Ancient Philosophy

by Julia Annas

  It is not so easy, however, to resist the search for a philosophical explanation of the phenomenon we are concerned with. I have chosen Medea as an example which was not only discussed in ancient philosophy but has continued to be a subject of lively concern in the modern world. If we look at artistic representations of the subject, or watch a performance either of Euripides’ original play or of an updated version, we immediately see that a stand has to be taken on the Stoic-Platonic debate. Is Medea to be represented as overrun by passion which is overwhelming her power to reason what the best thing is for her to do? Or is she to be represented as a woman who is lucidly doing what she sees to be a terrible thing for herself as well as others, because she is not able to let go her ideals of pride and dignity?

  Two nineteenth-century pictures of Medea bring out this point acutely. Eugène Delacroix’s Medea is what Galen has in mind: a human overwhelmed by irrational feelings to the point of appearing radically nonhuman. Half-naked for no very obvious reason, her hair wild, her vision symbolically shadowed, Medea writhes with her children in a dark cave, hunted like the animal she appears to be. Frederick Sandys’s Symbolist picture, on the other hand, presents Medea as quite in control of what she is doing. Surrounded by the instruments of her revenge, which is just beginning, Medea is aware of, and troubled by, choosing the perverse course, but she is presented as reasoning in a controlled and deliberate way. The picture beautifies and aestheticizes revenge in a way distancing it from the Stoics, but it is still far nearer the Stoic than Galen’s Platonic view.

  There is no neutral way of presenting Euripides’ Medea; directors and actors have to make fundamental decisions as to how she is to be represented, and they will be influenced by the translation or version used. This is one reason why she has remained a key case for discussion of reason and the passions. It seems, then, that any reflection about a case like this will reveal that we need to pursue philosophical explanation.

  1. Delacroix’s Medea: a hunted animal

  2. Sandys’s Medea: deliberately choosing evil

  But philosophical explanation is itself divided! How then can it advance us?

  Philosophical explications of what is going on in a puzzling and difficult case may not leave us with a general consensus. (The more puzzling the case, the less likely this is to happen.) But we are driven to reflect philosophically about reason and passion for the reason already mentioned: until we try to understand what is happening, we are opaque to ourselves. If I act in anger, and reflect afterwards that I went against what I hold to be the best course, then I don’t know why I acted as I did. If I accept Plato’s theory, I will think of myself as internally divided, and my action as the result either of agreement between the parts of myself, or as the outcome of a battle between them (depending on whether I think of the parts other than reason as being themselves receptive to reasoning, or as non-rational, subhuman parts). If I accept the Stoic theory, I will think of myself as oscillating, as a whole, between different courses of action, motivated either by reasons of my overall good or by reasons infected by various emotions. Either way I will understand more about myself and other people.

  Philosophical understanding, in the tradition of ancient philosophy, is, as we shall see, systematic, part of a large theory. Plato’s idea that the soul has distinct parts is worked out in different contexts in different dialogues. In the Timaeus, for example, he argues that the soul’s parts are actually located in different parts of the body. In the Republic he draws an elaborate analogy between the parts of the individual’s soul and the parts of an ideal society. The Stoic theory of the emotions is part of their ethical theory, and also part of the account they give of the role of reason in human life and in the world as a whole.

  Most ancient philosophers see their task as being, in general, that of understanding the world, a task which includes understanding ourselves, since we are part of the world. Aristotle is the philosopher who puts the point most memorably: humans, he says, all desire by nature ‘to understand’. The Greek word here is often translated as ‘to know’, but this can be misleading. What is meant is not a piling-up of known facts, but rather the achievement of understanding, something that we do when we master a field or body of knowledge and explain systematically why things are the way they are. We often begin looking for such explanations when we find things problematic, and Aristotle stresses that philosophy begins with wonder and puzzlement, and develops as we find more and more complex answers to and explanations for what were problems for us. We begin by being puzzled by the phenomenon of acting in passion against our better judgement; we understand it better when we have a theory which explains it to us in terms of a more general theory of human action. (Aristotle has his own theory on the topic, one distinctly closer to the Stoics than to Plato.)

  * * *

  Aristotle (384-322 BC) Plato’s greatest pupil, differs from him radically in method. He is a problem-centred philosopher, beginning from puzzles which arise either in everyday thinking or in the works of previous philosophers. He has a huge range of interests, producing work on a variety of topics, from formal logic (which he invented), to biology, literary theory, politics, ethics, cosmology, rhetoric, political history, metaphysics and much more. He is a systematic thinker, using concepts such as form and matter in a variety of philosophical contexts. However, his works (we have his lecture and research notes) aspire to system rather than achieving it. Later his work was systematized in often inappropriate ways (see pp. 90–1, 93).

  See the picture on p. 92.

