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The Concept of Presocratic Philosophy: Its Origin, Development, and Significance

2019; Duke University Press; Volume: 128; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00318108-7697889

1558-1470

Alan Kim,

Classical Philosophy and Thought

The writings of the eminent French scholar and philosopher André Laks have long turned on a double axis: the study of ancient and especially Presocratic thought, and reflection on modern interpretations of the ancients. In The Concept of Presocratic Philosophy, first published in French in 2006 as Introduction à la “philosophie présocratique,” he has bottled the intense distillate of decades of work in both areas.Holding the thinkers we are pleased to call “the Presocratics” at arm’s length Laks asks, “What is a ‘Presocratic’ philosopher, anyway?” The question quickly ramifies: “Where does the term, ‘Presocratic’, come from, and what does it mean?” “In what sense were the thinkers so called philosophers?” “What might the history of this concept—‘Presocratic Philosophy’—tell us about our own condition as philosophers considering our discipline’s past?” In short, Laks is not here interested in the philosophy of the thinkers before Socrates per se, but in how, why, and in what contexts they came to be thought of as a group in contrast to Socrates. Once we recognize Presocratic philosophy as a construction of modern philosophy’s autobiography, we may ask with Laks to what degree this construct, on the one hand, legitimately represents philosophy’s past (ix), and, on the other, betrays the self-image of philosophy’s present.The book has six chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 set the stage by investigating, respectively, pre-Socratic “typologies” in antiquity and modernity. Chapter 3 examines “the meaning of ‘philosophy’”; chapter 4, “the question of rationality”; and chapter 5, “the very notion of ‘origin’” (ix–x). Finally, chapter 6 compares “two philosophical models of the historiography of philosophy,” embodied by Gadamer and Cassirer. The argument, which I track below, is not always easy to follow, due in part to its extreme compression, in part to a translation (by Laks’s longtime collaborator, Glenn W. Most) that hews exceedingly close to the French original. But as Most told Laks in urging an English version, The Concept will undoubtedly challenge and thus widen the “Anglo-Saxon” perspective on ancient thought by showing it through an unfamiliar prism.Although the term ‘presocratic [vorsokratisch]’ has been traced no further back than 1788, the ancients themselves marked a “major caesura between Socrates and what preceded him” (1). Chapter 1 distinguishes two ancient interpretations of the “Socratic rupture.” On the “Socratic-Ciceronian” reading, Socrates turned away from his predecessors’ concern with nature to seek the human good; on the “Platonic-Aristotelian” reading, by contrast, the break was not a matter of primary content (nature vs. man), but of critical reflection on method, concept, and definition. Of course, for the ancients who followed Socrates, his uncanny singularity presented an immediate problem for their very identity as philosophoi.The Socratic caesura has a very different significance for the modern philosophers looking back across the millennia. For such figures as Schleiermacher, Hegel, Zeller, and Nietzsche, the question arises in the context of establishing, or demolishing, the nature of the Western tradition in relation to the Greeks. The first three thinkers all “relativized” the caesura, minimizing Socrates’s originality by placing him in the broader context of the sophistic movement. In this way, they reestablished a continuity between the earliest Greek thinkers and the post-Socratic (or Platonic) tradition, which they figured, in different ways, as civilizational progress. By contrast, Nietzsche, rejecting this teleological approach to historiography, emphasizes the autonomous standing of the pre-Socratics. Because he saw them as “pessimistic” manifestations of the “tragic spirit,” he did regard the “optimistic” Socrates, with his (alleged) faith in reason, as a breaking point, though not as a step forward. Thus, the category of the “Presocratic” came under pressure from opposite directions. On the one hand, since Socrates was not that distinctive, there was no real “rupture.” On the other hand, even if Socrates did represent a rupture, it was for ill, not good; in any case, his predecessors deserve to be taken seriously in their own right, and not as inferior “anticipations,” either of Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle. Thus, in Zeller’s wake they came variously to be called “pre-Attic,” “pre-Sophistic,” or simply the “first philosophers of Greece.”Here for the first time Laks shows his hand: the term, ‘Presocratic’, for all its difficulties, usefully distinguishes a group of thinkers from what he calls the “undeniable intellectual and spiritual watershed that was the appearance of Socrates” (32). More importantly, it marks the fragmentary guise in which they are known to us moderns (as opposed especially to Plato’s Socrates). For this literal fragmentation of their thought is a symptom of their place in the tradition: they are philosophical “losers” written into and out of history by the winner, an “alliance of Platonism and Aristotelianism” (34).Given the continued utility of the concept, Presocratic philosophy, it nevertheless behooves us to investigate its problematic features more closely. Thus, in chapter 3, Laks investigates in what sense the Presocratics were philosophers. Two pairs of opposites are often invoked in order to differentiate philosophy from other modes of “discursive positions”: (a) myth vs. reason; (b) scientific vs. philosophical rationality. Laks argues that although the historical boundary between them is often hard to fix, it yet makes sense to speak of a “transition from muthos to logos” (40) because the eidetic contrast between the two is clear. In a fascinating if dense discussion of the Hippocratic treatise, On Ancient Medicine, Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen, and Plato’s Euthydemus, Laks argues that some kind of distinctive discursive intellectual activity was underway in the last third of the fifth century BCE. Even if its object domain and methods were still in flux, two parameters jointly mark it off from both myth and science: like myth (but unlike, in particular, medicine) this proto-philosophy was “totalizing,” concerning itself with the whole of being, the cosmos or nature. On the other hand, like science (but unlike myth), it followed a path of rational argumentation.Laks thus locates philosophy in the overlap between science and myth, its very hybridity essentially distinguishing it from both. Having isolated rationality as one of its two characteristic features, he devotes chapter 4 to its closer examination. He first reckons with the vexed history of debate over the emergence of Greek rationality, finding drawbacks in the various positions. Thus, Laks relates J.