by A. A. Long
Aitia occurs only once in Democritus (DK 68 B83), with the meaning “reason” or “motive.” Prophasis for its part has the meaning of “excuse” or “justification” (DK 68 B119), which is quite normal among historians and doctors.5 In Gorgias aitia, which occurs in the Helen and Palamedes (DK 82 B11, 11a), naturally retains the significance of “culpability” or “responsibility,” which is standard in moral and juridical discourse. The term is used in the same Gorgianic way by Antiphon in his Tetralogies. These rhetorical exercises, designed to prepare people for argument in the law courts, make a strict connection between legal responsibility and culpability or religious pollution (miasma).6
In his second Tetralogy the question at issue is the responsibility of a youth who, in the course of training, threw a javelin, killing one of his associates who had inadvertently entered the grounds of the gymnasium. This type of problem resembles an anecdote told by Plutarch with reference to Protagoras and Pericles (DK 80 A10). They had spent an entire day discussing those who were responsible (aitioi) for the involuntary killing of a certain Epitimus, in circumstances similar to those treated by Antiphon. This was clearly an exemplary legal question: Who or what was reponsible, the javelin, the thrower, or the gymnastic officials?
We are not dealing in these cases with “speculation on cause and effect,” as Adkins has suggested in regard to Gorgias, treating that as one of the main themes of the contemporary sophists.7 The evidence points rather to a debate on questions of responsibility and culpability both in a moral and religious context – a debate that reaches one of its high points in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, where Oedipus declares himself morally and legally innocent (katharos) because his crimes were involuntary (lines 546–8; see also 266–72) – and in the legal sphere, as with Gorgias, Antiphon, and the story about Protagoras.8 The same issue, as we shall see in the next section, occupies a central position in the historians’ thoughts about political actions.
It seems certain, then, that neither in their physics nor in their sophistic debates were early Greek philosophers concerned with any theoretical work on the language and concepts of causation in general. To discover the first traces of this, we need to extend the investigation into the fields of historiography and especially medicine.
THE HISTORIANS
The history of Herodotus begins with a discussion of the aitia for the wars between Greeks and barbarians. At issue here are the reasons or motives of war, but these consist of a reciprocal dispute, an exchange of charges for the responsibility for crimes committed and for acts of retaliation. In the eyes of the Greeks, the Phoenicians are aitioi, culpable for the wrongs (adikêmata) committed against them (I.1). But the Greeks in their turn are culpable for adikia against the barbarians and at the end are considered “greatly culpable” (megalôs aitioi, I.4.1) for the aggression deployed against Troy. Throughout Herodotus the normal meaning of aitia remains “charge for a crime committed,” and also “culpability” that constitutes the motive for punishment (cf. I.137.1).
This use of aitia (and correlatively of aitios) is a clear extension of judicial language into the context of political disputes. In some cases (e.g., IV. 167.3) the charge is only a “pretext” (proschêma) adopted to justify a violent act. The association of this word with aitia is interesting because in one place (IV. 133.1) proschêma is linked to prophasis, and prophasis in Herodotus has exactly its normal meanings, “pretext” or “excuse” (cf. IV. 145.1). Now, if aitia partially overlaps prophasis, that is certainly not a move in the direction of causal language, but rather an indication that we are dealing with the exchange of charges, imputations, excuses, and pretexts that are typical of legal and political disputes. Prophasis can also take on the meaning – consistent with but slightly different from pretext – of “chance circumstance,” by means of which something predestined takes place. Thus Herodotus introduces the story of the Scythian King Scyles’ ruin: “Because it was destined (edei) that things would go badly for him, this was the occasion for it” (apo prophaseos toiêsde, IV.79.1). So prophasis also signifies the obvious and visible aspect of a hidden destiny.
