets physical constraints on the divine craftsman’s workmanship (cf. 30a3, 37d2). Most important, for our understanding of Plato’s God, is the proposition that what motivates him to make the best possible world is the material chaos that initially confronts him (30a4–5). Here we may again draw a contrast with the Judaeo-Christian idea that the deity is an absolutely omnipotent creator who faces no pre-existing disorder. Here too we may find the distant legacy of archaic Zeus, who in Hesiod’s Theogony defeats and controls the older generation of disorderly Titans. A. E. Lovejoy famously proposed that the Demiurge is conceived as ‘SelfTranscending Fecundity’.¹⁷ Plato, it is true, characterizes his divinity as ‘completely unbegrudging’ and as ‘wishing all things to be as like himself as possible’ (29e2–3). But there is no hint in the text of the Timaeus that creativity simply emanates from the Demiurge, as it will in due course emanate from the Neoplatonic One. As Sarah Broadie has convincingly objected to Lovejoy, the Demiurge is motivated by his judgement that order is in every way preferable to chaos.¹⁸

being’ because I agree with Saunders’ translation [in the Penguin edition of the Laws] of the description of it at 967d6 as ‘far older than any created thing’. I think Plato’s point is that the Laws’ World Soul, in virtue of being a supreme nous, is the world’s first cause and thus functions for that dialogue in the way that the Demiurge does in the Timaeus. The whole point of Laws 10 is to prove that the world is governed by intelligent divinity. If the virtuous World Soul of this dialogue were not precisely that being, the ensuing and thoroughly systematic proof of the World Soul’s existence would completely miss the mark. I am therefore sympathetic to the positions adopted by such scholars as Taylor, 1928, 82, and Cherniss 1944, 607, to the effect that Plato’s God is uncreated soul endowed with nous. I thank Patricia Slatin for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this note. ¹⁷ Lovejoy 1936, ch. 2. ¹⁸ Broadie 2001, 10–16.

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This judgement enables us to gauge the power and originality of Plato’s craftsman image and the inter-entailment of his conceptions of goodness and rationality. Demiurge in its nominal or verbal or adjectival forms is one of Plato’s favourite quasi-technical words. While he sometimes uses these words in relation to such humble crafts as cobbling, he applies them in the Cratylus (389a2, 390e1) to the exalted maker of names, whom he also calls a legislator. The semantic field of demiurgy, for Plato, ranges over all crafts. He takes any craftsman worthy of the name to be infallible in the sphere of his craft; and he characteristically associates demiurgy with the technical expertise necessary for rational and goal-directed creativity. The concept presupposes an ideal paradigm, an expert craftsman, and amorphous materials that the craftsman sets into appropriate order, following the formal structure of his paradigm.¹⁹ This is exactly the scheme we are offered as the image of God in the Timaeus. ‘God’s wish’, Plato says, ‘was to make the cosmos optimally resemble the most beautiful and most complete of intelligible things, and so he created a single visible living being, containing within itself all living beings of the same natural order’ (30d). Why, we may ask, is the Demiurge motivated to make the visible cosmos a complete replica of his intelligible paradigm? Would his desire to bestow order on material chaos not be better served by restricting his creativity to the manufacture of items that best instantiate rationality, to wit—the celestial bodies and their associated souls rather than the complete animal and plant domains? One answer could be that the materials available to the Demiurge and the subordinate gods are necessarily limited in quantity and susceptibility to their craftsmanship, making it impossible for them to create more stars from material they actually end up using for terrestrial creatures. The materials are, though, sufficient to manufacture tokens of the intelligible Forms’ rationality in the structures of all the living beings that the Demiurge and the subordinate divinities create, thus ensuring complete homology between paradigm and visible copy. Prior to the world’s creation, reality already contains supreme goodness and rationality by virtue of the intelligible Forms and the Demiurge himself. His creativity extends that goodness and rationality to the generated universe, as far as possible. Throughout the Timaeus numerical proportion and geometrical symmetry are the principal concepts by means of which order and limit are bestowed on the universe. I have already referred to the ratios in the composition of the incorporeal World Soul. As to the world’s physical constituents, the Demiurge imposes geometrical shapes on the pre-cosmic antecedents of the elements, making their structure and motions mutually harmonious, so enabling them to mutate into one another systematically.

¹⁹ For further discussion, see Johansen 2004, 83–6, and Sedley 2007, 173–80.

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In the Timaeus Plato offers us a description of divine craftsmanship in action. Yet, as we read on into the work’s account of the human body and soul, we realize, remarkably, that quasi-demiurgic rationality and harmonics are actually being prescribed as the microcosmic goal of human life (cf. 89d4–90d). As rational selfmovers, in virtue of being given a rational faculty of soul, we are also equipped, according to Plato, to conform our disorderly mental motions to the ‘thoughts and revolutions of the cosmos’ and so become rational craftsmen of our own lives, and thus like God.²⁰ Yet, unlike the Demiurge, human beings are incarnate souls, with bodies that require the incorporation of irrational mental faculties. Although the body we are given is wondrously shaped and proportioned with a view to serving the needs of a life that sets a premium on rationality, embodiment, like the material constraints on the Demiurge but to a far greater extent, necessarily limits human agency. Human beings, given their psychological and physiological complexity, face the strenuous task of imposing proportion and harmony on their mental and physical constituents. Thus human rationality, though a quintessentially divine gift, can only take command of the entire self if its affinity to cosmic order and intentionality is fully recognized and cultivated. It should now be clear that Plato’s model of divine craftsmanship concerns much more than world formation. Demiurgic rationality is the exercise of paradigmatic goodness. As such, it stands as a model of virtue quite generally. In making best use of the available materials, the Demiurge serves Plato as theological underpinning for the civic excellence he imagines that Athens in the remote past displayed when its citizens singlehandedly overcame invasion from Atlantis. Sarah Broadie makes the essential point, where she writes: ‘If the creation story is not simply subordinate to the heroism story, then surely they are related as variations on the same theme: the overcoming of disorder.’²¹ But, as she also observes, there is the following crucial difference between the stories: while divine reason, because it is unembodied, can operate unhindered, human beings are assigned the very difficult task of liberating their own rationality from its bodily encumbrances. The human goal is to complete the work of the Demiurge by making a specifically human contribution to the world’s rationality. With this thought we are offered a remarkable theological reason as to why human beings are created in the first place.

III Stoicism’s Immanent Demiurge For further variations on the theme of cosmic craftsmanship in ancient philosophy, I turn to Stoicism. The antecedents of this Hellenistic school’s cosmology and theology are complex. Its founding fathers were certainly inspired by Heraclitus, ²⁰ See Sedley 1999b, 316–21, and ch. 3 above, pp. 51–3.

²¹ Broadie 2001, 18.

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and also probably (though the extent is difficult to specify) by Aristotle. However, neither of these predecessors envisioned the world as the product of divine craftsmanship. That the Stoics did so is quite certain, and it is equally certain that Chrysippus, their leading thinker, drew directly on Plato’s Timaeus.²² Dêmiourgein, the verb corresponding to Plato’s noun dêmiourgos and signifying ‘work as a craftsman’, is one of the standard ways Stoic authorities described God’s cosmological activity.²³ There is every reason to think that they encouraged their students to recognize this affinity to Plato’s theological cosmology. Craftsman, rational, providential, and benevolent—these attributes are common to the Platonic and the Stoic God. When it comes to specifics, however, the Stoic Demiurge and the world that he generates turn out to be very different from their Timaean counterparts. One type of difference is literary. In writing the Timaeus, Plato took himself to be producing ‘a likely story’ or myth. We are probably intended to take much of the work’s scientific detail seriously if not quite literally, but Plato has invested his Demiurge with a personality and conversational style that the Stoics did not normally replicate.²⁴ More significant than literary differences is the quasi-scientific nature of the Stoic Demiurge’s cosmogonical functions, which includes rejection of Plato’s incorporeal and independently existing Forms or archetypes. Like Plato, the Stoics attributed the structure of the world and its natural contents to divine agency and planning, but in accounts of how their Demiurge operates they largely eschewed metaphor or vague expressions such as Plato’s statement that Intellect sought to ‘persuade’ necessity (Tim. 48a). We can take them to have reasoned thus: if the world has a cause that is not only intelligent but also intelligible, it had better act in ways that conform to observation and experience. According to these criteria, the Stoics inferred that only bodies can engage in causal interaction.²⁵ Therefore God himself cannot be body-less but must be an embodied mind, acting directly in physical processes and giving form to matter by being present within it. Plato’s Demiurge gives the world a body and a soul, but the Demiurge himself remains apart from that creation.²⁶ He does not make an artefact that is distinct from himself. He is, so to speak, his own product, making himself into the world by causing matter to become informed by his omnipresent intelligence. Does this ²² For Chrysippus’ clear allusions to the text of the Timaeus, see Plutarch, On Stoic selfcontradictions 1052d = LS 46F (referring to Tim. 33c7–d3) and Aulus Gellius 7.1.7 = LS 54Q (referring to Tim. 69b). For detailed discussion, see Reydam-Schils 1999, esp. ch. 1, and Sedley 2002. ²³ DL 7.134. ²⁴ There are exceptions, e.g. Epictetus, Discourse 1.1, but there the Zeus that addresses the reader is clearly a fictional conversationalist. ²⁵ See the sources excerpted in LS, ch. 45. ²⁶ The virtuous World Soul of the Laws is a closer analogue to the Stoic Demiurge, not only in its lack of personality but also in its being immanent in the world. The created world of the Timaeus is an ‘intelligent living being’(zôion), and that description pertains to the Stoic cosmos in virtue of the presence of the Stoic divinity throughout as the world’s soul (Plato, Tim. 30c, Philo speaking for the Stoic Chrysippus, De aeternitate mundi 94).

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pantheistic notion imply that there is no difference between God and the world? The answer depends on the perspective and the context of the question. If we pose it as a question about the world inhabited by us, God is taken to be present everywhere in the structures of animate and inanimate things alike. However, the Stoics were convinced that the world we inhabit had a beginning and will eventually end. From that perspective God has an identity that transcends the world because his existence, like that of matter, is eternal. In everlasting recurrence, God makes himself into the world and then, in a striking expression ‘withdraws into providence’, bringing himself out of the world and ending it, in order to prepare for it anew.²⁷ With inspiration from Heraclitus, the Stoics described God as a fiery intelligence, and they looked to the role of fire in technology as one of their models for God’s demiurgic and self-transforming activity.²⁸ What that technology involves, however, has less to do with manufacturing than with biophysics; which brings us to what has been well called the Stoics’ cosmobiology, and a further marked difference from Plato’s idea of divine craftsmanship.²⁹ The Stoic God’s plan for the world is not a static paradigm, but a set of causal principles memorably and presciently called ‘seminal’ or ‘spermatic’, which are equivalent to the creative mind of God at work.³⁰ In a quite literal sense, this divinity, to whom the Stoics gave the exalted name Zeus, fathers the world by endowing matter (allegorically construed as the female goddess Hera) with a kind of cosmic DNA or genetic programme.³¹ That programme represents divine providence, but no less basically it represents fate or causal determinism. Having seeded the world, as it were, the Stoic divinity causes the world to evolve according to his predetermined formulae (spermatikoi logoi). Unlike the Platonic Demiurge the Stoics’ craftsman God does not need to ‘persuade’ necessity, because he incarnates necessity in the causal nexus that operates throughout the world.³² That causal nexus, leaving no room for any undetermined happenings, was one of the Stoics’ most powerful contributions to the concept of a rational cosmology. Yet, the causal nexus does not make their physical theory purely mechanistic, as it might appear to do, if taken in isolation from their theology. As the enactment of divine rationality and providence, the causal nexus is not only the way things necessarily had to be but also the way things optimally had to be. According to this theory, someone who fully understood the world’s causality would be in touch with the benevolent mind of God.

²⁷ ²⁸ ²⁹ ³⁰ ³¹ ³²

For evidence and discussion, see LS, ch. 46 and Long 2006, ch. 13. See Aetius 1.7.33 (LS 46A) and DL 7.135 (LS 46B). For cosmobiology see Hahm 1977, ch. 5. See Hahm 1977, 75–6, and references in n. 28 above. Dio of Prusa 36.55 (SVF 2.622) and Origen, Contra Celsum 4.48 (SVF 2.1074). For a selection of texts on fate and the causal nexus, see LS, ch. 55.

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Plato’s Demiurge, despite his power and benevolence, is constrained to some extent by material necessity. Not so the Stoic God. Matter (hulê) in this system is taken to be completely plastic and analogous to wax in its lack of intrinsic shape. It is thus accessible to every form that divine intelligence determines to be required in order for this to be the best of all possible worlds.³³

IV Platonic and Stoic Demiurgy Compared I have provided only a lightning sketch of Stoic cosmology, but I hope it can serve as sufficient preparation for asking how the Stoics positioned themselves in regard to the teleology and rationality of the Platonic Demiurge. That divine figure, motivated by unbegrudging goodness, sets out to make the best-possible world, first by generating a soul for the heavens and imposing mathematical order on pre-existing bodily chaos; and second, by fashioning human beings with the ‘celestial’ gift of a divine nature, in the form of a rational psychic faculty. With what motivation is the Stoic God credited and precisely how does his rational creativity manifest itself? For answering these questions in the absence of any complete Stoic text comparable to Plato’s Timaeus we have only fragments to work with. Here is a brief statement of what we can find. The Stoics, as I already observed, named their cosmic divinity Zeus, taking that great name to signify ‘the cause of life’, following the etymology proposed by Plato’s Socrates.³⁴ This etymology plainly fits their cosmobiology. Moreover, it identifies the divinity so strongly with his procreative function that Lovejoy’s word ‘fecundity’, which he misapplied to the Platonic Demiurge, is wholly apt in the Stoic case. No pre-cosmic disorder faces their Zeus, motivating his benevolent desire to introduce measure and proportion. The Stoic divinity is so bursting with life that he is not content to be alone for ever. His fecundity motivates him to generate a world of which he is the soul, and to whose particular beings he is the cause of life and life-giving elements.³⁵ This divinity, unlike Plato’s Demiurge, is not a mathematician but a chemist and biophysicist and nuclear engineer. We hear nothing in our Stoic sources concerning the divinity’s arithmetical and geometrical activity, and much, instead, of his selftransformations and the mixing and vibrant motions of which he is the cause.³⁶ The world that he creates and makes himself into is a harmonious structure, but, because the matter with which he works is completely plastic to start with, he has no need to begin by restructuring it in terms of number and shape and proportion. ³³ Calcidius 292 (LS 44D). ³⁴ See Plato, Cratylus 396a–b and DL 7.147. ³⁵ In support of the Stoic God’s ‘fecundity’, I refer again to the school’s allegorical deployment of the marriage of Zeus and Hera, with Hera likened to the matter impregnated by Zeus (references in n. 31 above). ³⁶ For a selection of texts on the physical manifestations of divine activity, see LS, chs 46–8 and 54.

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Turning now to rationality, I have already remarked on the causal nexus that the Stoic divinity plans out initially and then implements. This striking innovation transforms Plato’s external and constraining necessity into the internal and unconstrained operations of the divine mind. Yet, causal necessity, it may seem, has no conceptual connection with a mind’s rationality and benevolent intentionality. You can believe in determinism without believing in a divine creator. Indeed, you may well find these two ideas incompatible, especially if you think that determinism leaves no room for the kinds of choices that Plato’s Demiurge requires human beings to make. I shall have to omit any detailed treatment of how the Stoics replied to this problem.³⁷ It is clear, however, that in their eyes the causal nexus allows for human action to be ‘in our power’, in the sense of its not being enforced by factors external to our own characters and our innate capacity to give or withhold assent.³⁸ In addition, the causal nexus exhibits the feature of rationality that most impressed them, which was not mathematical proportion, balance, and limit, but coherence and consequentiality. The Greek word that I refer to here is akolouthia. In Stoicism this term is importantly at work in all three of their divisions of philosophy.³⁹ First, in physics, it expresses the connection between antecedent events and their necessary effects, i.e. the causal nexus. Second, in logic, it names the relation of consequence that a valid conclusion has to the premises of a sound argument. And third, in ethics, it signifies actions that are in conformity with the normative nature of human beings. Akolouthia is a concept that identifies the ideal of rationality permeating Stoic philosophy as a whole. It asks us to take causality, logic, and ethics to share in the kind of coherence we formulate when we say that B follows A or A leads on to B. As cosmic mind, the Stoic divinity is the foundation of this multidimensional coherence. But if this were all, it would not be clear why divine rationality is also well intentioned and prescriptive, offering itself as the model for human action.⁴⁰ What is morally good about cosmic coherence? The Stoic answer is that it makes the world ‘like a well-ruled community’, governed by irrefrangible laws.⁴¹ Those laws are not only formulated by the divinity; they are also, as Seneca states, always followed by him.⁴² Though omnipotent, the Stoic Zeus acts as a constitutional

³⁷ For my early effort to explain Stoic compatibilism, see Long 1971c. ³⁸ See Bobzien 1998, esp. ch. 6.3.5–7. ³⁹ See Long 1971b, 95–6. ⁴⁰ Obedience to God and kinship with God are among Epictetus’ constant themes; see Long 2002, 156–72, 184–9. Epictetus is the Stoic philosopher with the most fully elaborated account of how human beings stand and should stand in relation to divinity. ⁴¹ See Schofield 1991, ch. 3. ⁴² De providentia 5.8: ‘Although the actual creator and ruler of the universe wrote the decrees of fate, he follows them; he obeys for ever, but gave orders only once . . . The craftsman cannot alter his material; this is its condition’ (ille ipse omnium conditor et rector scripsit quidem fata, sed sequitur; semper paret, semel iussit . . . Non potest artifex mutare materiam; hoc passa est).

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monarch, conforming himself to the prescripts of rational coherence. The Stoic world is the city of God. We can now see that divine craftsmanship in Stoicism is much more directly political and anthropocentric than in Plato’s conception. The chief lesson of the Timaeus, as we have seen, is for human beings to cultivate their rationality, taking celestial motions as their model for trying to achieve mental balance and harmony. Plato politicized the human mind with his injunctions to put reason rather than passion in charge of our lives;⁴³ but he did not conceptualize the created world as a polity. The Stoics took that bold step, calling the world ‘the habitation, as it were, of gods and human beings and the things that have come into being for their sake’, and treating all the world’s contents as generated for our sake.⁴⁴ This was another way of saying that the project of the Stoic God is to generate a world in which the seeds of divine rationality and coherence are directly extended to human beings, equipping them, subject to their own understanding and volition, to function as a community in the law-governed ways he himself embodies. Much more directly than Plato, Stoicism sought to give cosmic craftsmanship an exact counterpart in the human ideal of a rational and socially cooperative craft (technê) of life.

V Conclusion To conclude: basic to the concept of cosmic craftsmanship in both philosophies is the proposition that human beings exist because a supremely creative and benevolent intelligence has deemed it good to fashion a world containing beings with a potential likeness to itself. Evidence of that providential intellect is available to us in the physical world’s orderly structure. This evidence prompts the further proposition that orderly structure, as manifested in psychological and ethical integrity, should be the prime desideratum of any mind that fully recognizes its rational capacities and social identity. Cosmic order is the model for a well-ordered soul whose voice to itself can function as the human vehicle of divine craftsmanship. Thus far there is substantial agreement between Plato and Stoicism. But when we ask about the practical and emotional effectiveness of their theological cosmologies, large differences begin to emerge. The Platonic Demiurge does his best, but he is constrained by his corporeal materials. So too are we, as we are also constrained by our psychological complexity. Straddled

⁴³ See Long 2015, ch. 4. ⁴⁴ Eusebius, Praeparatio evangelica 15.15.305 (LS 67L). For discussion, see Schofield 1991, 64–7. Eusebius continues: ‘It must be believed that the God who administers the universe exercises providence for human beings, since he is beneficent, kind, well-disposed, just, and has all the virtues.’

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between incorporeal rationality and bodily motions, our dualistic nature presents us with a managerial task that is extremely demanding but encouragingly reflected in the wonderful cosmological work performed by the Demiurge himself. In Stoicism by contrast the divinity is faced with no externally limiting constraints. He makes the best possible world without qualification. The embodiment he confers on human beings is derived, like their souls, from himself.⁴⁵ With consummate ease, it seems, he makes himself into the world. Yet, the craftsmanship human beings are required to exercise, to make themselves godlike, is taken to be so demanding that everyone in fact falls short, with no known human being as yet having achieved fully fledged Stoic wisdom. Why does their omnipotent and benevolent divinity make things so difficult for us, so distant from him in spite of our common share of rationality? I ask an absurdly large question at the end of this chapter. Among the many things that help to furnish some answers, I think the most relevant idea is the absolute perfectibility implicit in the Stoic concept of rational coherence. Nothing external, including our bodies, necessarily inhibits human beings from sharing in divine perfection. We are endowed with that potentiality, and are thus far like the divinity. But the gap between potentiality and actuality is absolute because rational coherence and the excellence it constitutes do not admit of degrees.⁴⁶ Rather than asking us, like Plato’s Demiurge, to negotiate our unavoidable psychosomatic complexity, the Stoic divinity sets human beings the extraordinary project of conforming their own rational faculty to his rational coherence. The offer of this-worldly perfectibility and the exponential difficulty of accepting the offer go hand in hand. At this point Stoicism moves beyond its Hellenic sources and becomes the tributary of a mightier theological stream. Jesus is reported to have told his disciples: ‘Be ye perfect, even as your father in heaven is perfect’ (Matt. 5.48). Stoicism anticipates and echoes Jesus’ imperative, which has always embarrassed sin-obsessed Christian theologians. The stock charge against Stoicism among Christians has been its shamelessly ‘arrogant’ proposal that we can, in principle, perfect ourselves (really become godlike) by our own efforts if and only if we never deviate from the voice of reason.⁴⁷ What Christian critics have failed to understand is that the voice of Stoic reason (if it really is that, and not some beguiling pretender to the office) actually is the voice of God, and accessible to us because that is what we hear when we exercise our own rationality correctly. The ‘holy spirit’ of Christian doctrine—the hagion pneuma—had a pre-Christian gestation as the divine offshoot of the Stoics’ cosmic craftsman. ⁴⁵ The human soul is sometimes described in Stoicism as an ‘offshoot’ (apospasma) of God, e.g. Epictetus 1.14.6. ⁴⁶ See Stobaeus 2.99, 3–8 (LS 59N), id. 2.113, 18–19 (LS 59O), and Diogenes Laertius 7.101 (LS 60O). ⁴⁷ See for instance Blasie Pascal, Discussion with Monsieur de Sacy, cited in Long 2002, 263–4 and Brooke 2012.

11 Aristotle on Eudaimonia, Nous, and Divinity For man, then, the life based upon intellect is best and pleasantest since intellect more than anything else is man.

I Introduction My aim in this essay is to investigate Aristotelian eudaimonia and selfhood by reviewing these notions’ associations with divinity and with nous. Much modern debate has centred on the question of whether Aristotle represents eudaimonia as a plurality of intrinsically choiceworthy goods, chiefly comprising all virtuous activities (‘inclusive end’), or whether, instead, he envisions it to be a unitary goal (‘dominant end’) consisting strictly in just one supremely excellent thing, the exercise of intellectual virtue or contemplation (theôria). It is widely agreed that his preliminary discussion of eudaimonia in Book 1 of the Nicomachean Ethics (NE) is couched in terms that are too general or too ambiguous to settle the question decisively, though they tend, in my view, to favour the ‘inclusive’ alternative. However, in Book 10 Aristotle states unequivocally that the happiest life consists in contemplation, while the political life of moral virtue (which he has been exclusively treating throughout Books 2–5 and 7–9), is happiest only ‘secondarily’ (1178a6–10). A page or two later he writes (1178b28–32):¹ Happiness extends, then, just so far as contemplation does, and those to whom contemplation more fully belongs are more truly happy, not incidentally but in virtue of the contemplation; for this in itself is precious. Happiness therefore must be some kind of contemplation. (theôria tis)

Taken just by themselves, these passages, especially the last one, undoubtedly favour the ‘dominant end’. In that case, though, how does Aristotle intend his readers to evaluate the life of moral virtue, to which he has devoted so much careful attention in the earlier books of NE? Is he finally asking them to take courage, justice, temperance, ¹ Unless otherwise indicated, I draw on the translation by Ross 1925 with minor modifications.

Selfhood and Rationality in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Heraclitus to Plotinus. A. A. Long, Oxford University Press. © A. A. Long 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198803393.003.0012

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and so forth to pertain to a life that is happiest only secondarily (10.8, 1178a9), and its corresponding activities to be ‘not choiceworthy for their own sake’ (10.7, 1177b18)?² Can activity in accordance with these virtues be plausibly understood as only an ‘analogue’ to contemplation, or an ‘approximation’ of it, or instrumentally contributory to it?³ Much subtle argument has been devoted to such proposals, but they have little or no explicit foundation in Aristotle’s text. Early in the first book, he already distinguishes between the political and the contemplative lives (1095b18–19), but he defers treatment of the latter (1096a4–5). Right at the beginning he declares that politics is the ‘most authoritative’ or ‘master’ art, meaning that it includes the ends of all other sciences, and so ‘its end must be the human good’ (1094a26–1094b7).⁴ A few pages later, Aristotle concludes that happiness or the human good is ‘activity of soul in accordance with virtue, and if there is more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete’ (1098a16–18). Those who support the ‘dominant end’ interpretation, take ‘best and most complete virtue’ to be a cryptic allusion to ‘wisdom’ (sophia), which is the virtue corresponding to contemplation according to NE 6.6, 1141a16–20. But it is quite possible, and indeed more plausible, given the political tenor of the argument thus far, to interpret the expression inclusively, to signify ‘total virtue, i.e. the combination of all virtues’, taking that to include both the (as yet) unidentified and undefined moral virtues and their intellectual counterparts.⁵ It could be, of course, that every effort to achieve a satisfyingly unitary interpretation of the NE as a whole is doomed to fail because the work as we have it is a compilation by Aristotle’s editors rather than a fully integrated opus sanctioned in this form by the author himself. If that were so, the chapters that seem to treat contemplative activity on its own as the necessary and sufficient condition for perfect happiness could be regarded as a Platonizing appendix, recalling the early Protrepticus, and out of place in a work that deals so carefully and systematically with morally virtuous activity.⁶ The three central books of NE (5–7), which it shares with Books 4–6 of the probably earlier Eudemian Ethics virtually prove that post-Aristotelian editors are ultimately responsible for the transmitted text of both ethical works. ² These questions become still more difficult if ‘secondarily’ (deuterôs) is detached from ‘happiest’ (eudaimonestatos) in the previous line, as by such translators as Ross (1925): ‘But in a secondary degree the life in accordance with the other virtue is happy.’ ³ See Charles 1999, Richardson Lear 2004, and Kraut 1989. ⁴ This claim can, by a stretch, accommodate contemplation (as theoretical science), but it certainly does not anticipate the secondary status finally accorded to the happiness constituted by the virtues of the political life. ⁵ See Ackrill 1980, 28–9. My objective here is not to advocate either an inclusive or dominant interpretation of such controversial expressions as ‘best and most complete virtue’. The prevalence of this disjunction threatens to reduce study of NE to a virtual chess game, where the legitimate moves are tantamount to ingenious readings of a few ambiguous expressions. As long as discussion of Aristotle’s stance is based on such moves, it is all too easy for the defending side in this protracted debate to declare stalemate. ⁶ See Gauthier-Jolif 1970, II.2, 875–8.

