Examined Lives: Introducing Ancient Philosophy to Students
STEVEN M. STANNISH
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David Curry has been my colleague for twenty-three years at SUNY Potsdam. Still, it is not easy to pick a topic for an encomium, for David has been active in so many aspects of campus life. In addition to his teaching and scholarship, he served on numerous committees, coordinated the Classical Studies Program for a decade and a half, and tirelessly advocated for academic integrity. I think, however, that a professor’s most important work is in the classroom, and that David’s most enduring legacy will be the introduction of ancient philosophy to thousands of students.
Although I am not a philosopher, but a historian, I regularly integrate philosophy into my classes. The main reason is that historians must, as far as possible, enter into the imaginary world of their subjects. Doubtless, the best approach is by way of philology, but it is obstructed by a deeply rooted American reluctance to learn foreign languages. The second-best path runs through poetry and art, and is somewhat more feasible. The third, I think, is via philosophy, and it has the added advantage of challenging students’ assumptions about a range of subjects, from ethics to metaphysics. It requires them to reevaluate the way they think and act, so that as a matter of course, they subscribe to Socrates’s famous maxim “The unexamined life is not worth living” (Apology 38a).
In my view, ancient philosophy is not only distinct from ancient poetry, but also a reaction against it. Modern Americans often fail to grasp the importance of poetry—from the epics of Homer to the plays of Euripides—for early Greece. This is because modern poetry and theater are first and foremost the leisure of elites, whereas ancient poetry and theater were vehicles of general education. In an oral culture, performative verse is a far better tool for preserving information than prose, and if presented in a pleasurable context, integrating exciting stories, communal feeling, music, and dance, it effectively imparts life lessons. Hesiod probably made the Muses the daughters of Mnemosyne, of the goddess of memory (Theogony 53ff., 915), for this reason.
An expert on Plato like David will immediately hear echoes of Eric Havelock in the preceding paragraph, and know where its reasoning leads. The disadvantage of narrative poetry, with its compelling flow of metamorphoses, is that it risks reducing human beings to automata. “We must launch a ship, and when the son of Atreus did, he chose rowers, sacrificed, set Chryseis on board,” and so forth (cf. Iliad 1.308–311). One may overstate the degree to which verse binds reflective thought—I believe Havelock did—but philosophy was surely an effort to break its spell. When Socrates posed a question, and to the answer replied, “What do you mean?” he “abruptly disturbed the pleasurable complacency felt in the poetic formula or image.” Philosophy thereby moved away from the auditor enchanted by rhythmic imagery, and towards the independent psychê investigating abstracted objects.
Naturally, the ancient break with poetry was neither immediate nor complete. Eight centuries after the death of Socrates, the young Augustine could still be moved to tears by Virgil (Confessions 1.13.20–21). Nevertheless, the development of philosophy—from its Milesian beginnings—constituted a seismic event in Mediterranean culture. Of critical importance for this shift was Plato’s Academy in Athens, and in my classes, I often focus on this school’s celebrated apostate, Aristotle of Stagira. Admittedly, Aristotle’s surviving works are the unlovely akroatikoi logoi, records of his lectures from the library of the Lyceum, but they were the most influential analytic texts in the Mediterranean and the Middle East for two millennia. Indeed, according to legend, the Abbasid caliph al-Mamun became a patron of philosophy after dreaming that Aristotle told him it provided the best knowledge, superior to even Islamic law (Ibn al-Nadim, Kitāb al-Fihrist 7.1). I will thus mention two Aristotelian works which I teach: the Nicomachean Ethics and On the Heavens.
Broadly speaking, the Nicomachean Ethics concerns “the good life.” The Greek conception is integrally related to eudaimonia, often translated into English as “happiness,” but not without a loss of meaning. “Happy” is derived from the Old Norse happ, “chance” or “good luck,” and thus has an accidental quality. One is gifted with beauty, inherits wealth, or dodges a falling piano, and therefore lives well. In contrast, eudaimonia combines eu- “good” and daimôn, “divine power,” and hints at guidance from within, though to be fair, the poets link it to external forces like gods and curses.
