The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy
Page 34
This state of affairs is most likely to be the trace, at a certain degree of philosophical sophistication, of the original dissociation between the soul, conceived as a principle of life, and the whole range of functions that we are accustomed to call psychological, such as feelings, passions, and cognitive processes. Although the Homeric human being may possess more unity than B. Snell’s celebrated theory allowed,5 it still holds true that psychê was not for Homer the principle of this unity but more like one of its constitutive elementsalbeit a vital one.
As the fifth century progresses, however, soul, sensation, and thought become more and more tightly associated. One can even say that the history of this triad, during this period, is the history of its constitution, which ultimately led to a unified theory of psychological life.6
This unification is the result of a complicated process, in which three main fields must have interacted. It seems to be obvious that the poetic tradition, especially lyric poetry, played an important role in this story. It is there, for the first time, that the soul appears as the main organ of emotional life.7 In addition, religious movements certainly contributed a great deal to the conceptualization of a personal psychic entity. Soul/body dualism may be said to go back to Homer, since, if psychê is life, sôma is as such the corpse. But the meaning of the opposition changes with the spreading of beliefs in transmigration, whose importance in the sixth and fifth centuries is beyond doubt.8 The assimilation, in Orphic circles, of the body to the soul’s tomb turns Homeric values upside down. The soul, far from suffering absolute deprivation when it leaves the body, only then begins its true life. It is difficult to know whether psychê was used to refer to the immortal “self” in Pythagorean circles9; but significantly Empedocles avoided using the term in this sense not only in his physical poem but also in his Purifications, despite the strong Orphic and Pythagorean background of the work.10 Psychê, in this poem, is no more than life, as we have seen; the self is referred to through the much more evocative word daimôn (literally divinity). Thus when Democritus identifies the soul with the dwelling-place of one’s good or evil daimôn (DK 68 B171), he appears to be invoking a secularized version of the extraordinary spiritual promotion that was bestowed on the old “vital breath” in the wake of religious considerations and cults of salvation.
Philosophy certainly played a role also in this evolution, but one that is somewhat difficult to assess.11 Aristotle tells us that Thales attributed a soul to the magnet, because it moves iron,12 and Anaximenes probably identified the soul with his first principle, the air; he could thus claim that soul governs the universe, just as it governs us (DK 13 B2).13 There are several indications that further developments of the concept of the soul were shaped by two demands that go in two potentially opposite directions. On the one hand, the task was to unify psychic functions; on the other hand, to differentiate them. If Philolaus B13 is genuine,14 it reflects some kind of intermediate stage: soul, localized in the heart, is recognized as being the sensory organ, while intelligence is still kept apart and localized in the brain. But one generation later, in Diogenes of Apollonia and Democritus, integration has reached its final stage. Air, for Diogenes, and spherical atoms, for Democritus, are both the material that constitutes the soul, and the sensory and intellectual centre of cognition.15 Theophrastus’ careful wording in his presentation of Diogenes’ doctrine (Sens. 39) suggests that this comprehensiveness was intended: “Diogenes,” he writes, “links to air sensations too, as he does life and thought.” Anaximenes had identified the psychê, in its Homeric sense of life, with air, and air was probably also responsible for what we call thought, since it governs Anaximenes’ universe. It now turns out that air is also responsible for sensations. The next question would of course be how to differentiate between sensation and thought. Diogenes invokes the quality of the air (only dry and pure air can think), Democritus invokes localization (the brain thinks).16 This kind of criterion did not convince Aristotle that the difference had been accounted for.
The soul’s new status as the central organ of life, emotion, and cognitive processes alike, reshaped current views about the relationship between body and soul. Two texts are significant in this respect. The author of the medical treatise On diet, talking about dreams, emphasizes the autonomy of the soul in the very exercise of its bodily functions:
When the body is awake, the soul is its servant, and is never her own mistress, but divides her attention among many things, assigning a part of it to each faculty of the body – to hearing, to sight, to touch, to walking, and to acts of the whole body … But when the body is at rest, the soul, being set in motion and awake, administers her own household, and of herself performs all the acts of the body. For the body when asleep has no perception; but the soul when awake has cognizance of all things – sees what is visible, hears what is audible, walks, touches, feels pain, ponders. (IV.86, Loeb tr.)
