Dept of Philosophy
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97401
rohrer@darkwing.uoregon.edu
ph: (503) 346-5550
(c) 1995 Tim Rohrer
Presocratic thought has long been thought to rely heavily on metaphor. Typically, commentators have argued that the Greek lexicon was not sufficiently developed at this early stage for Presocratic philosophers to express their thoughts literally. The embodiment hypothesis, however, turns that view on its head; if our understanding of mental activity is always reliant on bodily metaphors, then the Presocratic thinkers were not radically different from our own thought in the use of metaphors to convey abstract thoughts. That is the starting point of my investigation, and where possible I try to buttress my account with philological evidence as to other uses of the words in question. On occasion, however, especially in the case of Anaximander (of whom we have only one fragment), I am forced to speculate using twentieth-century culture as a base.
It is difficult to form a positive concept of what Anaximander meant by apeiron. Instead, I draw the concept out by asking questions of its opposite: What would bounded stuff be? What are boundaries? From this standpoint, further questions emerge: Why are boundaries important to philosophy? Why do we think of philosophy as something where the boundaries are broken (or at least pushed)? After a similar fashion, W.K.C. Guthrie also observes that apeiron can be understood with respect to its opposite--perata (boundaries). Following Aristotle's account in the Physics,[2] Guthrie observes that bodies may have perata in both an internal and an external sense. If a body is unbounded externally, it has no bounding edge--it simply continues indefinitely. Guthrie suggests that for Anaximander this conception of apeiron as externally unbounded is rooted in the word's use to mean 'ring' or 'sphere,' on whose surface one may travel for an indefinite period of time without coming to a bounding line. Homer uses the word apeiron to characterize the ocean as a 'boundless sea' on which one may travel for an indefinitely long time. The internal sense of perata has to do with the part-whole distinction--whether or not the whole may be divided into parts. Apeiron in the internal sense is to be an indeterminate whole, indivisible into parts; if something has no parts then it has no internal boundaries. Guthrie further surmises that Anaximander probably did not use the word apeiron in the sense of spatial or temporal infinity, which are later uses of the word apeiron also discussed by Aristotle.[3]
Leaving the Greek world for a moment and pursuing the notion of boundaries from the perspective of cognitive science, the embodiment hypothesis directs us to look first as to what boundaries could be on the most immediate level of experience: the bodily. Two boundaries readily spring to my mind: the boundary formed by the skin and the boundary formed by a physical object we encounter. Our own body has a boundary of its own--the skin--into and out of which we breathe, bleed, drink, eat and excrete. These activities form a recurring pattern in our minds; we regularly experience our skin as the boundary of our body. Our identity is in part formed from our understanding that we are bounded creatures. One way we understand our self is that we are defined by the body we inhabit--we are bounded objects, contained within our skin.
The boundary formed by the skin can also be seen as the external boundary of the tangible perceptual field. Phenomenologically investigating what boundaries are for each of the classic five modes of perception--touch, vision, hearing, taste and smell--provides a starting point from which to inquire into what a boundary is, both for ourselves and the Greeks as well. In addition to having a recurrent pattern of understanding our bodies as bounded by our skins, we regularly encounter other bodies in the world. As with our skin, these bodies also have tangible boundaries. We come to understand this when the perceptual organ of touch--the skin--comes into repeated contact with other bodies. Through repeated encounters, we come to form a pattern of experience that other bodies are tangible and typically impenetrable to our touch. Sometimes these other bodies are living; however, sometimes they are not, but we metaphorically extend the term 'body' to cover non-living physical objects as well. This PHYSICAL OBJECTS ARE BODIES metaphor enable us to conceive physical objects as selves which have or 'possess' their own boundaries. Physical objects have boundaries--edges--like our bodies have a bounding skin. The external perata of the field of tangible perception is the skin, and the internal perata of tangible perception is when we touch other bodies and encounter their edges.
Similarly, we can imagine the limits of the other modes of perception. For instance, we regularly experience the bounds of our vision--"as far as I can see." This limit would be the external perata (or bounding edge) of vision--the horizon or whatever intervenes to limit and define the field of vision. For example, if I am in a room, my vision is limited by the walls, floor and ceiling. Contrast this with the vision I have of a pencil on my desk. How do I see it as a pencil and not part of the desk? Color, shape, brightness, and many other factors combine to convince me that there is a difference between my pencil and the desk. The edges of the pencil would be boundaries internal to my field of vision. Internal perata allow me to distinguish between different physical objects. Furthermore, I can coordinate between my two modes of perceiving boundaries to pick up the pencil; boundaries are something which cut across the different modes of perception.