For his part, Aristotle made eudaimonia a matter of personal volition. According to the Nicomachean Ethics, it results from the cultivation of virtue (aretê), which in turn depends on habit (ethos) (II.i.1). The repeated choice of right action creates a disposition (exis) for further right action (cf. V.ix.14–16). As for virtue’s nature, Aristotle explains that it is a mean (mesotês) between two extremes (II.ii.6ff.). Courage (andreia), for example, strikes a balance between cowardice (deilia) and rashness (thrasutês), though it resembles the latter more (II.viii.5).
For much of its length, the Nicomachean Ethics clearly constitutes an elaboration of the Delphic maxim “Nothing in excess (mêden agan).” Where Aristotle departs from Archaic tradition is in his conclusion that deriving wisdom from philosophy is the greatest pleasure and highest virtue, and that eudaimonia therefore consists of the disinterested contemplation of the truth (theôria) (X.vii.1–4). Such, he says, is the telos of human existence.
Obviously, students who encounter Aristotle’s views on ethics have an opportunity to imagine the pedagogy of the Lyceum, and in doing so, conceive of life in terms other than capitalist materialism. Leaving aside the possibility that people must be predisposed to forming good habits, which would consign eudaimonia to the will of Zeus or the distaff of Clotho, some may begin to ask whether living well involves more than ravaging the planet for the sake of a few dollars or obtaining the latest desired object, whether satisfaction might instead be found in study and thought.
Aristotle’s On the Heavens is a more difficult work. The Greek word for “heavens” is ouranos, and it denotes not only the sky, but also the whole universe. Thus, On the Heavens is a cosmological treatise about the stars and planets, the elements, motion, and even heaviness and lightness. And though it does not yet advance the Aristotelian concept of the “unmoved mover” (ou kinoumenon kineî), the uncaused cause of all things, it offers a systematic and challenging model of the universe—one driven by Greek geometry.
Two of Aristotle’s fundamental cosmological ideas pose a startling dilemma, for they directly contradict modern knowledge (cf. 269a). In the first place, his celestial (superlunary) and terrestrial (sublunary) realms operate under different laws. The celestial realm is entirely divine aether and its motion is circular. In contrast, the terrestrial realm is subject to generation and corruption—due to the mixing and dissolution of the elements—and its motion is rectilinear. In the second place, because earth and water are the heaviest elements, and thus fall to the center of the system, the universe must be geocentric.
Obviously, On the Heavens provides a good deal of material for discussion. Beyond Aristotle’s description of contemporary theories with which he disagrees, such as the Pythagorean notion of a central fire around which the earth and a counter-earth orbit (293a-b), his intuitive and elegant cosmology provides a backdrop for occidental anthropocentrism even after the Scientific Revolution. Perhaps the most interesting part of the work for students, however, is a passage concerning the earth’s sphericity, where Aristotle says that sailing west would lead directly to Asia: “Those who imagine that the region around the Pillars of Heracles joins onto the regions of India, and that in this way the ocean is one, are not, it would seem, suggesting anything utterly incredible” (298a). This pericope, of course, inspired Christopher Columbus to undertake his momentous voyage almost two thousand years later.
I would close by reiterating that the rise of philosophy, as important as it was, hardly eclipsed the poetic life of the Mediterranean. Hellas was no more a land of Aristotles in the fourth century BC than it was during its War of Independence in the nineteenth century AD. I suspect David would agree that students should realize that most ancient people worked the land, possessed marginal literacy, and had only a passing acquaintance with the likes of Pythagoras and Plato. Such a reality must temper our estimation of a discipline which can change our lives. Nonetheless, it is to David’s great credit that he has introduced so many students to it.