This physiological autonomy finds its moral counterpart in Democritus, who takes soul to be responsible for the state of the body:
If the body takes the soul to court, accusing it of all the pain and suffering of a lifetime, and he [= Democritus] is judge of the case, he would gladly find the soul guilty for having ruined the body with neglect and dissolved it with drunkenness, for having debauched and distracted it with indulgence, just as the user of a tool or equipment in bad condition is held responsible for its reckless misuse. (DK 68 B159)17
Even if it is impossible to decide whether the last comparison belongs to the author of the quotation (Plutarch), or goes back to Democritus himself, it is obvious that we are pretty close here to Socratic doctrine, just as by the end of the fifth century, Plato’s and Aristotle’s comprehensive concept of the soul is to a great extent already available.
What role did Heraclitus play in this development? Occurrences of the term psychê are remarkably frequent in his fragments,18 a fact that obviously reveals his keen interest in the soul. In some cases at least, the soul appears as an organ of control, as in B117 (“A man when he is drunk is led by an unfledged boy, stumbling and not knowing where he goes, for he has his soul moist”); or as the source of psychological life, on one reading at least (the text is disputed) of B85 (“it is hard to fight anger (thymos); for one buys it at the price of soul”).
Caution is in order, however. As with a number of other phenomena, Heraclitus’ emphasis seems to have been less on the soul’s governing role than on its paradoxical identity. His special interest in the soul is best explained, I suggest, by the fact that psychê – our own psychê – has the single privilege, among the many phenomena that display the universal tension between opposites, to be able to feel it. According to B77, for the dry soul (life, that is), psychic pleasure consists in becoming moist, and thus experiencing its own death, since moisture is what destroys dryness (“for souls, it is either pleasure or death to become moist”). Be that as it may, Heraclitus’ statements on the soul seem to presuppose that it exercises some kind of controlling function rather than contributes to establishing the view. In this regard, it may be significant that Heraclitus offers no physiological theory about cognitive mechanisms and other vital functions.19 Yet the double process of differentiation and unification that the soul underwent during this period would hardly have occurred without the emergence of physiological theories. On this point, it is interesting to contrast Heraclitus with Diogenes. Diogenes’ theory relies on the same opposition that Heraclitus uses between the dry and the moist. But for him this means giving an extremely detailed account of how dry air and vital fluids (blood in the first place) are responsible for the totality of physiological functions – not only the senses and thought but also nutrition, sleep, respiration, and digestion. Nothing of the kind is to be found in Heraclitus. This is probably the reason why Theophrastus’ De sensibus (On the senses), which includes a detailed account of Diogenes’ theory (43–45), has nothing whatever to say about Heraclitus.
The question about Heraclitus’ role in the development of a un
ified psychology raises the issue of the kind of interest that early Greek philosophers had in the various psychological functions, whether cognitive or vital. This issue is crucial for the discussion of early views about thinking and the senses.
2. DISTINGUISHING THE SENSES AND THE MIND
In his treatise On the soul Aristotle claims that the Ancients (hoi archaioi) took sensation and thought to be identical (De an. III.3 427a2I-22). A contextualized version of the same verdict appears in Metaphysics IV.5 1009b12–15: “Because they assumed that sensation was thinking, and that the former consisted in an alteration, they claim that sensory appearance is true of necessity.” In the following sentence, Aristotle names Empedocles, Democritus, and “so to speak every other,” before adducing evidence, either about the alleged premise or the conclusion, from Empedocles, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, and an anonymous body of thinkers who took a line from Homer as support for their view. This evidence is worth looking at.20
(a) “A saying of Anaxagoras to some of his friends is also related, that things would be for them such as they supposed them to be.” Aristotle relies here on oral tradition, rather than on Anaxagoras’ treatise. The apophthegm does not mention the senses, and the story is about “what appears to [Anaxagoras’] friends,” which, of course, does not imply that Anaxagoras himself would take what appears to be true to be true actually – rather the other way round. All these features suggest that Aristotle did not find in Anaxagoras’ writings anything to support the view he wishes to attribute to him.
