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Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus

2013; Duke University Press; Volume: 122; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00318108-2315378

1558-1470

C. C. W. Taylor,

Classical Philosophy and Thought

The project of this impressive work is the exploration in the work of various ancient philosophers and philosophical schools of a conception of philosophy that, Cooper argues, was characteristic of the ancient world but is largely absent from the modern. Whereas the contemporary conception of philosophy is that of an academic subject comparable to mathematics or history, pursued primarily for its own intrinsic interest as a contribution to a general understanding of the nature of things and only secondarily, if at all, for its practical application to how people run their lives, the major philosophers and schools discussed in this book all took it for granted that the role of philosophy was in one way or another to show people how to live. All believed that the purpose of human life was to achieve the individual's good and identified that good as eudaimonia, happiness or well-being, of which there were various specific conceptions. All apart from the skeptics maintained that an essential function of philosophy was to reach via argument a conception of the good sufficiently determinate to enable the individual to pursue that good systematically, in some sense on the basis of those arguments. The qualification “in some sense” is important; while both Stoics and Epicureans arrived at their widely divergent conceptions of the good via theoretical arguments and expected their adherents to pursue that good because they accepted the conclusions of those arguments, only the former required that all must understand the principles and arguments for themselves and conduct their lives on the basis of that understanding. For the Epicureans, it was sufficient to believe that Epicurus had discovered the true nature of the good and to follow his teaching, irrespective of whether one was capable of grasping the arguments on which that teaching was founded. But even for the Stoics, Cooper emphasizes (224–25), though active understanding of their principles and arguments was a standing requirement, it was not a part of the good life that one should engage in systematic philosophical inquiry on a daily basis. In that respect Stoics, Epicureans, and skeptics can be contrasted with the other philosophers whom Cooper discusses, that is, Socrates, Aristotle, and Plotinus, all of whom (again in different ways) saw the constant practice of philosophical inquiry as itself constitutive of the very good whose nature it was a function of that inquiry to discover.The plan of the work is straightforward. After a preface that acknowledges the influence of the work of Pierre Hadot on the original conception, and an introductory chapter setting out the main themes, there follow five substantial chapters respectively on the Socratic way of life, Aristotle's conception of philosophy as two ways of life, the Stoic way of life, the Epicurean and skeptical ways of life, and Platonism as a way of life, which is in fact concerned exclusively with Plotinus. In keeping with the author's aim of studying “the texts of ancient philosophy, and their interpretation, in the terms of ancient philosophy itself—without coming to them from contemporary problems so as to see what the ancients might have to say about those, but seeking to understand ancient philosophy ‘as it actually was’” (xiv), these chapters are closely based on the texts, but at the same time Cooper systematically employs his own philosophical understanding in filling in gaps in the arguments, drawing out implications and distinctions that are not explicit in the texts, and generally offering sympathetic interpretations of the authors discussed. Both aspects of the enterprise deserve the highest praise. The work covers a huge range of texts, much of it in meticulous detail (scrupulously keyed to references in the footnotes), while, as an interpreter, Cooper displays a remarkable ability to think himself into the theories that he is discussing, so as to present ancient theories commonly dismissed as counterintuitive and even bizarre as at least intelligible and possibly even attractive to the modern reader. Besides textual references, the footnotes contain detailed points of interpretation; larger issues, including some historical information about authors and works discussed, are dealt with in twenty-four pages of endnotes. There is a list of further readings for each chapter and a general bibliography, consisting mostly of modern editions of ancient texts, together with a few articles and monographs. The work is completed by an index of topics and proper names; there is no index locorum.To do justice to the wealth of challenging material in each of these chapters would require lengthy critical discussion; the constraints of this brief review restrict me to a few points. A central theme in Cooper's sympathetic presentation of the Stoic way of life is his defense of Stoicism against the charge that its central doctrine that the only good is virtue commits the Stoic to a cold, affectless attitude to all the other values that are ordinarily taken to be essential to human life, including all pursuits and interests other than the pursuit of, and interest in, virtue, and, above all, personal relations. He points out that for the Stoic all these other values, though not goods, are “preferred indifferents,” to the pursuit of which we are prompted by nature (which is itself identical with the rational self-direction of the universe toward the maximal good), and he argues that in directing his or her life toward the achievement of these values, the Stoic