  * * *

  What happens when I find that there are conflicting theories on the matter, and that holding one theory involves disagreeing with another? I am advancing further towards understanding, not retreating. For now it is clear that I have to put in some work for myself, in examining the different theories and the reasoning behind them – for I have to work out for myself which theory is most likely to be the right one. In the present case, it is clear that the Platonic and Stoic views can’t both be right. Which is? Whatever I conclude, I have to be drawn into the theories and their reasonings. If I just feel that one appeals more than the other, but cannot back this up with argument, I have given up on my original drive to understand what is going on, to get beyond feeling puzzled and find some explanation. Ancient philosophy (indeed, philosophy generally) is typically marked by a refusal to leave things opaque and puzzling, to seek to make them clearer and more transparent to reason. Hence reading ancient philosophy tends to engage the reader’s reasoning immediately, to set a dialogue of minds going.

  Ancient philosophy is sometimes taught as a procession of Great Figures, whose ideas the student is supposed to take in and admire. Nothing could be further from its spirit. When we open most works of ancient philosophy, we find that an argument is going on – and that we are being challenged to join in.

  Chapter 2

  Why do we read Plato’s Republic?

  Why do we read Plato’s Republic? The question can point in more than one way. It could be asking for the point of reading this work – what we get out of it philosophically. Or it could be asking about the historical pressures of various kinds which bring it about that this, rather than some other, is the work we read. I might, for example, read it because it is part of a required course at university. Many people do just that. We do not read works of philosophy in a vacuum, and there are important, though far from completely understood, connections between the context of reading a work and what the reader will get out of it.

  The first chapter introduced you to an issue in ancient philosophical debate which was (I hope) accessible without much adjustment. But not all issues in ancient philosophy are so easily available to a modern reader. In this chapter we will pull back the focus and look at some of the factors which separate us from ancient philosophical texts and issues. It is only when we confront these, as well as the factors making some ancient philosophy immediately engaging to us, that we will understand how we can read and argue
with texts from such a distant and different culture.

  The tradition and how it got to us

  Before turning to the Republic, we need to think about the whole tradition of ancient philosophy, how it has come down to us, some of the changes that have occurred in our reception of it, and the way in which such changes can, for example, shape our reading of Plato and of a work like the Republic.

  Ancient philosophy is, to begin with, a very large and rich tradition. It begins in the sixth century BC, and ends in the West with the end of the Western Roman Empire and in the East with the fall of the Byzantine Empire. It arose and developed in Greek city-states, especially Athens, but continued to flourish as the Romans dominated the Mediterranean and beyond, and formed an important part of culture in most of the Roman empire, merging into Christian culture with varied success. It forms a huge and extremely diverse body of texts. It contains a number of very different kinds of philosophical movements, from those that prize mystical insight and dogma to those that favour rigorous argument; a number of different and opposed schools, such as Stoics and Epicureans; and a range of wildly different philosophical positions, including materialism, dualism, scepticism and relativism. More will be said about these differences in Chapter 6; here I shall focus on factors in our reception of this tradition which make a difference to the way that ancient philosophy is seen as forming a tradition or canon, and to the way in which certain philosophers are seen as important.

  Firstly, the issue of which parts of a tradition are seen as important only arises when we have the tradition. Much of ancient philosophy was lost to Western Europe in the period of the break-up of the Western Roman Empire, for a variety of reasons to do with cultural changes and the breakdown of political stability. Apart from Plato’s dialogue Timaeus, for many hundreds of years the only ancient philosophical works which were known in depth were those of Aristotle, who dominated medieval philosophy. The period of the Renaissance saw the rediscovery, from a variety of sources, of a much wider range of ancient philosophers. But with the chances and fortunes of history, many ancient authors’ original works have been lost, leaving us with only second-hand accounts of their theories and fragments of their own words. This is the fate of all the ‘Presocratic’ philosophers and of many philosophers after Aristotle, in the so-called Hellenistic period. Discoveries continue to be made of ancient philosophical works, mainly on papyrus rolls discovered in the dry sands of Egypt – and one collection of Epicurean works preserved in charred form at the eruption of Vesuvius. But big gaps remain, and for some individuals and schools of philosophy we remain dependent on often inadequate later accounts.

  * * *

  In AD 79 the eruption of the volcano Vesuvius covered in molten lava many aristocrats’ country houses at Herculaneum, near Naples. This included one, which has been excavated since the eighteenth century, which turned out to contain a large library of books devoted to the works of the philosopher Epicurus and to later followers’ discussions of his ideas. They lift the curtain on a hitherto unknown community of philosophical debate among Epicureans and with other schools. The books are rolls of papyrus (ancient paper), the charred fragments of which have been carefully studied by scholars.

  Much of our evidence for ancient philosophy has a similarly accidental quality, and has come down to us in fragments.