(b) Similar caution is required in interpreting Parmenides and Empedocles. Parmenides B16 says:
For as is at any moment the composition of the much-wandering limbs,
so mind is present to human beings; for them in each and all,
that which thinks is the same thing, the substance of their limbs;
for that of which there is more is thought.21
The fragment does not speak of the senses, but, as Theophrastus remarked (Sens. 3), of cognition in general (gnôsis); it concerns the thoughts of mortals (noos, noêma, phronein), which are characterized by their instability. The lines, which must come from the second part of the poem, do not represent Parmenides’ views about correct thinking, which, at the very least, is as important to somebody’s views about what thinking is as to his views about everyday (erroneous) thinking. As far as Empedocles is concerned, we shall see that Aristotle may have had better reasons for foisting on him, rather than on Parmenides,22 the view that sense perception and thinking are identical, even if the passages to which he refers, B106 and B108, basically describe how human thinking varies (one should stress that in B106 at least, this variation is positive, not negative):
Insofar as they [= the elements] have changed in their nature, so far changed thoughts (phronein) present themselves to them. (DK 31 108)
For man’s cunning (mêtis) grows according to what is present. (B106)
Aristotle’s complex strategy in Metaphysics IV, like so much in this book, has its roots in Plato’s Theaetetus (“knowledge is sensation” is the first thesis to be examined in the dialogue). This cannot be analyzed here, but it should be fairly obvious that the historical value of his remarks cannot be read straight off the text. This is confirmed by Theophrastus’ treatment of the same topic in his treatise On the senses. It is true that to a certain extent Theophrastus gives support to Aristotle’s claims. However, he is conspicuously more careful than his master. For one thing, he does not attribute the identity thesis to “the Ancients” in general, but only to Parmenides and Empedocles. Moreover, his treatment of these two authors is more nuanced than Aristotle’s. The nuance may be subtle indeed in Parmenides’ case. In Sens. 4, the sentence: “For he (Parmenides) speaks about perceiving and thinking as if they were identical,” following the quotation of B16, is introduced as a justification of the fact that Parmenides spoke about thinking in terms of its instability (rather than as something that does not vary, as must have been presupposed in the Peripatetic point of view); the sentence does not strictly speaking assert that Parmenides took intellectual cognition to be identical with sensation. His report on Empedocles is even more telling: “Thinking takes place in virtue of what is similar, ignorance in virtue of what is different, whereby he (Empedocles) implies that thinking is identical or very similar to sensation” (Sens. 10). First, thinking is opposed to ignoring, and hence refers to true thinking or knowledge, not to thinking in general or false thinking. Second, the reason given for assuming that knowledge and sensation are the same makes clear that what is identical is not sensation and knowledge themselves but rather the principle of their explanation. The idea is that sensation and thinking both take place in virtue of what is like (to homoion), and the absence thereof in virtue of what is different/contrary.23 Third, Aristotle’s “identical” is corrected by the addition of “or very similar,” a formula that allows a certain amount of difference. Last but not least, Theophrastus also makes clear that Aristotle’s statement is to be construed as an implication, not as a report.24 Thus, although Theophrastus’ phrasing reminds us of Aristotle’s, the implications are different.