Up to this point, as has been seen, Herodotus’ language does not depart from the traditional uses in contexts of justice, ethics, politics, and religion. However, vague signs can be found of a shift towards an embryonic transference from the domain of responsibility to that of causality. In discussing the reasons for the flooding of the Nile, Herodotus reports the opinion that the etesian winds are responsible (aitioi) for it, and refutes it on the basis of the fact that the flooding occurs even if these winds are not present (II.20.2-3). The passage can certainly be read as acquitting the winds of blame, but it also hints at an important requirement of causal thinking, the presence of the cause in connection with its effects. In the same passage, Herodotus declares that in his own view the sun is responsible (aitios) equally for the flooding and for the air’s dryness in Egypt (II.25.5-26.1). Here too we find a vague hint of transition from the language of imputability to the conception of causality.
Other passages, all of a hesitant or negative kind and featuring the nominalized adjective to aition, admit to the same interpretation. Thus (VII. 125): “I am puzzled about what the motive (to aition) was that compelled (to anankazon) the lions to spare the other animals and to attack the camels, a creature they had never seen or had any experience of.” The hesitant tone of the passage implies the sense: “I don’t know how to find an explanation for this event.” What is clear is that, just as in the discussion of the Nile’s flooding, we are witnessing a transition, however vague and unarticulated, in the direction of a type of causal thinking.
The beginning of Thucydides’ History is entirely Herodotean – to describe the charges and quarrels (I.23.5: aitiai/diaphorai), that is, the motives (aitias) publicly adopted for the outbreak of war between the Athenians and the Spartans (cf. I.146). The sense that Thucydides normally gives to aitia in reference to political controversies is an extension of its usage to signify responsibility or culpability in juridical or ethical contexts. Hence, it is frequently associated with hamartêma (error of fault) and adikein (wrongdoing) (e.g., II.60.4-7, 1.39.3, IV.114.5). In the debate between the Corinthians and the Spartans (I.69.6) aitia, a “complaint” brought against friends who err – hence a term free from hostility – is contrasted with katêgoria an “accusation” that is directed against enemies. However this psychological nuance, even if it originates from judicial language, is not consistently adopted by Thucydides, who often uses aitia in reference to antagonists.
A move in a decidedly causal direction has often been seen in the celebrated passage (I.23.6) where Thucydides, after setting out the complaints and charges exchanged between the Athenians and Spartans, adds that “The truest prophasis, although the one least manifest (aphanestatê) in the debates,” was the fact that the Spartans were forced (anankasai) to make war from their fear of the growing Athenian power. What needs to be emphasized here is that prophasis does not mean “the ultimate cause” as distinct from the stated pretexts (aitiai). The word prophasis (derived not from phêmi but from phainô, as Irigoin has shown) means “to show, to bring to light.”9 Thucydides contrasts this prophasis with the speeches of the combatants that conceal the true reasons for the war. What he means, then, is, “The truest reason that I can exhibit, notwithstanding the fact that it was not stated publicly,” was actually the unavoidable situation, both psychological and political, in which the Spartans found themselves.10 We are again in the general vicinity not of causal thinking but of the courtroom – the discovery of a hidden motivation.11
More important and more difficult to interpret is a passage on the plague at Athens (II.48.3) where the crucial word is not prophasis but aitia. Thucydides writes, “As to the plague, let anyone, physician or layman, state, to the extent of his knowledge, from what source it probably (eikos) originated and what he thinks (nomizei) were the causes (aitias) of this catastrophe sufficient to have the power (dynamis) to produce it.”
The occurrence of terms like eikos and nomizein here may suggest that we are again in a context of imputing responsibility and blame (as in Herodotus II.25.5 cited above). Yet, the connection of aitia with dynamis, in the sense of “capacity to produce effects,” undoubtedly gives this passage a distinctly causal sense and aligns it with certain medical texts such as Ancient medicine that make a still greater advance in this direction. We should note that there, as here in Thucydides, the causal expression is aitia, not prophasis or the neuter form to aition.
