metaphysics

May 1, 2013 ∞

Plato and Aristotle on Wonder

Aristotle is famously acknowledged as the author of the claim that "philosophy begins in wonder." I'm not the first to point this out, but it bears repeating that the same claim in nearly the same words occurs in Plato's dialogue Theaetetus. Here is my quick translation of the passage I have in mind:

"My friend, Theodoros appears to have hit the mark [2] concerning your nature. For wonder is certainly the passion of a philosopher; for there is not another beginning of philosophy than this one, and the one who said that Iris [3] was born of Thaumas seems not to genealogize badly." -- Plato, Theaetetus

(Θεόδωρος γάρ͵ ὦ φίλε͵ φαίνεται οὐ κακῶς τοπάζειν περὶ τῆς φύσεώς σου. μάλα γὰρ φιλοσόφου τοῦτο τὸ πάθος͵ τὸ θαυμάζειν· οὐ γὰρ ἄλλη ἀρχὴ φιλοσοφίας ἢ αὕτη͵ καὶ ἔοικεν ὁ τὴν Ἶριν Θαύμαντος ἔκγονον φήσας οὐ κακῶς γενεαλογεῖν.) (Greek text from here. Another English translation - Fowler's 1921 translation - here at Perseus.)

[1] See his Metaphysics, 982b12.
[2] Literally, "not to aim badly."
[3] Plato associates Iris with speech or dialectic, or with the kind of conversation that leads to discovery.

Feb 6, 2013 ∞

Epimenides, Or Religion Without Metaphysics

This week I've been reading and re-reading Howard Wettstein's The Significance of Religious Experience and, at the same time, talking with my friend John Kaag about creativity and wonder in Peirce and the other classical Pragmatists.

At the end of his Cambridge Conference lectures of 1898, Peirce quoted a phrase from the Book of Acts, ch 17. The phrase is "live and move and have our being." It appears in a speech by St. Paul, the only time the Greek Testament records a Christian conversing with philosophers. Paul quotes two Greek writers in that speech, Aratus and Epimenides.

The citation of Epimenides is relevant to the Areopagus, the place where Paul is speaking, as I have written elsewhere. Paul quotes Epimenides' poem, the Cretica, in which Epimenides says of Zeus. "In him we live and move and have our being."

Epimenides had been summoned to the Areopagus several centuries prior to Paul's visit. The Athenians were suffering from a long plague and none of their sacrifices had ended it. As Diogenes Laertius recounts,* Epimenides suggested that if their sacrifices to the gods they knew were not availing them, perhaps they should sacrifice to an as-yet unknown god.

The difficulty is that if you don't know the god, how do you know what the god wants? What are the proper prayers? What are the right sacrifices? Who should make them?

Epimenides' solution appears to have been to confess ignorance and then to engage in the ritual to the best of his knowledge. In the absence of settled doctrine, he leaned on human practice. As Epicurus once pointed out, (see the very first line in Epicurus's Principal Doctrines) if your god gets angry about that sort of thing, it's probably not a god worth worshiping anyway.

To put a positive spin on that, consider how the Epimenides story ends: he directs the sacrifices, and the plague ends. And the Athenians leave the altars to an unknown god on the slopes of the Areopagus, where Paul finds one centuries later. Maybe, just maybe, it's possible to pray without knowing everything about God. And maybe, if there's a God, that God knows we don't know much about God at all, and is okay with that. Maybe religion is, as Wettstein suggests, like mathematics, something we can engage in even in the absence of settled knowledge about the underlying metaphysics. I hope so.

Foreground: Agora of Athens; Background: Acropolis (L) and Areopagus (R) of Athens.

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I took this photo from the temple of Hephaestus on the West end of the ancient agora of Athens. The ruins in the foreground are the old marketplace and civic buildings. At the top left is the Acropolis and the Parthenon; just to the right of the Acropolis is the Areopagus, which currently hosts no buildings, though if you look closely you can see some tourists walking around on the hill. Presumably Epimenides built his altars on the slope leading up to the Areopagus. According to the story in Acts, St Paul preached first in the agora and then on the Areopagus, walking up past an altar left by Epimenides.

