Lives of the Eminent Philosophers

by Pamela Mensch

  And Diogenes Laertius does provide us with a great deal about Pre-Socratic philosophers that is either unique or uniquely presented. Often it is most useful as a way to reconstruct how they were read and appreciated down to the Hellenistic period, although there is also plenty of other apparently reliable material. For Diogenes Laertius’ book is characterized by its profound heterogeneity—a feature fundamental to the kind of history he was engaged in, and which makes it difficult most of the time to decide who is speaking—Diogenes Laertius or the many sources he uses and arranges for his own, often inscrutable purposes.

  I shall finish, then, by showing how Diogenes may be the source for crucial information and insights about these ancient Greek philosophers—which makes him both an inexhaustible resource for scholarship and, in spite of his shortcomings, an everlasting source of reflection.

  ***

  The chapters on some of the archaic thinkers are rather meager. This is the case, for example, of the relevant chapters in Book 2; for the treatment of Archytas, Alcmeon, Hippasus, and Philolaus in Book 8; and with the accounts of Parmenides, Melissus, and Diogenes of Apollonia in Book 9.

  Even there, however, we get revealing snippets. We would not know, for example, how Alcmeon or Diogenes of Apollonia’s books began were it not for Diogenes Laertius’ antiquarian habit of quoting the first lines of a given work, which must have been originally a way of identifying its author (see 8.83 and 9.57, respectively). And the chapter on Parmenides is interesting just because it presents an unfamiliar way of reading him (“He was the first to declare that the earth is spherical and is situated at the center” [9.21]). Without Diogenes Laertius, we would not know about the ancient dispute as to whether Parmenides was the disciple of Xenophanes, of Anaximander, or of a certain Ameinas (an otherwise unknown Pythagorean)—which reflects the existence of a debate about Parmenides’ philosophical ascendance, and hence about the nature of his teachings.

  A last example I would like to adduce is the thin section on Anaximenes in Book 2, which, apart from reproducing apocryphal letters from Anaximenes to Pythagoras, also happens to contain a characterization of Anaximenes’ style that is important for appreciating the question of his place in the development of philosophical writing (“He wrote simply and plainly in the Ionic dialect” [2.3], implicitly opposing him to Anaximander’s “poetic” inclinations).

  More extended sections often preserve invaluable documents, even when these are of questionable provenance. Take the summary of Pythagoras’s alleged doctrines (8.25–33). This may tell us little about the verifiable views of the real Pythagoras, but it tells us a great deal about his reception in a period of which we otherwise know practically nothing. Consider, too, the detailed catalogue of Democritus’ works, which Thrasylus has organized by tetralogies, “as he also arranged Plato’s works” (9.46–49). Above all, Diogenes Laertius is our only source for a number of precious Pre-Socratic fragments, from Heraclitus and Empedocles.

  There is also Diogenes’ suggestive power, not in spite but rather because of his paractactical mode of composition. These seemingly miscellaneous juxtapositions often trigger reflection, and may well be themselves the expression of a special kind of reflection—the reader is free, at least, to read Diogenes as if his parataxis were a deliberate device.

  Consider just one example. In his life of Empedocles, Diogenes tells us, “Satyrus, in his Lives, says that Empedocles was also a doctor and an excellent orator”; he then adds that “Gorgias of Leontini, at any rate, who excelled in rhetoric and has left a treatise on the art, had been his student”; “Apollodorus, in his Chronology, says that Gorgias lived to the age of 109”; and then that Satyrus says Gorgias was present when Empedocles did magic tricks. Finally, he quotes nine lines where Empedocles promises a disciple that he will not only teach him to heal, but to “bring back from Hades a dead man’s strength,” and more generally to master meteorological phenomena. This jumble of information suggests a number of relationships between medicine and magic, magic and rhetoric, and master and disciple that, while they remain indefinite, are also open to a variety of intriguing interpretations, some of which are reflected in scholarly literature about Empedocles and Gorgias.

  But perhaps the ultimate source of Diogenes Laertius’ mysterious appeal is his fascination with the death of philosophers. The story of Empedocles’ jump into the crater of Etna (9.67–74), in particular, is behind several great literary creations, such as the three versions of Hölderlin’s Death of Empedocles, Matthew Arnold’s “Empedocles on Etna,” and Bertold Brecht’s “Empedocles’ Shoe.”

