The Life of the Mind (20 page)

To state this in conceptual language: The meaning of what actually happens and appears while it is happening is revealed when it has disappeared; remembrance, by which you make present to your mind what actually is absent and past, reveals the meaning in the form of a story. The man who does the revealing is not involved in the appearances; he is blind, shielded against the visible, in order to be able to "see" the invisible. And what he sees with blind eyes and puts into words is the story,
not
the deed itself and
not
the doer, although the doer's fame will reach the high heavens. Out of this then arises the typically Greek question: Who becomes immortal, the doer or the teller? Or: Who depends on whom? The doer on the poet, who gives him fame, or the poet on the doer, who must first accomplish things that deserve to be remembered? We need only read Pericles' funeral speech in Thucydides to learn that the question remained controversial, the answer depending on who replied—the man of action or the spectator. Pericles, at any rate, statesman and friend of philosophers, held that the greatness of Athens, the city that had become the "school of Hellas" (as Homer had been the teacher of all Greeks), was for that reason "far from needing a Homer ... or other of his craft" to make it immortal; the Athenians by the sheer power of their daring had left "imperishable monuments" behind them on land and sea.
¹²

It is the distinctive mark of Greek philosophy that it broke entirely with this Periclean estimate of the highest and most divine way of life for mortals. To quote but one of his contemporaries, Anaxagoras, who was also his friend: when asked why one should choose rather to be born than not—a question, incidentally, that seems to have preoccupied the Greek people and not merely philosophers and poets—he replied: " "For the sake of viewing the heavens and the things there, stars and moon and sun,' as though nothing else were worth his while." And Aristotle agrees: "One should either philosophize or take one's leave of life and go away from here."
¹³

What Pericles and the philosophers had in common was the general Greek estimate that all mortals should strive for immortality, and this was possible because of the affinity between gods and men. Compared to other living beings, man is a god;
¹⁴
he is a kind of "mortal god" (
quasi mortalem deum,
to quote Cicero's phrase again),
¹⁵
whose chief task therefore consists in an activity that could remedy his mortality and thus make him more like the gods, his closest relations. The alternative to that is to sink down to the level of animal life. "The best choose one thing in place of all else—everlasting fame among mortals; but the many are glutted like cattle."
¹⁶
The point here is that it was axiomatic in pre-philosophical Greece that the only incentive worthy of man qua man is the striving for immortality: the great deed is beautiful and praiseworthy not because it serves one's country or one's people but exclusively because it will "win eternal mention in the deathless roll of fame."
¹⁷
As Diotima points out to Socrates, "Do you suppose that Alcestis would have died to save Admetus, or Achilles to avenge Patroclus ... if they had not believed that their excellence
[aretē],
would live for ever in men's memory, as in fact it does in ours?"
¹⁸
And all the various kinds of love, according to Plato's
Symposium,
are ultimately united by the striving for immortality of all things mortal.

I do not know who was really the first Greek to become aware of the decisive flaw in the praised and envied immortality of the gods: they were deathless
(a-thanatoi,
those who were forever
aien eontes),
but they were not eternal. "As the Theogony informs us in some detail, they have all been born: their vital duration had a temporal beginning. It is the philosophers who introduce an absolute
archē
or Beginning which is itself unbegun, a permanent and ungenerated source of generation. The initiator here is probably Anaximander,
¹⁹
but we can see the result more clearly in the poem of Parmenides.
²⁰
His being
is forever
in the strong sense; it is ungenerated
(agenēton)
as well as unperishing
(anōlethron).
Limited neither by birth nor by death, the duration of
What is
replaces and transcends the unending survival which characterized the Olympian gods."
²¹
In other words,
Being,
birthless as well as deathless, replaced for the philosophers the mere deathlessness of the Olympian gods; Being became the true divinity of philosophy because, in the famous words of Heraclitus, it was "made by none of the gods or men, but always was and is and shall be: an ever-living fire, fixed measures kindling and fixed measures going out."
²²
The gods' immortality could not be trusted; what had come into being could also cease to be—were not the pre-Olympian gods dead and gone?—and it was this flaw in the gods' everlastingness (much more, I think, than their frequent immoral conduct) that made them so vulnerable to Plato's ferocious attacks. The Homeric religion was never a creed that could be replaced by another creed; "the Olympian gods were laid low by philosophy."
²³
That the new and everlasting divinity, which Heraclitus in the fragment just quoted still calls
kosmos
(not the world or the universe but their order and harmony), is finally, starting with Parmenides, given the name "Being" seems due, as Charles Kahn suggests, to the
durative
connotations this word had from the beginning. It is indeed true, and by no means a matter of course, that "the durative aspect, being inseparable from the stem, colors every use of the verb, including every philosophical use."
²⁴

 

If Being replaced the Olympian gods, then philosophy replaced religion. Philosophizing became the only possible "way" of piety, and this new god's newest characteristic was that he was One. That this One was indeed a god and thus decisively different from what we understand by "being" becomes obvious when we see that Aristotle called his "First Philosophy" a "Theology," by which he did not mean a theory about the gods but what much later—in the eighteenth century—was called
ontologia
or "Ontology."

