I regaled you last week with a couple of simple points from a book written in the early 200s of the Common Era, Diogenes Laertius' LIVES AND OPINIONS.
The two points were these: Socrates was taught by a philosopher named Archelaus, who was a philosopher of nature in the manner of the Ionians. Separately, Socrates may have been a dramatist, who assisted in writing some of the works normally attributed to Euripides.
If accepted as true (I don't think they are -- I have read a fair amount of discussion of Socrates without encountering ether of them) -- but IF accepted as true, do they change our understanding of the Athenian Enlightenment in any important way?
Well ... perhaps. One of the bromides of Socrates scholarship is that before his time philosophy was about Nature writ large, the essence of the Cosmos. (Is everything water? is it air? fire? atoms? something else?). Through Socrates, philosophy came to encompass also a microcosm, the human soul and its virtues and vices.
That bromide gets some shading if Archelaus was his mentor and if Archelaus was who Laertius says. In that case, Socrates learned about the Ionian approach to philosophy and deliberately rejected it. He didn't disrupt it by offering a new start. He was a heretic from an orthodoxy that his teacher had championed.
What about the Euripides bit? If you were ask me, "with what Athenian dramatist do you associate Socrates" I would of course mention the comic genius, Aristophanes. They are linked both by the latter's play, THE CLOUDS, portraying Socrates as the leader of the Sophists, and by Plato's great dialog, SYMPOSIUM, in which a magnificent speech about the origins of eros is put into Aristophanes' mouth. To some tastes, anyway, Plato lets Aristophanes here outshine Plato's usual protagonist ... Socrates.
But Socrates the uncredited part of a writing team with Euripides? That gives me a whole different vibe. I'm not exactly sure why it is important but I suspect that it is.
An ancient Greek walks into a tailor with torn pants. He puts them on the counter of the store and the tailor looks at them. "Euripides?" he asks. "Yes," says the man. "Eumenides?"
ReplyDeleteGoing back to your introductory illustration of water and iron. Substantially, they consist of molecules and atoms. Water changes form easily from liquid, to ice, to steam/vapor and back to the liquid state. The extremes involve about 212 degrees. Iron is much more dense. The molecules are tighter, involving a substance, substantially harder than the hydrogen-oxygen amalgam life needs to be alive. We did not make this up, though we understand it better, through science, math and physics. We are fortunate, and alive, because there is water. We both benefit and suffer from the presence of iron. Stone age people made do with rock. Ancient philosophers did the best they could with what they had and knew. We could have done no better, seems to me. Times and seasons and such...
ReplyDeleteYes: the images that I use to illustrate these log entries are often at a tangent to the content, sometimes a good deal more severely tangential than an illustration of ancient atomism.
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ReplyDeleteTo continue my point from above -- been the day before, I used an image of Victor Herbert for a post that, though it glancingly mentioned Herbert, is chiefly about the meaning of the phrase "economic history".
DeleteI will continue to read your blog, respectfully. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteRespect of course that is reciprocated!
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