Consider auditory boundaries. While in vision the internal boundaries are generally sharp and clear, in hearing the internal boundaries are not very distinct. If I hear several people talking at the same time outside my office door, I may have trouble distinguishing among the various voices. Or I may find it difficult to determine which car honked in city traffic. But we also perceive external limits to audible phenomena. If someone walks down the hall outside my office, I gradually become aware of their footfalls growing in intensity as they approach my door, then gradually fade off into indistinctness as they round the bend at the end of the hall. The external limits of our auditory field are typically vague boundaries, just as the internal boundaries were vague. Vision, by contrast, produces generally sharp and distinct internal boundaries--at least assuming my pencil is not the same color as my desktop--and often, when we are indoors or trees and hills intervene into the horizon, the external boundaries are sharp as well. Of course, these are typicalities--we can imagine a vague visual boundary by picturing sitting on the beach and seeing the sky and sea fade into one another at the horizon, or picturing a desktop the same bright yellow color as my pencil. Similarly, sounds can sometimes be sharp and distinct, suddenly startling us into looking about for the body that caused the noise which surprised us. When auditory boundaries are sharp, it can bring us to reflect on the temporal bounds of sound: their duration. Sometimes sounds emerge gradually over time and then fade back away, as with the footsteps in the hall, but they also can have a distinct and clear duration, as with notes played on a flute.
Taste is almost inextricable from touch as a mode of perception. In eating, we enclose an object within our mouths and touch it upon all sides, fully experiencing how other objects are also enclosed by their external boundaries. As we chew the morsel we break down its internal boundaries as well and come to know its texture even more fully. Similarly, there is an initial taste to the outside of a food, and then its tastes change as we break down the food's internal boundaries. But what are the boundaries of taste? Externally, a food may be too much--the initial flavor may cause us to spit it out immediately. It may be too much for our field of taste. By contrast, internal boundaries of taste would be the play between the salt, sweet, sour and bitter flavors of the food. When we savor food, we are distinguishing between the internal flavor boundaries, letting the salt, the sweet, the sour and the bitter exist independently as we continue to chew and break down the internal boundaries of the food. How do we know when to swallow? When the food is fully chewed and its internal boundaries of texture and flavor completely broken down into a unity of flavors, we take it fully into ourselves. The external boundaries of taste are the extremes--when something is excessive to our palate, while the internal boundaries are the flavors.
With taste and hearing we are perhaps getting closer to an understanding of what the boundless might be on a bodily level, but first consider two more bodily experiences of perceptual boundaries. (I leave the olfactory mode of perception aside for the purposes of this essay.) We have a sense of place and a sense of what we can reach. We know where our hand is at the moment independently of the tangible, visual and other modes of perception. A sense of place, of knowing where we and our limbs are at all times--called a propioceptive sense in neurological terminology[4]--is a mode of perception produced by the nervous system and brain working together. Without propioception, we might have to look at our feet as we walk, or we could not navigate the stairs while reading a memo without tangibly feeling out each step with the toe of our foot. Though we sometimes think we need our vision to know where our limbs are, a simple experiment shows the extent to which we use propioception in our ordinary goings-about: close your eyes, extend your hand and then touch your nose. What sense guides your hand? With respect to internal boundaries, propioception lets me locate a pain in my hand as opposed to my wrist or my foot. Externally speaking, propioception provides the boundaries of my spatial location: it provides me with a sense of where my body is as a mass, and where my center of gravity sits.
A more complex bodily boundary we ordinarily experience is the limits of our reach. How do I know that the pencil across the desk is with in my grasp while the papers on top the file cabinet are not? The perception of what is graspable results from a dialogue between the internal and external boundaries of propioception. I know I can extend my hand across the desk and reach the pencil without moving from this place, but going for the papers on the file cabinet requires that I change my location. Our reach is a bounded space limited by how far we can extend our limbs without changing our place. Yet when I imagine the shape defined by the external boundary of this space--Is it spherical? Or cylindrical? Or cubic?--I cannot. Still, I know when things are within my reach or not. Internally I know whether it will require the movement of one or more limbs and which hand (or foot?) I will have use to reach. Despite its oddly perceived boundaries, graspable space is a basic bodily experience of boundaries. Without a sense of the extent of our reach, we would find it difficult to live.