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Still, such an explanation for the difficulties of crediting Aristotle with a fully coherent account of happiness in NE should be only a last resort; and indeed there are many indications, as one reads through the whole work, that it is intended to constitute a unity, notwithstanding loose ends such as the absence in the main body of the work of an earlier statement (as claimed at 10.7, 1177a17) that ‘perfect’ (or ‘complete’) happiness is ‘contemplative’. In his treatment of contemplation Aristotle emphasizes the godlikeness of such activity for human beings: The activity of God, which surpasses all others in blessedness, must be contemplative; and of human activities, therefore, that which is most akin to this must be most of the nature of happiness. (NE 10.8, 1178b21–3)

This sentence and its surrounding context have given rise to the widespread belief that Aristotle introduces divinity specifically to characterize contemplative happiness and to distinguish it accordingly from the secondary happiness of moral virtue. In fact, however, divinity is also a prominent concept in the later sections of the first book of NE, where, as we have seen, Aristotle draws no overt distinction between moral and intellectual virtue. These early mentions of divinity have played little part in the ‘inclusive’ vs. ‘dominant’ debate. I propose to argue, on the basis of these passages and some comparative material, that all eudaimonia, for Aristotle, is a blessed (makarios) condition, and as such, quasi-divine or ‘godlike’. This will not have the effect of making contemplative excellence the standard for judging the lesser value of morally virtuous activity or for seeing the latter as an approximation or instrument thereto. Rather, it will suggest that there are two complementary routes to happiness and the godlike condition that all authentic happiness involves. One route, constituted by the virtuous exercise of practical reason and adequate provision of external goods, is the specifically human way to achieve a godlike condition. The other route, consisting entirely in contemplative activity, temporarily transcends ordinary human identity and is thus (unlike the other route) directly imitative of divinity (which involves nothing directly analogous to phronêsis and moral virtue).⁷

II Divinity and Happiness in the Greek Philosophical Tradition Before I concentrate on the NE, it will be helpful to step back and briefly situate the work in two larger contexts—first, divinity’s relation to eudaimonia in the

⁷ This proposal has most in common with ideas developed by Broadie 1991 and 2002 and by Hare 2007.

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mainstream Greek philosophical tradition; and second, Aristotle’s ideas elsewhere concerning the relation of human identity to nous and divinity. ‘Likeness to god’ is Plato’s repeated expression in his later dialogues for a mental disposition ruled by reason, and virtuous accordingly.⁸ Most eloquently and fully, Plato’s Timaeus proposes that we should think of our rational faculty as a divine spirit (daimôn), by ministering to which we may think divine thoughts, and immortalize ourselves to the greatest extent possible.⁹ The requisite ministrations include subordination of our non-rational faculties, and the study of astronomy to conforming our mental motions to those of the divine world soul. Plato exploits the etymology of eudaimonia by having Timaeus say that the route to supreme happiness is keeping one’s daimôn or intellect (the faculty conferred on human souls by the demiurge himself) in the best condition of which it is capable. Book 10.7 of NE recalls this striking Platonic passage in many ways.¹⁰ First, Aristotle follows Plato in proposing that supreme eudaimonia requires the excellent activity of a human being’s best or highest capacity. Second, like Plato, he identifies that activity with the exercise of intellect. Third, he agrees that intellectual activity is something divine or godlike, a doctrine he underlines by implying an etymological connection between theios and theôria (e.g. 1177a15–18). Fourth, he echoes Plato’s ideal of godlikeness by recommending us, human though we are, to transcend our ordinary humanity by seeking to ‘immortalize ourselves to the greatest extent possible’ (1177b33). On the evidence of these two passages, we can be confident that Greek philosophers took the term eudaimonia, as its etymology implies, to register an essential connection with divinity.¹¹ Most literally the word signifies a godfavoured, and hence a supremely prosperous or happy life. How better to assure such prosperity or happiness than by making oneself as like to divinity as possible? Subsequent to Plato and Aristotle, we find Epicurus saying that a perfected Epicurean will live like a god among men; and his followers reverenced Epicurus himself as a god, viewing him as both a paradigm of eudaimonia and

⁸ Theaetetus 176a5–c3; Republic 10.613a–b; Phaedrus 252c–253c; Timaeus 90a–d. In the first two of these passages godlikeness explicitly involves justice, and in Timaeus 41c the demiurge connects the proper rule of reason and consequential immortality with consistent adherence to that virtue. ⁹ See above, p. 51. ¹⁰ See Sedley 1999b for a full discussion of the links between the two contexts. He is undoubtedly right to argue that Aristotle in NE 10.7 strongly reflects the influence of the Timaeus passage. However, Sedley’s thesis is more ambitious; for he proposes (394) that ‘the main structure of Aristotle’s ethics reflects this same passage’, by which Sedley means the elevation of the contemplative life over the life of ethical virtue. In order for that to be correct, we need to interpret Plato’s ideal of godlikeness in the Timaeus as that of ‘a pure intellect directly contemplating eternal truths’. While that is a possible reading of Timaeus 90a–c, it does not fit well with Plato’s general understanding of the human condition in the dialogue, especially 41c. ¹¹ See Broadie 1991, 30: ‘Etymology points to the notion of a favourable divinity steering a person’s destiny.’ I elaborate this point in ch. 3 above.

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wisdom and as a saviour.¹² In Stoicism the ideal sage enjoys a happiness that does not differ from that of divinity.¹³ Epictetus tells his students that Zeus made human beings with a view to their eudaimonia (III.24.2). He also tells them that, in virtue of their rational faculty, they are carrying God around in themselves, an endowment that registers their status as ‘children’ of God (I.3.1). This common ground does not imply that the four philosophical schools specified the same conditions in order for eudaimonia to be achieved, and we know, of course, that they did not. What the congruity strongly suggests is that philosophical eudaimonia, whatever are taken to be its detailed conditions, is presumed without argument to be a godlike or quasi-divine existence. The presumption does not need argument because this connotation of the word is a cultural datum. Can this finding, however, be right in the case of Aristotle? To be sure, it fits his account of contemplative happiness perfectly: ‘Of human activities, what is most akin to this [divine contemplation] must be most productive of happiness’ (1178b22–3). One reading of this sentence (a prevalent one) is that godlikeness, as signified by human contemplative activity, is precisely what differentiates the happiness constituted by theôria from the secondary happiness of moral virtue. It is this presumed rift between the two types of happiness that has generated the chess-game style (n. 5 above) of interpreting the NE. Before settling for the rift, however, we need to take stock of the fact that Aristotle in NE 10.7–8 repeatedly ascribes a comparative range to eudaimonia. Thus, as in the passage just cited, the point pertains to ‘what is most productive of happiness’. A few lines later ‘the life of the mind’ makes a human being ‘happiest’ (1178a8). The contemplative life yields ‘perfect’ or ‘complete’ happiness (1177a17, b24). And the individual who cultivates nous is ‘most dear to the gods’ (1179a24) and ‘especially happy’ (1179a32). As to the gods themselves ‘we have assumed that they are especially blessed and happy’ (1178b8–9). Just as there are degrees of happiness, there are also, for Aristotle, degrees of ‘divinity’. Eudaimonia, he declares, is ‘one of the most divine things’ (NE 1. 1099b16), and ‘more divine’ than justice (1101b27). These last two passages, let it be noted, are from his introduction (Book 1). This survey of instances shows that the godlikeness and happiness human beings can achieve by contemplative activity is quite compatible with their achieving a lesser degree of godlikeness through performing morally excellent activities. For sure, the gods do not engage in such actions (1178b10–18). But the gods’ exclusively intellectual excellence does not entail that the happiness achieved by morally virtuous activity has nothing godlike about it. Given the general sense of eudaimonia and Aristotle’s understanding of the term, there should be something divine about morally virtuous activity. ¹² Letter to Menoeceus 135 and Lucretius 5, 1–12. ¹³ Stobaeus, Ecl. 2.98, 17 (Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta 3.54).

  , ,  

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Sarah Broadie has plausibly argued that we should view the two forms of human happiness as linked by their resemblance to divine happiness:¹⁴ In stating that there are two forms of happiness, Aristotle is committed on general logical grounds to the assumption that one and only one of them [i.e. the theoretical form] constitutes the primary sense of the word, while the other constitutes a derivative sense dependent on some relation to the first. Otherwise, ‘happiness’ used of both is simply an equivocation, and there will be no unitary chief good and goal of political expertise.

And, after a few sentences that I omit, she continues: Resemblance is the key to the fact that both are forms of happiness . . . In fact, according to Aristotle’s clinching argument, the respect in which we should be comparing the political and theoretical ideals is the degree to which they approximate the life of gods, the paradigms of happiness. If we apply traditional ideas of the gods (as deploying or as somehow present in elemental physical forces, ‘rulers of land and sea’,¹⁵ and also as great interferers in human affairs), then one result follows; but if these notions are set aside in favour of a more rational conception of the divine life as wholly independent of physical and social environment, then purely reflective activity emerges as closer in nature to the divine activity than any other human phenomenon. The political form of the human chief good is thus secondary to the reflective, since both resemble the perfect divine paradigm¹⁶ (and therefore each other) enough to count as happiness, but the former lags behind the latter in this respect.

I find this proposal extremely helpful. Further argument, however, is needed if we are to follow Broadie’s lead, in the interest of crediting Aristotle’s project in NE with as much unity and coherences as possible. Having outlined my general support for the position she adopts, I now try to strengthen and refine it.

III Human Identity, Nous, and Divinity Divinity is a concept that helps to underwrite several of Aristotle’s principal doctrines including, but by no means confined to, the contemplative activity of ¹⁴ Broadie 2002, 77–8. See also Richardson Lear 2004, 193–4, on the ‘resemblance’ claim. I applaud much of her analysis, but I shall question (below) whether she is right to locate the resemblance in the way ‘the excellent use of practical reason resembles wise human theoretical reasoning.’ Similarly Cooper 1999, 235. ¹⁵ Broadie refers to NE 10.8, 1179a4, where the phrase applies to human rulers. ¹⁶ Broadie compares NE 1.2, 1094b9–10, where, as she notes (91, n. 414), ‘it is finer and more godlike to bring about the chief good for a nation or for cities than for one individual.’

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nous and the supreme bliss of a life devoted to such activity exclusively and eternally.¹⁷ Divinity is the domain of celestial physics with its necessary truths and imperishable substances, moving in everlasting circles because of their desire to emulate the self-directed intellectual activity of the prime unmoved mover. As such, divinity marks the boundary between the existentially changeless region of the heavens and the sublunary world of natural change. That boundary, however, is by no means absolute. Nous, or at least its active aspect as the agent of thought, is at work in both domains. The prime unmoved mover is (a) nous, and nous is intermittently active in us, furnishing us with ‘something divine, or what is most divine in us’ (NE 10.7, 1177a15–16). Thanks to this endowment, human beings have a unique status in the animal world. But is our species unique in partaking of divinity to any extent at all? Aristotle keeps his options open. ‘Of all living beings with which we are acquainted man alone partakes of the divine, or at any rate partakes of it in a fuller measure than the rest’ (Part. an. 2.10, 656a8–9.¹⁸ ‘Of all animals man alone stands erect, in accordance with his godlike (theia) nature and substance. For it is the function of the most godlike (theiotaton) to think (noein) and be wise (phronein)’ (Part. an. 4.10, 686a26–8). In virtue of our nous and capacity for contemplation, we are the only creature capable of eudaimonia (NE 10.8, 1178b24). Yet, ‘All things have by nature something divine in them’ (NE 7.13, 1153b32).¹⁹ As to godlike men, they are very rare (NE 7.1, 1145a27); so much so, that asking one man to rule is tantamount to enthroning a beast (something driven by appetite), whereas the rule of dispassionate law may be seen as the rule of ‘God and nous’ (Pol. 3.16, 1287a28–9). Reflection on such passages reminds us of the immense gap separating theology in ancient Greece from that of monotheistic religions. Divinity was an extremely important and contentious concept for Platonists, Aristotelians, Epicureans, and Stoics. What they could chiefly agree on was semantic rather than substantive, taking god(s) to be the signifier of what they deemed, in their different ways, to be the best life to which a human being could aspire. There were no supposed facts, whether based on revelation or tradition, appeal to which could settle theological controversies or validate one’s own theological stance. Students are regularly disconcerted by the fluidity of singular and plural in the philosophers’ references to divinity.

¹⁷ Hare 2007, 12–51, provides excellent orientation on the theological dimension of Aristotle’s ethics. He is particularly good at disarming mentions of the divine that have ‘been troublesome to some of his [i.e. Aristotle’s] twentieth-century interpreters’. ¹⁸ The context is about grades of life and vital functions, with man instanced as the animal who above all others possesses ‘life of high degree’. ¹⁹ Suggesting that all creatures are alike in taking pleasure in reproduction as their way of ‘participating in the eternal and divine’ (De an. 2.4, 415a24–b1).

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Given Greece’s polytheistic religious tradition and the absence of any authoritative scripture or divinely mandated rules for conduct, we should not be overly troubled by Aristotle’s superficially inconsistent and, as often, rather vague references to divinity.²⁰ What chiefly matters to him, and should matter to us as his interpreters, is his conviction, on the one hand, that ‘there are things much more divine in their nature even than man’ (NE 6.7, 1141b1), and, on the other hand, his doctrine that ‘man is pre-eminently (or predominantly) nous’; and therefore, by virtue of nous, what is best and most important in us is ‘something divine’ (NE 10.7, 1178a7). A way of making Aristotle’s point would state that the constituents of the world are comprised by, or rather themselves comprise, a vertical scale of value (to timion). Divinity (eternal and unembodied life of the mind) tops the scale. Hence our human rank, embodied beings that we are, is necessarily lower. Yet we are potentially closer to the top than anything other than an actual god, owing to our affinity to the divine in the potentially excellent activity of our nous. Such discourse will continue to irritate those who find any talk of divinity virtually meaningless or who seek for complete clarity in the analysis of contemplation and the divine life that it encompasses. If we ask why Aristotle is so imprecise concerning the best and happiest life, the most obvious answer is the one he gives at NE 10.7, 1177b26: Such a life would be too high for man; for it is not in so far as he is human that he will live so, but in so far as something divine is present in him . . . If nous is divine, then, in comparison with man, the life according to it is divine in comparison with human life.

This passage is so familiar that we have become accustomed to reading it with little attention paid to the extraordinary paradox it asserts. Taken literally, Aristotle claims that human beings have a composite nature, the best part of which is not human but divine. We may try to make the paradox more tractable by interpreting it as Aristotle’s way of stating that human beings as a species are equipped with a faculty that can enable them intermittently to transcend their quotidian activities as living bodies and live as if they were pure intellects.²¹ In his more sober expressions of this ideal, Aristotle recognizes this ‘as if ’ condition, as when, after saying that happiness must be ‘some form of contemplation’ (NE 10.8, 1178b33), he immediately pulls back, and says:

²⁰ Cf. Hare 2007, 19: ‘Aristotle gets tentative when he starts talking about God.’ ²¹ Cf. Nagel 1980, 13: ‘Men are not simply the most complex of animals but possess as their essential nature a capacity to transcend themselves and become like gods,’ and Hare 2007: ‘The structural point about theological language is that Aristotle consistently uses it to get leverage up to something that is human but not merely human.’

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But, being human, one will also need external prosperity; for our nature is not self-sufficient for contemplation, but our body must also be healthy and must have food and other attention.

Having now surveyed contexts where Aristotle applies theological language in characterizing what human beings are and what they are not, I turn to look in detail at his references to nous and divinity in Book 1 of NE.

IV Divinity and Nous in Book 1 of NE The first passage that calls for discussion occurs in Aristotle’s criticism of the Platonic Form of the Good. As the basis for rejecting a univocal and universally applicable use of ‘good’, Aristotle cites his own doctrine of categories, to show how ‘good’ is predicated: Good is spoken of in as many ways as being is spoken of. For it is spoken of in [the category of] substance [literally ‘what’], as God and nous; in quality, as the virtues; in quantity, as the moderate; and in relative, as the useful; in time, as the opportune moment; and in place, as the right location and so forth. (NE 1.6, 1096b19–27)²²

Scholars generally treat this passage as a sort of footnote, unrelated to Aristotle’s main argument concerning the human good. I too had been of that company until I studied the following observation by Broadie (1991, 29):²³ If we lean on the obscure passage just quoted, it seems that ‘God’ and ‘intelligence’ refer to the central human good. Are they then names of the same thing? And what can it mean to say that the central human good is God. Aristotle holds that mind is something divine or godlike, and that our highest good is the activity of intelligence. But that this is his position does not become clear until we reach the end of the Ethics.

Actually, as we have seen in my survey of Aristotle’s remarks on human identity and divinity, NE Book 10’s doctrine, to which Broadie alludes, will not have surprised those of Aristotle’s ancient readers who knew his entire corpus, especially the early Protrepticus, where he wrote: ‘Intelligence is the god in us— whether it was Hermotimus or Anaxagoras who said so.’²⁴ Broadie is suitably ²² Translation based on that of Broadie 1991, 29. ²³ I thank John Hare for first bringing Broadie’s observation to my notice. In Hare 2007 he connects the reference to ‘God and nous’ with Aristotle’s doctrine of substance. ²⁴ Fr. B110 Düring.

  , ,  

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cautious in advancing her interpretation of the passage on ‘good’ and categories. She could, however, have invoked in its support our most authoritative commentators on NE, who refer to passages in Book 9 (i.e. contexts before Aristotle identifies contemplative life as the highest form of happiness) concerning nous as a human being’s essence.²⁵ ‘God and nous’ is a virtual hendiadys in Aristotle (see above, p. 184). To confirm this expression’s reference in Book 1 to the substance or essence of human beings, we need look no further than the succeeding lines (cited above), where quality, quantity, and so forth are all illustrated by terms that pertain to human beings specifically—virtue, moderate, useful. The students who first heard Aristotle’s Nicomachean lectures could have picked up this implicit reference to a human being’s divinely intellectual essence. Very likely they had already been instructed in his categories. Here, though, I claim no more for Broadie’s subtle interpretation of this passage than its anticipation of subsequent references to God and nous in NE. The passage is, however, an important step in my argument. Book 10 will repeatedly emphasize that the most divine and most happiness-producing activity of nous is contemplation. The argument I propose to develop is that all virtuous activities of nous are productive of some degree of happiness because they, and not exclusively contemplation, involve the exercise of our divine essence. If the divine life is the standard reference and paradigm of happiness, and happiness is essentially the virtuous activity of nous, should it not be the case that happiness is predicable of all virtuous activity of nous, whether that activity is engaged in contemplation or practical reasoning? ‘We always choose happiness for its own sake and never for the sake of something else’ (NE 1.5, 1097b1). Aristotle immediately clarifies the unique status here ascribed to eudaimonia by instancing the following items—honour, pleasure, nous, and every virtue—as things we choose both for their own sake ‘and for the sake of happiness, supposing that through them as means we shall be happy’.²⁶ In this context Aristotle is reporting what he takes to be standard opinions as distinct from his own special claims. Even so, we should notice the status accorded to nous as good both in itself and for the sake of happiness. At this stage of his argument Aristotle is not interested in distinguishing between theoretical and practical applications of nous. I take that to be equally true when, by eliminating lower-

²⁵ Gauthier-Jolif 1970, vol. II.1, 40, where they note: ‘Si nous disons que le bien de Coriscos, c’est le dieu qui est in lui, c’est-à-dire l’intellect . . . nous désignons son essence.’ And in support they cite the reference to the Protrepticus I have quoted above, and also NE 9.4, 1166a16–17 (‘for the sake of the intellectual element in [man], which is thought to be the man himself ’), NE 9.4, 1166a22–3 (‘the element that thinks would seem to be the individual man, or to be so more than any other element in him’), and 9.8, 1168b35 [or better 1169a2] (‘that this [i.e. nous] is the man himself, then, or is so more than anything else, is plain’), as well as the more familiar statement at NE 10.7, 1178a2 (‘nous would seem to be each man himself, since it is the authoritative and better part of him’). ²⁶ As Gauthier-Jolif 1970 note, honour, pleasure, and nous refer back to the three types of life— hedonistic, political, and contemplative (1095b17–1096a4).

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      

life activities, he arrives, in his argument concerning the human function, at ‘an active life of the [psychological] element that has a rational principle’ (1098a3–4).²⁷ The upshot of the function argument, as I understand it, is to posit reasoning well or virtuous rational activity (i.e. activity of nous) as the ultimate end of any happy life, whether this activity is exercised through contemplation or through political service or through both.²⁸ Besides ‘unqualified completeness’ (1097a30)—i.e. always chosen for its own sake and never for the sake of anything else—Aristotle advances three further characterizations of eudaimonia now glossed as ‘the complete’ (or ‘perfect’) good: (2) self-sufficiency (1097b7–8); (3) virtuous rational activity, as shown in the function argument (1098a7–15), either understood singly, or, if multiply, as ‘the best and most complete’ of such activities (1098a17–18); and (4) complete life (1098a18–19). Having posited these four criteria as an ‘outline sketch of the human good’, Aristotle proceeds to seek confirmation for their appropriateness from what people, especially philosophers, say or have said about eudaimonia (1098b9ff.). His account, he says, fits the following viewpoints: their making happiness a good of the soul (as distinct from something external or pertaining to body and soul jointly), and, as such, an activity; their fitting what one expects of living and doing well; their accommodating virtue (aretê), practical wisdom (phronêsis), and philosophical wisdom (sophia); and, in addition, pleasure and external prosperity.²⁹ In what follows (NE 1.1098b30–1099b8) Aristotle repeats his earlier insistence that the virtue happiness requires must be actively engaged (as distinct from being merely a disposition), and he gives detailed justification for including, in the full specification of happiness, pleasure and adequate external goods. He says nothing further in Book 1 about phronêsis and sophia. We cannot be certain, unfortunately, whether he intends his readers to distinguish these two intellectual virtues as respectively ‘practical’ and ‘theoretical’, according to the position he will later adopt in Book 10, or whether, instead he cites them as virtually synonymous, as they often are in Plato and in Aristotle’s own Protrepticus. Either way, however, the claim that his account of happiness attends to them seems to me decisive support for an inclusive, rather than dominant, interpretation of the human good, as proposed at this early stage of the analysis.³⁰ We can best interpret the way he

²⁷ Cf. Gauthier-Jolif 1970: ‘La vie “active” inclut aussi bien la contemplation que l’action.’ ²⁸ So too Kraut 1989, 60. ²⁹ Aristotle (1098b27–8) attributes these features of happiness to ‘many’, or ‘men of old’, or ‘a few eminent people’ (endoxoi). Gauthier-Jolif 1970 take the partisans of aretê to be the ancients (Homer etc.), and opt for Plato’s Philebus, perhaps mediated by the Protrepticus, as Aristotle’s proof text for citing phronêsis, sophia and pleasure. Most of the older commentators, and also Broadie 2002, 281, take Aristotle to be distinguishing phronêsis from sophia as in NE Book 6. ³⁰ Aristotle’s mention of phronêsis and sophia in this context is overlooked in most of the studies I have consulted.

  , ,  

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takes himself to have accommodated phronêsis and sophia by saying that his account of happiness takes in all the virtuous activities of human nous. By the time Aristotle reaches the end of NE 1.8, he has enumerated and justified the following seven attributes of eudaimonia: (1) completeness/ultimate end/ never chosen for the sake of something else; (2) self-sufficiency; (3) virtuous activity (or activities) of reason; (4) completeness of life; (5) best and finest of things (ariston, kalliston, 1098a22–32); (6) pleasantness; and (7) adequate provision of external goods. Without as yet offering any detailed analysis or account of virtue(s) as such, he has indicated that the account of happiness he is advancing is in line with traditional viewpoints that make reference to aretê (seemingly covering such basic virtues as justice and courage) and philosophical specifications that include the intellectual excellences (undefined) of phronêsis and sophia. If we now pretend to be first-time readers of NE 1, Aristotle appears to be leaving himself a good deal of flexibility at this stage of his work. Thus, the ‘function’ argument is compatible with three possible contexts for deploying excellent rational activity—a life devoted to normative politics (exercising reason in social contexts), a life focused as exclusively as possible on philosophy (contemplative activity), and thirdly, a life that combines both politics and philosophy. The cryptic sentence ‘if there are more excellences than one, [activity of soul] in accordance with the best and most complete’ (1098a17–18), could in principle foreshadow Book 10’s elevation of contemplation (the ‘dominant end’ interpretation), but that exclusionary interpretation does not fit the political context Aristotle has employed so far; nor does it sit well with his explicitly postponing treatment of the contemplative life (1096a4–5). That Aristotle is completely leaving open the question of which of the possible plural excellences would satisfy the condition of being ‘best and most complete’, is shown by the fact that he begins Book 2, by observing that there is excellence of thought as well as excellence of character and that the two kinds of excellence differ in how we come to acquire them (1103a14–18); he says nothing there about whether or how these excellences differ from one another in value or significance for happiness.³¹ Returning now to Book 1, we should next note the main thrust of Aristotle’s argument from chapter 9 up to chapter 12:³² #9 Is happiness acquired by learning or habituation, or sent by God, or by chance? #10 Should no human being be called happy while he lives? #11 Do the fortunes of the living affect the dead? #12 Virtue is praiseworthy, but happiness is above praise. ³¹ The expression for ‘excellence of thought’ is aretê dianoêtikê, which in this context covers both sophia and phronêsis (1103a6). It is only in NE 6 that Aristotle distinguishes ‘practical’ from ‘contemplative’ thought, and starts to use dianoêtikon to apply only to the former (1139a30–1139b5). ³² I take over the chapter headings given by Ross 1925.

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      

With chapter 9 Aristotle begins for the first time to associate eudaimonia explicitly with divinity. As its possible sources, he nominates (A) learning (which anticipates the source of intellectual excellence), or habit (which anticipates the source of moral excellence), or some other practice; or (B) divine dispensation, or (C) chance. How does he ask us to adjudicate between these three types of source? First, turning to divinity, he says: If anything is a gift from the gods to mankind, it is reasonable that happiness should be god-given, and most surely god-given of all human things inasmuch as it is by far the best. (1099b11–13)

Deferring further consideration of the divine source, he then takes up the (A) possibilities, saying: Even if happiness is not god-sent, but comes as a result of virtue and some process of learning or training, it is thought to be the most divine of things because the prize and goal of virtue is manifestly what is best and something divine and blessed. (1099b14–18)

Finally, Aristotle dismisses (C) chance as an appropriate source of happiness. We seem to be asked to conclude: Either (A) or (B) or (C); not (C) and not (B) simpliciter; therefore (A) but with connotations of (B) as well.³³ Alternatively, reading this passage in the light of NE 10.7, we may see an anticipatory allusion to the statement that perfect (or complete) happiness is excellent activity of nous or whatever else in us is ‘divine or the most divine of the things in us’ (1177a13–17). We have already noticed Aristotle’s tendency, outside as well as inside NE 10, to characterize our human nous as divine or virtually so. Thus Aristotle’s dismissal of (B)—happiness as god-sent—is importantly qualified. Happiness is not dispensed to us by some divinely vouchsafed external gift, but he accepts a qualified version of (B), provided we interpret (B) by reference to nous as our internal divinity. And so, (A) and (B) do not point in opposite directions. To confirm the tight association between happiness and divinity, Aristotle turns in chapter 12 to consider whether eudaimonia is something praised (epaineton) or, rather, something prized, or honoured (timion). In the previous two chapters his focus had been on the vicissitudes of human life, with an implicit contrast to the absolute invulnerability of the gods. Thus he concludes chapter 10 by saying that those who do fulfil his specifications for happiness may be called

³³ Cf. Broadie 2002, 282: ‘Although Ar. opts for [A], he continues to call happiness “most divine” [1099b16]. This insinuates the thought, on which he will build in X.7–8 . . . that our human nature contains something divine or godlike—how not so, if godlike happiness is in our human power? Thus [A] and [B] are not pointing in opposite directions after all.’