  * * *

  Differences of approach

  This situation opens up differences of approach. With authors whose work has to be studied in fragments and through later sources whose own approach has to be taken into account, historical and interpretative questions have to be faced before we can confidently assume that we actually have the philosophical position in question right. Wading right in with philosophical questions risks prematurely finding a position which turns out to reflect only our own philosophical concerns. It is more straightforward to approach authors whose own work we have as partners in a philosophical dialogue. It is not very surprising, then, that the authors whose philosophy is most prominently taught in philosophy departments are Plato and Aristotle, from whom we have complete works, rather than authors like Epicurus of whose original words we have only a small fraction.

  3. A papyrus fragment of a work on anger by the Epicurean Philodemus

  This contrast can be overstated, however. Plato is the only author for whom we can feel certain that we possess all the works he made public. None of Aristotle’s published works survive entire; what we have are his (very copious) research and teaching notes, which raise interpretative problems of their own. But even Plato is not a straightforward author to read; for one thing, the dialogue form distances the author from the ideas he puts forward, and interpretations of Plato are probably the most varied of any ancient philosopher. So it is just as possible to get Plato or Aristotle wrong by prematurely taking them to be engaged with our philosophical issues as it is with the Presocratics. And in any case authors and schools whose original work we have only in part can pose philosophical issues that engage us directly, despite the additional historical and interpretative work we have to do. The last twenty years has seen a huge shift in interest in research, publication and teaching in ancient philosophy, away from an almost exclusive focus on Plato and Aristotle to a concern with Hellenistic (post-Aristotelian) philosophers.

  Changing interests

  Why do we focus on one part of the many-faceted tradition of ancient philosophy rather than another? Apart from the vagaries of transmission, and the question of whether historical or philosophical interest is the driving one, there remains an ineliminable factor of philosophical interest, and this changes from period to period. Researchers and teachers are now interested in a wider range of issues and philosophers than they were twenty years ago, when Plato and Aristotle were more dominant; and similar shifts and changes have occurred many times in the past. Since there is no one single neutral way to take in, never mind discuss, the huge ancient tradition in full, this selectivity is not surprising. Nor should it surprise us that if we are introduced to one way of engaging with ancient philosophy, this should seem natural and inevitable, and that its limitations should become invisible, especially as it gets passed down from teacher to pupil and solidifies in books and journal articles.

  We can, at least sometimes, trace an intellectual context to the way in which different parts of the ancient philosophical tradition are found interesting at different times. Some works of ancient philosophy seem dormant, as it were, at some times. They do not raise issues that people already find gripping, or ask questions to which people have competing answers. Then at other times they do do these things. Which parts of the ancient tradition that we engage with depends, at least to some extent, on our own philosophical interests. (How these, and changes in these, should be explained is another matter.) As we shall see, this is not a oneway street. Engaging with texts in ancient philosophy can help us to clarify and further our own thinking on some issues. (More on this in Chapter 3.) Because of their prominence in the teaching and development of Western philosophical thinking since the eighteenth century, some works of ancient philosophy form not just literally the ancient history of the subject, but part of the modern tradition too.

  The changing fortunes of Plato’s Republic

  Plato’s Republic is a dramatic example of the way a work of ancient philosophy can become, or cease to be, interesting to think about in contemporary philosophical terms. It is probably the most dramatic example.

  For most of the twentieth century, and some of the nineteenth, the Republic has been far and away the best-known work of ancient philosophy. It is probably the only work in ancient philosophy that a large number of people have read. In universities, colleges and schools in many countries it figures in courses in ancient philosophy, in introductory philosophy, in ‘Western Civilization’, in political philosophy and in humanities. If you have to touch on ancient philosophy, or Plato, in any of these courses, the Republic is seen as the obvious work to choose. In modern readings of Plato the Republ
ic is the centrepiece and high point of Plato’s thought, the work which best presents the most important aspects of Plato’s thought.

  There is another important point: the Republic is predominantly read in the light of its brief account of an ideal society. Plato there sketches an ideally just society, in which there would be complete division of labour between wealth on the one hand and political power on the other. The rulers would be ‘Guardians’, who would devote their lives to the public good and running the state. Those engaged in what we call economic activity would be excluded from political rule, on the grounds that their way of life narrows them to consider only their own self-interest and makes them unfit to take part in the public arena where what is at stake is the common good. The Guardian class, by contrast, is educated and trained to care primarily for the common good and to sacrifice their own interests to this.

  It is often assumed that this ideal political construction is the organizing idea of the book; indeed often the book is introduced as though it were Plato’s chief response to what he thought were political questions of the time. The Republic contains a number of themes. However, commonly what is seen as holding all these together is Plato’s political vision, the idea that only in an ideal state, ruled in the interests of all, can people be virtuous and so happy. Sometimes this ideal of rule by the wise is seen as a reaction to the Athenian culture of democracy in which Plato grew up, and against which he reacted in what is assumed to be an élitist and reactionary spirit. So deeply ingrained is this way of reading the work that, at least in American libraries, the Republic and works about it are shelved in the political science section, rather than the history of philosophy section. The very way we have access to the book suggests the way we should read it. And it is often taken for granted that the book should be taught as a contribution to political thought, with its other aspects as extras.