-P. Vernant’s attack on the myth of the “Greek miracle,” according to which rationality came into the world in sudden perfection. Instead, Vernant sought to reveal reason’s roots in the Greek polis. Nevertheless, Laks concludes that Vernant cannot easily account for reason’s formal aspect, which is perfectly compatible with its nonpolitical, theoretical, or even experimental realization. Moreover, neither the naturalizing “positivism” (here called “positivity”) nor the public openness of the emerging polis can account for “the specific development of ‘philosophical’ thought” (62), which, after all, is at issue here.Laks finds a more useful templet in Max Weber’s conception of rationality, which discriminates between its scientific-technical, metaphysical-ethical, and practical dimensions, for Greek rationality is from the outset concerned with all three (66). They form a matrix within which various “Ideas” or Weltbilder (“images of the world”) rapidly arise in a Cambrian radiation of competing formations of reason. Laks is all too telegraphic at the end of this chapter; I would especially have welcomed a more detailed account of the relationship between “ideas” and the three aspects of rationality, with concrete illustrations from the Presocratics themselves.Instead, he hastens on to explore in the last two chapters “the nature of our relation with [these Weltbilder] insofar as they are situated at the origin of Western philosophy” (67; emphasis added). In chapter 5, Laks examines two opposed possible senses of “origin”: as a temporalized beginning or genesis, or as a nontemporalized principle, cause, or norm. While he is of course concerned here with the origin of philosophy among the Presocratics, it is remarkable that this same ambiguity between “beginning” and “principle” already appears within Presocratic thought itself, namely in the Milesians’ concept of archē. As in the previous two chapters, a dense and aporetic discussion of opposing options leads Laks to a relatively anodyne conclusion: in this case, that historical epochs are for the most part difficult to demark precisely, and that we should therefore content ourselves with a deflated, less “heroic” idea of “beginnings.” On this view, a beginning may be retrospectively determined in terms of what it would come to “make possible” or “authorize,” even if it did not cause, consciously initiate, or even foresee those eventualities (77). In history, much as in life, inchoate projects develop and, in developing, come to authorize themselves. It is in this spirit, then, that Laks thinks we should consider the archai of Greek philosophy.Laks entitles the final chapter: “What Is at Stake.” Unfortunately, he never explicitly answers this question (if it is a question). In chapter 5, however, he says the following about the figure of the “first inventor” in Greek myth: “If the stakes in identifying the first inventor are so high, [it] is because he determines the very form of the invention” (73). This, then is likely the point of chapter 6, as well. How we describe and conceive of the Presocratic “inventors” of Western philosophy says less about them, perhaps, than it says about us, and how we want to think of this “invention.” Laks lays out two basic alternatives: a rationalist view that emphasizes continuity, regarding the Presocratics as the fundus of philosophy’s perennial problems; and an antirationalist view that instead stresses rupture. Although Laks sees this tension in both the “Anglo-Saxon” and Continental scholarly traditions, he chooses the latter to illustrate his point, contrasting Gadamer’s and Cassirer’s respective conceptions of the Presocratics.Laks takes Gadamer as representative of what he calls the “phenomenological,” “Heideggerian,” “discontinuist model” of the history of philosophy. There is of course nothing intrinsically “discontinuist” about phenomenology or its attitude toward the history of philosophy: Husserl, the father of phenomenology, consistently calls himself a Platoniker. Nonetheless, it is true that Heidegger and Gadamer were obsessed with the Greek Anfang of philosophy. Like Heidegger, Gadamer rejects (progressive) teleology as a historiographical principle; against this, Laks argues that their very notion of a “beginning” still would seem to imply “end.” More seriously, Gadamer is misled by Plato into making Parmenides the only Presocratic who really counts. Parmenides’s monistic motif infects Gadamer’s interpretation of the Presocratics generally, according to Laks: Gadamer “den[ies] the role of discussion, criticism, and polemic within Presocratic thought.” Instead, his “homogenizing approach . . . [makes] the first thinkers of Greece all speak with a single voice,” so that it seems the original works “would say nothing more than what Plato says about them” (84).Against the apparent inadequacies of this so-called phenomenological view, then, Laks favors Cassirer’s more nuanced interpretation of early Greek thought. Cassirer, following in the steps of his Marburg predecessors, Cohen and Natorp, finds in the Presocratics logos in embryonic form: from the Milesians, through Pythagoras and Heraclitus, and lastly in Parmenides, it unfolds in phases. If, as Laks argues in chapter 3, proto-philosophy separated forth from the conjugation of myth and medicine, it is through a dialectical argument that logos articulates itself, thus coming into its own as an autonomous discipline.What, for Laks, then, is at stake in the concept of Presocratic philosophy? Apparently this: Either (1) these earliest thinkers are radically detached from us, who stand at the end of a long decline initiated by Socrates or Plato or Aristotle. As such, they may present us with a model, not of substantive doctrine, but of “originary thought” which we are called on to reinstitute in our own way against the spirit of our age. That is the antirationalist, discontinuist, “phenomenological” option. Alternatively (2), we may find in them our beginnings as thinkers striving through logos toward self-understanding. On this view, the Presocratic moment remains “most interesting” to us because of the minimal differentiation between form and content, just as the first divisions of a zygote seem more gripping and alien than the difference between that “same” animal on its ten thousandth and ten thousand and first days—especially if that animal is us.