  , ,  

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‘blessed, as human beings’ (1101a20–1). From this somewhat chastening conclusion it might seem to follow that human happiness cannot after all be regarded as something godlike. To correct that impression, Aristotle proposes that the value of happiness is, in effect, something absolute and beyond praise. Such qualities as ethical virtue are praised because of the relation in which they stand to something other than themselves, such as noble actions: What applies to the best things is not praise, but something greater and better . . . for what we do to the gods and the most godlike of men is to call them blessed and happy . . . No one praises happiness as he does justice, but rather calls it blessed, as being something more divine and better . . . It seems to be so also from the fact that it is a first principle; for it is for the sake of happiness that we do all that we do, and the first principle and cause of all goods is, we claim, something prized and divine. (1101b23–1102a4)

This is Aristotle’s last word about happiness in Book 1 of NE. Most proponents of the ‘dominant end’ interpretation say little or nothing about Aristotle’s connections between happiness and divinity in these closing chapters of the first book. By attending to the connections, as I have done here, it seems only reasonable to conclude that, at this stage of his argument, Aristotle proposes that all human eudaimonia is godlike. In Book 10 he will distinguish higher and lower recipes for happiness, and he will deem the life of the contemplative philosopher to be the happiest and most akin to the divine life as such. On returning to Book 1 after reading Book 10, the earlier book’s observations about happiness and divinity naturally acquire associations and nuance that they cannot express in their own context as such. But to say that is to view Book 1 retrospectively, and not in the way Aristotle presumably intended his first-time readers to interpret his thoughts as they proceeded from Book 1 to Book 10. If he approved the NE in the form and order it has reached us, we should either presume that he intended his initial account of happiness to apply equally well to the human good in both the forms that he eventually distinguishes, or (as I am sometimes tempted to think) that his eventual distinction between contemplative and political happiness was an afterthought that he did not originally intend to include in a work on ethics. Either way, I think it is a profound mistake to take the references to divinity in NE 1 to make covert allusion to the contemplative, as distinct from the ethical or practical, route to happiness.³⁴ It is safer to suppose that NE 1 under-determines the kind of lives that satisfy the formal conditions of eudaimonia. As long as I can secure agreement to the godlikeness of eudaimonia as such, I can readily allow NE

³⁴ Hence the main argument of this chapter goes in quite the opposite direction to that of Van Cleemput 2006, who proposes (154) that Aristotle in NE 1. 9–12 prepares ‘the way to identify eudaimonia with contemplation’.

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      

1 to be compatible with both forms of happiness, leaving it to Book 10 to propose that happiness varies in degree and kind according to the type of excellence and activity by which it is instantiated.

V Divinity, Happiness, and Nous in Book 10 of NE Aristotle returns to the subject of happiness half way through Book 10 with the following transitional comment: Now that we have spoken of the virtues, the forms of friendship, and the varieties of pleasure, what remains is to discuss in outline (tupôi) the nature of happiness, since this is what we state the end (telos) of human nature to be. Our discussion will be the more concise if we first sum up what we have already said. (1176a30–3)

The summary he offers recalls most of the criteria for happiness he has specified in Book 1, though not in the order he set out in NE 1.7–8: an activity, not a disposition (hexis), and specifically the type of activity that is desirable entirely and only for its own sake; self-sufficiency and completeness; virtuous actions; fineness and excellence (kala kai spoudaia).³⁵ He also elaborates the earlier criterion of pleasure, glossing it as the enjoyment of serious things (1176b9–1177a8). If his argument were then to proceed directly to chapter 9, his text would read as follows: Happiness does not consist in such practices [as comic activities and bodily pleasures], but, as we have said before, in virtuous activities (1177a9–11) . . . If these matters and the virtues, and also friendship and pleasure, have been dealt with sufficiently in outline, are we to suppose that our project has reached its end? (NE 10.9, 1179a33–5)

Actually, of course, the sentence immediately following the first one printed above (the last sentence of chapter 6), is the first sentence of chapter 7: If happiness is activity in accordance with virtue, it is reasonable that it should be in accordance with the highest virtue; and this will be that of the best thing in us. (1177a12–13)

³⁵ Curzer 1990 suggests that these criteria are too different from those advanced in NE 1 to justify the thesis that Aristotle is continuing Book 1’s investigation of happiness. I disagree, but I am sympathetic to his view (432) that NE 10.6–8 is a ‘reconsideration’ rather than ‘a mere continuation’.

  , ,  

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So begins Aristotle’s excursus (NE 10.7–8) on the ‘superhuman’ happiness of the contemplative life, its affinity to the activity of the gods, and its superiority to ‘the life in accordance with the rest of virtue [1178a9–10, signifying practical wisdom and the moral excellences]; for activities performed according to them are human.’ As previously observed, I assume that Aristotle intended his readers to encounter NE 10.7–8 at this point of his work. Undeniably, though, his demotion of the political life is extremely abrupt and difficult to accommodate to the main thrust of his work so far. For instance, in speaking of the special excellence of the contemplative life he dwells on its leisureliness, by contrast with the busy actions of politics and military service (1177b4–18), but he made no mention of leisure as a criterion of happiness in NE 1. Yet, by prefacing his treatment of contemplative happiness with many of the criteria set out in Book 1, Aristotle clearly wants his readers to keep these earlier conditions in mind; indeed he argues that the contemplative life satisfies them better than acts of moral and political virtue, ‘splendid and great though these latter are’ (1177b16–26). But are we, as human animals, teleologically equipped specifically for a contemplative life? Such a life would be too high for human beings; for it is not in so far as an individual is human that he will live thus, but in so far as something divine is present in him; and by so much as this is superior to our composite nature its activity is superior to that which accords with the rest of virtue. If nous is divine, then, in comparison with man, the life according to nous is divine in comparison with human life. (1177b26–30)

The interpretation of this challengingly difficult assertion is central to the project of this chapter. For, if we take Aristotle’s ensuing prescription, ‘we should strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best of the things in oneself ’, to imply that the supreme value of the contemplative life both authorizes the subordinate value of the virtuous political life and yet also explains what is excellent about morally virtuous action, paradox will infect the entire NE. For it is profoundly paradoxical, on the strength of NE 10.7–8, to think that ‘excellent theoretical truthfulness sets the standard for the excellent practical truthfulness of morally virtuous action’, and that a virtuous choice is ‘a sort of contemplation in action’.³⁶ Can we avoid such a strained interpretation of Aristotle’s overall ethical project, while acknowledging his commitment to contemplation as the best, albeit transcendent and virtually superhuman, way of life? I have been suggesting throughout this chapter that Aristotle’s appraisal of nous is the most promising approach to crediting him with a more or less unitary and ³⁶ So Richardson Lear 2004, 4. However, I applaud parts of her analysis, such as her admitting the possibility that ‘morally virtuous action is godlike enough to count as happiness for us’ (195).

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      

consistent conception of happiness. In particular, I have emphasized his view, outside the context of Book 10, that human nous as such endows us with something godlike. Let us now ask how this doctrine squares with his preliminary statement in NE 10.7, 1177a12–18. After saying that happiness, qua virtuous activity, should accord with the excellence of what is best in us, Aristotle continues: Whether it is nous or something else, which is thought to be our natural ruler and guide, and to take thought of things noble and divine, whether it is itself also divine or only the most divine thing in us, the activity of this in accordance with its proper virtue will be perfect happiness.

Throughout this chapter Aristotle blows hot and cold in the firmness of his findings, as in his assertions of excellence and perfection, on the one hand, and his hesitancy over nous and divinity on the other hand. Such wavering should warn us against identifying a selection of his statements in this context as the basis for interpreting the entire NE. Here, though, I call particular attention to his specifying our divine nous (with his qualifications removed) as both ‘our natural ruler and guide’ and the instrument of our thinking ‘things noble and divine’. The roles attributed here to nous are both practical and theoretical.³⁷ As such, they recall Aristotle’s analysis of nous in Book 6.11, 1143a35–b5, where he attributes both roles to this faculty—discovering first principles in theoretical reasoning and identifying the facts pertaining to practical reasoning.³⁸ How, then, should we interpret ‘the proper virtue’ of nous? What many of Aristotle’s interpreters, myself included, would like him to answer is ‘an appropriate combination of theoretical and practical wisdom’, but, instead, he bifurcates these virtues, treating the former as the basis of perfect happiness and godlikeness, and the latter as the essence of purely human, second-degree happiness. In many other contexts of the corpus, as we have seen, Aristotle treats nous as a unitary faculty whose functions cover all types of reasoning, and thus provide the human animal with a divine essence. Here, instead, his distinction between perfect (godlike) and second-degree (strictly human) happiness depends on limiting the activity of nous to contemplation, and giving nous no apparent role at all in the domain of morally virtuous activity. Far from saying that there is anything godlike about practical wisdom (phronêsis), Aristotle offers no textual support in NE 10.7–8 (or in 6.7) for suggesting, as Broadie does (p. 181 above), that second-degree or political ³⁷ As Broadie 2002, 441, notes. ³⁸ In NE 6.1, 1139a12, Aristotle divides the rational part of the soul into scientific (epistêmonikon) and calculative (logistikon) parts, assigning the former part to contemplation and the latter to practical reasoning. Like Broadie (see previous note), I take it that the nous Aristotle refers to at the beginning of NE 10.7 ‘is both practical and theoretical’ (otherwise it could not be called ‘ruling and guiding’) and is therefore not presumed to issue from different parts of the soul as in Book 6.2.

  , ,  

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happiness gets its status as happiness from its dependence on, or resemblance to, ‘the perfect divine paradigm’. Could his reticence in this regard be due, at least in part, to the rhetorical fervour he brings to his account of ‘perfect’ happiness. We should carefully observe how this runs. First, we get an accumulation of superlatives – ‘best’ (or ‘highest’), ‘most divine thing’ (in us), ‘most continuous’, ‘most pleasurable’, ‘especially self-sufficient’, and the special properties ‘leisured’ and ‘tireless’, all of which pertain to contemplation, not as attributes of happiness as such but as attributes of ‘perfect’ happiness. Next, we are told that, though such a life transcends the strictly human, we should strive for it in order to achieve what is best and happiest. That concludes NE 10.7. So far, Aristotle has said nothing to imply that some contemplative activity, or even an approximation of it, is a necessary condition of any life that satisfies the sufficient conditions for happiness; rather, contemplation is the activity essential to the happiest life. The next chapter (10.8) begins: ‘Second happiest is the life in accordance with the rest of virtue.’ Aristotle then explains that this specifically human life, and its happiness, pertain to us as composites of body and soul. ‘But the virtue of nous is separate (1178a22). Hence its activity is less in need of everyday necessities.’ As in the previous chapter this reference to nous applies to it purely as the faculty that enables us to contemplate. However, Aristotle moves seamlessly from talking about ‘the contemplative man’ to that same man’s choosing to act virtuously, ‘in so far as he is a man’ (1178b3–6), and his therefore needing the wherewithal to perform such virtuous acts. He then gives a further proof for ‘perfect’ happiness being a contemplative activity: that must be the gods’ activity because gods do not engage in any actions in the ethical or productive domain. The only activity that leaves for them to practise is contemplative. Since the gods are paradigms of happiness, contemplation is the activity that makes human beings most akin to the gods and therefore ‘happiest’ (1178b23). Thus far Aristotle’s focus has been entirely on ‘perfect’ happiness. But he now says: The whole life of the gods is blessed, and that of men too in so far as some likeness of such activity belongs to them; but none of the other animals is happy, since they in no way share in contemplation. Happiness extends then, just so far as contemplation does, and those to whom contemplation more fully belongs are more truly happy, not incidentally but in virtue of the contemplation; for this in itself is precious. Happiness, therefore, must be some kind (tis) of contemplation. (1178b25–32)

It is the second part of this passage that has caused the greatest difficulty. Up to this point Aristotle’s focus had been entirely on ‘perfect happiness’. None of his

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comments on the second-level happiness of morally virtuous activity suggested its having any connection with contemplation. Yet, now, taken at face value, he appears to be making contemplation ‘of some kind’ a necessary condition for any authentic happiness. The best solution to restore coherence and plausibility to this passage, is to presume that Aristotle’s mentions of happiness here should be taken to refer restrictively, as they have done hitherto in this context, to its perfect form.³⁹ In this way we are relieved from the rather desperate expedient of importing ‘some kind of contemplation’ into the exercise of practical wisdom.⁴⁰

VI Conclusion If the second-level or strictly human happiness has nothing directly or indirectly to do with contemplation, as I am suggesting, are the two types of happiness quite independent of one another in their intellectual conditions? By no means. We can support Broadie’s intuition concerning the ‘resemblance’ of each type to the divine paradigm by invoking the quasi-divinity of human nous, and by taking the term in its broad usage as the faculty of all types of thought and reasoning. In NE Book 1 Aristotle draws on divinity and excellent rational activity to make preliminary proposals concerning the essence of human happiness; he does not differentiate between practical and theoretical reason or propose that there is more than one level of happiness. In Book 10 he recalls the principal criteria he has invoked in Book 1. This reprise reminds us that everything he has been saying about morally virtuous activity in the preceding books fits his overall interest in delineating happiness. More particularly though, the reprise serves as the prelude to introducing the reader to ‘perfect’ happiness—a new topic whose abrupt emergence at this very late stage of the main argument, though arresting as literature, is structurally flawed. For it turns out that the previously articulated criteria make a much better fit with a type of eudaimonia that falls outside the main political context of his work—a type of transcendent happiness that aligns us directly with divinity, and which, thanks to our innate affinity to divine rationality, we are capable of trying to achieve by contemplating—at least to some extent and for some of the time.⁴¹

³⁹ This proposal (canvassed but rejected by Kraut 1989, 62) gains support from 1178b33, which immediately follows the statement that seems to identify happiness simpliciter with contemplation: ‘But, as a human being, one will also need external prosperity.’ ⁴⁰ See Richardson Lear 2004, especially 194–6. ⁴¹ Limitations of space prevent me from considering whether my conclusions fit Aristotle’s position elsewhere, especially EE 8.3 and Pol. 7. 2–3, on the relation between excellent political or moral activity and contemplation. Suffice it to say that I think they are consistent.

12 Second Selves and Stoic Friends This chapter is about how the Stoic philosophers investigated friendship and what they understood by a truly good friend.¹ After situating this theory within its cultural and philosophical context, I explore the main similarities and differences with Aristotle. I then turn to Seneca and Epictetus, who enable us to put some flesh on the bare bones of the Stoic theory. Finally, I ask what we can learn about friendship from Stoicism, making allowance for its historical distance and its status as a theory about relationships between perfectly virtuous persons.

I We often speak of a good friend, especially in cases where someone has been helpful to us, saying: ‘You have been a really good friend.’ This expression shows that we typically look to our friends for assistance. Stoic friends are unfailingly helpful to one another, but the goodness of Stoic friends signifies a much deeper quality than their readiness to assist each other when needed. They are good because their character and values are flawless, exemplary, completely admirable. In fact, you cannot strictly be a Stoic friend unless you are virtuous through and through.² Stoic friends would be expected to have the face-to-face knowledge, shared experience, and common interests characteristic of any ordinary notion of friendship. But what makes Stoic friends loveable and capable of giving love is the excellence of their characters, nothing less and nothing more. Stoic friends ‘treat one another exactly as they treat themselves’ (DL 7.124 = SVF 3.631). They are ‘another I’ or ‘another self ’ (DL 7.23 = SVF 1.324). They possess ‘wisdom’, which means that their mutual love is based upon knowing the true value of things (Seneca, Ep. 81, 10 = SVF 3.633). Such friendships involve ‘agreement on everything human and divine, along with good will and affection’

I presented this chapter as Lennox lecturer at Trinity University, San Antonio, in 2013, and later to the Classics Department at San Francisco State University. ¹ For complementary accounts see Graver 2007, ch. 8, and Reydams-Schils 2005, ch. 2. ² Stobaeus 2.108, 15 (SVF 3.630) summarizes the Stoic theory as follows: ‘Friendship is confined to the wise because they alone are of one mind (homonoia) concerning the things pertaining to life; and being of one mind is knowledge of goods that are shared. This is because authentic, not simply nominal, friendship is impossible without trust and reliance . . . True love is only possible between virtuous people.’ Similarly DL 7.124 (SVF 3. 631).

Selfhood and Rationality in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Heraclitus to Plotinus. A. A. Long, Oxford University Press. © A. A. Long 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198803393.003.0013

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(Cicero, De amicitia 20). While they are relationships of reciprocal help, material benefit is not their grounds; they are cultivated for their own sake and for the sake of the friend, not for the sake of anything useful by way of goods and services, which are simply incidental benefits from the friendship (DL 7.124; Cicero, De finibus 3. 70). The shared beliefs and values that these thoughts imply are obviously integral to any notion of deep and enduring friendship. Other thoughts are quite alien to a modern sensibility. Should our friends be so like us that we regard them as second selves? Some difference in personality and character seems essential to friendship, to engage our interest, to enable us to learn from our friends, to come to see things about ourselves that we would like to improve, and so forth. Such critical responses to this outline of the Stoic theory would be quite in order if that theory were intended to describe the friendly relationships of everyday life and spontaneous feelings of affinity. Instead, the Stoic theory of friends and friendship was designed to characterize the features of an ideal partnership between persons, not as a description of actual experience, but to serve as a model for what friendships would be like if friends truly possessed wisdom. Stoic philosophers themselves did not lay claim to wisdom and even doubted whether it had ever been fully attained by any human being. However, we should not dismiss the theory as merely an academic exercise, but regard it, rather, as a template for assessing the friendly relationships of ordinary experience and seeing how well they measure up to the ideal standard. In this light, we can see that critical responses such as those above are tinged with egoism. If we want our friends to be interesting and sources of selfimprovement, are we loving our friends simply for their own sake rather than loving them, at least partially, for what we can get out of them? What does it mean to love a friend entirely for the friend’s sake, and not at all for one’s own sake? Is that psychologically feasible? If it is, or even if it is not, could this condition explain why the Stoics set the bar to authentic friendship so high in requiring that only persons of exemplary character can completely love one another for the other’s sake, and so be friends in the strict and proper sense? Response to these questions will take us into the heart of Stoic philosophy. By way of social context we should reflect on the role of friendship in ancient Greek and Roman society, on how friendship had been treated a generation or two before the earliest Stoics by Plato and Aristotle, and on how it was being treated by the Stoics’ contemporary rivals, the Epicureans. Attention to these matters will help to show why the Stoics set such an exacting standard for authentic friendship.

II The Greek for friendship is philia and the Latin word for it is amicitia. Philia may equally be rendered by love, and the Latin for love is amor. What one loves, in the

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usage of these words, can cover the entire spectrum of things we commonly regard as desirable. Basic to the Greek verb philein is also the notion of regarding something as ‘one’s own’, or ‘as belonging’. Philoi, translatable as friends, are one’s own people, including family, the people one belongs to and who belong to oneself. Ties of affection are built into the very notion of what is one’s own, most basically of course, oneself. To be dear to oneself, in this context, is not narcissism, but rather the recognition that nothing could be closer to anyone than oneself, or make a greater claim on one’s regard and protection. Hence, to love (philein) the other as oneself or to treat the friend (philos) as a second self implies the idea that the other person’s identity is part and parcel of one’s own. We can now see why the most basic attitude such a notion of philia involves and requires is that of helping. If something belongs to us, we naturally cherish it, protect it, and try to look after it. This explains the intensity of Achilles’ grief and remorse at the death of Patroclus in Homer’s Iliad. Achilles had loved Patroclus in the strong emotional sense that any culture attaches to the notion of loving. But what most troubles Achilles is not, or not simply, the death of his beloved companion, but the recognition that he has failed to protect the life of the man who was his particular philos. In Sophocles’ play, Philoctetes, we observe the anguish of someone who has been betrayed by his previous philoi. Philoctetes’ fellow warriors have marooned him on a barren and unoccupied island, leaving him to fend for himself with a snake-bitten leg, because they could not stand the stench of his ailment on board ship. Philoctetes complains that his plight is a complete negation of the philia owed to him by his philoi. What devastates him is not primarily unrequited affection but concrete ill-treatment in place of the help required of one friend to another. In its fundamental Greek sense, then, philia covers much more than spontaneous emotional bonding between individuals. Family members, who may not even like one another, are necessarily philoi. Sons and daughters can inherit their father’s friends. Fellow citizens are one’s philoi, since they are ours, our people, the people we belong to. In its most extended sense philia covers membership in societal groups of all kinds (Aristotle, NE 8, 1161b13). The word does not denote a legal relationship such as marriage or parenthood, but it has a quasi-institutional aspect that is absent from our modern notion of friendship. This is especially evident in the Roman world where one’s amici include clients and supporters, persons to whom one is tied purely by reciprocal benefit as well as those with whom we have a strong emotional relationship. The centrality to Greco-Roman society of these notions of friendship explains why the ancient philosophers, unlike their modern counterparts, treated friendship as a basic topic of ethics.³ When scrutinized philosophically, moreover, friendship showed itself to be a far from intuitively clear and uncontroversial

³ See Lynch 2005 and Nehamas 2010.

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notion. The problems that philosophers could raise about it are briefly but trenchantly aired by Plato in his short dialogue Lysis. They include the following questions. Is utility the basis for friendship? Must the relation between friends be reciprocal? Do friends have to be good or virtuous people? What do people desire from friendship? Can a self-sufficient person want or need friends? How is friendship related to people’s love of what is their own? These questions of the Lysis do not receive much in the way of answers, let alone definite answers. The questions do, however, set the agenda for the philosophers who came after Plato, most notably Aristotle, and they have also strongly influenced the Stoics.

III Aristotle has written on friendship more searchingly and influentially than any other philosopher. The points most germane to Stoic theory are his general account of friendship, his distinction between the types and grounds of friendship, and his discussion of whether the good man needs friends.⁴ Aristotle defines friendship as a relationship in which each party wants for the other what he thinks good, for the other’s sake, not for his own sake, does his best to bring it about, and knows that such good will is reciprocated.⁵ This definition specifies reciprocal affection and benefit as the essential constituents of any friendship. What the definition cleverly leaves open is the construal of benefit and the motivations of the putative friends. In Plato’s Lysis puzzles are generated by difficulties in determining the precise grounds for friendship. Are likes attracted to likes or to unlikes? Is the bad attracted to the good? Are friends attracted to what each of them lacks? The Platonic discussion proceeds on the presumption that friendship is a completely univocal notion. Aristotle, instead, provides a definition that is sufficiently broad to cover different kinds of goodness, each of which incorporates his reciprocal benefit condition. This refinement enables him to take account of different motivations for forming friendships, and to differentiate between types of friendship. The differentiae he proposes are three in number—utility or material benefit, pleasure, and virtue. A utility friendship’s basis is the practical value one friend provides to another, for instance business services rendered and the payment the provider of the services earns. You may like your server at the checkout counter, she may like you, and you may wish each other well for each other’s sake. This reciprocal affection and benefit are sufficient to make the encounter a kind of friendship, but one that goes no further in its basis and origination than utility benefaction. ⁴ For detailed discussion, see Cooper 1999, ch. 13. ⁵ I am giving a composite definition based on Rhetoric 2.4 and NE 8.2.

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In the case of a pleasure friendship, what each friend gives to the other is just that, pleasure. Such friends find one another appealing because they enjoy one another’s company, irrespective of any material benefits they receive or of any firmly positive judgements concerning one another’s characters. Mutual pleasure and enjoyment are what make these friends wish each other well in the contexts of their spending time together and keeping in touch. A pleasure friendship does not involve or depend on mutual services nor on admiration for each other’s characters. Which does not imply, of course, that two people could not be friends on the basis of utility and pleasure. Aristotle does not argue that utility and pleasure are mutually exclusive. Friendship in the perfect and unqualified sense, for Aristotle, is a relationship in which the basis for the mutual affection, good will, and benefaction is each person’s excellence of character.⁶ He entirely anticipated the Stoics in holding that friendship, strictly speaking, is grounded neither in utility nor in pleasure. (For the Epicureans, all friendship originates in utility, but can then flower into a pleasurable relationship that is desirable, so the school claimed, for its own sake.⁷ That position could satisfy neither Aristotle nor the Stoics because it implies that egoism in the sense of one’s own advantage is the foundation of every friendship.) Aristotelian virtue friends are admirable persons who love one another and are good for one another entirely because of each other’s virtues. In all likelihood such friends will be both useful and pleasurable to one another, but utility and pleasure are incidental to such friendships. Because the friends are completely alike in their excellence of character, an Aristotelian virtue friend displays a form of self-love in loving his friend. This is not because he is narcissistic or self-centred, but because his own virtues are mirrored in the loveable virtues of the friend. In loving the friend because of the friend’s virtues, an Aristotelian virtue friend cannot help but love himself too. According to Aristotle, virtue is the perfection of human nature, and this explains why a friend in the virtue sense is ‘another self ’ (allos autos, NE 9, 1166a32, heteros autos, 1169b6). The love that Aristotelian virtue friends display towards one another involves the reciprocity condition—loving the other purely for the other’s sake, and being loved in return purely for one’s own sake. As such, the friendship is equally good for both persons. This is exactly the case for Stoic friendship, grounded, as we have seen it to be, in the friends’ excellence of character. Like Aristotle (though without Aristotle’s allowance of qualified friendships, based on utility or pleasure) the Stoics treat excellence of character as the necessary and sufficient condition for perfect friendship, with the corollary that only good persons can strictly be friends to one another. The Stoics too, as we have seen, take the friend to be ‘another self ’. Their notion of friendship resembles Aristotle’s non-egoistic form of self-love,

⁶ See NE 8.3.

⁷ See Long 1996, ch. 9.

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since, according to Stoicism, both self-preservation and sociability are every normal person’s instinctual drives.⁸ What is best for a Stoic self is excellence of character. Hence Stoic friends, in loving one another as second selves, are also loving and benefiting themselves. In one of our Stoic sources ‘friendship with oneself ’ is also given as the basis for being ‘a friend to one’s neighbours’.⁹ Seneca (Ep. mor. 6, 7) expands this idea in a quotation from the Stoic philosopher Hecato: ‘You ask what progress I have made? I have begun to be a friend to myself.’ Seneca comments: ‘He did indeed make great progress; he will never be alone. You can be sure that he is everyone’s friend.’ It is hardly news today that we need to care for ourselves if we are to establish successful relationships with other people.¹⁰

IV I now come to a big difference between Aristotle and the Stoics. This difference will cast fresh light on the Stoics’ restriction of true friendship to relationships between morally excellent persons. According to Aristotle goodness comes in many forms: there are mental and moral goods, pertaining to one’s soul; there are bodily goods to do with one’s health, strength, and appearance; and there are external goods, which comprise everything else, animate and inanimate, that one has good reason to value— family, friends, property, reputation, national success, and so forth. Aristotle, regards goods of the first category as primary and the foundation for a good life, but that life, as he puts it ‘needs the external goods as well; for it is impossible, or not easy, to do noble acts without the proper equipment. In many actions we use friends and riches and political power as instruments’ (NE 1. 8, 1099a33–1099b2). Unlike Aristotle, the Stoics have a monolithic theory of goodness. This theory is based on the claim that anything truly good should be beneficial in all circumstances, and anything truly bad should be always harmful. The only items that pass this demanding test in Stoic philosophy are virtue and vice, on the assumption that such character states are unconditionally beneficial and harmful respectively.¹¹ Hence the referent of Stoic goodness is always and only a virtuous character, what Aristotle classifies as goodness of soul, and the referent of Stoic badness is always and only the opposite disposition. The Stoics do not deny the obvious fact that we are naturally disposed to prefer health and wealth to sickness and poverty. We

⁸ As reflected in the Stoic concept of oikeiôsis: see Cicero, De finibus 3.16–17 and 62–3 with discussion by Long 1996, ch. 7. ⁹ Stobaeus 2.9, 27 (SVF 3.98). See Banateanu 2001, 70–2. ¹⁰ See for instance Fromm 1968, Ricoeur 1992, 180–8, and Kwan 1997. ¹¹ The Stoics defined virtue as ‘a consistent character, choiceworthy for its own sake and not from fear or hope of anything external’ (DL 7.89). The primary Stoic virtues are prudence, courage, justice, and moderation. For the details, see LS, ch. 60.