The great advantage of the new discipline was that man, to win his share of immortality, no longer needed to count on the uncertain ways of posterity. He could actualize it while he was alive without requiring any help from his fellow-men or from the poets, who in earlier days, by bestowing fame, could make his name last forever. The way to the new immortality was to take up one's abode with things that are forever, and the new faculty making this possible was called
nous
or mind. The term was borrowed from Homer, where
noos
encompasses all mental activities besides designating the specific mentality of one person. It is
nous
that corresponds to Being, and when Parmenides says "
to gar auto noein estin te kai einai
"
²⁵
( "to be and to think
[noein,
the activity of
nous]
are the same"), he is already saying implicitly what Plato and Aristode then said explicitly: that there is something in man that corresponds exactly to the divine because it enables him to live, as it were, in its neighborhood. It is this divinity that causes Thinking and Being to be the same. By using his
nous
and by withdrawing mentally from all perishable things, man assimilates himself to the divine. And the assimilation is meant pretty literally. For just as Being is the god,
nous,
according to Aristotle (quoting from either Ermotimos or Anaxagoras), is "the god in us," and "every mortal life possesses the part of some god."
²⁶
Nous,
"as all wise men agree," said Plato, "is the king of heaven and earth";
²⁷
hence it is above the whole universe, just as Being is higher in rank than anything else. The philosopher, therefore, who has decided to risk the voyage beyond "the gates of Day and Night" (Parmenides), beyond the world of mortals, "shall be called the friend of god, and if ever it is given to man to put on immortality, it shall be given to him."
²⁸
In short, to engage in what Aristode called the
theōrētikē energeia
that is identical with the activity of the god
(hē tou theou energeia)
means to "immortalize"
(athanatizein),
engage in an activity that in itself makes us immortal "as far as that is possible, and [to] do our utmost to live in accordance with what is highest in us."
²⁹

For us, it is of some importance to note that the immortal and divine part within man does not exist unless it is actualized and focused on the divine outside; in other words, the
object
of our thoughts bestows immortality on thinking itself. The object is invariably the everlasting, what was and is and will be, and therefore cannot be otherwise than it is, and cannot
not
be. This everlasting object is primarily the "revolutions of the universe," which we can follow mentally, thus proving that we are "not an earthly but a heavenly growth," creatures who have their "kindred" not on earth but in heaven.
³⁰
Behind this conviction, we can easily detect the aboriginal wonder, in itself philosophical. It is wonder that sends the scientist on his course of "dispelling ignorance" and that made Einstein say: "The eternal mystery of the world [i.e., the universe] is its comprehensibility." Hence all subsequent "development" of theories to match the universe's comprehensibility "is in a certain sense a continuous flight from 'wonder.'"
³¹
The God of the scientists, one is tempted to suggest, created man in his own image and put him into the world with only one Commandment: Now try to figure out by yourself how all this was done and how it works.

At any rate, to the Greeks, philosophy was "the achievement of immortality,"
³²
and as such it proceeded in two stages. There was first the activity of
nous,
which consisted in contemplation of the everlasting and was in itself
aneu logou,
speechless; then followed the attempt to translate the vision into words. This was called
alētheuein
by Aristotle and does not just mean to tell things as they really are without concealing anything, but also applies only to propositions about things that always and necessarily are and cannot be otherwise. Man qua man, as distinct from other animal species, is a composite of
nous
and
logos:
"his essence is set in order according to
nous
and
logos"—ho anthrōpos kai kata logon kai kata noun tetaktai autou hē ousia
.
³³
Of these two, it is only
nous
that enables him to partake of the everlasting and the divine, while
logos,
designed "to say what is,"
legein ta eonta
(Herodotus), is the specifically, uniquely human ability that is also applied to mere "mortal thought," opinions or
dogmata,
to what happens in the realm of human affairs and to what merely "seems" but
is
not.

Logos
as distinguished from nous is not divine, and the translation of the philosopher's vision into speech—
alētheuein,
in the philosophers' strict sense—created considerable difficulties; the criterion of philosophical speech is
homoiōsis
(in opposition to
doxa
or opinion), "to make a likeness" or assimilate in words as faithfully as possible the vision provided by
nous,
which itself is without discourse, seeing "directly, without any process of discursive reasoning."
³⁴
The criterion for the faculty of vision is not "truth" as suggested by the verb
aletheuein,
derived from the Homeric
alēthes
(truthful), where it is used only for the
verba dicendi,
in the sense of: tell me without hiding (
lanthanai
) within yourself, that is, do not deceive me—as though the common function of speech, here implied in the
alpha privativum,
were precisely deception. Truth remains the criterion of speech, though now, when it has to assimilate itself to and take its cue, as it were, from the vision of
nous,
it changes character. The criterion for vision is only the quality of everlastingness in the seen object; the mind can partake in that directly, but "if a man is engrossed in appetites and ambitions and spends all his pains on these ... he cannot fall short of becoming mortal altogether, since he has nourished the growth of his mortality." But "if he has set his heart" on contemplating the everlasting objects, he cannot "fail to possess immortality in the fullest measure that human nature admits."
³⁵

It is generally admitted that philosophy, which since Aristotle has been the field of inquiry into things that came after the physical and transcended them (
ton meta ta physika,
"about what comes after the physical"), is Greek in origin. And being Greek in origin it set itself the original Greek goal, immortality, which seemed even linguistically the most natural aim for men who understood themselves as
mortals, thnētoi
or
brotoi,
for whom, according to Aristotle, death was "the greatest of all evils," and who had as their kindred, their blood relations, as we would say, "drawing breath from one mother," the immortal gods. Philosophy did nothing to change this natural goal; it only proposed another way to attain it. Summarily speaking, the goal disappeared with the decline and fall of the Greek people and disappeared from philosophy altogether with the arrival of Christianity, bearing its "good news," telling men they were not mortals, that, contrary to their former pagan beliefs, the world was doomed to end, but they would be bodily resurrected after death. The last trace of the Greek quest for the everlasting may be seen in the
nunc stans,
the "standing now" of the medieval mystics' contemplation. The formula is striking, and we shall see later that it indeed corresponds to an experience highly characteristic of the thinking ego.