So what might it mean to be boundless on the bodily level? I have been suggesting that our perception of boundaries is cross-modal; boundaries are something which cut across all our modes of perception. They are common-sense, in that they are common to all the senses. We might suspect that boundless perception would by contrast be that which is not separable by perception, or perhaps even that which is entirely aperceptual, though I do not think the boundless is aperceptual. The contrast between sharp and vague boundaries in hearing and vision may have begun to throw some light on what the boundless and indefinite might be. Consider a cacophony or white noise. Each tone is indistinguishable from the next. There are no distinguishable internal boundaries between the tones which make up the sound. This would seem a good candidate for an internal apeiron, but unless we imagine the sound to be everlasting and everywhere--as the Pythagoreans perhaps did[5]--it does not do so well as an example of external boundlessness, as we typically experience white noise originating at a location and existing for only a finite duration. Taste provides another candidate. When a morsel of fully savored food has broken down and the flavors entirely mingled, the food reaches a sort of unity as we ingest it. Again, however, this experience of boundlessness is of the internal boundaries of taste (flavors), not of the external boundaries (palatableness). We do not become one with that of which we cannot bear the taste.
What else might a bodily experience of external boundlessness be? Aristotle cites the experience of traveling on a ring, about which one could travel indefinitely without coming to an edge. If we were to walk in a circle, we might approximate this bodily. Then again, we might just get dizzy; or perhaps dizziness is the primary attribute of our trying to imagine the externally boundless. The boundless is everywhere and has no center; in dizziness we lose our center and our propioceptive sense of place. That is not a very pleasant bodily conception, but I have another more pleasing alternative, albeit far from Anaximander's experience: backcountry skiing. (However, one could consider sailing or virtually any other sort of physical play and make the same case; I simply speak from what I know best.) When I spend a day backcountry skiing in Colorado, most of the day consists of slogging uphill for a chance at one magnificent and fast downhill run home. Skiing, whether uphill or downhill, requires an extreme level of alertness and coordination between the different modes of perception. Going uphill, a smooth and even motion must be established, the limbs coming into a propioceptive harmony with each other and with one's breathing. The taste and smell of the air is cold, dry, sharp and clear and the silence is unbroken except by my own self. As an act taking place in an atmosphere of sublime winter beauty, my vision is overwhelmed with appreciating ever-changing views. Then, after a late lunch, the often harrowing descent. The speed of downhill skiing eclipses the rhythm of the ascent. There is only the lean and attitude of the body, the sense of the footwork, and the eyes, ears and nose carefully scouting for wet sticky-sweetness of avalanche-prone snow; the rapidity at which obstacles approach and must be circumvented; all the senses combine to form a complete experience. I lose myself in the act; it is no longer clear to me that the boundaries of my body end with the skis, the snow, or even the mountain. The feeling is transcendent but not aperceptual, as the bodily coordination required produces a profound sense of unity with the world. It is a dizzying loss of self, but the demanding coordination of sensual perception leaves no time for vertigo, only full engagement and awareness. It is a deeply embodied experience shot through and through with an aesthetic unity.
Friends tell me that similar experiences may be had in other forms of physical play, such as sailing or running and other forms of athletic endeavor not unknown to Anaximander. What I wish to stress is the bodily component of the experience of boundlessness. While it is pure speculation as to whether the word apeiron may have been used to describe similar experiences, I think following out this notion of the boundless as perceptual coordination through a set of metaphorical projections will prove philosophically revealing.