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could even say, on their behalf, that such things are quasi-good and quasi-bad. However, according to Stoic axiology, these things are not essentially good or bad, because people can misuse health and wealth, thus making them harmful and bad; contrariwise, virtuous people can make beneficial use of situations in which they find themselves sick or poor. Rather than count health as a bodily good and wealth as an external good, as Aristotle does, the Stoics classify such things as ‘preferred indifferents’, and they classify their opposites as ‘dispreferred indifferents’. These cumbrous expressions signify that health and wealth are things that we are naturally disposed to prefer to sickness and poverty and indeed should prefer, as long as such preferences are compatible with virtuous action. But such things are indifferent in the sense that they lack the unconditional beneficial value that is essential to happiness and to living a good life. We prefer to have them and to be without their opposites, but we can live well without them and live well with their opposites.¹² Persons who are of excellent character satisfy the monolithic theory of goodness because virtue by its nature can never fail to benefit and do good. Such persons because of their character invariably benefit themselves and they also benefit others like them.¹³ According to Stoicism virtuous persons, by reason of their character, have all that they need, over and above basic subsistence, in order to flourish to the highest possible degree. These ideal persons, like everyone else, have natural preferences for what Aristotle calls bodily and external goods, and these preferences will normally enter into their conduct of daily life. But a preferred item is not a requirement of Stoic happiness, and so its absence cannot diminish the virtue that is unconditionally required. Given this monolithic theory of goodness, we might well suppose that the Stoics would have no use for the concept of ‘external goodness’. Since goodness is encapsulated by virtue and only by virtue, must it not be an entirely internal thing, the state of mind constituting excellence of character? That account of virtue is incontrovertible because virtue is always internal to a mind, but virtue can in principle be instantiated in many minds, each of which would necessarily be external to the others. This explains why the Stoics do have a use for the concept of external goods, a use that is both compatible with their monolithic theory of goodness and highly germane to their theory of friendship. Some Stoic goods pertain to the soul, while other goods are external.¹⁴ Items of the first category are exactly what we would expect from the monolithic theory of goodness, namely ‘virtues and virtuous actions’. The external category is what ¹² The concept of preferred and dispreferred indifferents has been highly controversial ever since it was first propounded. For the Stoic sources and discussion, see LS, ch. 58, and for recent discussion, cf. Klein 2015. ¹³ For the extension of virtue’s benefits to other virtuous persons, see Bett 1997, 89. ¹⁴ Stobaeus 2.70 (SVF 3.97; DL 7.95 (SVF 3.97a); Sextus Empiricus, Adversus mathematicos 11.46 (SVF 3.96).

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interests us here; for it is primarily occupied by friends, meaning virtuous people who are friends of virtuous people. It is easy to see why friends are classified as external. However close one’s friends are, they remain literally as external to oneself as one’s house and garden. The house and garden count as preferred indifferents, but what promotes friends to the status of external goods? The answer must be their virtue together with the further Stoic notion that virtue is unfailingly beneficial. The only thing outside virtuous persons that could be truly and unfailingly beneficial to them is the virtue of other virtuous persons because affectionate and mutual benefiting are the essence of friendship.¹⁵ We can understand, then, why friendship and goodwill are also classified as ‘relational goods’, meaning character states that bring about one’s beneficial and kindly relation to people who will also include oneself if one is a virtuous person.¹⁶ We should now ask how one virtuous friend benefits another. This is a telling question because virtuous persons are presumed to be completely self-sufficient, meaning that their excellent character gives them all that they need, over and above material necessities, in order to live the good life. In approaching the Stoic answers to the question, we should note that, besides placing friends in the category of external goods, the Stoics also place them in the category of ‘productive’ goods, saying that ‘the friend and the benefits accruing from a friend are productive goods in as much as they produce happiness’ (eudaimonia).¹⁷ This cannot mean that happiness is causally dependent on friends; for if that were the case, the virtuous person’s unassailable self-sufficiency would be negated. A virtuous Stoic can in principle do without friends.¹⁸ The necessary and sufficient producers of happiness are the virtues. Can we take the ‘productive’ contribution of friends to mean that friends in some way facilitate happiness? I shall suggest that this is on the right lines, but in what way it is on the right lines will require extensive discussion. The Stoics classify the virtues as ‘goods that are both constitutive and productive on the grounds that the virtues not only produce happiness but also complete it by being its very parts’.¹⁹ The constitutive aspect of the virtues is central to Stoic ethics because of their doctrine that happiness consists entirely of a virtuous character. As the terms ‘productive’ and ‘constitutive’ exemplify, the Stoics liked to use jargon to signify fine conceptual distinctions. What they seem to have in mind here looks like a version of the familiar distinction between means and ends. ¹⁵ In Stoicism, because pleasure is indifferent to happiness, it is not specified as a consequence of the friendship between virtuous people, as it is in Aristotle. See Fraisse 1974, 359–61. ¹⁶ Stobaeus 2.73, 16–19 (SVF 3.112). See Banateanu 2001, 78, and Reydams-Schils 2005, 69. ¹⁷ DL 7.97 (SVF 3.107). Cicero, De finibus 3.55 (SVF 3.108) classifies the friend as the only good that is simply productive. ¹⁸ See Seneca, Ep. mor. 9, 5–9. ¹⁹ DL 7.97. The Greek word that I render by ‘constitutive’ is telikos. Literally translated, this word means ‘ultimate’ in the teleological sense of fulfilling an end.

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The Stoic end of life is happiness, constituted by virtue. This explains why the virtues are constitutive goods. Calling them productive goods as well looks a circular move, but it is not viciously circular if we take the virtues, as the Stoics did (Cicero, De finibus 3. 24), to be analogous to skills that produce their goal by being performed, like dance. As to the friend’s status as a productive good, this must have to do, for reasons we have already seen, with the friend’s virtues and only their virtues. I emphasize this point in order to underscore the absence of material benefit from the Stoic notion of friendship. Virtuous Stoics do not need material benefits from their friends in order to complete their happiness.

V This analysis raises the following question. If the virtues, which are internal to the self, both produce and constitute happiness, why do the Stoics emphatically make the virtuous friend, who is external to the self, a productive good in his own right. How or why does the self-sufficing virtuous person want friends? Aristotle devotes a chapter of the Nicomachean Ethics (9.9) to this very question. While he differs from the Stoics in assigning instrumental goodness to material benefits, subject to that qualification, his treatment of virtuous friends is very close to that of Seneca, to whom I will come in this section. Aristotle and Seneca do not think that neediness or helplessness has anything to do with virtue friendship, but they are equally insistent that their exemplary persons want to have friends. A fascinating balancing act is at work in both philosophers’ views on how to reconcile self-sufficiency and friendship. Aristotle situates his rejoinders to the self-sufficiency question by posing a seeming inconsistency between the virtuous and happy person’s supply of goods and the notion of a friend as another self. The ‘other self ’ idea, he proposes, would be plausible if a friend does for you what you cannot do for yourself (otherwise the friend would not be an other self ), but if you are flourishing anyway and selfsufficient, won’t a friend be superfluous? Aristotle has a four-part reply. First, he concedes that a genuinely flourishing person will be adequately supplied with life’s wherewithal. But he finds it ‘strange’ that such a person would be without friends because friends are thought to be the greatest of external goods. Second, Aristotle takes it that friendship is more concerned with benefiting than with being benefited, and that benefiting is especially characteristic of a virtuous person. In this case, he infers, a virtuous person will need friends in order to have people to benefit; otherwise his social virtues will be merely potential rather than actively exercised. Third, Aristotle argues, human nature is inherently and essentially sociable, so a flourishing and virtuous person will choose a sociable life, and one spent with friends rather than strangers. Finally, with his fourth and most interesting response to the self-

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sufficiency challenge, Aristotle draws on his previous distinction between the three grounds for friendship—utility, pleasure, and virtue. A virtuous person will have no need for friends purely on the basis of a friend’s utility or pleasuregiving qualities. However, the non-necessity of such friends does not entail the virtuous person’s ability to be happy without any friends. On the contrary, virtuous people need virtuous friends in order to be fully aware of the goodness that is common to their own and their friends’ existence. In this perfect form of friendship, a pair of virtuous friends illuminates each other’s characters, and is thus of immense cognitive value to one another in exemplifying and revealing their cognate virtues. We have already noted the Stoics’ affinity to Aristotle in their assigning friends the status of external goods, their making mutual helpfulness a function of virtuous character, and the attribution of sociability to all normal human beings. They also developed ideas, according to Seneca, that recall this striking Aristotelian notion that the friend, in being another self, is an instructive mirror for the self.²⁰ Seneca is our fullest source for the Stoic philosophy of friendship. His most relevant work is his series of Moral Letters to Lucilius.²¹ Whether the correspondence was genuine or a literary ploy we shall never know for sure, but Seneca’s expressions of love and concern for Lucilius ring true. The main theme of the Letters is how to achieve progress towards the Stoic ideal of wisdom. Seneca presents himself as devoted to this project both on his own account and as an adviser and helper for his younger friend Lucilius. Thus the Letters, with one proviso, may be read as a literary instance of Stoic friendship in action—the friend as a ‘productive good’, with the more advanced Stoic exhorting and advising the other. The proviso is that, in strict Stoic theory, as we have seen, you have to be someone of flawless character, in order to qualify as a Stoic friend. Seneca is at pains to indicate his own shortcomings, and shortcomings pertain even more to his implied correspondent. We do not, then, have a pair of Stoic paragons writing to one another, but what the Stoics themselves called progressives, fallible persons doing their best to achieve a fully virtuous character. However, the merely progressive status of Seneca and Lucilius enhances the interest of the Letters. Many of them are literary attempts to approximate ideal Stoic friendship. The warm tone Seneca adopts towards Lucilius shows that it is mistaken to call Stoic friendship in general, as one scholar has done, ‘austere’,²² or to say with another that the Stoics had small interest in friendship.²³ Apart from registering deep

²⁰ Magna Moralia 1213a10–26. ²¹ Seneca’s observations on friendship are well treated by Reydams-Schils 2005, ch. 2. See also Wildberger 2018. ²² See Lesses 1993. ²³ Konstan 1997, 113.

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affection and joy, Seneca also gives Lucilius detailed instructions concerning the theory of Stoic friendship in its strict sense. In what follows, I will be chiefly concerned with the theory, but to preface that I translate much of one short letter (number 35), as an example of the correspondence’s characteristic mixture of affection, jesting, and admonition: When I ask you so insistently to get serious, I am doing my own business: I want a friend, and that can’t happen to me unless you proceed to develop yourself, in the way you have begun. At present you love me, but you are not my friend. ‘Hey’, you say, ‘Are these things different?’ Yes, very different. One who is a friend loves, but one who loves is not automatically a friend. That’s why friendship is always helpful, but love sometimes even does harm. If for no other reason, make progress, so you can learn how to love. And make haste, while you are making progress for me, lest another person benefit from your lessons. Actually, I am already getting a profit from imagining the time when we shall be of one mind . . . but I also want to rejoice over the reality. Joy comes to us from those we love even when they are distant, but it is light and fleeting; the sight of them, their presence and conversation, have a pleasure that is alive, at least if you not only see the person you want to see, but also see him in the condition you want him to be in. So bring yourself to me, an immense gift, and to put on speed realize that you are mortal and I am old. Hurry to me, but hurry to yourself first. Make progress, and above all take pains to be consistent with yourself.

This letter delineates the reciprocal benefits accruing to both parties from a virtuous or would-be virtuous friendship. Seneca gently taunts Lucilius for lacking what it takes to be an authentic Stoic friend—knowledge of how to love. You can love someone without being unfailingly beneficial, which is what Seneca hopes for from Lucilius. If Seneca’s hope looks self-seeking or egoistic, we should notice that it is entirely related to his benefits to Lucilius, meaning his efforts to advance Lucilius’ progress. Any of us will press a friend to come and visit us, but Seneca makes his wanting to see Lucilius conditional on Lucilius’ progress, which he expresses by saying ‘hurry to yourself first’. The ‘self ’ Seneca urges Lucilius to hurry towards is Lucilius’ improved character, a self that will approach the Stoic ideal of human nature at its best.²⁴ For Seneca and Lucilius fully to benefit one another as strictly Stoic friends, they would need to be completely of one mind and moral character. At present that is only a distant prospect. In the letter prior to this one, Seneca had congratulated Lucilius on the latter’s progress, calling him ‘my handiwork’ (opus), choosing a metaphor based on the way a farmer takes delight

²⁴ For a full treatment of Seneca on the self, see Long 2006, ch. 17.

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      

in the fruition of his orchard (Ep. mor. 34, 2). In this ensuing letter he assures Lucilius that his mentoring has not been entirely disinterested. He wants to profit from it by a friendship with Lucilius that the latter’s progress can facilitate, and he jestingly wants to be sure that he, and not someone else, will reap that profit. We need to be careful how we interpret Seneca’s talk of profit. He is not suggesting that he has befriended Lucilius in order to benefit from him. That would be seeking a friendship from utilitarian motives. Seneca’s friendly motivations are on behalf of Lucilius and for Lucilius’ benefit. Still, friendship of any kind, however virtuously motivated, must be reciprocal to some extent. You can love someone who doesn’t love you back, but you cannot be genuine friends with persons who do not make a significant return to you in care and affection. Seneca’s hoped-for and so-called profit from Lucilius is reciprocal benefit from the younger man in return for the interest in him that Seneca has been taking and the instruction Seneca has been giving. As Seneca states in another letter (Ep. mor. 81, 12): ‘It is a part of love and of friendship to return favours.’ Although Seneca and Lucilius are not friends, according to strict Stoic theory, the way Seneca presents their relationship is instructive as a guide to that theory precisely because of the way the pair presently falls short. Seneca is trying to instruct Lucilius in the principles of the Stoic way of life. Lucilius’ imperfect grasp of these principles is implicit in Seneca’s observation that Lucilius does not yet know how to love. By trying to instruct Lucilius, Seneca pretends to play the role of a fully fledged Stoic friend. As we have seen, the Stoics counted friends as ‘external’ and ‘productive’ goods, meaning that each provides the other with the benefit of their own virtues. Stoic virtues consist in moral knowledge, knowledge of how to conduct oneself appropriately in all circumstances. Stoic friends benefit one another by sharing in one another’s virtues, and since Stoic virtues are invariant in quality and value, and in the knowledge that they require, such friends benefit one another equally. At present Lucilius is the greater beneficiary. But Seneca, though more advanced in his understanding and practice of Stoicism, still lacks the infallible knowledge of the Stoic wise man.

VI Why do the Stoics, in their theory of perfect friendship, lay such emphasis on knowledge in the special sense of infallible grasp of goodness? To respond to that question, I outline a discourse from Epictetus (2.22). With the heading ‘On friendship’, it was delivered some fifty years after Seneca’s death in the early years of the second century AD. I summarize the argument as follows. 1. True love requires complete devotion to whatever one loves. 2. A person can be completely devoted only to good things.

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3. Therefore, true love requires knowledge of good things. 4. Wise persons know good things, and can distinguish them from things that are bad or indifferent. 5. Non-wise persons lack that knowledge. 6. Therefore, only the wise are capable of true love. The conclusion is startling: you must be completely knowledgeable about authentic values in order to love truly. The argument’s first premise, ‘True love requires complete devotion’ is acceptable if one thinks of love that is unqualified and unconditional. The second premise, ‘A person can be devoted only to good things’, is also acceptable as long as it means that one can be devoted only to things that one believes to be good, or to things that one likes a lot; for it would be absurd to be devoted to things that one finds bad, or dislikes, or regards as indifferent? The controversial premise is the third one: ‘True love requires knowledge of good things.’ By ‘knowledge’ Epictetus means objective certainty, and by ‘good’ he means ‘whatever is always and unfailingly beneficial’. As we have already seen, the Stoics classified numerous things that people ordinarily find good (health, wealth, and so forth) as preferred indifferents, and they classified the opposites of such things not as ‘bad’ but as dispreferred indifferents. They reasoned that our natural preferences do not confer goodness or badness on these things. Such value judgements are applicable, instead, to the use made of the things, with the good or bad use dependent on people’s judgements and intentions, not on the things themselves.²⁵ Hence the Stoics concluded that no preferred or dispreferred thing is essentially beneficial or harmful. When we build these points into Epictetus’ argument, we can begin to understand his startling conclusion that true love requires wisdom. If people are completely devoted to physical exercise or financial success or their family’s prestige, it would be irrational for them not to judge such things to be desirable goals and to deem success in pursuing them to be good and contributory to happiness. But if such things (though preferable) are indifferent to happiness and excellence, given the posited connections between love, goodness, and knowledge, they cannot be objects of true love. Epictetus develops his connection between true love and wisdom by imagining someone who admits lack of wisdom but who also claims to love his child. He has a discussion with this person and finds that he lacks wisdom by the instability of his judgements and emotions.

²⁵ See Long 1996b, 28–9, for the Stoic notion that goodness does not reside in ‘things’ but in the kind of use people make of things or the way people respond to things.

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Do you think that you can be the friend of someone if you hold incorrect opinions about him? No. What if your opinion about him is subject to change. Can your relations be warm? No. And if you alternate praise with criticism? Not then either.

As the dialogue continues, Epictetus confronts his respondent with situations in which quarrels develop between father and son over an inheritance or a girlfriend or an award for public service. The point is to show that true love is only possible between people who understand and endorse the indifference of all these contested things, and who situate goodness in one another’s excellence of character. Stoic wisdom, the argument runs, is essential to true love; for without that people’s friendships are unable to benefit one another in the virtuous ways true friendship requires.

VII Epictetus’ exposition will probably strike many readers as throwing cold water over their closest relationships. Must we see our friends or be seen by them as moral perfectionists if our friendship is to flourish or even get off the ground? The strict Stoic answer is affirmative, but it must immediately be tempered by the recognition that Stoicism is a perfectionist philosophy. Strictly speaking, all people, including Stoic philosophers, are ignoramuses according to the infallible standard of Stoic wisdom. In setting the bar to perfect friendship beyond realistic attainment, Stoicism challenges complacency. Seneca, however, even when speaking of this unattainable point, offers many thoughts that are applicable to imperfect friendships. This will be especially clear if we review his responses to Aristotle’s question about why the self-sufficient and virtuous man wants to have friends. In Letter 9 specifically on this topic, Seneca explains a Stoic distinction, hard to render in English, between ‘lacking’ (egere) on the one hand, and ‘requiring’ (opus esse), on the other hand. Wise persons, thanks to their virtuous character, cannot lack anything relevant to happiness. Even if they are maimed or suffering from other disadvantages, they are not needy or incapable of living well. Still, for living a normal daily life they require adequately functioning limbs and sense organs. Such persons can, if circumstances dictate, do without friends and still maintain happiness; but they do not wish or choose to be alone. They require friends in order, as Seneca, in his typically extreme way, puts the point, to have someone to die for or

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whom they may follow into exile. In this perspective, friendship is desirable, not for one’s own utility or pleasure or making up for what one lacks, but as the means of exercising the moral virtues, just as Aristotle had previously argued. In a later Letter (109) Seneca gives a more searching response to the selfsufficiency question. If friendship is a relationship of mutual benefit, how can wise persons, who are replete with all that is good in their individual characters, benefit one another? In the first place, he says, they do so by activating one another’s virtues, motivating one another, giving each other opportunities for honourable action. They prod and learn from each other. Secondly, by cheering each other on, they are a source of joy and confidence. ‘One wise person will help another, not only with his own strength, but also with the strength of the one he is helping.’ Here we can observe the deficiency that Seneca was still finding in Lucilius’ character. Seneca imagines someone objecting that the two wise people do not really help one another; rather each helps himself. I quote his retort in full (Ep. mor. 109, 9–11): The wise man cannot maintain his mental disposition unless he has access to friends like himself with whom to share his virtues. Furthermore, you should note that there is mutual friendship between all the virtues. Therefore, help is provided by one who loves the virtues of a person like himself and who in return supplies his own virtues to be loved. Things that are alike give pleasure, especially when they are honourable and their recipients know how to be mutual in approving them. Besides, the only person who has the expertise to motivate a wise person is another wise person, just as only a human being can rationally motivate another human being. Therefore, just as reason is needed to motivate reason, so perfect reason is needed to motivate perfect reason.

Here, if I am not mistaken, we have Seneca’s version of the Aristotelian mirror notion of friendship: you love your friend’s good qualities, and what your friend gives you in return is the reflection of your own virtues.

VIII The Stoic theory of friendship, like Aristotle’s virtue friendship, is an ideal. It is not intended to cover the affectionate relationships that ordinary people engage in from day to day. But the ideal nature of this friendship, with its exclusive focus on virtuous character, enables the theory to serve as a touchstone for the quality of imperfect relationships, for it gets us to ask such questions as the following. Do our friends really deserve our regard for them, and do we really deserve their regard? What do we owe our friends, and are we genuinely of help to them and

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they to us? Do we and our friends have enough in common to constitute a relationship that is so mutually helpful, lasting, and close that we can share everything with our friend? Do we really and fully love our friends for their sake rather than our own sake? We may well be disinclined to ask such questions because they seem too rationalistic and peremptory to suit the spontaneity we associate with the formation and continuation of friendships. However, the answers to such questions could forestall the disappointments and ill will that sometimes bring modern friendships to conclusions of mutual recrimination. We may still find Stoic friendship disturbingly remote from our own experience in the little interest that it explicitly takes in a friend’s personality and uniqueness, and in the circumstances under which friends come to care for one another. Aristotle, with his emphasis on virtuous character rather than personality, has been criticized on these lines, and the Stoics seem liable to the same objection, perhaps even more strongly. Seneca states that the Stoic wise man will never lack friends because it is always in his power to replace the friends he has lost (Ep. mor. 9, 5). Instead of lengthily mourning deceased friends, Seneca recommends us to love them ‘greedily’ while we have them and rejoice in remembering them thereafter (Ep. mor. 63.8). Both statements, even in their full context, are chilling to a modern sensibility. By way of Stoic justification, we need to fill them out. Grief is never an acceptable emotion for a Stoic because it is presumed to involve the mistaken belief that one has suffered a real harm as distinct from losing a ‘preferred’ indifferent.²⁶ As to forming new friends, Seneca presents that as the proper application of an ideally loving nature. Truly good persons want many friends, in order to extend their capacity to love. Seneca characterizes anyone who has only one friend to lose as deficient in affection. Such observations on the desirability of making and replacing friendships remind us that the Stoics were fashioning their views within a world where friendship in the general sense of reliable and mutual benefit was expected and even essential for the conduct of daily life in all its forms. Ancient friends, as I remarked earlier, strongly depended on one another’s affection, loyalty, reciprocity, and practical help. The Stoics completely endorsed these attributes of friendship, but they challenged their conventionally utilitarian basis by treating virtuous character as the essential foundation for a truly loving friendship. In this proceeding they can be seen to have canvassed what Jennifer Whiting 1991 calls ‘impersonal friends’. Whiting bases her argument on Aristotle’s virtue friendship, but it applies equally well, or perhaps even better, to the Stoics. ²⁶ Epictetus counsels verbal sympathy, and even sharing someone’s groans, but refraining from ‘groaning within oneself ’ (Encheiridion 16). Here we may see a difference from Aristotle, who acknowledges ‘grieving with’ one’s friend as a characteristic of friendship; see NE 9, 1166a7; Eudemian Ethics 7, 1240a36–9, Rhetoric 2.4, 1381a3–5. However, Aristotle emphatically recommends people not to burden friends with their own suffering, NE 9, 1171b4–10.

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Character friends, as Whiting calls them, value themselves as persons of a certain sort, namely as virtuous; and valuing someone for the sake of the person’s virtuous character entails valuing that same character in the case of anyone of that sort anywhere. In this way, Whiting argues, we can envision a ‘pool of impersonal friends’, people the virtuous person could love not because of who they are in particular but ‘as persons of a certain sort’. In fact of course, the virtuous person’s actual friendships will depend on contingencies of time, place, and interest— whom she meets and how they get along—but what she primarily values in her actual friends could have been satisfied by the similar merits of others. ‘Impersonal friends’ is an oxymoron, but it does not mean that such friends do not value one another as individual persons. To the contrary, it means that they value one another for individually embodying the virtues of character. That the Stoics envisioned impersonal friends in Whiting’s sense should be clear from my earlier remarks, but it is also made quite explicit in the following testimonies: If a single wise person anywhere at all extends his finger prudently, all wise persons throughout the world are benefited. This is their friendship’s function; this is what wise persons’ virtues, with their shared benefits, are for.²⁷

And: All virtuous persons benefit one another, but they are not in all circumstances friends and well-wishers . . . of one another because of not being acquainted or not living in the same place. But their disposition to one another is always friendly and well-wishing.²⁸

In other words, according to Stoicism, any virtuous person could become the friend of any other virtuous person because they all share the same wise and benevolent character.²⁹ These traits transcend their qualities as unique individuals. Do these Stoic paragons also need to be drawn to one another as personalities? That condition, so basic to our modern idea of friends, is not specified. What the Stoics offer us instead is the mutual attractiveness that fully virtuous people have for one another.

²⁷ Plutarch, De communibus notitiis 1068F (SVF 3.627). ²⁸ Stobaeus 2.101, 24 (SVF 3.626). According to Cicero, De natura deorum 1.121 (SVF 3.635), the Stoics held that the wise are friends even without knowing one another, but that extreme claim conflicts with the second testimony cited above. ²⁹ Underlying these striking statements is the Stoic doctrine that all virtuous persons form a community constituted by the perfection of reason in which they share along with the gods. See Banateanu 2001, chs 7–8, Reydams-Schils 2005, 70–82, and Vogt 2008. This worldwide community is completely utopian, owing to the absence of any actually wise persons, but the ideal that it represents can serve as a model in the way that I have argued here in the case of Stoic friendship. The cosmic scope of Stoic social theorizing is a marked divergence from Aristotle’s understanding of small Greek citystates as the paradigmatic human society.

13 The Self in Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations I Introduction ‘Precepts’ (parangelmata) is the earliest attested title for the work we call the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (Farquahrson 1944 vol. 1, xv, and vol. 2, 433). The Roman emperor may well have applied this, or an equivalent term, to his philosophical reflections. As a practising Stoic, he had ample authority for exhorting himself to live up to the school’s demanding regimen. He mentions his own hypomnêmata (‘memoranda’, 3.14), and he also uses this word in reference to the works of Epictetus (1.7), the Stoic philosopher who influenced him most strongly. However, the earliest manuscript of Marcus’ work calls it biblia eis heauton, a phrase that most literally means ‘books to do with himself ’, or ‘books for himself ’, meaning books for his personal use. If this phrase goes back to classical times, it would be a unique title for a work of literature. The Greek expression is commonly rendered ‘books to himself ’, but this is a misleading translation because it suggests that Marcus is addressing himself in the way that one does in a personal memoir or autobiography.¹ The Meditations does contain personal allusions (most notably in the first book of acknowledgements to all the people Marcus feels indebted to), but what it records, in as much as it records anything, is not how he has spent his day but how he seeks to monitor his mind and control his emotional outlook. Marcus composed the Meditations in the light of Stoic doctrines of ethical theory and moral psychology, but he was quite inventive in the advice he gives about understanding and managing himself in particular and the self as such. Although he constantly uses ‘I’ or the singular ‘you’, and refrains from addressing people in general, his philosophy of selfhood is applicable to anyone committed to living the Stoic life. Much of its effectiveness derives from the author’s expository power, which modulates between factual claims about human nature in general and normative claims about the ideally rational self. Befitting a work that is informal, not a philosophical monograph, his language for characterizing selfhood varies from page to page, but his basic model is the same throughout, and founded upon the following Stoic axioms:

¹ For that sense, the appropriate Greek preposition would be pros not eis.