This last term, which Thucydides does not use very frequently, normally means “motive” in a quite general sense.12 However, there is one interesting occurrence of it in a passage very similar to those we have cited from Herodotus. In regard to a tidal wave, Thucydides states his opinion of the cause (aition, III.89.5), “an earthquake without which I do not think such an event could have happened.” Here we observe not only the extension of the concept of responsibility to any phenomenon (Frede’s point about the origin of causal thinking) but also a formulation, as in Herodotus, of the necessary presence of the cause in connection with its effect. Here too we can see the beginning of a transition towards a form of causal thinking, but it is still vague and without any conceptual generality. It is among the medical writers that we shall find a more decisive step taken in this direction.
MEDICINE
The medical material that could be discussed for our purpose in this chapter, even confining it to the fifth-century writings, is too extensive to be investigated fully here. Instead, I shall limit myself to considering a number of crucially important texts that provide the coordinates for a map of the medical thinking relevant to our topic. So far as their relative dates are concerned, we know too little to proceed on a chronological basis, and in any case, we can find divergent positions adopted in Hippocratic texts that are probably contemporeaneous. We cannot speak of a univocal progress of medical thought during the fifth century, either for our own topic or for any other. At one extreme we find writings in which the language of causal explanation is completely absent or irrelevant. Thus, the words aitia and prophasis never occur in De locis in homine, regarded as one of the oldest works in the Hippocratic corpus (440–430?), and also from some points of view as one of the most authoritative.13
Terms for cause and responsibility are also nearly absent from a work as important as Prognostic, and here I need to clarify an equivocation widely found in the history of this work’s interpretation. It has been long supposed (on the basis of an unconsciously positivist prejudice) that the prognostic functions of Hippocratic “signs” were based on their character as “causes”: a sign (sêmeion) would thus be predictive because it constituted the cause of the effects that follow it in the duration of the disease. But this is entirely groundless.14 The Hippocratic sign (which retains some affinity with the prophetic predictions from which it originated and with which it competed) is predictive because it represents the visible aspect of a constellation of phenomena to which it is linked with a regularity registered by the physician’s memory and by the recording of prognostic manuals. It will suffice to cite on this a passage from Prognostic (sect. 4):
As to the motion of the hands, I know the following facts: in acute fevers, pneumonia, phrenitis and headache, if they move before the face, hunt in the empty air, pluck nap from the bedclothes, pick up bits, and snatch chaff from the walls – all these signs are bad and deadly.” (tr. Jones)
The motions of the hands are certainly, in no possible sense, “causes” of the death, rather, because they are regularly associated with a fatal ending of the disease, they represent the visible level of its otherwise unseen progression; they are an aperture through which the invisible (aphanes) makes itself evident (phaneron) and therefore predictable. Neither De locis nor Prognostic, then, have any bearing on the formation of causal thinking.
An intermediate position on our map is occupied by three treatises: two of these, On the sacred disease and Airs, waters and places, are rather similar and relatively old, while the third (On the nature of man), which probably belongs to the beginning of the fourth century and plays an important role in consolidating Hippocratic thought, was as well known to Aristotle as to Galen. Let us begin with On the sacred disease, in whose opening lines (as edited by Littré) many (starting with Jaeger) have seen the inaugural declaration of a full-fledged theory of natural causality. In Grensemann’s recent edition this reads: “As regards the so-called sacred disease [epilepsy] the situation is thus. It is not, in my opinion, any more divine or more sacred than any other disease but, just as others have a nature, from which they originate, so too it has a nature and a prophasis.“15
The sacred disease has a natural (not a divine) origin and therefore a prophasis – an explanation, a clearly adducible reason, just like the war in Thucydides’ prologue. The task of the Hippocratic treatise will consist in specifying this “public” explanation of epilepsy. By contrast, the author’s opponents, magicians and purifiers, attribute the disease to the divine in order that, if the patients die, “they can have the excuse (prophasis) to advance that not they but the gods were culpable (aitioi)“ (1.20). Here, as in Thucydides again, the language of prophasis/aitios slides clearly in the juridical direction of blame and exculpation, indicating a striking conceptual vagueness. This even returns in the statement with which the “positive” part of the text begins: “It is the brain which is responsible (aitios) for this ailment, as with all other serious diseases. In what way and for what reason (prophasis) it happens, I will clearly declare” (sect. 6). This language, on the one hand, recalls a speech in the law courts: the guilty party has been unmasked, and the methods and the motives of the crime have been revealed. But, on the other hand, prophasis (which, in the author’s usage, refers to the action of warm winds on the brain from which the ailment originates) goes beyond this context in the direction of causal explanation.