If we next take the problem of what apeiron might mean in the case of non-living physical bodies, we come to something perhaps closer to Anaximander's apeiron. How would objects which are apeiron appear? That is a misleading question--for the apeiron would not appear to any of the perceptual faculties--instead, it would be just the boundless stuff, amorphous and undifferentiable. There could be no objects in this stuff, for objects (plural) implies division into determinate parts; rather, the stuff must be a single mass and have no internal boundaries. The apeiron must be a mass which goes on indefinitely without external boundaries. It is in this material sense of the boundless as stuff that Anaximander conceives of apeiron as the arche of the universe, existing prior to any bounded objects and as a fundamental unity from which all objects and the opposites are generated. We see this material conception of the boundless in Simplicius' account of Anaximander's writings, from which we derive the only extant fragment of his thought:
Anaximander ... asserted that the source and element of existing things is the apeiron. He was the first introduce this name for the source. He says that it is neither water nor any of the other so-called "elements," but of another nature which is apeiron, from which all the heavens and the world-orders in them arise. Into those things from which existing things have their coming into being, their passing away, too, takes place, 'according to what must be, for they make reparation to one another for their injustice according to the ordinance of time,' as he puts it in somewhat poetical language.[6]Anaximander seems to conceive of the apeiron in what later Greeks might describe as the substantive character of experience. The apeiron is the unity which underlies all the elementary oppositions. Its material character comes from his attempts to articulate how the perceptible elementary oppositions of earth and air, fire and water--which the Milesian Greeks conceived of as the material elements of the cosmos--are generated, underlaid, and brought back to the boundless matter.[7]
While I think we have something of an understanding of Anaximander's cosmology at this stage, I wish to continue probing the notion of apeiron with respect to philosophical thought. I suspect Anaximander chose the apeiron as the foundation of his cosmology precisely because it does strike to the core of some important human concerns. Leaving Anaximander for the moment behind, then, and continuing to work with his conception of boundlessness, the question which now occurs to me is "What would some cultural and philosophical ramifications of boundaries and the boundless be?"
The embodied experiences of being bounded and being boundless serve as the basis for a number of metaphorical projections in both our everyday contemporary culture and in our philosophical thought. The first metaphorical projection I see of boundaries and the boundless is to the personal and interpersonal level. In our culture, we have a conception of the self as a bounded object--i.e., the personal space occupied by one's own body. But the SELF IS A BOUNDED SPACE metaphor is supplemented in a number of ways: for instance, we have an understanding of personal space as defined by a projection of boundaries, as evidenced by how the expressions "get out of my sight" and "out of sight, out of mind" use the metaphor PERSONAL SPACE IS VISUAL SPACE. Visual space is metaphorically projected onto our conceptualization of our personal space. Similarly, we become uncomfortable or threatened when a stranger moves within that space defined by our understanding that our PERSONAL SPACE IS GRASPABLE SPACE, and we say such things "get out of my face," "it bothered me that he was within reach," and "hey, creep, don't touch me." In interpersonal relations there is an observable progression of boundary crossings from the outermost to innermost: first from personal space as defined by auditory and visual boundaries, inward through personal space as graspable space to the personal space understood as tangible and propioceptive space.
Additionally, there are other ways that boundaries are cashed out on a cultural level. Objects we possess are extensions of our personal boundaries to cover those objects which are within our reach (i.e., those which are graspable). This metaphor of possession leads to understandings of property boundaries, land rights, ownership and mining claims. We draw a boundary around these objects and extend the bounds of ourselves to encompass them. The notion of ownership is at root a metaphorical extension of the boundaries of the self. We all know that it is painful to have things stolen, and we feel violated and wounded--as if our physical boundaries had been penetrated. In our culture the self is extended to include one's possessions.
What would be the metaphorical projection of the boundless onto a personal and interpersonal level? Remember that boundaries on the bodily level seemed inextricable from perception, while the boundless was unfixed by a single perspective. On the personal level, perhaps the boundless is religious or transcendent experience--the feeling of being in unity with all things, though perhaps not stemming from a bodily experience such as being actively engaged in play but instead from prayer or worship. Another possibility might be the detachment from the ordinary world and the reality of the fictional world one experiences in reading a novel for enjoyment. Or we might find such a feeling of boundless wonder by contemplating a star-filled sky on a clear night. These all are examples of how our experience of the indefinite are projected in our understanding of a slightly more abstract level of personal experience. A projection to the interpersonal level seems more straightforward to me: love relationships, marriage partnerships and deep friendships all have the character of boundlessness. We call a commitment deep when it is unlimited, as when one lends a true friend support during a time of crisis. In deep interpersonal relationships there is a sense that boundlessness requires a merging of personal spaces, or at the least an intertwining of them. When marriages fail one of the ways in which the former partners recover is by beginning to setting limits again on their relationship.