Selfhood and Rationality in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Heraclitus to Plotinus. A. A. Long, Oxford University Press. © A. A. Long 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198803393.003.0014

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(1) The universe is a physical continuum, governed and permeated throughout by Nature = God = Providence = Reason. (2) The Nature of the universe operates by means of a causal nexus (‘fate’) such that nothing that happens could be otherwise, and, given proposition (1), is always for the good of the whole. (3) Human beings are rational animals. As such, their natures or souls are ‘offshoots’ or ‘parts’ of universal Nature. (4) Notwithstanding the universality of fate, human beings are autonomous agents and completely responsible for their own moral character and mental processes. (5) Happiness and goodness depend entirely on conforming one’s human nature to universal Nature. (6) The only unconditional values are virtue (perfected reason) and vice (faulty reason). Everything else is indifferent. These propositions, or versions of them, are explicit or implicit throughout the Meditations. For the present, I let them stand without further comment except to call attention to two apparent points of tension—first, the alleged compatibility of fate and autonomy, and second, the coherence of the part/whole relation supposedly existing between individual human natures and universal Nature. Marcus’ injunctions, far from ignoring these tensions, depend on maintaining and exploiting them. I shall need, in my conclusion, to face them directly. As further preparation for approaching his text, the first Discourse of Epictetus is an excellent guide. Its theme, ‘the things that are up to us and not up to us’, is most memorably set out in a dialogue that Epictetus imagines himself having with Zeus, who addresses him as follows:² If it had been possible, I would have made your little body (sômation) and property free and unhindered. But in fact—take note of my words—this is not your own but only artfully moulded clay. Since I could not give you this, I have given you a portion of myself, this faculty of positive and negative impulse and of desire and aversion—the faculty, in short, of using mental impressions. By caring for this and by situating all that is yours therein, you will never be impeded, you will never be restricted, you will not groan or find fault or flatter anyone.

The freedom specified here is not freedom of action in the sense of bodily independence or an open and undetermined future. Epictetan freedom is entirely internal, signifying authority over one’s motivations and emotional responses to

² Discourses 1.1.10–12. I use the translation of Long 2002, 160. Zeus is a name that the Stoics, including Marcus, frequently applied to universal Nature.

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the world.³ By calling this internal freedom ‘the use of mental impressions (phantasiai)’, Epictetus envisions an unrestricted capacity for self-determination over one’s judgements, values, and affects. Perfecting this capacity is his standard recipe not only for freedom but also for reverence (aidêmon) and all other moral excellences. Marcus took the point: Everywhere and continually it is up to you to be reverently content with your present situation, to behave justly to the people you are with, and to skillfully manage your present impression, so that nothing slips into your mind that you have not thoroughly ascertained. (7.54) You are to remember that nothing within the boundaries of your flesh and your life-breath [as distinct from your mind] is yours or up to you. (5.33)

II The Human Being’s Mental Structure Because the Stoic concept of nature is physical through and through, an incorporeal soul or self, as in Platonism, was not an option for Marcus. All entities, including the cosmos itself, are structures composed of matter and the everpresent corporeal agent variously called God, cause, and the breath (pneuma) that informs and vivifies matter. In the following passage Marcus gives his own twist to the four metaphysical distinctions Stoic philosophers posited for classifying types of entity (Origen, De principiis 3.1.2–3): Most items that evoke popular admiration belong to the general class of things held together either by coherence (hexis) or by nature (physis), such as stones and logs, or figs, vines, and olives . . . Somewhat superior people are impressed by things held together by soul (psychê), such as flocks or herds, and still more refined people are impressed by things held together by rational soul (logikê psychê), though not meaning rational as such but skilful or artistic in some way. Yet one who values a soul that is rational and sociable (politikê) no longer focuses on these other things but above all on keeping his own self (literally ‘his own soul’) in a rationally active and sociable condition, and cooperates with his fellow human beings to this end. (6.14)

The first four categories (hexis, physis, psychê, and logikê psychê) classify things in an ascending scale of complexity, from inanimate, vegetable, generically animal, up to specifically human. Marcus then treats his own notion of the normative self, ‘a soul that is rational and sociable’, as if it were a fifth and supremely refined

³ See Long 2018a.

    ’ 

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metaphysical category. He takes the sociability of the normative self, one of his constant themes, to be a necessary accompaniment of its rationality. We might suppose that someone dedicated to sociability should be highly extroverted, but Marcus’ characteristically inward turn is essential to his philanthropic goals: he focuses on himself to concentrate on what reason requires of him in his social and political life. Psychê can often be translated in Marcus by self, as in the last sentence of this passage, but Stoics also used the word to signify the principle of animal life in general. Marcus does so in the third of his classifications. In its strict Stoic usage the psychê is an eight-part entity consisting of the five senses, the faculties of voice and reproduction, and ‘the governing part’ called hêgemonikon, located in the region of the heart.⁴ The Stoics had Platonic precedent for analysing mental functions by means of political metaphors, but their hegemonic concept of the soul’s principal part was a striking innovation. While every psychê has its hêgemonikon, this governing part is only rational (logikos) in the case of adult human beings. For the Stoics, what governs a mature human life is reason through and through, manifested in the governing part’s powers to motivate persons by thoughts, beliefs, and desires. The human hêgemonikon does not contain any nonrational faculties, but the rationality that it constitutes is either correct or incorrect. When it is incorrect, persons act contrary to sound reasoning, and so irrationally. The Stoic concept of hêgemonikon is probably the closest any ancient thinker came to formulating a specific term for the self. One way to see this is by noting how in Marcus the word is often associated with reflexive pronouns or possessive adjectives. For instance: The hêgemonikon is what activates and adapts itself, makes itself whatever way it wants, and makes everything that happens appear to itself exactly as it wants. (6.8) How is the hêgemonikon treating itself ? Everything turns on this. (12.33) What am I making of my hêgemonikon?

(10.24)

In the second and third quotations personal reflexivity is paramount. Marcus could have written (as he does elsewhere), ‘How am I treating myself?’ or ‘What am I making of myself?’ In the first excerpt the principal notions are will, autonomy, and power. Describing oneself in terms of a hêgemonikon sets up a presumption of first-person agency, authority, and leadership, as in saying ‘I am the master of my soul.’ People can, of course, abrogate authority and leadership over themselves. According to Stoicism, as Marcus constantly reminds himself, ⁴ I treat the fundamental doctrines of Stoic psychology in Long 1996a ch. 10 and Long 1999b.

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that is precisely what happens when people give way to passion, judge things according to false assessments of goodness and badness, and focus attention away from their rational essence. We are now in a position to consider how Marcus situates the hêgemonikon within his understanding of the body and the physicalism that was foundational in Stoic philosophy. Here are two cardinal passages: See to it that the governing (hêgemonikon) and authoritative part of your soul is not distracted by smooth or rough motion in the flesh [i.e. by pleasurable or painful sensations]. Don’t let it coalesce with them, but have it isolate itself and limit these pressures to their own [bodily] parts. But whenever, as a result of the other interaction [i.e. body acting on mind] they present themselves to the mind (dianoia), in a unified body’s normal way, you should not try to resist the feeling, natural as it is, but ensure that the governing part (hêgemonikon) does not, from itself, add a judgement concerning the goodness or badness of the feeling. (5.26) The primary thing in a human being’s constitution is sociability, and the second thing is resistance to bodily pressures; for rational and intelligent activity is marked out by its limiting itself and never being overcome by sensory or impulsive movement. Both of these are merely animal, but intelligent activity seeks to be dominant and not be in thrall to these others. (7.55)

Taken together, these two passages express the essence of Marcus’ recommended policy for self-management. Like every other item in the Stoic universe, Marcus is a body. As such, he is liable to affect and be affected by anything he encounters. There are no gaps between his body and its immediate external environment, and more relevantly, there are no gaps within his body separating his hêgemonikon from its surrounding flesh, blood, and bones. Marcus is a soul/ body complex with a unified corporeal structure that makes him a psychophysical whole. Yet, notwithstanding his objective unity as a living body, Marcus identifies his essence or his self with his governing part, i.e. the rational faculty of his soul. He does not, however, pretend to make himself impervious to sensations. Hence, he proposes various strategies for dealing with bodily experiences: he can say to himself, ‘what is feeling this pain is not me, but my body’. Or, when the sensations become too strong to be sidelined in this way, he can say, ‘I should acknowledge my feelings to be quite natural experiences, but withhold from them any value judgement, and thus keep them isolated from my intellectual essence.’ Why should he do this? Why not, as an Epicurean would do, simply register the feelings as good or bad respectively? The answer is provided by the second passage just cited. In Marcus’ philosophy of selfhood, you cannot have a hêgemonikon deserving of the name, i.e. a genuinely governing self, if you allow your mind to be

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controlled by sensations and impulses that pertain to animal life quite generally, and thus fail to accord with your specifically human nature.⁵ Marcus’ limitation of his self to the soul’s governing part is not simply an endorsement of standard Stoicism; it should also be seen as a reflection of his role as actual governor of the mighty Roman Empire. I have already cited passages that connect the hêgemonikon with sociability and political involvement. Marcus recurs several times to his imperial position, as, for instance, when he reminds himself to act according to the ‘rationale of ruling and law-giving’ for the benefit of mankind (4.12). Were he to allow himself to become dominated by purely animal drives, like a conventional despot, he would be unable to play the social and political part that he takes to have been assigned to him. The passages I have cited identify the self by abstracting it from other features of the human being. Marcus plays numerous variations on this theme and shifts between three-fold, two-fold, and single models of human identity. The three-fold model has many variations, but in essence it juxtaposes body, soul, and intellect or governing part (2.2, 3.16, 5.33, 7.16, 8.56, 12.3, 12.14; see Gill 2007, 176–9). For body (sôma), Marcus sometimes writes mere body (sômation), flesh or mere flesh (sarkidion), and he may replace soul (psychê) with breath (pneuma) or mere breath (pneumation). These substitutions serve to disparage all parts or aspects of the person except the intellect or governing part. This negativity can be extreme, for instance: As one already dying, despise the flesh—gore, bones, the network of nerves, sinews, veins, and arteries. Consider the breath too, the sort of thing that it is— wind, constantly changing, but all the time emitted and inhaled. The third thing, then, is the governing part. (2.2)

Taken in isolation, such a passage would make Marcus appear worryingly troubled by the physical realities that are an inevitable feature of a living body. In fact, the Meditations show that he also had a keen eye for natural beauty. His disparagement of the human body is more than a rhetorical ploy, but it is deliberately exaggerated, to emphasize the distinctiveness of the essential self. The two-fold model focuses on the contrast between body and intellect, dropping reference to the soul or vital breath. Marcus describes himself as an amalgam of the ‘causal’ and the ‘material’, a pairing that invokes the fundamental Stoic principles—active ‘cause’ and passive ‘matter’ (5.13). He also contrasts his flesh with his intellect (nous, 7.66), or his hêgemonikon with his flesh (12.2). Such apparent dualism has sometimes been regarded as a Platonic intrusion into the Stoic philosophy of the Meditations. Marcus does allude to Socrates in passages ⁵ In view of Epictetus’ influence on Marcus’s thought and vocabulary, it is worth noting that the emperor never uses prohairesis (will or choice), Epictetus’ favourite term to refer to the self.

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coloured by the asceticism of Plato’s Phaedo (3.6, 3.7), but when he echoes the sharp contrasts found there between soul and body he does not literally import the incorporeal features of the Platonic psychê. Epictetus was Marcus’ immediate linguistic model in such contexts, and Epictetus accepted the physicality of the human soul (see Long 2002, 158–62). Marcus was not a metaphysical dualist, but when he describes the soul’s governing part as a different kind of entity from its physiological covering, he means exactly what he says. In this way he is like a modern thinker who accepts the physicality of all events, but declines to reduce mental experiences and mental states to the neuro-physiological occurrences with which they are necessarily correlated. For Marcus the three-fold and two-fold models are a foil for identifying the essence of the self with the hêgemonikon or intellect as such.⁶ The ethical implications of this view are set out in the following extraordinary excerpt: You are composed of three things—mere body, mere breath, and intellect. Two of these are yours to the extent of your needing to take care of them, but the third alone is strictly yours. So if you separate from yourself, that is from your mind, everything other people say or do, or whatever you yourself have said or done, and whatever in the future troubles you, all that accrues to you involuntarily (aproaireta) from your bodily envelope or associated life-breath, and everything the external flux whirls around, so that your reflective mind, freed from its fated accompaniments (synheimarmena) lives purified and released by itself, doing what is right, accepting what occurs and speaking the truth—if, I say, you separate from this ruling part (hêgemonikon) your emotional attachments (prospatheia) and the events of the past or the future . . . and practise living only the life you are living, that is the present, you will be able to live out the rest up till your death untroubled and kindly and in harmony with your own divinity (daimôn). (12.3)

Many difficult ideas clamour for comment here. These include detachment not simply from one’s bodily frame and metabolism, but also from one’s entire social milieu, one’s own past acts and words, one’s concerns about the future—in short, Marcus recommends himself to focus wholly on the present moment, stressing, as he frequently does, that the present is all that one ever has. Very well, we may say. But what could such a self be, detached from memory and anticipation? The desirable outcome, he proposes, is ‘doing what is right, welcoming all that occurs, and speaking the truth’. Could anyone practise that regimen in complete detachment from their spatio-temporal context? How can persons be anything at all in abstraction from their history? Supposing that to be ⁶ Cf. Epictetus, Discourses 4.6.34: ‘Who am I? Not a mere body, nor a piece of property, nor a name. None of these. What then? I am a rational creature.’

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possible, would it not be an abandonment of oneself? Marcus’ exhortation to sever his governing part from all the rest of him reads like a policy of self-cancelling. Tempting, though it is, to find this (by no means unique) passage too highly rhetorical to be fully coherent, I want to probe into it more deeply. What I take Marcus, most basically, to be recommending to himself, is expressed by Epictetus in ‘the divine law’ (Discourses 2.26.28): guarding one’s own, using only what one is given, not getting emotionally involved (prospaschein) with anything else, whether companions, places, or even one’s own body. Expressed in this way, Marcus’ regimen is the standard Stoic doctrine that the key to genuine self-realization for ourselves as rational minds is not the world’s impingement on us, but our outlook on the world, ‘how one thinks about everything’, or ‘all is thinking’, as he characterizes his essential philosophy of life in the expression pan hypolêpsis (2.15, 3.9, 5.26). However, this version of his regimen makes it tractable at the cost of deflating its distinctiveness. Marcus’ model of the self requires his own language, hyperbolical though it is in the long passage above, in order for its strangeness and interest to be appreciated. His recommended detachment from time, space, associates, and even his own history, highlights the self as an autonomous subject of consciousness, a fixed internal point of refuge in an outer context of flux and confusion. With an intensely personal, almost desperate, plea, he seeks to give himself a renewed future, a purification as it were, a shedding of the past, merging his subjective consciousness with the ideal rationality that he calls his own divinity (daimôn). Before turning to that concept, let us note that Marcus’ recommended detachment is not confined to his body and external situation. It may also extend to the basic faculties of the hêgemonikon, as emerges most starkly in these passages (9.7): Erase your impression (phantasia), stop your impulse (hormê), quench your desire (orexis); restrict the governing part to its own power. Erase your impressions by continually telling yourself: it is up to me to have no faultiness in my soul, no longing or any disturbance at all, but focusing on what everything is really like, I treat everything according to its worth. Be mindful of your having this power thanks to nature. (8.29)

What Marcus, following standard Stoic terminology, calls impression, impulse, and desire are basic faculties of the mind or governing part. Impression (phantasia) covers all thought contents, whether mediated by the senses or emerging into consciousness through memory, imagination, or abstract reasoning. Impulse and desire are the mind’s motivating faculties, and range over emotion, wanting, avoiding, and the like. Epictetus, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter (p. 213, identifies the good life with making correct use of one’s impressions and motivating oneself accordingly. This is a Stoic formula for the rational life that human beings are divinely qualified to lead.

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Marcus entirely agrees with this regimen. But in his therapeutic exercises he sometimes tells himself to ‘contract’ into a mental space that, for the moment, excludes all thought and desire (7.28, 29). We may best understand this contraction as a recommendation to concentrate as intensely as possible on the mind’s identity as a faculty of judgement, untrammelled by this or that impression or impulse.⁷ In normal consciousness, a mind will always have some impression as its thought content and some inclination or aversion arising from its impressions. As Marcus says: ‘Your mind will be just like the sequence of your impressions’ (5.16). But, to the introspective emperor, this experience always carries the risk of acting precipitately, assenting to impressions without carefully reviewing them, and reacting like a puppet that is jerked about by the strings of its manipulator.⁸ In telling himself to suspend normal mental processes, Marcus seeks to direct his focus exclusively on his capacity for rational reflection, or what he likes to call the self ’s internal divinity, an offshoot of the divinely governed cosmos.

III Internal Divinity and Offshoot of the Cosmos By abstracting from his body and surroundings, focusing only on the present, Marcus assures himself that he will be able to live in harmony with his own divinity (daimôn). What does this notion contribute to the emperor’s understanding of the self in general and his own self in particular? To approach this large question, we need some background. The idea that human beings contain divinity in virtue of having a rational mind is common to Plato, Aristotle, and Stoicism, as we have seen in this book’s earlier chapters. Daimôn is a term that can signify either divine power at the highest level or something lesser, a demigod or spirit; and it can also refer to a person’s lot or individual fate. Hence eudaimonia, conventionally translated happiness, is literally a divinely favoured condition or a good dispensation. In archaic Greece rationality was not a divine attribute, but Zeus, the supreme god, was always taken to have a far-seeing and world-governing intellect (nous). As the philosophers developed ideas concerning reason, divinity lost its physical resemblance to humanity but acquired super-human rationality instead. In this way Nature’s causality, goodness, and perfect reason came to be regarded as mutually entailing concepts. It is thus not too difficult to see why philosophers, starting with Plato, referred to the best human life as likeness to god. In Plato and Aristotle, who take the soul to be incorporeal, divinity lacks a body, but Stoicism introduces a pantheistic conception of the world, according to which God is embodied in the form of fiery breath (pneuma), acting as the immanent ⁷ Cf. Epictetus, Encheiridion 2: ‘As for desire, give it up completely for the time being.’ ⁸ See Berryman 2010.

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cause of all natural events (see Long 2002, 143–8). As I indicated in the axioms accepted by Marcus (pp. 3–8), Stoics envisioned the life principle or soul as an ‘offshoot’ of the omnipresent divinity, with the human soul having the potentiality to acquire rationality from its divine source. Seneca (Ep. mor. 41) and Epictetus (1.14, 2.8) speak of human beings possessing ‘a god within’, in reference to the intellect or governing part, and we can be sure that this locution was characteristic of the school. But Marcus uses it far more frequently than any other Stoic author. He was probably encouraged to do so by the related Roman concept of genius, meaning the divine spirit of a family (gens) that was supposedly inborn in each family member and acted as that person’s supernatural guardian (Farquharson 1944, vol. 2, 529). In origin this familial idea of a guardian spirit had nothing to do with divine rationality, but in Marcus’ use of the term daimôn, the traditional Roman notion of a divine aspect to the self has been conflated with the special Stoic notion of one’s divine rational essence. Here is a representative selection of relevant passages: It is the mark of the good man to accept and welcome the events and things fated for him, and not to pollute the divinity seated in his chest and disturb it with a throng of impressions, but to watch over it graciously, harmoniously following god, saying nothing false and doing nothing wrong. (3.16) ‘Live with the gods’ You live with the gods if you continually display your own soul to them, as content with their dispensations, and executing the will of the divinity given by Zeus to each person as guardian and leader (hêgemôn), and offshoot (apospasma) of himself. This divinity is each person’s intellect and reason. (5.27) All the things of the body, a river; of the soul, a dream and delusion; life, a war and foreign residence; posthumous fame, oblivion. So what is able to escort us? One thing only, philosophy. That means keeping the internal divinity inviolate and unharmed, mastering pleasures and pains, and doing nothing randomly or falsely or with pretence. (2.17)

We have encountered many of these ideas already—accepting fate, resisting impressions and sensations, keeping a pure consciousness, integrity of word and deed, and internal security to counter the instability of everything external to the self. Some things in these passages, however, have come up for the first time in this chapter, such as exhibiting one’s soul to the gods. This striking expression should warn us against treating Marcus’ internal divinity as simply a highly charged reference to his mind or reason, although he often does apply these prosaic words to his self. Everybody agrees that human beings have a mind and rational capacity, but it is hardly normal to think that these properties have anything divine about them; and if they do, what might that mean?

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In other passages, as we have seen, Marcus identifies himself with his mind as distinct from his body and his life-breath. But if his ‘I’ or self were simply identical to his internal divinity with no qualification, it would hardly make sense for him to speak of the latter as his guardian or of his needing to cultivate it and keep it unharmed? Three responses to these points suggest themselves. First, any concept of selfhood presupposes reflexivity. I am not two things, an ‘I’ and a self: being or having a self presupposes an ability to detach one’s identity, i.e. oneself, from one’s subjectivity as thinker or speaker. Hence, we are all able, like Marcus, to address, berate, and encourage ourselves without becoming bifurcated. But, secondly, this elementary linguistic fact is insufficient for our present purpose. Marcus is not writing a diary. He is constantly confronting the ‘I’ or ‘you’ of his present consciousness with an ideal self that is he, as he would like it to be, or as he thinks that it ought to be. This ideal self has much in common with what we might call conscience, a mind that is completely pure and undistracted— perfected rationality as Stoics would call it. Such an analysis can account for Marcus’ treating the ideal self as a guardian, but it does not do justice to his full-blown religious language—‘the divinity seated in his chest’, which requires to be kept inviolate. The third dimension, then, beyond reflexivity and ideal selfhood takes us into the remarkable cluster of ideas comprised by Stoic pantheism, providence, and fate. When Marcus and Epictetus enjoin cultivation of the internal divinity, they are not treating this aspect of selfhood as a unique peculiarity along the lines of Socrates’ divine sign (daimonion), which intermittently told him not to do something he was contemplating.⁹ All human beings, according to Marcus, have an intellect (nous) that is God (theos)—an emanation from universal Nature, which is the source of everyone’s soul (12.26). Epictetus similarly says: ‘You are carrying God around, you poor thing, and you don’t know it’ (2.8.12). The question we need to ask, then, is how this curious amalgam of psychology and theology relates to Marcus’ ethical injunctions—to be just and truthful, to cooperate with fellow human beings while also withdrawing into the private sanctum of a mind sealed off from everything else including his own natural motions. The passage containing his remarks about everyone’s divine intellect (12.6) surrounds that statement with a series of other ‘reminders’. First, the world’s nature is such that everything happening now has always happened and will always happen. Second, human beings are akin to one another not physiologically but mentally, which implies that the human community is potentially a community of minds. Third, all the things we might deem to be our own property—children, body, and soul—are Nature’s products. Fourth, everything is what we judge it to be. Fifth, and last, all that anyone ever lives and loses is the present moment.

⁹ See ch. 7 above.

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These propositions give Marcus two complementary perspectives on the self. One of these, which we may call objective (or a view from nowhere) seems to reduce individual persons to brief phases in the life of the universe.¹⁰ Because our bodies and our minds are made up of material that is constantly recycled, this is a perspective in which we view our selves as mere moments in the cosmic flux, endlessly repeatable and ultimately forgettable. Under this point of view, an individual mind, far from appearing self-possessed or something on its own, is on loan, as it were, from its pantheistic source: we are not the sole and final authors of our thoughts and feelings since these are, ultimately, the way the world’s universal reason is distributing and particularizing itself. This objective perspective underwrites Marcus’ constant refrains concerning tolerance of other people, the indifference of suffering, disappointment, and prospect of death, the essential sameness of everything, the merging of himself in the cosmic whole. The other perspective is represented in his equally repeated reminder that everything is what the mind judges it to be with the governing part ‘adapting and making itself whatever it likes, and making every event appear to itself however it likes’ (6.8). That reads like an acknowledgement of extreme subjectivism, experientially speaking. The way things appear to us is how they are for us. Marcus does not and could not mean that there are no facts or truths or objective values. He can, and I think does, mean that the world we live in is a world irreducibly mediated by the way we, as individuals, think and by the concepts (true or false) that shape our individual minds.¹¹ Another way to review the two perspectives is to think of them in terms of outer and inner. When Marcus reflects on the course of events, on human history, and on the cycle of life from birth to death, he is inclined to view the self and himself in an externalist and deflationary way. But when he focuses inwardly on what he calls ‘the properties of the rational soul, its capacity to see itself, articulate itself and make itself into whatever it wants’ (2.14), he treats his subjective identity as if he himself is the ultimate subject—no mere part of cosmic Nature but fully consonant with it. Either way, he speaks with the voice of his internal divinity.

IV Autonomy and Partnership with the Whole At this point I need to address the two points of apparent tension I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter: the compatibility of fate and autonomy, and the

¹⁰ Hadot 1995, ch. 9 calls this perspective ‘the view from above’, and Annas 1993, 161 ‘the point of view of the universe’. See also ch. 1 above, p. 22, and Long (2002), 205. ¹¹ The relevance of subjectivity and individualism to late Stoic conceptions of the person is controversial. Those who find it strongly present include Long 1996d and 2006b and Sorabji 2006, ch. 8; on the other side see Gill 2006, ch. 6.5 and Inwood 2005, ch. 12 and 2009.

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coherence of the part/whole relation existing between individual human natures and universal Nature. Marcus repeatedly insists that his nature, as a rational being, equips him to be autonomous, meaning never subject to the will or power of anything outside himself (5.10, 34; 7.54, 68; 8.47, 9.32). A human hêgemonikon has ‘its own authority’ (8.56) and cannot be prevented from living according to its inherently rational nature (6.58). This autonomy, grand though it sounds, has limitations that are best explained in his own words (8.32): You should construct your life, one action at a time, and be content if each action fulfils itself as far as possible; no one at all can prevent you from that achievement. ‘Some external obstacle will be in the way’. But none to stop you from acting justly, moderately, and sensibly. ‘Perhaps something else will be prevented from occurring’. But by contentedly facing that impediment and sensibly adapting to the circumstance you will immediately have another action that will fit into your life plan.

Just like Epictetus (p. 213 above), Marcus limits unrestricted freedom of action to the internal attitude one can adopt, thanks to one’s God-given rationality, to circumstances, motivations, and moral disposition. Does he take himself in this regard to fall outside Nature’s causality, or the chains of fate? By no means: Bear in mind the whole of substance, in which you participate to a minute extent, the whole of time, of which a tiny hair’s breadth has been assigned to you, and the fate of which you are so minute a part. (5.24) Another person errs. How does that concern me? He will deal with that; he has his own disposition and activity. I at this moment have what universal Nature wants me to have, and I do what my own nature wants me to do. (5.25)

Universal Nature comprises all individual natures; its causal sequence governs everything. By comparison and from that objective perspective, the self is a miniscule and pathetically temporary thing. None the less, the self ’s cosubstantiality with universal Nature dignifies it hugely, by bestowing on it a share of the world’s reason (the internal daimôn) and thus a potentially selfdetermined mentality. Selves that allow their animal nature and unreflective minds to govern their lives abrogate that autonomy. By contrast a reflective mind’s inherence in Nature, and its understanding of Nature, give it subjective autonomy. Such a self knows itself to be ‘a minute part of fate’, and so an integral part of Nature’s causal chain. Because that chain determines everything outside the self ’s reflective powers and rational motivations, a self with Marcus’ philosophy recognizes both fate and providence in all Nature’s activities. It would be

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irrational and impious for such a self to want external events to be otherwise than they turn out to be (see Long 1971c, 191 and Frede 2011, 79–80). By identifying his self with his internal daimôn, Marcus integrates his subjective identity with his objective participation in Nature’s causal chain. Under these Stoic perspectives free will requires determinism and free human beings require to see themselves as parts of the whole universe. If it is fully up to you to will what happens as it happens, as Marcus tells himself, you had better believe in providential determinism. Otherwise, given all the bad things that happen, it would be irrational not to want the world to be different from the way it is. As for part and whole, a non-Stoic might completely reject Marcus’ commitment to seeing himself as an integral member of the whole, a citizen of the world. But if you think, as he does, that the possession of reason unites all human beings into a community of selves who are partnered by the omnipresent God or Nature, there is nowhere else to go. To be the rational agent that you are, in Marcus’ view, requires your cosmopolitan community participation.