The same critical point emerges even more visibly in Airs, waters and places. In this work (which was well known to Plato), we find frequent instances of the adverbial use of anankê to designate the necessary dependence of peoples’ psycho-somatic characteristics on geography and climate.16 This deterministic context also influences the meaning assigned to the terms aitia/aitios and prophasis.
In some cases we are not far from Herodotus’ usage. Thus, for instance, the distinction between prophasis and aition (sect. 4): “Many abscesses occur for any reason (prophasis). The tension of the stomach and the hardness of the intestine are responsible (aition) for this.” More complex is the text of section 16: for the differences of character between Asians and Europeans, the seasons, which in Asia do not produce strong variations of temperature, are responsible (aitioi). For these reasons (prophaseis), the author adds, “and also on account of their laws,” which make them subject to monarchs, the Asians are weaker. It is very difficult to distinguish here between responsibility and cause on the one hand, and between explanation and cause in the strict sense on the other hand. This difficulty is due to more than one factor – the oscillation in the usage of terms, and the author’s adoption of a doubly deterministic perspective (environmental and political), expressed by such phrases as “and also,” which weaken the line of causation.
Still more interesting is the conceptual structure of section 22, where the topic is the reasons for the prevalent impotence of the Scythians, who “attribute the blame (aitia) for it to the gods.” According to the author, the affliction is due to the Scythians’ habit of riding, to swellings of the joints that ensue, and to the cure that they practise on themselves, cutting the veins behind their ears. Their impotence is due to this cluster of reasons (prophaseis), “and also” because their habit of wearing trousers and of riding prevents them from masturbating so that they forget about sexual desire. It is clear that the plethora of reasons adopted by the author cannot amount to a genuine causal nexus, but rather to a system of explanations (signified by apo/dia) that serves to invalidate the imputation of the ailme
nt to the divine and to restore it to the natural level of demonstrable evidence. (The same purpose is served by the author’s argument that impotence affects only the wealthy Scythians, who can afford to ride, which would not happen if the ailment were of a divine origin because they can ingratiate themselves with the gods by offering numerous sacrifices.)
Rather than a cause, we can speak here (as in connection with the double determinism of environment and politics) of the convergence of a plurality of circumstances or reasons that serve the needs of rational explanation. The conceptual vagueness surrounding causality can also be regarded in such passages as a richness in the forms of explanation that will still be echoed in Aristotelian thought.
In On the nature of man, we find language that is similar though less complicated. When faced with diseases of an epidemic character, we are told (sect. 9) “that it is necessary to impute the responsibility” (aitia) to that which is common to everyone, namely, the air breathed in. But in cases where the pathology differs, the individual’s dietetic regime will be responsible (aitia), and therefore therapy must attack the reason (prophasis) for the ailment. The possibility of ascertaining the reasons for the disease is interestingly connected with the ability to give a public account of its development (sect. 13). Here the language of prophasis is not far from Thucydides’ statement about the reasons for the Peloponnesian War, but at the same time, the passage shows a decisive transition towards the sense of giving the cause. This transition appears still more clearly in a number of texts that reflect sophistic influence on medical writing, such as On breaths and On the art, datable to the end of the fifth century or the beginning of the fourth century.