Another important projection of boundaries is their extension to groups such as families, tribes, nations and cultures. One understands one's self as partly defined by one's familial group, whether a nuclear family, an extended family or a clan. Another experiential basis for this metaphor is that a family is typically those with whom one shares living space. Injuries and violations of the boundaries of others within the clan are understood as if they were injuries to our own body. This kind of self-understanding can be seen to give rise to a system of morality as retribution where hostile acts on a member of the clan must be avenged in kind by the violated member's kin. Finally, if we push the metaphor to the point where it becomes almost indistinguishably vague, a nation or culture can be conceived as a bounded space defined by the common beliefs, customs, habits and shared perspectives of the people who inhabit it. A nation has a strong experiential basis of these boundaries--as it was for those who live within the bounding city walls of the Greek city-state--but the external boundaries of a culture are typically vague boundaries.
When we ask what a similar metaphorical projection of the boundless would be for the cultural level, however, the question lands us in the interesting philosophical thicket: the culture wars between cultural relativists and those who believe in a universal truth. Perhaps a metaphorical projection of Anaximander's apeiron is at the heart of our notion of universal truth, for to be culture-bound is to be bound relative to the perspective of one's culture, while one answer to the relativist is to appeal to the notion of intercultural truth. Of course, universal or intercultural truth as a projection of apeiron would have an indefinite or boundless character, resisting any attempt to put bounds on it. Such an intercultural truth would be the intellectual analogue of the boundlessness we experience when all our intellectual faculties perceive in the perfect playful coordination of the backcountry skier's perceptual faculties, requiring not a projection of one's own culture to the status of the universal, but requiring a sensitivity to the many differing perspectives of disparate cultures and then making a projection as to what universal might coordinate those perspectives. Such a projection would always remain tentative however--truth's boundless character necessitates that one could never say exactly what such truth was in precise and definite language, but simply give a best approximation or current articulation of what such truth might be, and indicate the route of further questions.
Another philosophical ramification of boundaries can be seen in our tradition of the ownership of ideas. Not only do we speak of owning opinions and ideas informally--"Oh, you have your idea and I have mine"--but we actually have a legal system in which it is possible own ideas--intellectual property law. Take, for example, patent law. When an invention is patented, it is the idea of the invention which is patented, not simply the mechanism or process, nor the project. In conversations with patent attorneys about their work, they usually observe that the most difficult aspect is putting the boundaries around the idea properly. The lawyer has to understand precisely what the idea is and describe it in such a way that not merely the particular instantiation of the invention is protected by patent law, but the idea of the invention is owned no matter what physical process instantiates it. However, should the description be too broad, the patent can be challenged and thrown out. Copyright and trademark law are other branches of intellectual property law intended to provide a framework in which ideas can be bought, sold and licensed like any other property. So we have a formal tradition whereby an intellectual idea can become a bounded thing.
But this sort of an idea certainly is not like Plato's highest eidos, or the form of the good. Where the idea is a bounded (and therefore knowable) intellectual concept, the highest eidos is in contrast a metaphorical projection of the boundless onto the level of ideas. Thus, the eidos is not possessable as our more ordinary ideas are, but remains indefinite. Friedlander observes that the indefinite nature of the eidos is the point Socrates invariably makes as he embarrasses antagonist after antagonist into admitting they cannot define 'justice,' 'piety' or a host of other ethical terms. The point may be put simply: one simply cannot define ideas which are of a boundless nature. Instead, the eidos has to be lived. Friedlander writes:
Socrates asked indefatigably: What is justice? What is the good? What is techne or sophia or anything else you talk about all the time? But his final purpose was not the discovery of a concept, just as he was never satisfied with any definition he reached. Behind every and any question asked there was the final question: How should man live in service of the city, which requires the virtuous man, and in the service of God, who requires the virtuous man in the well-ordered city? Socrates knew there was an answer to that question because he was that kind of man; and that knowledge determined the form of his dialogues. In and through his inquiries he turned to where an answer might be found. He asked: What is ....? Hence there must be something that is. But only Plato's eyes saw it, and in the Eidos he found what Socrates had taught his students to seek and what Socrates himself had lived.[8]Hence in Plato we find a constant dialectical tension between the expression of the ideas and the eidos itself, boundless and eternal. Socrates' project throughout the dialogues is to repeatedly demonstrate to his antagonists that their finite opinions, conclusions and ideas must all 'participate' in the boundless character of truthful reasoning if they are to have any merit at all.