V Conclusion Marcus’ Meditations are grounded in the study and practice of Stoicism, but their interest goes far beyond these acknowledged antecedents. The emperor was not an original theorist, but thanks to the intensity of his inward focus and his genius as a writer the Meditations are as great a contribution to the literature on selfhood as the work of such authors as Augustine, Pascal, and Kierkegaard. Within the ancient tradition, Marcus may be seen as the culmination of the Socratic injunction to live an examined life (3.6). Once his work became widely available in the seventeenth century, its influence, or at least related ideas, became diffuse, and today he is probably the most popular of the ancient Stoics.¹² The Kantian notion of rational autonomy is one major instance of this diffusion. Comparison can also be made between Marcus’ distinction between his embodied mentality and internal divinity, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, Kant’s distinction between the empirical self and the transcendent ego (Critique of Pure Reason, ‘Third Antinomy’).¹³ We may find echoes of Marcus’ effusive descriptions of Nature and Nature’s inner voice in Rousseau and German Romanticism (see Taylor 1989, chs 20–21). In our modern attempts to find appropriate language and concepts for our embodied selfhood, the Meditations have renewed relevance.

¹² See for instance Robertson 2019, who treats the Meditations from his professional perspective as a cognitive psychotherapist. ¹³ See also Long 1996d, 282. There, in the case of Epictetus, I reject the idea of a noumenal self or observer, detachable from all experience. Marcus, however, seems to play with this idea in his recommendations to contract into one’s governing part.

14 Plotinus on Self and Happiness Plotinus was the most radical of all ancient philosophers in his understanding of selfhood. In his essay on happiness (Ennead 1.4) he makes a critical review of Aristotelians, Stoics, and Epicureans.¹ He proposes to show that their intuitions on happiness (eudaimonia) are viable if and only if they give up certain unacceptable doctrines and replace them with Plotinian, i.e. supposedly Platonic, notions of the self.² Rival philosophers take supreme happiness, as he does, to be a godlike condition.³ His main charge against them is that only Platonists have the system for showing how to become the incorporeal gods that, in a sense, we already are, while simultaneously living our presently embodied condition with virtue and in tranquillity. The other philosophers lack the psychology and metaphysics to sustain their claim that the virtuous person can remain happy, or at least ward off misery, even in the face of extreme misfortune.

I To begin the argument, I outline Plotinus’ main points of agreement with Aristotle and the Stoics, stating these points in general terms to bring out the broadly shared ideas: 1. Eudaimonia is the ultimate and self-sufficient goal of human life, involving perfection of one’s essential nature and activity as a rational being. 2. The necessary conditions for attaining eudaimonia include control or elimination of irrational passions. 3. Once achieved, eudaimonia is a stable and complete disposition. 4. Because eudaimonia is the disposition of a perfected human being, it is a very rare accomplishment and coincident with wisdom (sophia). ¹ I gave versions of this chapter at the Universities of Toronto, California Santa Barbara, Uppsala, Stanford University, and at the 2010 Arizona Ancient Philosophy Colloquium in honour of Julia Annas. I thank these audiences for their questions and comments. Zina Giannopoulou, my designated commentator at the Arizona colloquium, was unable to attend the meeting. In two of the notes I respond to issues she raised in written comments. ² The text and translation I have primarily used is that of Armstrong 1966. There is a fine commentary on Ennead 1. 4 by McGroarty 2006. See also Rist 1967, chs 11 and 12, Schniewind 2000, and Song 2009. ³ See ch. 3 above.

Selfhood and Rationality in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Heraclitus to Plotinus. A. A. Long, Oxford University Press. © A. A. Long 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198803393.003.0015

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Plotinus agrees with Aristotle that the highest human excellence, outranking social and political virtue (phronêsis), is sophia, exercised in contemplation of intelligible beings (theôria).⁴ In this activity, the mind or soul of the contemplator is identical to the supra-sensible beings that are the contemplative mind’s objects. However, Plotinus finds Aristotle’s treatment of theôria unsatisfactory in being presented as (i) an activity that human nature permits us to engage in only intermittently, (ii) not properly integrated with phronêsis, and (iii) unduly dependent, like the exercise of phronêsis, on bodily and external contingencies. Accordingly, Plotinus offers Aristotle a higher human self that remains completely unaffected by lower psychic and bodily activities, i.e. an eternally active intellect (Ennead 1.1, 9). With his doctrine that the ethical virtues are activities of a lower composite self, Plotinus proposes to accommodate them without interrupting the higher life of non-discursive reasoning and pure intellection; what he calls nous as distinct from dianoia. Plotinus approves of the Stoics for identifying eudaimonia solely with the perfection of rational living. However, he finds that their corporeal notion of nature prevents them from giving rationality its properly intellectual field of activity. He endorses the Stoic doctrine that bodily and external conditions make no constitutive contribution to eudaimonia, and he also agrees on the need to adapt one’s rational responses to changing circumstances and to engage in such ‘natural’ actions as caring for one’s health. His recommendation to separate one’s essential nature from one’s body agrees verbally with Epictetus.⁵ But, according to Plotinus, this injunction is feasible only on the basis of the ‘amphibious’ psychology just mentioned, i.e. a higher, ‘undescended’, soul-part or self, and a lower composite part. This bifurcation enables the higher self to be completely detached from the composite self of soul and body, and, at the same time, it allows practical reason to cater to the basic needs of the body.⁶ Plotinus also gives the Epicureans a modest pat on the back. Although he completely dismisses hedonism as an account of eudaimonia, he includes in his own specification the Epicurean doctrines of static pleasure and ataraxia, and he emphasizes the universal friendliness of his own ideal person (1. 4. 12).

⁴ See ch. 11 above. ⁵ For instance Discourses 1.3; 1.14.12. ⁶ See the following passages: Enn. 1. 1. 10: ‘The joint entity [body/soul composite] is part of us, especially when we have not yet been separated from the body; for we say that we are affected by what affects our body. So the “we” is twofold, either the composite including the beast, or what transcends this even now. The beast is the animated body. But the true human being is someone else [allos], pure of these things; its virtues belong in the sphere of thinking (noêsis) and are situated in the separated soul, which is separated and separable even while it is here . . . But the virtues that arise not from practical wisdom [phronêsis] but from habits and training belong to the joint entity’; Enn. 4. 8. 8; ‘our soul has not descended [into the body] in its entirety, but there is always something of it in the intelligible realm . . . every soul has something of what is below, in relation to body, and something of what is above, in relation to intellect.’

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I turn now to a close analysis of the essay, taking it chapter by chapter. He starts, as he often does, in Aristotelian fashion by surveying different options for elucidating his topic and the problems that they raise.

II Chapter 1. The philosophical tradition had restricted eudaimonia to human and divine beings (cf. Arist. NE 10. 8, 1 178b25), but it had also presumed, as Aristotle emphasizes (NE 1. 4, 1095a19; 1. 8, 1098b21), that ‘being happy’ (eudaimonein) is identical to ‘living well’ (eu zên). In that case, Plotinus asks, should we not grant the other living beings their share of being happy, whether we treat living well in passive terms of ‘good feeling’ (en eupatheiai) or actively by fulfilling natural functions? Drawing again on Aristotle, who had discussed the notion that eudaimonia might be analysed in terms of ‘unimpeded’ (and therefore pleasurable) activity of natural dispositions (NE 7. 13, 1153b11), Plotinus argues that it would be inconsistent in that case to withhold ‘living well’ (euzôia), another Aristotelian term, from other creatures. It is natural for birds to sing, so why not allow them to be happy in virtue of their unimpeded activity of singing?⁷ As to plants, it would seem quite reasonable, in using the ‘living well’ account of eudaimonein, to say that plants do live well or not, depending on their fruitfulness. As to other famous specifications of eudaimonein, the same kinds of objection on grounds of arbitrary exclusion of non-human beings apply—for instance, the Epicurean goals of pleasure and ataraxia, and the Stoic goal of living in agreement with nature (cf. SVF 3. 17). Both goals could pertain, without further clarification, to all animals. This first chapter, then, is entirely exploratory and critical. It tells us nothing yet about Plotinus’ own position.⁸ Chapter 2, part 1. Plotinus now raises a general question about the relation of ‘being in a natural state’ (one of the main Hellenistic candidates for eudaimonein) to having awareness (aisthêsis) of that state. Those who withhold from plants the possibility of ‘living well’ may be influenced by the thought that goodness of life can be attributed only to sentient beings. But in this case, they are really identifying the goodness of the good life not simply with the being’s natural condition (e.g. pleasure) but rather with the knowledge or judgement that such-and-such a condition is good. By treating a certain kind of awareness to be constitutive of the ⁷ The dialectical extension of ‘happiness’ to animals and plants can be interestingly compared with Enn. 3. 8. 1–4, where Plotinus in all seriousness extends theôria to the whole of ‘nature’, even including the inanimate earth. I owe this point to Will Shearin. ⁸ Like most commentators (e.g. Armstrong 1966 ad loc., and Rist 1967, 139–40), I take Plotinus to have Aristotle chiefly in mind in this chapter. McGroarty 2006 thinks that the Stoics are also a prime target, but from Plotinus’ final comments on pleasure and life in accordance with nature (allusions to Epicureanism and Stoicism respectively) he clearly intends this chapter to take in the eudaimonist tradition quite generally.

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good life, such people (i.e. Epicureans) take it that life is better the clearer it is. Even the Epicureans, then, in their mistaken hedonism, have recognized that any adequate account of a good life for human beings needs to build some cognitive activity into it.⁹ Chapter 2, part 2. Next Plotinus turns full attention to the Stoics. They are probably correct to locate eudaimonein not simply in life or even in awareness but in ‘rational life’. But their treatment of reason’s functions raises the following questions. Is reason simply an instrumental means for securing the ‘primary natural advantages’, such as food and shelter?¹⁰ Or is reason desirable for its own sake, irrespective of any such instrumental role? If the first is the case, then the Stoics have no grounds for withholding happiness from non-rational creatures, which are capable without reason of satisfying their natural needs. If the second is the case, the Stoics owe us an account of what it is about reason that makes its perfection superior to actually achieving the primary natural advantages. Here Plotinus airs familiar criticism of the Stoics for appearing to posit two inconsistent goals of life, while he also adds to the criticism (lines 46–50) his own doctrine: ‘It cannot be the study of these primary natural advantages that perfects reason; its perfection is something else, and its nature is different.’¹¹

III Chapter 3. Having criticized Aristotle, Epicurus, and the Stoics, Plotinus now says that he will give his own proposals about eudaimonein starting ‘from the beginning’ (ex archês), which I take to mean ‘from the term’s conceptual and ontological foundations’. His thesis is the following: eudaimonein pertains strictly to life only at the ontological level (or hypostasis) of pure intellect. To establish this claim, he continues to focus on the term ‘life’. As long as eudaimonia is defined in terms of a good life understood univocally, there is no reason to deny its possibility to any kind of living being, as he has already argued. By restricting ‘living well’ to a ‘rational life’, the Stoics have in effect grounded eudaimonia not in the life that pertains to any living being, but in the ‘quality’ of rationality. This means that what they are trying to identify is a quite different type of life from a univocal sense of the term life, such as metabolism, reproduction, or self-motion. With this interpretation of Stoicism, Plotinus is in a position to take his first positive step. Drawing on the Aristotelian concepts of ‘something being said in

⁹ That Epicureanism is Plotinus’ main target in this section of chapter 2 is assured by his focus on aisthêsis, hêdonê, pathos, and oikeion; see Epicurus, Ep. Men. 124 and 129. ¹⁰ Plotinus uses the Stoics’ technical expression ta prôta kata phusin. ¹¹ For evidence and discussion, see Long 1967 and LS ch. 64.

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many ways’ and homonymy, and on the notion of a hierarchical scale of value, he infers that living in the expression ‘living well’ is not univocal but differs in accordance with the type of creature to which it applies. He then offers as criteria for distinguishing these kinds of life ‘clarity’ (tranotês) and ‘obscurity’ (amudrotês), terms he has already used in chapter 2. Here, for the first time in this essay, Plotinus draws on ideas that presuppose his general philosophical outlook (see the Appendix). The antithetical terms tranotês and amudrotês refer not only to cognitive capacities, but also, as always in Plotinus, to levels of reality.¹² At the bottom we have matter, which is maximally ‘obscure’; at the top we have the intelligible realm, which is maximally ‘clear’. Correspondingly, owing to its admixture with the body, sense perception is obscure relative to the clarity of intellect. All of this, of course, is authentically Platonic, and Plato had said, in characterizing the upward path of Republic 7, that thought (dianoia) is sharper than vision but more obscure (amudroteron) than knowledge or understanding (epistêmê, 533d 6). ‘Living well’, then, differs in its content and value according to the mental clarity a living being can attain, its degree of freedom from corporeal admixture, and the ontological level at which the life is lived. Having made these crucial points, Plotinus cryptically says: ‘If one thing is an image of another, it follows that its good is the image of that other good’ (lines 23–5). Here again, he deploys his Platonic metaphysics of value and scale of ontological levels. Everything in this physical world is an image or shadow of intelligible reality. Goodness as such is to be found only in the incorporeal archetypes and, beyond them, in the Absolute One (which I take Plotinus merely to hint at here). Inasmuch as we, in our embodied and composite life, are only an image of our non-embodied and fully intellectual selves, so the goodness of life here and now must be sought not (as non-Platonist thinkers have supposed) in facts about our lives as embodied and composite beings but in the image available to us of an exponentially superior kind of life. Plotinus next offers a brief account of what, in his view, the fully real, complete, and non-imaged life consists in. We are to look to the ultimate source of all life as such: that is to say, the intellectual realm of authentic reality. To live there, he says, is to live to the ‘extreme’ degree (agan) because nothing real will be lacking to such a life, and its goodness will be intrinsic, not something imported from outside (lines 25–32). Plotinus sums up, with the following theorem of his graduated monism: ‘If all living beings have a single source but do not all live at the same level, this source itself must be the primary and most perfect life.’ We now, then, have a preliminary answer to the question of what Plotinian happiness is: living to the extreme degree, or in Armstrong’s apt translation, ‘living superabundantly’.

¹² See 1. 6. 5. 35; 2. 4. 10. 27; 2. 9. 11.

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IV Chapter 4. The next question Plotinus addresses is how the ‘perfect life’ he has just set forth is accessible to human beings. His initial proof, that it is accessible and not restricted to divinity, is the proposition (which Stoics and Aristotelians accept in their own specific ways) that what perfects human beings is their having, in addition to sense perception, the capacity for reasoning and authentic intellect (logismos kai nous alêthinos). Still, he continues, the having of these latter capacities is in fact a potential part of what just ordinary people are. The truly happy person does not have ‘the perfect form of life’ as a mere potentiality or part of himself. In a sense, moreover, he does not have it, because he is it in actuality: he is identical to the good that he has. His self-identification with the transcendent intellectual life (the higher life of his undescended soul) is such that he detaches his volition and ownership from everything else he might be thought to have, including his body and external things. He should not be regarded as having any other parts, but only as being involuntarily clad in them. He is the good for himself because he has Goodness present to himself and (I take Plotinus to be saying) predicates it of himself. One move Plotinus makes here is to draw on his favourite Aristotelian doctrine that in actual thought (noêsis) thinker, thinking, and the object thought (in this case the Good instantiated in the transcendent hypostasis of Intellect) all coincide. But, more startlingly, I take him to be casting this doctrine in the garb of Platonic metaphysics or Pauline predications. Just as a Platonic Form is identical to the unitary and specific property that it instantiates—e.g. ‘Beauty is beautiful’, whereas beautiful things, which are also flowers, sun-sets etc., only have (a share of) beauty—so Plotinus’ perfected human being is identical to the intellectual goodness that he has. Quite abruptly he now asserts: if a human being is spoudaios, he has what suffices for happiness and the acquisition of good (lines 24–5). Reading him through Stoic and Aristotelian eyes, we would take him to be saying that ethical excellence is sufficient for human eudaimonia. Yet the excellence he has just attributed to the happy person appears to be not virtue of character but what Aristotle calls ‘intellectual excellence’. What does Plotinus mean by spoudaios? To respond, we need to refer to Ennead 1. 2 on the virtues. There we learn about the two kinds of Plotinian excellences or virtues—‘civic’ or political ones, corresponding to the virtues of Plato’s tripartite and embodied soul, and higher ones that Plotinus (following Phaedo 69b) calls ‘purifications’.¹³ The higher excellences purge the rational soul from all voluntary or deliberate association with the body, detach it from fear and sensual desire, subordinate its irrational aspect, and so, by

¹³ See Annas 1999, 66–9, and Baltzly 2004.

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their focus on nous, bring about ‘likeness to god’. Like Aristotle and unlike the Stoics, Plotinus withholds ethical excellences from divinity or from the intelligible realm. His distinction between the two levels of excellence enables him to accommodate the divergence between Aristotelians and Stoics concerning the normative emotional disposition: in virtue of the civic excellences a soul achieves the Aristotelian condition of ‘moderate emotional affect’ metriopatheia (1.2. 2), while the Stoic ideal of complete unaffectedness (apatheia) is generated by the purificatory excellences and the detachment from the body that these involve (1.2. 3). Hence in Plotinus the Aristotelian ethical virtues are a precondition for achieving intellectual excellence.¹⁴ Would Aristotle agree? However one responds, Plotinus does not think, that the ideal human life is bifurcated between contemplation and ethical practice.¹⁵ Aristotle had gone a long way towards Plotinus in saying that ‘we should strive as far as possible to transcend our mortality and do everything with the aim of living in accordance with the highest of the things in us’, i.e. our divine nous (NE 10. 7, 1177b33–4). Yet, he had also insisted on the need for eudaimonia to include not only excellence of character but also ‘external prosperity, in so far as one is human’ (1178b30). Plotinus acknowledges the fact that virtuous people will seek things for their bodies, but he contests the Aristotelian notion that this need inevitably qualifies the completeness and self-sufficiency that the best human life could possibly achieve here and now. The body is only an attachment, not the true self as such but something that merely belongs to it (lines 26–8). The Plotinian spoudaios gives the body what it, as distinct from what he himself, needs, treating the body as something that lives its own life, not his life. ‘Likeness to god’ is the unitary goal of the excellent person.¹⁶ External contingencies, including the death of family and friends, do not affect his essential self but, if at all, his non-intellectual constituent (lines 34–7). We should notice how closely Plotinus is aligning himself at this point with Stoicism, especially the Stoicism of Epictetus. In the first discourse of Arrian’s collection Epictetus imagines Zeus telling him that your body is not ‘your own’ ¹⁴ In her commentary on the first version of this chapter, Zina Giannopoulou raised trenchant questions concerning the relation between the two kinds of Plotinian virtues, the main upshot of which, drawing on the later chapters of Enn. 1.2, is a worry about the ethical and psychological integrity of the recommended life. By urging that the spoudaios live the life of the gods rather than a socially engaged life, and at the same time, circumstantially, exercise the civic virtues, Plotinus seems to require a kind of schizophrenia from the spoudaios, as he seeks to satisfy the demands of the two lives. Another essay would be required to give an adequate response to this issue. The best I can suggest here is that Plotinus, on the evidence of Enn. 1. 1. 10, bites the bullet with his dual sense of the ‘we’ (see n. 4 above). In our embodied life ‘we’ are necessarily both a ‘composite’, meaning an ensouled body, and an incorporeal intellect. I do not think that Plotinus views this condition as schizophrenic, in any pathological sense. Rather, his distinction between the two kinds of virtue or ways of being spoudaios is a response to the reality and potentiality of what he takes to be the inevitably dualistic human condition. ¹⁵ As Aristotle is often interpreted as thinking, see ch. 11 above. ¹⁶ It is because the life of the spoudaios is consistently directed to the intellectual realm (2. 9. 9) that he has all the goods he needs for happiness.

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(son) but only artfully moulded clay (1.1.11). Epictetus recalls Socrates’ image of the body as shackles (desmos) in Plato’s Phaedo, contrasting our ‘attachment’ to ‘these chains’ with our ‘kinship to the gods’ (1.9. 11). Epictetus uses a passive form of the verb prosartaô to express this attachment, and Plotinus follows suit (1.4. 4. 28). Like Plotinus, Epictetus acknowledges that the body has needs that it is rational to attend to, but he minimizes their importance, going beyond even Plotinus in characterizing the living body as a corpse! Thus far Plotinus has synthesized Aristotle’s intellectual excellence, Stoic indifference concerning body and externals, and his own concept of the higher self ’s purely noetic activity and identification with the goodness of that activity.

V Chapters 5 and 6. Plotinus’ next step is to defend the self-sufficiency of this proposal against Aristotelian challenges, while also turning the very same objections against Stoicism. Thanks to metaphysical dualism, and the dualism of simultaneously higher and composite selves, contingencies such as pain and misfortune make no impact on Plotinian eudaimonia, which is exclusively the condition of a happy person’s higher and non-embodied self. Yet they are bound to affect Aristotelians, Epicureans, and Stoics, whose notion of nature is incompatible with excluding the body from essential human identity. Hence these philosophers cannot deliver a human ideal of happiness that is invulnerable to fortune’s vicissitudes and thus an unequivocal likeness to the divine.¹⁷ Plotinus proceeds dialectically, first raising and then rebutting challenges. I summarize as follows: What about pain and sickness, loss of consciousness, poverty, disgrace, or the sufferings of Priam? Even if the virtuous person bore such things most finely (cf. Aristotle, NE, I. 10, 1100b20), he would not want them. But the happy life needs to be wishable (boulêtos). Given human embodiment, no notion of eudamonia can satisfy the self-sufficiency condition without catering to the well-being of all our parts. Plotinus responds. These challenges would be completely in order if we counted good health, absence of pain, and good fortune as essential constituents of happiness. They are irrelevant, however, if the goodness that happiness involves is unitary and distinct from an aggregate of ‘goods and necessities’. We do not strictly ‘wish for’ such so-called ‘necessities’ as health and absence of pain. We seek them out only in their absence (a tart but somewhat plausible observation). ¹⁷ Bussanich 1990, 154, is right to say that Plotinus contests the Stoics’ claim that virtue, as understood by them, is sufficient for happiness. Cf. Enn. 5. 9. 1. 13–16: ‘Since they were unable to see what is above, as they have no other ground to stand on they are brought down, with the name of virtue, to practical actions and choices of the things below from which they tried to raise themselves at first.’

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Normative striving or ‘wishing’ (boulêsis) is directed at what is ‘superior’, by which I take Plotinus to refer to the soul’s highest intellectual activity. These points recall the Stoics’ sharp distinction between the ‘goodness’ of perfected reason and the indifference of the so-called ‘preferred’ things. Chapter 7. Plotinus now makes an intriguing move, which enables him to circumvent standard criticisms of this Stoic doctrine.¹⁸ Choosing the verb ethelein rather than the stronger desiderative verb boulesthai, he asks: ‘Why does the happy man like [ethelei] these so-called “necessary” things to be present and rejects their opposites?’ He responds: ‘We shall say that it is not because they contribute anything to his happiness, but rather, to his existence [to einai], whereas their opposites pertain to his non-existence or, by their presence, interfere with his goal of life.’ The distinction between happiness and existence reads oddly, but it makes good sense in Plotinian dualist terms. As long as we are on earth, embodied existence is part of what we are even though our higher self, at the same time, finds its fulfilment in the realm of pure thought. Epictetus, as we have seen, sounds Plotinian when he maintains that our bodies are ‘not our own’, but in the light of the Stoic soul’s corporeality and diffusion throughout the body, Epictetus’ statement must be judged rhetorical rather than substantive or psychologically plausible. Plotinus’ dualism gives him the means both to assign relative importance to external necessities and bodily existence and consistently maintain Stoic indifference to fortune’s effects on the life of his higher soul. Chapter 8. After a veritable Stoic sermon on the truly good person’s superiority to all external misfortunes that he or his family and other people might experience (ch. 7, lines 22–48), Plotinus argues that one cannot liken the outlook of the virtuous person to that of ordinary human nature. ‘Things do not look the same to him because circumstances, including pleasures and pains, and distress at the sufferings of others, do not reach his inside (lines 10–13, meaning, I take it, his higher self. He uses his virtue like a warrior’s shield, to protect his soul from being adversely affected.¹⁹ Much of this language and thought recalls Epictetan Stoicism, including the legitimacy of suicide in extremis as an autonomous act (exercise of autexousion).²⁰ But Plotinus largely avoids the unattractive brand of bravado that sometimes accompanies Stoic accounts of their paragon’s superiority to fortune, and he shows a sensitivity to extreme physical pain that is remarkably rare in Greek ethical texts.

¹⁸ The criticism takes three related forms: (1) specifying the goal of life in terms of selecting the preferred indifferents but not deeming the getting of such things to contribute to happiness; (2) endowing human beings with a natural impulse to pursue things that are irrelevant to happiness; (3) setting up two inconsistent goals of life. See LS, ch. 64. ¹⁹ Plotinus also likens the virtuous person’s fortitude (lines 5–6) to the light of a lantern that shines out in a storm, which recalls Aristotle’s statement (NE 1.10, 1100b30) that even in extremis nobility shines through. ²⁰ Cf. Epictetus, Diss. 4.1.68.

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Chapter 9. Taking Aristotle again as his target, Plotinus now makes a highly original contribution to the eudaimonist tradition. With his conception of happiness as an activity, as distinct from a disposition (hexis), Aristotle has a problem about sleep.²¹ On the one hand, he declines to identify eudaimonia simply with virtue (aretê) on the grounds that one can be virtuous, as distinct from actively flourishing, while asleep (NE I. 8 1099a1). On the other hand, Aristotle hardly wants to say, as Plotinus tartly observes, that happiness is something intermittent with the implication that it pertains to people only when they are awake and hence not to their complete life. Turning to the virtuous person’s possible loss of consciousness (through illness or even magic), Plotinus presents an argument that requires some teasing out. I will first translate its three steps, and then comment on their target or targets: 1. ‘If they [unidentified, as usual] maintain that the virtuous man is virtuous when unconscious and merely asleep, what prevents him from being happy? For they do not remove him from happiness during sleep, nor do they count this time [when he is asleep] in such a way as to say that he is not happy for his entire life.’ (This thesis implies that, while virtue as disposition is essential to happiness, consciousness and virtuous activity are not essential.) 2. ‘But if they say he is not virtuous [when asleep], they are no longer discussing the virtuous man. Yet, we are positing the virtuous man and enquiring if he is happy as long as he is virtuous.’ 3. ‘We grant’ (they say) ‘that the man in question is virtuous, but if he is not conscious or acting virtuously, how can he be happy?’ (This thesis implies that both consciousness and virtuous activity are essential to happiness.) In this argument Plotinus presents the Aristotelians with a dilemma. If they agree that happiness continues during sleep, it is not interrupted by loss of consciousness. If, on the other hand, they say that the virtuous person’s happiness depends on consciousness of his own virtue, they are making the highly questionable assumption that people can only be in good conditions, such as health or wisdom, if they actively know that fact.²² Aristotelians would have a point if the activity of wisdom were an import from outside (epaktos), like our sensory input (lines 18–19). Instead, Plotinus invokes his doctrine that wisdom (sophia) is an eternally active substance—in fact the very substance of the intelligible realm ²¹ Cf. NE I. 5. 1095b 32; 10.6, 1176a 34. ²² McGroarty 2006 takes what I call step I to be directed against the Stoics, but the only support he cites is a belief that Aristotle first becomes the target at what I call step II. I find it implausible that Plotinus would switch targets in this way over a few lines, of which he gives no indication of doing. The passage makes good sense as a sustained retort to Aristotle, who, unlike the Stoics (as far as we know), makes explicit points about the relation between happiness, virtue, and sleep.