  Also worth mentioning is the recurring pattern of death by revenge, so to speak, wherein a philosopher dies because of the classical elements his doctrine had downplayed. Thales, who had chosen water as the ultimate substance of things, dies from heat and thirst. Heraclitus, who had elected fire as his cosmic principle, suffers a fatally abnormal accumulation of fluid in the cavities of his body. And Pythagoras in one version dies at the hands of an angry mob as he is “trying to avoid the beanfield”—one of the foods he considered taboo.

  These transparently symbolic anecdotes all tell us something about the relationship of philosophy to life in general, and may stand for a specific approach to intellectual history of which Diogenes Laertius remains for us the only full-fledged representative. His Pre-Socratics, just as Nietzsche intuited, play an important part in this (alternative) history of philosophy.

  1 G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane (London, 1892), 1:166–67 (pt. 1, sect. 1, ch. 1).

  2 Ibid., 167–68.

  3 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. S. Hollingdale (Cambridge, 1986), 124 (vol. 1, sect. 261).

  Plato’s Doctrines in Diogenes Laertius

  John Dillon

  Diogenes Laertius’ life of Plato is one of his most substantial achievements, and is thus a particularly suitable perspective from which to evaluate the sometimes baffling way the author of Lives of the Eminent Philosophers represented philosophical doctrines. I will focus on the first segment of his survey of Plato’s doctrines (areskonta), in Book 3 (67–80), after the life proper and an extensive review of Plato’s works and their editing (3.47–66).1

  Diogenes’ account needs to be viewed against the background of previous collections of the philosophical opinions, or doxographies, of Plato. These date back to the period of the so-called Old Academy (347–266 BC), the school Plato left at his death. It seems likely that it was the third head of the Academy, Xenocrates of Chalcedon, in the period 339–314 BC, who first strove to forge Plato’s philosophical insights into a systematic body of doctrine.2 He, however, was not concerned to produce anything like a summary, such as we find in later times.

  At this early stage, the nearest such approach we find is from the pen of Theophrastus, Aristotle’s successor as head of the Peripatetic School, who composed Opinions on Natural Philosophy (Physikōn Doxai), in which he included Plato, crediting him with a two-principle system of the same type attributed to him by Diogenes:3 “Plato wishes to make the principles two in number, the one a substrate, in the role of matter, which he calls ‘the all-receiving’ (pandekhes, Timaeus 51a), the other as cause and motive agent (kinoun), which he connects with the power of God and of the Good.”

  The next doxographers of any significance date from the first centuries BC and AD. Arius Didymus, the court philosopher of the emperor Augustus, seems to have composed a comprehensive survey of the opinions of the philosophers. He may have been of the Stoic persuasion, but if so he does not impose his views very strongly. His work is preserved fairly extensively in the much later Anthology of Johannes Stobaeus (late fourth century AD), but it also seems to be an important source for The Handbook of Platonism (Didaskalikos) of Diogenes’ approximate contemporary Alcinous.

  In chapter 12 of this work, entitled “On the generation of the world,” for example, we can see (from parallels in Stobaeus, and in Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evangelic
a) Alcinous using Arius’ On the Doctrines of Plato virtually verbatim, and we may suspect that such borrowing is much more widespread than we can observe. The work of a later doxographer, Aetius, who seems to date from the late first century AD, is preserved in a compilation, On the Physical Doctrines of the Philosophers, falsely attributed to Plutarch. In contrast to Theophrastus, but in agreement with Arius (if we may judge from Alcinous, chapters 8–10), he attributes to Plato a system of three principles: God, Matter, and Idea (in the singular).4

  All these figures attest to a flourishing tradition of doxography on which Diogenes can draw, but it cannot be said that he is particularly close to any of the surviving practitioners of the genre, although he is, like them, dependent on only one major dialogue of Plato—the Timaeus—for the majority of his exposition. Still, there is much that is peculiar in his presentation of this material. It is to these peculiarities of the doxography of Diogenes that I now turn.

  ***

  Here and elsewhere in Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Diogenes seems broadly to be following the traditional division of philosophy into three areas: physics, ethics, and logic. But unlike most of his predecessors, Diogenes starts his account of Plato’s physics by summarizing Plato’s views on the soul. This is a significant choice, I think, betokening an account of Plato that stresses the pivotal role of the soul both in the structure of the universe and of the individual.