We can also see reflections of Anaximander's apeiron in Parmenides' contrast between the way of opinion--bounded ideas--and the way of truth (aletheia)--unbounded ideas. Aletheia, or the truth-inquiry, is an activity without end, and so is of an apeiron nature. When we project our bodily experience of the boundless onto the abstract level of ideas, we come up with truth. The roots of philosophical inquiry into truth may be found in the Anaximander's paradox of the apeiron.
I now turn to Heraclitus' paradoxes.
it was prose that was still inadequate for expounding the strange transcendental thought that was to be philosophy. Thus Heraclitus could not write a continuous text book. He expressed his ideas in spurts, in brief pronouncements, which in their attempt each time to be total statements were stylistically "compressed" and a sort of doctrinal dynamite.[9]Ortega y Gasset continues by suggesting that there still is no adequate genus dicendi in which to express philosophical thought, though we have certainly developed prose to the point where some expression of philosophic ideas is possible. If, as our examination of Anaximander has taught us, philosophy is conceived as a quest for boundless truth, then I believe even a stronger thesis: the attempt to put the object of that quest into merely descriptive prose must necessarily fail. Description in philosophy is a matter of putting boundaries on the philosophical idea, much as the intellectual property lawyer, in describing the invention, puts boundaries about the invention in order that it may be understood as a physical object and commodity. Such attempts are, I think, self-defeating; the reader may too easily dismiss the philosophic ideas as if they were the merely bounded ideas described. Paradoxes, however, intrigue us: they boldly capture our imagination and cause us to work out the philosopher's thoughts. The greater challenge requires the greater detail and care in working through the problem, and so serves to assuage the philosopher's greatest fear--being misunderstood. Far from it being that 6th century B.C. Greek prose was inadequate to the task of philosophic expression, Heraclitus may have chosen to write in paradox precisely because he saw that philosophy is not a subject for mere exposition.[10]
Paradoxes also make deep distinctions--both between those who can solve them and those who cannot; and between ourselves before we can solve them and ourselves after we have solved them. The feeling of having solved a paradox is akin to the feeling of having answered a riddle--in either case, a puzzle has fit together. Further, we are left with a feeling of accomplishment, perhaps even of smugness, at solving the puzzle. Why? Because not everyone could have solved the paradox--and we know this because we can clearly remember not being able to solve it ourselves.
I want to consider just one of Heraclitus' many paradoxes. That is the character of the logos, which Heraclitus simultaneously asserts is common to all humankind and ignored by most of us. Reading Heraclitus, it is easy to condemn him three times over as merely hopelessly obscure, undeniably aristocratic and possibly misanthropic. Such a condemnation would be foolish, however. Instead, in his penchant for the obscure Heraclitus may have been making a very deep metaphysical point about the character of knowledge. Consider the opening fragments from his book:
The logos is as here explained; but men are always incapable of understanding it, both before they hear it and when they have heard it for the first time. For though all things come into being in accordance with this logos, men seem as though they had never met with it, when they meet with words and actions such as I expound, separating each thing according to its nature and explaining how it is made. As for the rest of mankind, they are unaware of what they are doing after they wake, just as they forget what they did while asleep. (Fr. 1)In these two fragments the sense in which knowledge is something elitist and separatist should be apparent. There is a clear distinction drawn between the few humans who can understand the logos and the majority who cannot, but "live as if they had understanding peculiar to themselves" (Fr. 2). Throughout the fragments, Heraclitus appears to be vain, arrogant, haughty and prideful, scoffing at those who dismiss his pronouncements as unequal to himself; they are mentally asleep even while physically awake, while only Heraclitus and those few who can understand the strange riddles he utters are fully awake.[12] From the beginning of his book then, he makes explicit why his thought is challenging and paradoxical: the logos, not Heraclitus, is what is difficult to follow. In Fragment 50 he makes this point explicitly "When you have listened, not to me but to the logos, it is wise to agree that all things are one."[13] We are not to listen to Heraclitus, but to the logos in what he says.Therefore one must follow that which is common. But although the logos is universal, the majority live as if they had understanding peculiar to themselves.[11] (Fr. 2)