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(5. 8. 4) and always present to the human being’s higher intellectual self (1. 2. 6). The activity of this wisdom in the excellent person will not be disrupted by sleep or temporary unconsciousness provided we distinguish, as we should, between the continuous activity of the person’s higher part and the activity of the lower composite part that is subject to sleep and possible unconsciousness caused by magic or illness.²³ Chapter 10. To consolidate this claim, Plotinus argues that it is a mistake to model intellectual activity on the consciousness involved in perception (antilêpsis). The latter does require the mind to be aware of the sensory objects mediated to it, but Plotinus, with his Aristotelian doctrine that actual (as distinct from potential) nous is identical with its objects, takes human noêsis (unlike Aristotle) to be conceptually prior to sense perception. He acknowledges that we are normally aware of what we are thinking, but this awareness is not an essential property of intellect but only a reflexive outcome of our mind’s ability to present us with ‘mirror’ representations of our thoughts. Normal though that is, Plotinus disagrees with Aristotle that thinking must involve images (De an. 3, 431a16–b8). When the body is seriously disturbed (as in the case of great pain or delirium), the intellect continues to function without mental images and therefore without empirical consciousness (lines 18–22). He supports his claims about unconscious mental activity by invoking the examples of reading and courageous behaviour. Concentration in such cases, he says with great acuteness, is facilitated by our not focusing awareness on what we are doing. Recalling his concepts of purity and clarity, he concludes that we are most authentically alive and active when we are intellectually unified, not dissipating our lives into sense perception and the consciousness that that involves. Chapter 11. Plotinus now imagines his [Aristotelian] critics making the objection that someone unconsciously focused on purely intellectual activity would not even be alive, much less eudaimôn. In a kind of thought experiment, he accepts the challenge by inviting his critics to posit a person who is (a) alive and (b) virtuous and then investigate whether the person is eudaimôn, under the following conditions: 1. that the person is fully alive; 2. that the person is fully human; 3. that the person is consistently focused on purely internal wishables [i.e. objects of intellectual contemplation] as distinct from external activities. ²³ This section on consciousness invites further discussion. The consciousness deemed irrelevant to happiness is empirical awareness. At 1. 4. 9. 24–5 Plotinus says that, during such unconsciousness or sleep, it is only a part of the excellent person that is unaware of his ongoing activity at the higher noetic level. Is there, then, no change in the happiness of such a person when he is awake or conscious? According to Enn. 1. 5 neither time, memory, nor any external condition has a bearing on Plotinian happiness. Its sole focus is internal activity of the soul.

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He concludes that fullness of life and human excellence do not require the wish for external desirables and conscious awareness of them. The word I have translated by ‘wishables’ is boulêta.²⁴ Again using the weaker desiderative verb ethelein, Plotinus now says: ‘The excellent person would like everyone to fare well.’ After his earlier dismissal of sympathy for the sufferings of others, this looks like an attractive concession to the Aristotelians. Having made it, Plotinus puts on his Stoic hat again by remarking that, nonetheless, the virtuous person’s happiness will not be affected by the ills of others because he restricts his wishes, as distinct from his likes, to purely internal activities.

VI Chapters 12–16. The final pages of the treatise reinforce Plotinus’ combination of criticism and eclecticism. Here he gives the eudaimôn person a combination of quasi- Aristotelian, Epicurean, and Stoic attributes, while, at the same time, he invokes his special brand of transcendental Platonism to show why none of these philosophies is fully up to the challenge of making their brand of happiness totally or largely invulnerable to misfortune. In Aristotelian ethics happiness is intrinsically pleasurable. Plotinus faces this potential objection to his ascetic outlook head on. Aristotelians must agree with him that sensual pleasures and violent emotions have no place in the virtuous person’s happiness (12.1–5). Drawing on the Epicurean conception of ‘static’, as distinct from ‘kinetic’, pleasures, Plotinus proposes that such a person will in fact experience the static pleasures that accompany his permanent possession of authentic goodness.²⁵ This person has a stable disposition of joyous tranquillity, which also puts him in line with Stoicism.²⁶ Plotinus’ next revisits the Aristotelian doctrine that happiness can be impeded by misfortune to oneself. Without conceding that disasters can literally mar happiness, he had admitted in chapter 7 that the virtuous person would rather not have (ethelei again) his unimpaired good complicated by such things. Now he refines this point. On the one hand, he endorses the Stoic doctrine that the virtuous person’s activities, though varying according to circumstances, are always fine; and he even suggests that such adaptation may enhance their fineness. On the other hand, he concedes to the Aristotelians that theoretical activities, as in scientific research, may be impeded by circumstances. However, he denies that

²⁴ Plotinus follows the Stoics in restricting boulêtos to things that are authentically good; see SVF 3. 91. ²⁵ Note his Epicurean terminology: en kinêsei and katastasis hêsuchos; see Van Riel 2000, 94–120. ²⁶ Cf. Seneca, De vita beata 4.4, and Marcus Aurelius Med. 8. 47.

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they can ever impede ‘the greatest study’ (citing Plato’s ‘Form of the Good’, Rep. 6, 505 A 2), even in the torture chamber Bull of Phalaris. Epicureans and Stoics had claimed that their wise man’s happiness would not be undermined during extreme torture.²⁷ Plotinus responds that their position is indefensible because, in subscribing to a unitary self, they must say that one is simultaneously undergoing pain and enjoyment. He, on the other hand, with his doctrine of the human being’s composite nature, can allow what suffers pain to be distinct from, and merely an associate of, the fully authentic and incorporeal self. Embodiment, then, need not cause the incorporeal self to lose its vision of universal goodness. In support of this claim (chapter 14), Plotinus alludes to the doctrine of Plato’s Alcibiades I, 130 c, that human beings are not composites of body and soul but are pure souls. Rather than state this as a metaphysical thesis, he also recalls the Phaedo by saying that separation from the body is especially characteristic of the excellent person. This aligns him with the Stoicism of Epictetus because it implies that distinguishing one’s essence from one’s body requires correct ethical insight.²⁸ How, then, should the excellent person treat his body? Ascetically, as he should also treat worldly goods, with a view to concentrating on care of his fully real self—but not to the point of neglecting his health. In his youth he will wish to experience or at least learn about illness and pain; in old age he will wish to be in a physical condition that enables him completely to ignore his body. At that point he will be a full-fledged Stoic in the sense that the presence of the so-called natural advantages and disadvantages will make no difference to his flourishing. Plotinus reinforces his Stoic conclusion by inviting comparison between two wise persons with diametrically opposite dispensations of natural advantages. If they are equally wise, their flourishing is equal. Recalling, as I think, Epictetus, he focuses upon the kind of impressions (phantasiai) that induce fear and distress in ordinary people. Any measure of fear is incompatible with authentic wisdom and flourishing, which require one to become a non-ordinary godlike person.²⁹ Again recalling Epictetus, he allows his ideal human being to be subject to involuntary (aprohaireton) fear, which occurs prior to judgement, but once wisdom takes charge the result is complete unaffectedness (apatheia).³⁰ In a final gesture towards Epictetus, Plotinus insists that his excellent person’s freedom from passions does not imply an unfriendly or inconsiderate disposition. Rather, he is pre-eminently friendly to everyone, including himself, thanks to his intellectual disposition (meta tou noun . . . echein). ²⁷ Aristotle had already ridiculed the notion that a virtuous person, with an irreducible psychosomatic identity, could remain happy under extreme torture and misfortune (NE 7.13, 1153b19). ²⁸ See Epictetus, Diss.1.3. ²⁹ Cf. Enn. 3. 2. 4. 5. ³⁰ Aprohairetos is one of Epictetus’ favourite words, registering the negation of the autonomous self (prohairesis).

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In this final chapter, Plotinus explicitly invokes Platonism in response to the objection that his intellectualist account of happiness removes the excellent person from ordinary circumstances. The objector’s alternative would have to be a life that negotiates a mixture of good with bad, a difficult project that lacks the wisdom and pure goodness that happiness grounded in virtue requires. With reference to Plato’s Symposium (212a1), Theaetetus (176 b1), and Republic (427 d5), Plotinus says: ‘One who is to be wise and happy judges that he should get goodness from that domain above, and look to that and be made like it and live according to it’ (lines 11–13). Keeping focused on that goodness as his only goal, he should not modify his life with a view to enhancing his eudaimonia but do so only in consequence of reviewing the surrounding circumstances, including those that affect his body. Being strictly other than his body, he has the authority that Stoics also claim to have with rational decisions about the propriety of suicide. His activities will have two kinds of objectives: some directed at happiness and for the sake of his higher self, and others at caring for his instrumental bodily attachment. For inessential though the instrument is to his real self, it was originally given to him with good reason (lines 28–9).

VII A sceptic will say that Plotinus’ account of eudaimonia rests on ungrounded and counter-intuitive assumptions, especially in its claim that we are capable in our embodied life of achieving assimilation to objective goodness, irrespective of ordinary experience and even ordinary consciousness. A physically active and sociable person will question the desirability of marginalizing bodily existence and prioritizing intellectual perfection as distinct from virtues of character. Setting such contrary assessments aside, and viewing Plotinus in his historical context, we can agree that he succeeds in mounting powerful challenges and correctives to the preceding eudaimonist tradition. He is well informed about his rivals’ views, not only at a general level but also about specific doctrines and technicalities. Aristotle and the Hellenistic philosophers had been at one in proposing that their doctrines, in company with rigorous training and virtues of character, can give people all, or at least most, of what they need in order to flourish long term to the highest degree, even in the face of extreme bodily suffering and adverse circumstances. They had also been at one in treating eudaimonia as a godlike disposition and hence exemplary, quite out of the ordinary. Plotinus accepts these premises, but he argues that only a Platonist, who posits an incorporeal, purely intellectual and transcendent self, is entitled to advance them as unequivocally true and practicable.

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Appendix In this treatise we hear nothing explicitly about the One or the triad of hypostases, reincarnation, and much else characteristic of Neoplatonism. The distinctive doctrines Plotinus does deploy are the following quintet: (1) a hierarchy of ontological levels, with each lower level an image of its higher predecessor; (2) the soul’s capacity to live simultaneously at levels ranging from the highest intellectual activity down to its directing the body’s metabolism; (3) the metaphysical separation of the intellectual self from the nonphilosophical composite of body and soul; (4) an absolute and transcendent Good, which human beings can have present to them, even when living an embodied life; and (5) his doctrine that continuous intellectual activity is compatible with the embodied self ’s being unconscious of these thoughts. While this aggregate of doctrines is a substantial injection of Neoplatonism, it does not prevent Plotinus from engaging with other philosophers at quite a large level of shared ground. I conclude with a few clarificatory words about Plotinus’ use of Plato in Ennead 1. 4. He draws principally on the following passages: the Alcibiades I (129 e–130 c), arguing that we are neither body nor the composite of body and soul, but pure soul, whose relation to its body is entirely instrumental; the Theaetetus’ ‘digression’ (176a–b), on seeking likeness to god, and on the impossibility of removing evils from the everyday world; the Phaedo (65e– 67b) on separating oneself from identification with the body; and the Symposium (210d) and Republic (509a–b) on looking up to Absolute Beauty or Goodness as the proper focus for eudaimonia.

Epilogue As I put finishing touches to this book, I was teaching a freshman seminar on Roman Stoicism at the University of California, Berkeley. Owing to safety precautions against the COVID pandemic, we wore masks, which prevented the sixteen students and myself from seeing one another in full face for the entire semester. Rather than this inhibiting discussion, it seemed to have the opposite effect of enhancing interaction, as though people felt encouraged to open up to one another more freely than usual as we read excerpts of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. The class was typical of Berkeley in its cosmopolitan membership, including several students from Asian cultures. I had worried that the outlook of the Stoics, especially their masculine orientation, might be off-putting to a class consisting mainly of women. In fact they not only took it in their stride, but also adapted the Stoic teachings to their concerns about career, relationships, and what to make of themselves, the theme of this book’s second chapter. Some of the thoughts I have explored here, including the aspiration to become godlike, to perfect rationality, and to care for the soul, are remote from the individuality we associate with our modern sense of our selves and our personal identities. But I venture to hope that all fourteen chapters, historical though their material is, can offer interesting perspectives for viewing the human condition, whether we converse, as it were, with Heraclitus, Socrates, and Plato, or engage with the ideal self that Aristotle, Stoics, and Plotinus put forward. It was audacious of me to try to include all this in a single book. My defence, as I take off my mask, is to express gratitude for having had the opportunity to live a wonderful life in all periods of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, and to pass on the torch to the new generation of students wherever you are. Berkeley, December 2021

Selfhood and Rationality in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Heraclitus to Plotinus. A. A. Long, Oxford University Press. © A. A. Long 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198803393.003.0016

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Index of Passages For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Aetius 1.7.33 171n.32 Aeschylus Agamemnon 160ff. 67n.18 Anaxagoras (DK 59) B12 80 Antiphon Orations 5.93 150n.15 Aristotle De anima 2.4. 415a24–b1 182n.19 3.7, 431a16–431b8 236 De caelo 2.12, 292a20 165 De partibus animalium 2.10,656a8–9 182 4.10, 686a26–8 182 Eudemian Ethics 1.8, 1217b31 138–9 7.6, 1240a36–9 210n.26 8.3.1249b17 46n.10 8.3.1249b21 55 Rhetoric 2.4 198n.5 2.4, 1381a3–5 210n.26 Nicomachean Ethics 1.2,1094a26–1094b7 177 1.2,1094b9–10 181n.16 1.4, 1095a19 228 1.5, 1095b17–1096a4 185n.26 1.5, 1095b32 235n.21 1.5,1096a4–5 177 1.6,1096b19–27 184 1.7, 1097a30–1098b8 186 1.7,1097b1 22 1.7,1097b24 151 1.7, 10983–4 185–6 1.7, 1098a7–18 187

1.7,1098a13 57 1.7, 1098a16–18 177 1.8, 1098b2 228 1.8, 1098b27–8 186n.29 1.8, 1098b30–1099b8 186–7 1.8, 1099a1 234n.19 1.8,1099a33–1099b2 200 1.9-12 187 1.9, 1099b11–13 188 1.9, 1099b14–18 188 1.9,1099b16 46–7, 180, 188n.33 1.10,1100b20 233 1.10, 1100b30 234n.19 1.10,1100b35–1101a8 32n.22 1.10, 1101a6–8 46–7 1.10, 1101a20–1 188–9 1.12, 1001b27 46–7, 180 1.12,1011b21–1102a4 46n.9 1.12, 1101b23–1102a4 189 1.13, 1103a6 187n.31 6.1,1139a12 192n.38 6.21139a30–1139b5 187n.31 6.6, 1141a16–20 177 6.7, 1141b1 183 6.11,1143a35–1143b5 192–3 7.1, 1145a27 182 7.13, 1153b11 228 7.13, 1153b19 238n.27 7.13,1153b32 182 8.2 198n.5 8.3 199n.6 8.12, 1161b13 197 9.4, 1166a7 210n.26 9.4,1166a32 199 9.9 203 9.9.1169b6 199 9.11, 1171b4–10 210n.26 10.6, 1176a30–3 190 10.6, 1176a34 235n.21 10.6, 1177a9–11 190 10.7, 1177a12–13 190

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Aristotle (cont.) 10.7, 1177a12–18 191–2 10.7,1177a13–17 31n.14, 188, 192 10.7, 1177a15–16 181–2 10.7, 1177a17 178 10.7, 1177b4–18 191 10.7, 1177b16–26 191 10.7,1177b18 176–7 10.7,1177b24 180 10.7, 1177b26 183 10.7,1177b26–30 191 10.7, 1177b28 183 10.7,1177b30–4 8 10.7, 1177b33–4 232 10.7,1178a2 31n.14 10.7,1178a6–10 176 10.7,1178a8 180 10.7,1178a9 176–7 10.8,1178a22–1178b23 193 10.8,1178b8–9 180 10.8, 1178b10–18 180 10.8, 1178b21–3 178–9 10.8,1178b22–3 180 10.8,1178b24 182 10.8,1178b25–32 193, 228 10.8,1178b28–32 176 10.8, 1178b30 232 10.8, 1178b33 184 10.8,1178b33 194n.39 10.8, 1179a4 181n.15 10.8,1179a24 180 10.8, 1179a32 180 10.9, 1179a33–5 190 Magna Moralia 1213a10–16 204n.20 Metaphysics 1.986b21–5 78n.7 1.987a32–3 62 3.1005b22 20–1 3.1012a24 20–1 12.1072b14–1073a13 138–9 Politics 3.16, 1287a28–9 182 7.2–3 194n.39 Protrepticus Fr.B110 (Düring) 184n.24 Topics 112a36–8 52n.22

Cicero De amicitia 20 195–6 De divinatione 1.121 116n.11 De finibus 3.16–17 200n.8 3.24 202–3 3.55 202n.17 62–3 200n.8 3.70 176 De natura deorum 1.13–16, 153 57–8 1.121 211n.28 Tusculan Disputations 1.65 49 1.71 96n.4 1.97 96n.4 Democritus (DK68) B31 150n.15 B170 50n.16 B171 50 B187 150n.15 Dio of Prusa Orations 36.55 171n.31 Diogenes Laertius 2.16 103n.30 2.37–8 42n.3 6.2 105 6.24–53 106 6.38 107 6.43–4 106–7 6.54 105 6.60 106 7.87–8 55 7.89 200n.11 7.95 201n.14 7.97 202n.17 7.101 175n.46 7.124 195–6 7.134 170n.23 7.135 171n.28 7.147 172n.34 7.151 48n.13 9.5 61n.7 10.118 31n.15 10.22 39n.35

Aulus Gellius Noctes Atticae 7.1.7 170n.22

Diogenes of Apollonia (DK64) B3 164

Calcidius On Plato’s Timaeus 292 172n.33

Empedocles (DK31) B28–9 79–80 B115 49–50

   Epictetus Discourses 1.1 170n.24 1.1.10–12 212 1.1.11 232–3 1.2.29 97 1.3 227n.5, 238n.28 1.3.1 50 1.9.11 232–3 1.14.12–14 54, 220–1 1.14.6 175n.46 1.14.12 227n.5 1.24.18–19 31n.16 1.24.16–18 32n.21 2.14.13 27n.6 2.16.40–2 25n.2 2.8 220–2 2.22 206 2.26.28 219 3.1.24 97 3.1.36–7 97 3.22.23–5 97 3.22.10 96 3.24.2 50 3.26.23 96 4.1 25n.2 4.1.68 234n.20 4.11.19 96 Encheiridion 2 220n.7 16 210n.26 51 96 Epicurus Letter to Menoeceus 123-4 57n.37 124 229 129 229 135 31n.15, 45n.8, 180n.12

B32 163 B40 16, 162–3 B41 68, 73, 79 B43 68 B44 68 B45 18, 70, 79 B50 17–18, 69 B54 73 B57 17n.12 B60 16 B61 16–17 B62 16, 62 B67 16, 67n.18, 68, 163 B73 49n.15 B78–9 74n.30 B80 61n.5 B81 60–1 B85 68 B94 63, 68–9 B101 18, 35n.27, 79 B102 163 B112 19–20, 62, 65, 69 B113 74n.30 B114 63, 68, 163n.8 B115 18, 70 B116 17–18, 74n.30 B118 79 B119 49 B123 16, 73 Herodotus Histories 1.42.4 30n.11 2.17.1 71 7.8–18 35–6

Gorgias (DK82) B11 35, 71 B11.8–10 153

Hesiod Works and Days 109–201 129 122–5 48 254–5 48n.12 256–85 67–8 483–4 72–3 648 71–2 694 71–2 Theogony 719 71–2 720 73n.29 819-68 26n.3

Heraclitus (DK 22) A5 59n.2 B1 17–21, 59n.1, 65, 69 B2 17–18, 69, 79 B22 79 B28 68 B30 63, 68–9, 163 B31 69

Homer Iliad 2.212–14 72 15.187–89 73n.29 15.8–83 90 18.478ff 71–2 Odyssey 1.56 71

Euripides Fr. 1007 49 Eusebius Praeparatio evangelica 15.15.305 174n.44

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Isocrates Antidosis 180 150 Leucippus (DK 67) B2 71 Long/Sedley, Hellenistic Philosophers 44D 172n.33 ch. 45 170n.25 ch.46 171n.27 chs 46–8, 54 172n.36 46F 170n.22 54Q 170n.22 55 171n.32 59N 175n.46 600 175n.46 64 234n.18 67L 174n.44

7.54 214 7.55 216 7.66 217–18 8.29 219 8.47 237n.26 8.56 217 9.7 219 9.29 22–3 10.17 22 10.24 215 11.6 32 11.22 22–3 12.3 217–18 12.6 222 12.14 217 12.21 22 12.26 222 12.33 215

Lysias Orations 24.3 150n.15

Melissus (DK 30) A30 87 B7 87

Lucretius De rerum natura 5.1–12 45n.8, 180n.12 6.68–79 57n.37

Origen Contra Celsum 4.48 171n.31 De principiis 3.1.2–3 214

Marcus Aurelius Meditations 1.7 212 2.2 217 2.14 22, 223 2.15 219 2.17 221 3.6 217–18 3.7 217–18 3.14 212 3.16 217, 221 3.9 219 4.12 217 4.36 22 5.1 22–3 5.13 49 5.16 220 5.23 22 5.26 216, 219 5.27 54, 221 5.33 214, 217 6.8 215, 223 6.14 214 6.54 22–3 7.16 217 7.23 22 7.28–9 220

Parmenides (DK 28) B1.28–30 88 B2 84–5, 89 B3 80–6 B4 90 B5 90 B6.4–9 92 B7.5 71 B8.5, 22, 29 89 B8.22 85–6 B8.27–8 89 B8.34–6 83–4 B8.36–7 85–6 B8.44–9 90 B8.50–2 89 B16 92 Philo On the eternity of the world 94 170n.26 Pindar Isthmian Odes 6.71–72 72 Nemean Odes 6.1–11 44n.4 Pythian Odes 1.68 71n.23 3.107–108 49, 52n.21

   Plato Alcibiades I 103a 110n.4 129e–130c 240 130c 146n.6, 238 131a–b 37n.31 Apology 21b 109 24b 123n.4 29e–30b 151 30a–e 123 31c–d 109 33c 120n.16 38b 100 41d–42a 100–2, 123 Charmides 167a 37n.31 Cratylus 389a2 168 390e1 168 396a–b 172n.34 397d–398c 50 402a 20–1 Crito 45b 111 54d 123 Euthydemus 272e 109–10 Euthyphro 2a 103 3b5 108n.1, 141 15e–16a 123 Gorgias 468a 134 487a 154 492e–493a 63n.12 503d–507c 62 504a 153–4 507e6–508a8 62–3 508a 37 508e ff. 59n.2 521d 102, 123 523e 154–5 524e–525a 64 Laws 1.605a 107 1.644d–655b 117 4.715e–716b 67 4.716d 45n.6 10 122 10.897b8–9 166n.16 10.889a–d 165 10.892a–899d 164–5

10.896b 136 10.896d8 166n.16 10.902a2 166n.16 10.902a7 166n.16 10.902e5 166n.16 10.903c6 166n.16 10.904a6 166n.16 12.967b6 166n.16 Menexenus 237b–238b 129 Meno 86a 146–7 Phaedo 58b 123n.5 59b 104–5 60e 109 61c–66b 99–100 61a5 123n.5 64a 8 65e–67b 240 69b 231–2 75c 139n.39 80a3 136n.27 80d–81e 157 85b7 123n.5 97b–98b 103 99c 139n.39 118a 123 Phaedrus 230a 26, 102 242b9 109–10, 116 245c 155–6 246a 155–6 246d–e 131n.19 252c–253c 45n.6, 179n.8 Philebus 27b1–2 166n.16 28c–30d 164 28c7 166n.16 30d1–3 166n.16 55e 66–7 64e–65a 140 Protagoras 326b 67n.17 356d–57d 66–7 358d 134 Republic 1.327a 125 1.330d–331b 127 1.331e6 124n.7 1.352a11 127 1.353a–354a 151 1.354a 125

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Plato (cont.) 2.358a 133 2.364d 127 2.366c7 124n.7 2.368a4 124n.7 2.379a 128 2.379b–c 27n.4 2.379b–e 128 2.380d–381c 128, 131 2.382e6 108–9, 124n.7 3.383c 124n.7, 128n.11 3.412a5 66 3.413b–417b 128–9 3.416e5 124n.7 4.427d5 239 4.427b 129 4.431b–c 66 4.438a 134 4.414c1–415c 129 4.442d 37n.31 4.443d 132 5.469a 50, 137n.32 5.475c–e 130 6.484d 130 6.485b 131 6.486ab 131 6.486d5 66 6.486d7 66 6.492a 131 6.496c4 110n.4 6.496d 140 6.497c 124n.7, 132 6.500c–d 132, 137 6.500c9 124n.7, 130 6.500d 132–3 6.500e3 124n.7 6.501b 132–3 6.505a 133 6.505b 133 6.505d5–e4 134 6.506e–507a 135 6.508a 135–6 6.508c 135 6.508d 135 6.509a 135 6.509a–c 136, 240 6.509b–d 135–6, 139n.36 7.516d 134 7.517a 140 7.517b–c 137 7.517d4 124n.7, 130 7,518e2 122 7.526e 137 7.532a–532c 140–1

7.532c1 124n.7, 130 7.540a–b 138 7.540c2 130 9.580d. ff 38n.33 9.588c–d 51–2 9.588d 146 9.589e4 124n7 9.590d1 124n.7 10.602d 66 10.613a 27n.4, 45n.6, 179n.8 10.617e 53 10.621c 125 Sophist 244b–245d 94 244c–d 86n.24 248d–249a 86n.24 249a 94 Statesman 122 309c 134n.24 Symposium 202c 50–1 202e–303a 51–2 205a 50–1 206a 134 207c–209e 51n.19 210d 240 212a1 239 219d–e 39n.34 Theaetetus 151a3 110n.4 174b 145 176a 27n.5, 45n.6, 240 176b1 236 176c 137 Theages 128d1 109n.3 Timaeus 122 28c–30c 132–3 29e–30c 167 29e2–3 167 30a3–5 167 30c 170n.26 30d 168 30b7–8 162 33c7–d3 170n.22 36a–d 165–6 37a 137 37d2 167 37c 135n.25 41c 51–2, 156, 179n.8 48a 170 53ab 167 69b 170n.22 77b 156n.19

   89d4–90d 169 90a 56n.35 90a–c 30, 179n.10 90a–d 45nn.6,7, 49–50, 67n.19, 118–19 90b–d 27n.5, 179n.8 90c 52n.22 Plotinus Enneads 1.1.9 227 1.1.10 227n.6, 232n.14 1.2 231–2 1.2.6 235–6 1.1.10 227n.6 1.4 226–40 1.4.1 228 1.4.2 228–9 1.4.3 229 1.4.4 231 1.4.5 233 1.4.6 233–4 1.4.7 234 1.4.8 234 1.4.9 235 1.4.10 236 1.4.11 236 1.4.12 227, 238 1.4.13 237–8 1.4.14 238 1.4.15 238 1.4.16 239 1.5 236n.23 1.6.5 230n.12 1.6.9 142n.46 2.4.10 230n.12 2.9.9 232n.16 2.9.11 230n.12 3.2.4.5 238n.29 3.8.1–4 228n.7 4.8.8 227n.6 5.8.4 235–6 5.9.1.13–16 233n.17 Plutarch De genio Socratis 113–19 De Stoicorum repugnantiis 1052d 170n.22 De communibus notitiis 1068F 211 Posidonius (Edelstein-Kidd) F187 55 Proclus Comentary On Plato’s Parmenides 708 90–1

Seneca De providentia 5.8 173n.42 De vita beata 4.4 237n.26 Moral Letters 6,7 199–200 9,5–9 202n.18, 210 9,14 208–9 13, 14 96n.4 24, 4 96n.4 28, 8 96n.4 34,2 205–6 35 205 41,1 54, 220–1 63,8 210 67,7 96n.4 81,10 195–6 81,12 206 104, 27 96n.4 109, 9–11 209 Sextus Empiricus Against the Mathematicians 11.46 201n.14 Outlines of Pyrrhonism 3.230 63n.12 Sophocles Ajax 1361 149 Oedipus Tyrannus 64 149 1391 32 Trachiniae 1278 67n.18 Solon (West) Fr. 1 72–3 Fr. 13, 52 72n.28 Fr. 17 72–3 Stobaeus 2.9, 27 200n.9 2.70, 8 201n.14 2.73, 16–19 202n.16 2.98,17 180n.13 2.99,3–8 175n.46 2.101,24 211 2.113, 18–19 175n.46 Strabo 14.1.27 72n.27 Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta (SVF) 1.323 176 2.108, 15 195n.2 2.622 171n.31 3.627 211