  Complications arise straightaway. Diogenes declares that Plato holds the soul to be immortal; it takes on many bodies in succession and has a numerical first principle (arkhē arithmētikē). So far, so good—although the emphasis on the soul’s arithmetical nature is more characteristic of Plato’s immediate successors, Speusippus and Xenocrates, than of Plato himself (even if derivable from Plato’s account in the Timaeus, 35a–37c).5 But the phrase Diogenes has tacked on to this passage—“whereas the body’s first principle is geometrical”—has aroused suspicion because of its apparent irrelevance to the topic of the soul; even if one might argue that there is at least a loose association of ideas here, and that the soul, once embodied, gives the body a geometrical structure derived from the soul’s own mathematical essence.6

  Worse complications follow. Diogenes next presents us with a definition of the soul: “a form of breath diffused in all directions [idea tou pantēi diestōtos pneumatos]” (6.67). What we have here is, to all appearances, a fine farrago: the core of the definition, without pneumatos tacked onto it, is the one propounded by Plato’s successor Speusippus, a formulation that follows logically from Speusippus’ overall metaphysical scheme.7 The final pneumatos, however, introduces a new concept entirely, specifying that what is thus extended is actually a pneuma (breath, spirit).

  While this addition might seem at first a careless conflation, in fact it signals something more interesting, for this form of the definition actually corresponds to that of the Stoic Posidonius.8 Posidonius himself seems substantially to adopt the mathematicizing definition of Speusippus: “the Form of the omni-dimensionally extended, constructed according to number which comprises harmony,” while also characterizing the soul—as would after all befit a Stoic materialist—as “hot pneuma.” What we may be seeing here in Diogenes, however, is not so much the direct influence of Posidonius, but rather the Stoicizing tradition of Platonism descending ultimately from Antiochus of Ascalon, which incorporates certain formulations of Posidonius.9

  Pneuma, after all, is a concept already utilized by Aristotle, after he had largely “deconstructed” the soul in its Platonist sense, to explain how phantasia and purposive action arise in the soul-body complex—specifically, the “innate spirit” (symphyton pneuma) residing especially in the blood around the heart (De generatione animalium 736b27 ff.). Further, Heraclides of Pontus, within the old Academy, held that the soul was composed of aether, or pure fire, akin to the substance of the heavenly bodies, a position that would have strengthened Antiochus’ in his Stoicizing stance.10

  In other words, Diogenes is transmitting a largely Antiochian form of Platonism.11 We will see how far this impression is confirmed or challenged by what follows.

  Diogenes goes on to suggest a new conflation, or confusion, this time between individual soul and world soul (3.68–70). Drawing heavily on a passage of the Timaeus (36d–37c) where Plato describes the construction of the World Soul by the Demiurge, he now presents the soul as “enclosing the body from the centre outwards on all sides in a circle, and being compounded from the elements” (synestanai ek tōn stoikheiōn).

  What can Diogenes mean by this reference to “the elements”? Perhaps he (or his source) has combined Plato’s statement at Timaeus 37a—that the soul, through being made up of its components (Sameness, Otherness, and Being), is able to discern all the aspects of its environment—with Aristotle’s account, at De anima 404b16 ff., that Plato “makes the soul out of the elements” (tēn psychēn ek tōn stoikheiōn poiei), on the grounds that like must be known by like. However, the “elements” that Aristotle has in mind here are actually the first four numbers (the Pythagorean tetraktys), viewed as the principles of the point and the three dimensions. Some other creative soul, however—if not Diogenes himself—seems to have interpreted these stoikheia as the basic elements of the physical world, presumably on the grounds that the soul, in order to cognize it, will need to contain those elements within itself, at least in some sublimated form.12

  It seems to me that a Stoicizing Platonist in the tradition of Antiochus could well have fastened on the basic concept, enunciated by Aristotle and arguably adumbrated in the above-mentioned passage of the Timaeus, that like must be known by like, and concluded that the four basic numbers identified by Aristotle as presiding over the dimensions must actually comprehend also the principles of the four elements. After all, Aristotle adds further down (404b25–6) that “numbers are alleged to be identical with the Forms themselves and ultimate principles (arkhai), and they are composed [or ‘derived’?] from the elements” (eisi d’ ek tōn stoikheiōn). This is a rather obscure remark of Aristotle’s. Probably he has in mind the first principles of One and the Great-and-Small, which he attributes to Plato, but he could be taken to be referring to the four material elements. I suggest this is what our source—and Diogenes—did take him to be doing.