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* We also find reference to the altars erected by Epimenides in Pausanias (I.i.4); and in Philostratus' Life of Apollonius. Lucian's Philopatris alludes to it as well, but it is possible that he is referring to Acts 17. Epimenides is quoted more than once in the Greek scriptures; he is also quoted in Titus 1.12.

Feb 13, 2012 ∞

Sorcery and Pollution

In the Apocalypse of St John on Patmos, he writes that some will be excluded from heaven by their wickednesses. [1] He describes them with florid metaphor, calling them "the dogs," for example. He goes on to name some of them: sorcerers, fornicators, murderers, idolaters, and so on. A nasty lot, to be sure, all of them worshiping things not worthy of worship.

Of course, sorcery isn't much of a problem for us these days. At least, that's how most of us see it. But some folks are concerned that magic in modern fiction poses a threat to sanctity. Several years ago I wrote a book called From Homer To Harry Potter, in which one of my aims was to help Christians (many of whom were concerned about the sorcery of young Mr. Potter and its influence on their children) think about myth, fantasy, and magic. Not all magic is equal, I argued, and not all of it should alarm us.

So this word "sorcery" in St. John's Apocalypse caught my eye recently. Perhaps sorcery is a bad thing, after all? The word St. John uses is pharmakos, related to the Greek pharmakeia and to our word "pharmacy." It means one who makes potions, and especially potions used to poison others.

What's wrong with this version of sorcery should be obvious to everyone: it amounts to the idolatry of power and the abuse of nature to worship that idol. To put it in simpler terms: it is an idolatry of power because it regards human lives as things to be sacrificed on the altar of power. We kill because we desire to dominate. Selah.

And it is an abuse of nature because it regards chemistry as a tool of domination of others. It concocts in order to destroy, and, again, it destroys in order to dominate.

Christians who are concerned about magic should ponder this. Is God concerned with hand-waving, spells, and incantations? I doubt it. But it would appear that God is not pleased with using chemistry to do violence, and with regarding natural science as a tool for domination of other people. I know it alarms me, at any rate.

I haven't got a quick conclusion here. My point is not that we need to do away with chemistry or hold witch-hunts for chemists. But I frequently return to Francis Bacon in his Advancement of Learning, [2] where he offers a way to speed up science by dividing up the four causes that Aristotle said all scientists need to seek. Bacon suggests that if we can find the material and efficient causes of things - the matter and energy that cause particular contingent states and arrangements of things in the world - that should be enough for science. Seeking the other two causes - formal and final causation - amounts to something like seeking the meaning of things and their purposes in the world. To require scientists to seek these things is probably an undue burden on the natural sciences, and it certainly bogs down their progress by engaging them in endless debates about metaphysics and ethics. Bacon leaves these latter questions to theologians and metaphysicians, freeing natural scientists to much more rapid progress in their research. Bacon's division of causes was a brilliant stroke, and modern science owes it very much.

In the same book, Bacon finds he must make a defense of chemistry. He does so by means of an analogy between chemistry and sorcery. [3] It is prohibited to converse or do business with evil spirits, he says, but it is not prohibited to inquire into their nature and power. Those who do the former are sorcerers, but those who do the latter are theologians. Bacon adds, as an aside, that he's not sure either one is doing anything real, because those alleged spirits are "fabulous and fantastical." Still, the analogy is helpful: it may be unethical to use poisons on other people, but it is certainly not wrong to seek to understand the nature and power of poisons. So natural science, when it seeks to understand the nature and power of chemical compounds, for instance, is doing something like theology.

Here is where I find myself at a loss: theology has a story it can tell about why we should not converse with demons, and for those who live in the community that is shaped by that story, it is compelling. But what story can we tell that will teach us how to avoid modern sorcery? We have traded albs and chasubles for lab coats, and for the most part, this has been a positive development. But we have not been intentional about telling a good story about science, and we have liberated it from questions of meaning and purpose - a liberation that we have recently begun to question, as we "have become death, the destroyer of worlds." We have become unwitting sorcerers all, crafting potions that do wider and greater violence than the ancient theologians could have imagined.

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[1] Rev 22.14

[2] See Bacon, Of the Advancement of Learning, 2.VII.3, e.g.

[3] Bacon, op. cit., 2.VI.2.