This is significant. As a matter of fact, not only does Theophrastus not indulge in generalisations, he is also quite eager, throughout his treatise, to draw attention to the presence of an explicit distinction between sensation and knowledge in the authors he talks about. Thus he typically devotes a special section to “thought,” as in the cases of Empedocles (10), Diogenes of Apollonia (44), and Democritus (58). He praises Alcmaeon for having offered a criterion that makes it possible to distinguish animals that possess only sensation from human beings, who have both sensation and understanding (25). We also get a precious indication, albeit an indirect one, in the case of Clidemus, who claimed that among the senses, “only the ears do not distinguish by themselves, but transmit to the mind” (38). It seems obvious that Aristotle’s most faithful disciple must have thought that Aristotle had, to say the least, overstated his case. By and large, Theophrastus’ doxography shows that “the Ancients” did draw the kind of distinction that Aristotle previously denied them (see p. 255).
Fragments and testimonies from other sources confirm this. Philolaus B13 (see p. 252), Xenophanes B34, and several of Heraclitus’ fragments (DK 28 B1, 17, 34, 56, 72) take intellectual cognition to possess distinctive characteristics. Democritus notoriously opposed two kinds of cognition (gnômê), one that consists of “sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch,” and another one that is “separate from this” (DK 68 B11). In a famous passage employing personification, he had the senses defying the mind: “Wretched mind (phrên), do you take your assurances from us and then overthrow us? Our overthrow is your downfall” (B125).25 Thus, there is a sense in which the distinction between sensation and thought was a matter of course. Indeed, one wonders how it could have been otherwise. After all, part of the philosophical programme of the early Greek philosophers was to go beyond the evidence of the senses. Aristotle himself was very aware, in other passages, that the distinction was fundamental to some of them at least, and first of all to Parmenides. For in the Metaphysics, he says that, besides admitting a single principle” according to reason,” Parmenides acknowledged two principles “according to sensation” (I.5 986b27), and in On coming to be and passing away, clearly referring to the Eleatics, he writes that “some of the older philosophers … were led to transcend sense perception, and to disregard it on the ground that one ought to follow reason” (1.8 325a13).26
Why Aristotle came to hold two such different views about Parmenides, and whether he would have been prepared to find a similar duality in other early thinkers, are questions beyond the scope of this chapter. Yet, assuming the existence of a distinction between sensation and thought, we must ask what it amounted to.
I have already stressed Theophrastus’ interest in spotting the distinction in the works he read, but his indications about its nature are at best sketchy and, in some cases, no less misleading than Aristotle’s univ
ersalizing view. This is more because of what he omits than because of what he does say.
Some functional differences are indicated. Alcmaeon uses a word for “understanding” (syniêmi) that suggests some kind of functional distinction between perceiving (which is shared by all animals) and intellectual insight, which is distinctively human (Sens. 25). In Empedocles the opposition is between the fragmented insight of sense perception and synthetic insight through thinking, which in some sense is synaesthetic.27 Diogenes’ case is interestingly ambiguous. Thinking is distinguished from sense perception, but first, the distinction is material rather than functional. Diogenes says that we think “thanks to dry pure air,” when distribution of this air through the whole body is not prevented by various blocking factors (44). Moreover, Theophrastus’ testimony strongly suggests that Diogenes thought of nous as being the ultimate organ of perception. For in order to prove that “internal air” was the perceiving organ, he adduced as evidence the fact that “often, when our nous is directed towards other objects (when we think of something else), we neither see nor perceive” (43). If I am right, Diogenes was extending Clidemus’ scheme to sight as well as to hearing, if not to all the senses. (Xenophanes, in the wake of Homer, had already said that the divine nous sees and hears, DK 21 B24). If this is so, the distinction between perceiving and thinking in Diogenes threatens to evaporate, although in a way Diogenes might be considered as making a real advance, for he anticipates the distinction in Plato’s Theaetetus between the sense organs through which we perceive and the centre of sensation which perceives (184c). The difference, of course, is that Diogenes does not hesitate to call this centre nous, whereas Plato calls it psychê, leaving room for nous as a separate faculty.