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Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta (cont.) 2.1074 171n.31 2.1103 48n.13 3.17 228 3.54 180n.13 3.91 237n.24 3.96 201n.14 3.97 201n.14 3.97a 201n.14 3.98 200n.9 3.1078–108 202n.17 3.112 202n.16 3.626 211 3.631 195–6 3.630 195n.2 3.633 195–6 3.635 211n.28 Theophrastus De sensibus 3 92n.33 Thucydides Histories 2.34–46 129 2.40 97 Xenophanes (DK 21) B15–16 14–15, 78–9

B23–5 78–9, 89, 162 B25 78–9, 87 B26 78–9 B23–3 14–15 B34 14–15, 78–9, 93–4 Xenophon Apology 4.4 110n.4 13.6 110n.4 Memorabilia 1.1.2 108n.1, 141 1.1.4 110n.4 1.1.9 114n.10 1.2.1 99–100 1.2.12–26 103 1.2.17 99 3.6.1 104–5 4.3.10–14 108–9 4.3.14 113n.6 4.7.5–8 103n.30 4.8.6 110n.4 Symposium 1.5 104 4.34 104–5 4.38 105 8.5 110n.4

Index of Names and Subjects Note: The names of modern scholars are included here only where their views are mentioned in the main text or discussed in the footnotes. For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Absolute One 230 Adam, J. 124, 137n.31 Aeschylus 164n.11 Agathon 100 akolouthia 173–5 Alcibiades 38–9, 99–100, 103, 106–7 alêtheia 89–90 Alexander the Great 106–7 amudrotês 229–30 Anaxagoras 78–80, 87, 89, 103, 164, 184–5 Anaximander 59n.2, 61, 87, 98n.9, 163n.8 Anaximenes 13–15, 87 ancient ethics 41–3, 46–7, 56–8 ancient philosophers 27, 31–2, 38, 40 ancient philosophy 33–5, 38–40 morality of 38 Annas, J. 8, 41–3, 45–6, 56–7, 223n.10 Antisthenes 98, 104–5 apatheia, see unaffectedness Apollo 123n.5, 124 Aquinas, T. 9–10 Archelaus 103 Archer-Hind, R.D. 52 Aristippus 104 Aristophanes 33, 95, 98, 100–1 Aristotelians 25, 39–40, 182, 231–2, 236–8 Aristotle 1, 4–6, 8, 14–16, 20–1, 29–32, 38, 40, 43, 45–7, 55, 57–8, 60n.3, 62, 78, 78n.7, 81–2, 94, 117, 123, 138–9, 142, 151, 155, 157–8, 157n.20, 162, 165, 169–70; psychology of 155; on eudaimonia and divinity 176–94 passim; on friendship 198–201, 202n.15, 203–4, 209–11, 210n.26, 211n.29, 220–1; on nous 176–94 passim; his eudaimonism discussed by Plotinus 226–8, 231–3, 235–9, 238n.27 Armstrong, A.H. 228n.8, 230 Asclepius 123–4 Athenians 98–9, 123, 126–9, 169 Atomists 87–8, 94

autonomy 33, 35, 38, 213, 215–16, 223–5 internal 40 personal 40 rational 38, 225 Augustine 225 balance 59–60, 63–6, 68–70, 166–7, see also proportion internal 36–7 Barnes, J. 17, 59n.1, 77n.3 beauty 154–6, 168 being 76–94 passim Berlin, I. 27–8 Bett, R. 201n.13 belief 144–8 body 11n.5, 22–3, 213, 216–23, 227, 230–4, 236, 238–40 body / soul dualism 38–9, 56 Bordt, M. 142 Boys-Stones, G. 142n.46 Brickhouse, T. 113 Broadie, S. 46n.9, 139n.38, 167, 169, 179n.11, 181, 181nn15–16, 184–5, 186n.29, 188n.33, 192–4 Burnet, J. 69n.20, 77n.6, 84n.20, 103 Burnyeat, M. 11n.5, 16n.10, 123n.5 Cairns, D. 143n.52 Calcidius 116n.11 Callicles 37, 62–3, 153–4 causality 217–18, 220, 224–5 Celano, A.J. 46n.11 celestial motions 122, 146–7, 155–8, 165–6, 174 Cephalus 103, 127 Chaerephon 100–2, 109, 111 Cherniss, H. 166n.16 Christians/Christianity 72–3, 161 Chrysippus 54–6, 169–70, 170n.26 Cicero 49, 116n.11, 202n.17, 211n.28 Claus, D. 149n.14 Cleanthes 163n.8

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Clement 82n.15 coherence, as Stoic concept, see akolouthia consciousness 10–14, 19, 22, 110, 116, 219–22, 235–6, 239 subjective 219 loss of 233, 235–6 contemplation 176–94 passim as happiness-producing activity 185 life of 180, 184–5, 187, 191, see also godlikeness Cooper, J. 25n.1, 144n.1 Cornford, F. 81–2 cosmic order 34–5, 38–9, 57–8, 60–1, 63, 67–8, 157–8 in Heraclitus 68 in Plato 63, 67–8 Coxon. A.H. 77n.6, 81n.13, 83n.18, 84, 88–92, 90n.30 Crates 105, 107 creation 163, 167–71 Critias 103 Croesus 29–30, 32, 36 Crombie, I.M. 144–5, 156–7, 156n.19 Crystal, I. 94 Curzer, H. 190n.35 Cynics 96–7, 98n.9, 106–7 Cyrenaics 42 daimôn/s 43, 45, 47–56, 179 as intermediary between divine and human 51–2 celestial genealogy 52 Hesiod’s 48, 50–2 history and meaning of 47–8 monitoring spirit 47, 54 daimonion 101–2, 107, 108–20 passim, see also divine sign Darwin, C. 39 David, J.-L. 95–6, 99–100 death 8, 16–17, 127, 149, 154–5, 157, 159, 218, 223 Delphic injunction 26 demiurge 51–4, 165–7, 179 In Plato 167–75 In Stoicism 170–1 Democritus 50, 71n.25, 150, 165 Dennett, D. 10, 147–9, 152, 154 Descartes, R. 9–13, 21–2, 86, 144–5 desire 178–9, 184, 219–20 determinism 171 dianoia 216, 227, 230 Diogenes of Apollonia 87, 141n.43, 164 Diogenes Laertius 98n.9 Diogenes the Cynic 9, 98, 104–7

divine 26–30, 32–6, 43–5, 46n.11, 48–9, 51–6 attributes 27–9 divine craftsmanship 4–5, 161–75 passim distinction between human 29 divine goodness 128, 133, 140–2, 167 intellect 30–1 nature 28–9, 169 order 26 divine rationality 31, 34, 40, 47, 52, 57–8 divine sign 101, see also daimonion divinity 1–4, 13–15, 27, 30–5, 38, 43–7, 49–50, 52–3, 56–8, 67–8, 73–4, 101–2, 107–9, 118–20, 121–43 passim, 176, 178–85, 188–90, 192, 194, 218–22, 231–3 degrees of 180 of Aristotle 46–7, 58, 176–94 passim of Forms 131, 138–42 of Heraclitus 34–5 immutability of 131, 133 in politics 123, 125–6 internal 188, 220–3, 225 dominant end dualism, Cartesian 9–10, 12–13, 21 dualism of body and soul 38–9, 56 elenchos 110–14 Eliot, T.S. 23–4 embodiment 169, 175, 226, 230, 233–4, 238–40 Emerson, R.W. 39 Empedocles 29n.9, 44n.5, 49–50, 63, 70–1, 78–80, 87, 97–8, 114, 156n.19 end in Aristotle’s ethics dominant 176–8, 186–7, 189 inclusive 176–8, 186–7 Epictetus 3, 5–6, 25n.2, 27n.6, 30–3, 32n.23, 38, 45, 95–7, 104, 107, 170n.24, 173n.40, 175n.45, 179–80, 195; on friendship 206–8, 210n.26, 212–14, 217–22, 217n.5, 218n.6, 220n.7, 224, 225n.13, 227, 232–3; in Plotinus 234, 238 Epicureans 6, 25, 29–31, 38–40, 42, 45, 46n.11, 57, 97–8, 179–80, 182, 196, 199, 216–17, 226–9, 233, 237–8 Epicurus 38–9, 45–6, 179–80, 229, 237 epistêmê, 230, see also knowledge epistemology 144 Eryximachus 100 ethics 41–58 passim, 60–1, 63, 72, 144, 150, 152–3, 157, 166–7, 173–4 Aristotelian 176–94 passim eudaimonia 1–2, 6, 30, 41–8, 50–3, 55–8, 176, 178–9, 182, 185–6, 188–90, 194, 202, 226–8, 231–3, 235, 239–40, see also happiness

     Aristotelian characterizations of completeness 186–7 divinity’s relation to 43, 47, 50, 179–80, 188 Stoic 229 eudaimonism 42, 54, 56–7 excellence, see also virtue ethical 231–2 human 227, 237 intellectual 231–3 exhibitionism, of Diogenes 98, 105–7 external world 11–12, 15, 21–2, 78 Euripides 31, 49, 101 Eusebius 67n.18, 174n.44 Euthyphro 103, 114, 123 fate 47, 49–50, 53, 56, 213, 220–5 Ferrari, J. 136n.29 Feuerbach, L. 162n.5 flux 218–19 cosmic 223 universal 62 Forms, see Plato Form of the Good 237–8, and see Plato Frankfurt, H. 10, 147–8, 154 Frede, M. 9 freedom 25n.2, 31, 36–7, 40, 158 internal 38–9, 213–14 Stoic 27–8 Freeman, K. 69n.20 Freud, S. 39 friendship 195–211 passim Aristotle on 198–201, 203–4, 209–10 Stoics on 14–17, 195–6, 198–200, 204–11 function/ergon 151–2 Funkenstein, A. 21n.17 Galen 55 Garton, Ash, T. 40n.38 Gauthier-Jolif 185nn.25,26, 186n.27,29 Geertz, C. 39–40 geometrical equality 62–4, see also proportion geometry 37 Gerson, L.P. 139n.36 Giannopoulou, Z. 232n.14 Gill, C. 24, 38n.33, 223n.11 godlikeness 43–7, 51n.19, 55, 57–8 importance to eudaimonia 46–7, 55, 57–8 god(s) 12–17, 19–20, 26, 28–31, 35, 37–8, 45–52, 54, 58, 123–5, 123n.4, 131, 155–6, 161–2, 213–14, 220–2, 225 good / goodness 144, 151–2, 159–61, 168, 195, 198, 200–4, 206–8, 231, 233–4, 239–40 authentic 237

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intellectual 231 objective 239 universal 238 as properties of psychê 144, 153–4 bodily 200 external 200, 202 moral 200 Stoic 200–3 goods 176, 189 external 32, 178, 186–7 internal 44 Gorgias 35–6, 71, 100–1, 104, 153 governing part of soul 215–21, 223, see also hêgemonikon Graham, D. 24 Greek ethics 43–6, 56–7 Greek philosophy 1, 9, 12, 21–2 origins of 7, 12 relation to us 7–10 study of 12 Griffith, T. 134 Guthrie, W.K.C. 71n.24, 78–9, 84n.21 Hackforth, R. 142, 166n.16 Hadot, P. 223n.10 Hadrian 98n.10 happiness 1–2, 4–6, 25, 29–33, 35–43, 46n.9, 57, 144, 148, 176–81, 183, 185–92, 226, 229, 231, 233–5, 237–9, see also eudaimonia long-term 25, 29–30, 40 authentic 53–4, 153–4, 178, 193–4 intellectual 46n.9 of morality 56–7 as divine 181, 188–9, 192 as virtuous 185–8, 190, 192 contemplative 178, 180, 183–5, 191, 193 paradigms of 181, 185, 193 perfect 177, 180, 188, 192–4 political 189, 192–3 second-level 192–4 superhuman 191 in Aristotelian ethics 176–94 passim in Plotinus 226–40 passim supreme 226 Hare, J. 182n.17, 183nn.20,21, 184n.23 harmony 132, 135–6, 139–40, 143, and see proportion Hecataeus 60–1 Hecato 199–200 Hegel, G. 9–10, 80 hêgemonikon 6, 215–19, 224, see also governing part of soul Heidegger, M. 10, 76–7, 80

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    

Heraclitus 1–5, 8–9, 15–24, 29n.9, 34–5, 37, 49, 59–75 passim, 78–9, 87, 94, 97–8, 162–4, 166, 169–71; logos of 17–18, 20–1, 23–4, 59–61, 69–70, 75, 162–4; objective self in 16; psychê in 18; on sôphrosynê 62–3, 65–6; cosmology of 163–4 appearances in 16–17 deep structure in 16–19, 21 interpretation of 15–16 unity of opposites 16–17, 20–1 Hermotimus 184–5 Herodotus 29–30, 35–6, 71, 126n.10 Hieron 49 Hippias 100–1, 104 Hippolytus 69n.21 Homer 12–14, 26, 29, 31, 32n.23, 33, 38–9, 60–1, 70–4, 88–91, 105, 107, 127, 131–3, 149, 161–2, 186n.29, 197 human beings 28–9, 31n.17, 35, 37, 78–9, 92–3, 131–2, 137, 145–6, 148, 153–6, 159, 169, 174–5, 178–9, 213–17, 219–22, 225 human identity 178–9, 184–5, 222 human nature 28–9, 37, 227, 234 human rights 148–9, 153–4, 158 Hume, D. 38, 165–6 Hussey, E. 59n.1, 61n.5, 74n.30 immortality/ immortal 12–13, 28–9, 51, 53, 72–5, 138, 162 intellect 8 personal 29 soul’s 125 impersonal friends 210–11 incorporeality 150–1, 166 injustice 37, 40, 64 intellect/intelligence 5, 57, 63–4, 66, 68, 72–3, 126, 135, 138–40, 142, 150–3, 157, 163–4, 167, 170–1, 174, 217–18, 220–2, 228–9, 231, 236, see also nous incorporeal 6 divine 57, 72–4, 179, 222 authentic 231 clarity of 230 ontological level of pure 227, 229, 236 cosmic 72–3, 163, 170–1 benevolent 164, 167, 174 intentionality 147–9, 166, 169, 173 intuition 115–16, 118 Inwood, B. 223n.11 Irwin, T. 63 Isocrates 150–3, 156–7 Jesus 175 Johansen, T.K. 166n.15

justice 43–4, 51–2, 62–4, 67–8, 72–3, 124–7, 130, 132–6, 140–1, 148, 151–2, 157, see also Plato cosmic 61 divine 68 Kahn, C. 16n.11, 18n.15, 59n.1, 60–2, 65–6, 70n.22, 77n.4, 80n.11, 83n.18, 92n.33, 94 Kant, I. 28n.7, 41, 225 Kierkegaard, S. 225 Kimhi, I. 94 Kingsley, P. 71n.26 Kirk, G. S. 59n.1, 65n.14, 69nn.20,21 ‘know yourself ’ 26 knowledge 11, 14–15, 20–1, 23–4, 78–9, 111–12, 122, 129–31, 133–6 scientific 14–15 philosophical 134–5 moral 111–12 kosmos 2, 33, 37, 59–60, 62–3, 72–3 Kraut, R. 194n.39 Lear, Richardson G. 181n.14, 191n.36 Lesher, J. 88n.28 Leucippus 71 life 10, 11, 80, 85–7, 131, 146–7, 148–9, 151–2, 155, 157, 162, 164–5, 168, 172, 227–30, 236 Plotinus’ ideal 232 rational 227, 229 Locke, J. 10, 147–8, 153–4 logismos 66 logos 33–6, 111, 115–17 Heraclitean 1–5, 34–5, 59–61, 69–70, 75, 162–4 Long, A. A. 31n.17, 207n.25 Lovejoy, A. E. 167, 172 MacIntyre, A. 10 Mansfeld, J. 80n.11, 84n.21 Marcus Aurelius 7, 11, 20–2, 24, 32, 212–25 passim Marx, K. 39 mathematics 37–9, 64–5, 164, 166 as morality 38 geometrical proportionality 37–8 paradigm of rationality 37 in Plato 64 irrationals 65 matter, mindless 167 in Stoicism 172 McCabe, M.M. 159n.21 McGroarty. K. 228n.8, 235n.22 McPherran, M. 112–13, 138–9, 142 measure 59–61, 64–72, 74, see also metron in Heraclitus 68–71

     in Plato 64, 67–8 in Solon 72–3 Meletus 109, 114 Melissus 87–8 metaphysics 76–7, 131, 140–1, 144, 157–8, 166, 226, 230–1, 238, 240 metron 72–3 in Heraclitus 59–60, 69, 71, 73 Milesians 13, 61, 74, 78, 87 Mill, J.S. 41 mind/mental 2–6, 12, 17–18, 76–94 passim, 212, 214, 216–17, 219–22, 236, see also nous contemplative 227 rational 219–20 reflective 218, 224–5 morality 37–8, 41–2, 45–6, 56–7 happiness of, see also happiness of morality modern 45–6 secular 46–7 motion(s) 168, 172 bodily 174–5 celestial 165–6, 174 circular 165–6 Mohr., R. 166n.16 Mourelatos, A. 81n.12, 88n.28 myth/allegory 126, 128–9, 146, 155–6, 162, 169–71 Nagel, T. 7–9, 12, 16, 18–21, 24, 159–60, 183n.21 nature 7–9, 14, 16, 19–20, 22–3, 26, 28–31, 34, 37–8, 60, 65, 69–70, 73–4, 145, 150–2, 156–7, 162–3, 168, 170, 172, 178, 181–4, 190, 212–14, 216–17, 219–20, 222–5, 227–9, 233 laws of 68, 74 dualistic 174–5 nature as law-governed system 162–3 normative 173 composite 183, 191, 238 Stoic concept of 11, 214 universal 213, 222 corporeal notion of 227 Neschker, Henschke, A. 142 Nettleship, R. 139n.36 Nietzsche, F. 15–16, 30n.13, 31, 159 noêsis 231, 233, 236 normative life 152–4, 156–7 nous 5, 45, 49, 79–80, 89–94, 115–16, 118–19, 126, 142, 164, 176–94 passim, 217–18, 220, 222, 231–2, see also mind and divinity 192 as unitary faculty 192–3 godlike 191–2 objectivity 7–12, 16–17, 21–4, 157–60 orthos logos 38, 60n.3, 71 Oldfather, W.A. 96 Owen, G.E.L. 76n.2, 86n.24

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Palmer, J.A. 94 paradox 18, 86, 130, 159–60 Parmenides 7–10, 20–1, 70–1, 76–94 passim, 80 Pascal, B. 23n.20, 225 Pauline predications 231 perception 236 perfectibility 175 perfection 226–7, 229 intellectual 239 Perdiccas of Macedon 106–7 Pericles 97, 125n.9 Peripatetics 78, 98n.9 and see Aristotelians person(s) 8, 18–19, 22, 145–9, 152–60, 231, 233, 235–7, 239 concept of 144–60 passim excellent 232, 235–9 Plotinus’ ideal 227, 238 virtuous 232–8 personal identity 11–13, 17, 20–1 personalist concept 144, 146–7, 149, 164 personality 95–6, 98, 106, 148, 156–9 of Socrates 95–107 passim perspectivism 7–13, 15, 17, 19, 22–3 Phillip of Macedon 106–7 Phillips, E.D. 80n.11, 85n.22, 87n.25, 90n.31, 91n.32 Philo of Alexandria 170n.26 philosophy, Socrates on 95–8, 100, 106 history of 9–10, 33–5, 38–40, 78, 144–5 philosopher rulers 130 phronêsis 152–3, 227 physical world 73, 156, see also kosmos physics 173 Pindar 44nn.4,5, 49, 52n.21, 71–2 Plato 1–6, 15–16, 25–7, 26n.3, 28–9; on Heraclitus 20–3; on rule of reason 30–1, 37–8, 43, 44n.5, 45–6; on likeness to god 27, 29–30, 161, 169, 179; on daimôn 50–60, 56n.35, 60n.3; on measure and sôphrosynê 62–3, 153–4; on rationality 38, 64–5, 122, 152–3, 161, 167–9; on divinity 67–8, 122–6, 128–30, 134–40, 164–9; on politics 121–3, 126–7, 129, 140; on Parmenides 81–2, 85–6, 94; on persona of Socrates 97–104, 140–1; on Socrates’ divine sign 109–13, 117–19, 141; on Form of the Good 128, 133–43, 184; on philosopher rulers 130–2, 140; on Forms 124, 130–2, 168, 170; on justice 124–7, 133–6, 140–1, 151; on intellect 138–9, 142, 164; on dialectic 140–1; on psychê 144–7, 151–60, 169; on friendship 198; psychology 145, 148, 150, 152; Platonists 4, 6, 22–3, 25, 39–40, 138–9, 141–2, 182, 214, 226, 230, 239 Platonism 237, 239

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    

pleasure 238 kinetic 237 static 227, 237 Plotinus 2–3, 6, 8, 81–2, 132n.20, 135n.26, 226–40 passim Plutarch 3, 53–4, 110–11, 113–14, 114n.10, 116–19 politics 121–3, 125–31, 135–7, 140, 143, 177, 187, 191 Pomponazzi, P. 117n.13 Pope, A. 28–9 Posidonius 54–6 Presocratics 44, 71, 78, 83n.19, 87n.25, 97–8, 164 Proclus 82n.15, 90–1, 136n.30 Prodicus 100–1, 104 Protagoras 67–8, 104, 107 proportion 59–60, 62–6, 68–9, 71–2, 74, 168, see also geometrical equality in Heraclitus 63, 65–6, 68–70 in Platonic rationality 65–6 Pyrrhonists 97–8 Pythagoras 16, 29n.9, 44n.5, 48n.13, 60–1, 78, 114 psychê 4, 6, 117, 125–6, 132, 134–5, 144–60 passim, 214–15, 217–18, see also soul divine origin of 158 Homeric 149 Aristotle on 155 Isocrates on 150 Plato on 144–60, 217–18 Socrates on 153–4 rational activity 185–6 rational faculty 43, 45, 52–6, 141 rationality 7–12, 30–1, 33–5, 37–8, 47, 50, 52–3, 55–62, 64–6, 70–1, 74–5, 108–9, 112–13, 116–17, 134, 144, 147–9, 152–8, 161–75 passim, 214–15, 220–1, 227, 229 reason 1–3, 6, 25, 30–8, 40, 64, 148, 157, 162, 213–15, 220–1, 225, 229 link to divinity 34–5; rule of 30, 64; faulty 213; perfected 213, 233–4; universal 223–5; levels of 230 relativity 14–15, 17 religion 14–15, 123–7, 129–30 Rist, J.M. 56n.35, 228n.8 Robertson, D. 225n.12 Robinson, T.M. 144–5, 152, 164n.10 Roman Stoics 54, 56, 107 Romm, J. 105n.31 Rorty, R. 8n.2 Rosen, S. 94 Ross, W.D. 177n.2 Rousseau, J.-J. 225 Ryle, G. 11 scepticism 11, 21 Schofield, M. 28n.13, 32n.15

second-order volition 147–8, 154 Sedley, D., 39, 44n.5, 45n.7, 51nn.19,20, 52n.22, 83n.18, 138n.35, 141n. 43, 164n.10, 179n.10 self 6–10, 12–14, 18–21, 34–8, 144, 148, 151–4, 159, 212, 214–27, 232–4, 238–9 objective aspect of 7, 11–13, 23–4, 159–60; self-scrutiny 79, 92–3, 98; subjective aspect of 18; self-fashioning 99–104, 106; self-modelling 25–7, 29–33, 35–40; selfreflectiveness 148–9, 152–4; selfconsciousness 147–9, 154, 157; selfknowledge 154; embodied 6, 230, 233, 240; incorporeal 214, 238–9; intellectual 230, 235–6, 239–40; lower composite 226–7; true 238–9; transcendent 239; selfcontrol 154, 159; self-identifications 157; self-knowledge 98, 154 Seneca 5–6, 54n.25, 173–4, 195, 199–200, 203; on friendship 204–6, 208–10, 220–1 Sextus Empiricus 46n.11 Shapiro, A. 100 Shorey, P. 142n.50 Simplicius 82n.15 Smith, N. D. 112–13 Snell, B. 69n.20 sociability 199–200, 204, 214–17 Socrates 1–4, 26–9, 31–5, 37–9, 44, 50–1, 53–4, 56, 62–3, 75, 78; his persona 95–107; his divine sign 108–20; his role in Plato’s Republic 121–41; on psychê 151–5, 159, 164, 172, 217–18, 222, 225, 232–3; piety of 123, 140 sophists 97, 103–4, 107, 153 Sophocles 31, 67–8, 197 sophos 97, 103 sôphrôn 62, 66–7 sôphronein 60, 62–3, 65, 68 sôphrosynê 19–20, 36–7, 62–4, 68–9, 71–4, 153–4, see also self–knowledge, Heraclitus, Plato Sorabji, R. 223n.11 soul 13–14, 18, 48, 50–7, 62, 64–6, 70, 117, 125–6, 132, 134–5, 144–7, 213–17, 219–22, 227, 233–4, 240, see also psychê exceptional 116–17 governing part of 217 hegemonic concept of 215 incorporeal 214 physicality of 217–18 rational faculty of 216, 223 Platonic 231–2, 238 pure 238, 240 rational 231–2 Stoic 234 embodied 27 self-scrutinizing 36–7

     spoudaios 231–2 St. John 33–4 St. Paul 110 Stein, H. 92n.33 Stoics 25; on divinity 27; on freedom 28, 33, 208; on logos 33–4, 38, 40, 42; on eudaimonia 43, 47–8, 54–6, 96, 157–8, 162–4, 226–9; on akolouthia 173; on divine craftsmanship 169–72; on divine rationality 173–5; on friendship 195–211 passim; in Marcus Aurelius 212–25 passim; in Plotinus 226–40 passim; on indifference 233–4 subjective/subjectivity 10–11, 17–18, 21 Swinburne, R. 146n.7 Tarán, L. 81n.14 Taylor, A. E. 52, 166n.16 Taylor, C. 225 teleology, Plato’s cosmic 164–9 Thoreau, H. D. 39 Thrasymachus 127 Thucydides 126–7, 129 Tillich, P. 141–2 Timon the Pyrrhonist 107n.36 Toulmin, S. 14n.9 transcendence 12, 16, 18–23 tragedy, Greek 31n.19, 32–3, 39 truth 64–6, 69, 71 beauty of 65, 76–7, 79–80, 84, 86, 88–94, 130, 151, 153, 155–6, 159 unaffectedness 231–2, 238 utopia 126–30 value(s) 151–2, 155, 158–60 human 154 spiritual 157 transcendent 158

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Van Cleemput, G. 189n.34 Verdenius, W. J. 69n.20 veridical thinking 77, 84–5, 91 virtue 42, 45–6, 49–50, 55–8, 213, 226, 234–6, 239 moral 1–2, 5, 176–8, 180, 227 Stoic 5–6, 42–3, 45 of intellect 46, 176, 178, 186–7 Potinian 231–2 see Aristotle passim virtuous activities 176–8, 180, 185–7, 190–4 Vlastos, G. 85–6, 111–16, 119–20, 164n.11 volition, second-order 147–8, 154 Wardy, R. 62n.10 Wedin, M. V. 94 West, M. L. 59n.1 White, M. 117n.13 White, N. 41n.2 Whiting, J. 5–6, 210–11 Wiggins, D. 10, 147n.8 Williams, B. 10, 31, 31n.17, 41n.2, 146n.7 wisdom 5, 95–7, 100–1, 104–5, 151, 177, 179–80, 186, 226, 235–6, 238–9 Wittgenstein, L. 11, 15–16 world soul 165–6, 166n.16, 168 Xenocrates 48n.13, 52n.22 Xenophanes 14–16, 20–1, 60–1, 74, 78–9, 78n.7, 87, 89, 128, 162–3; Parmenides on 93–4 Xenophon 97–100, 103–5, 103n.30, 107, 109–11, 109n.3, 113, 113n.6, 114n.10, 128, 141 Xerxes 35–6 Zafiropulo, J. 85–6 Zeller, E. 81, 142 Zeno of Elea 87, 107 Zeus 94 in Stoicism 161–2, 167, 171–4