  One might even say, in Diogenes’ defense, that Plato himself, at Timaeus 35a, describes the composition of the soul in a manner compatible with the individual soul as well as the world soul, and maintains a close parallelism between the two (only later, at 41d, specifying that individual human souls are actually the outcome of a “second mixing” in the demiurgic Mixing Bowl, resulting in a somewhat inferior product—second and third pressings, as it were). This passage Diogenes chooses to ignore, possibly because the later Stoicizing tradition makes no such distinction between world soul and individual souls.

  In the middle of 3.69, Diogenes turns from the description of the soul to a specification of first principles. Here we find initially a two-principle universe, much as it is presented in Cicero’s account of Antiochian metaphysics at Academica 26 ff., with the proviso that in the Ciceronian passage (29) the active principle, while termed”God” and “Intellect,” is also characterized as”the soul/mind of the world” (animus mundi), whereas Diogenes sticks closer to the Timaeus in distinguishing between these: “Plato posits two universal principles (arkhai), god and matter, and he calls god mind (nous) and cause (aition). He held that matter is formless and unlimited (askhēmatistos kai apeiros), and that composite things (synkrimata) arise out of it.”

  In this statement, Diogenes takes no account of what in other doxographical accounts13 is listed as a third principle, namely Form, or Idea, representing the Paradigm of the Timaeus as the sum total of the Forms. The third principle does turn up further on, in 3.77, where the Forms are characterized as “causes and principles” (aitiai kai arkhai), though they are implicitly subordinated to God as creator, the contents of whose mind they are apparently assumed to be.
<
br />   Indeed, in one rather odd distortion of Plato’s views in the Timaeus (at 33b), Diogenes says (3.72) that Plato describes the cosmos as spherical “because such is the shape of its creator (ho gennēsas),” whereas in fact what Plato says is that the physical world is spherical because its model, “the Essential Living Being” (i.e., the Paradigm), is spherical. This gloss of Plato’s views makes sense, of course, if Diogenes is subordinating Plato’s Paradigm to Plato’s Demiurge. It also recalls the later Stoic characterization of God as spherical, which may accord as well with the views of Antiochus.14

  The rest of Diogenes’ description of Plato’s view on the creation of the world, in 3.69–77, follows closely with a few exceptions the account in the Timaeus.

  Diogenes, like some other ancient doxographers (such as Alcinous), has Plato accepting the temporal creation of the physical cosmos, against the prevailing consensus of most Platonists, but in accordance with the views of Plutarch and Atticus in the second century AD:15 though matter “once moved in a disorderly manner, it was brought together in one place by god, since he preferred order to disorder” (3.69; cf. Timaeus 30a). He then gives an account of the elements as combinations of the basic triangles, distinguishing (3.71) between their microcosmic levels, in which they are pressed together in the center to form living and inanimate beings, and the macrocosmic, where they are separated into their own proper spheres, i.e., fire at the outermost region, then air, water, and finally earth at the center (cf. Timaeus 58a–c).

  In one detail, at 3.75, concerning the functioning of the earth in the cosmos, Diogenes plumps for a minority interpretation of a passage of the Timaeus (40b8–c1), where Plato is saying either that the earth is “compressed” (illomenēn/eillomenēn) around its center, or that it is “winding” (i.e., in motion) around it (interpreting variants of the same verb). Aristotle, in De caelo, 293b30–2 and 296a26–7, takes it in the latter sense, whereas such authorities as Plutarch (Quaestiones plat. 8.1006C), Alcinous (Didaskalikos ch. 15), and Proclus (In Timaeum III 136, 29–138, 11) take it in the former sense. Diogenes states firmly that the earth, “being central … revolves (kineisthai) around the center” (3.75). It is interesting, in this connection, that Cicero (Academica 123) takes Plato to be saying that the earth revolves, though he admits there is some obscurity about this (sed paullo obscurius); so that we may here have once again an Antiochian connection.