lives to the full a life rich in interest, enjoyment, and personal satisfaction (181–84). Persuasive though this is, I am not convinced that it wholly frees Stoicism from the charge of incoherence in its account of values other than that of virtue. However much I may invest in a preferred indifferent such as friendship, in the sense of delighting in the company of my friend, caring for my friend for that friend's sake, and so forth, I should not feel grief if my friend dies suddenly and prematurely, for grief is the belief that I have lost a good, and my loss is not that of a good but merely of a preferred indifferent. But even if we accept that my loss is not the loss of a good, why should grief be restricted to the loss of goods? If Stoic rationality allows positive emotional attitudes to the pursuit and possession of preferred indifferents in the knowledge that those are not goods, why does it not equally allow the corresponding negative attitudes to the loss of those indifferents? The insistence that such negative attitudes are appropriate only to the loss of goods (which is for the Stoic equivalent to the loss of virtue) seems little more than an arbitrary stipulation. If we concede to the Stoic that grief strictly speaking can be a response only to the loss of a good, should we not introduce the notion of “grief2” (that is, grief loosely speaking), which the rational agent properly feels on the loss of those preferred indifferents that have been central to his or her life? Putting it summarily, if a rational life involves genuine positive affect in the pursuit and possession of preferred indifferents, it is incoherent to stipulate that it cannot involve negative affect on the loss of those indifferents. If Stoicism rejects the latter, it appears that it must reject the former also, thus reinstating the original objection that it is committed to advocating a cold, emotionally impoverished, and ultimately inhuman life.A possible reply, which Cooper considers (180–82), is that since the Stoic believes that the universe is a self-governing, wholly rational, and irresistible system, he or she believes that whatever happens is for the best; hence negative attitudes such as grief or disappointment can never be an appropriate response to the actual course of events, no matter how firmly one was committed in advance to preferring that things would turn out otherwise. But the belief that, from the point of view of the universe as a whole, the premature death of my friend was for the best is not incompatible with the wish that the ideal state of the universe had not involved his or her death, and for the reason given above, that wish appears to be not merely not irrational but inevitable given my love for my friend. Cooper writes (175): “It often happens that it is correct to want and decide to bring about something in the outer world…yet, we do not succeed. That means…that the maximally good history of the world required something else to happen there and then.… Hence, if we are to live in agreement with nature we must gladly accept this event, even if it does go against our antecedent wish and our antecedent efforts.” Stoic theory requires that I should accept this event as occurring for the best, but it does not follow from this that I must accept it gladly. On the contrary, I might (and given my previous commitments inevitably would) accept it with the bitterest regret. That conflict of attitudes does indeed presuppose a bifurcation between the personal standpoint and the standpoint of one who identifies with the rational direction of the universe as a whole. If Stoicism requires the elimination of the former standpoint in favor of the latter, or the incorporation of the former into the latter, it does indeed seem open to the charge of inhumanity specified above.While Cooper's capacity for sympathetic interpretation is amply manifested, not merely in his treatment of Stoicism, but also in his discussions of Socrates, Aristotle, Epicureanism, and skepticism, it seems to me to run out when it comes to Plotinus. Though his exposition of the baroque structure of neo-Platonic metaphysics is as meticulous as the corresponding discussions in the preceding chapters, it does not give the reader (and here I speak for myself) any sense of what might motivate anyone to accept this picture of reality and of the way of life that is founded on it. I do not think that this indicates any fault on Cooper's part. Rather neo-Platonic metaphysics is simply too remote from anything that the modern reader might find intelligible (much less congenial) to be an appropriate object of Cooper's manner of exposition. The implication may be that this section should have been substantially abbreviated (or possibly deleted as a whole).Cooper's expansive style of writing, with copious qualifications and recapitulations, makes the book somewhat longer than it need have been. His frequent employment of long, highly complex sentences, packed with nested subordinate clauses, makes considerable demands on the reader's powers of syntactic analysis. Very occasionally, complexity tips over into incoherence; I at least cannot construe the following (339) as an English sentence: “And we are also filled with feelings of pleasure and pain, and, depending on the particular characters of our soul-images, and all kinds of emotional reaction and response to what we perceive and the desire that arise as a result.” (See also 217, n. 83.) Given the length and complexity of the work, there are remarkably few typographical errors (55, l. 17; 125, n. 93); it is therefore particularly unfortunate that one of the few should mar the prefatory dedication “For G.E.L. O Owen [sic] and Michael Frede In Memoriam.” These are, however, minor defects in what is, taken all in all, a magnificent achievement.