But why listen to the logos in an obscure riddler's paradoxes? Why not simply tell it in plain and simple prose? Another of Heraclitus cryptic fragments is that "Nature loves to hide" (Fr. 123).[14] In posing paradox after paradox in his book, perhaps Heraclitus is making a deep point about the character of knowledge: perhaps the logos reveals itself to us as we work through a paradox. Such a reading would be consonant with his remark on nature loving to hide, in so much as paradoxes hide their resolutions from us before we work them out. In More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor, George Lakoff and Mark Turner argue that our reasoning is deeply structured by the GENERIC IS SPECIFIC metonymy.[15] The GENERIC IS SPECIFIC metonymy suggests that we metaphorically understand a specific situation to stand for a general class of situations. Further, the structure of the specific situation is imparted to how we understand the general class of situations. Take another fragment of Heraclitus for an example:
Not understanding, though they have heard, they are like the deaf. The proverb bears witness to them: 'Present yet absent.'[16] (Fr. 34)What is the specific situation of the proverb 'Present yet absent'? The first sentence of the fragment accuses an inexplicit 'they' of not understanding and continues by saying that these others, although they have heard, are like the deaf. Presumably, this proverb--'present yet absent'--was said by the Greeks of the deaf, for though the deaf might be bodily present they are also absent in that they cannot hear. From the context of this fragment, Heraclitus intends to extend this proverb to matters of 'understanding.' If, as I think reasonably obvious, the 'they' in this fragment are the many who fail to understand Heraclitus, then Heraclitus is claiming that the many are like the deaf in that while their bodies are present, their minds are absent. So the proverb in which the deaf are understood to be physically present yet auditorially absent has been extended to apply to a similar situation about mental activity--the many who hear and do not understand are physically present but mentally absent. (An everyday case leaps to mind: Students are often an excellent example of beings physically present yet mentally absent.) The shape of the situation presented in the proverb (which speaks specifically about deafness) has been extended to structure a more general situation--the life of the mind.
Seen in this light, the GENERIC IS SPECIFIC metonymy is also the key to why Heraclitus chooses to express himself in paradox. By presenting us with a variety of specific paradoxes which call to us to be worked out, Heraclitus is awakening our general sense of the logos. The specific situation (solving a paradox or riddle) stands for the general class of situations (listening to the logos or discovering knowledge). If on one level Heraclitus uses the GENERIC IS SPECIFIC metonymy as a cognitive tool in the construction of a particular paradox (such as we saw with "present not absent"), then on the meta-level of expressing himself in riddles he may well have chosen the same cognitive tool as well. Thus, he may have intended his cryptic paradoxes to be specific thought experiments which stand for the general process of coming to know the logos. The aletheic process of uncovering truth is better taught by riddles than by prose, for working out paradoxes instigates the kind of inquiry into the logos which constitutes doing philosophy. The expression of philosophy in paradox is also found in the work of the Sophist Gorgias.
To examine the speech in detail, Gorgias first argues that if it were fate that compelled Helen, then surely a mere mortal is not to be blamed for what is the will of the gods. Secondly, if she were carried off by force, then her abductor and not she would be to blame. The third argument is trickier: If it were by means of speech that Helen was persuaded to elope, Gorgias has to show that speech has a power akin to physical force. That he does by an analysis of poetry's effects on the emotions and the susceptibility of the psyche to another's opinion of events in matters where one's own memory is uncertain; persuasive force stems from the ability of words to arouse emotion combined with the fragility of our psyche. He also cites meteorology, legal contests and philosophical debates to buttress his contention that a soul is susceptible to a persuasive force, likening the persuasive power of speech on the soul to the effects of a drug on the body. This argument succeeds or fails on the analogy Gorgias draws between speech and force. In the fourth argument, that Helen was persuaded by love, Gorgias argues that compulsion due to love reduces to compulsion due to the fates. He maintains that love, like fear, is a result of our seeing something so tremendously x that it causes us to feel emotion x. He draws on the Greek theory that sight is caused by objects emitting particles which forcefully impress themselves on the eye, causing vision. Thus the sight of something tremendously fearful can 'force' someone out of their mind (as if they were forced by 'fear' particles), as when troops flee at the first sight of an enemy. Upon this analogy the sight of something tremendously lovely can 'force' someone to commit acts of passion. Since insanity was commonly regarded by the Greeks as either a form of possession by the gods or as a dreadful disease, the tremendous 'force' felt by Helen in beholding Paris must stem either from the fates, or from the power of the disease. If it were the will of the fates causing Paris to appear so lovely to her, then the gods would be to blame and not Helen. If Helen's insanity were caused by a disease, then Helen deserves no blame for her actions but is rather to be pitied for the misfortunes the fates have visited upon her. Thus Gorgias concludes, "Therefore, whichever of the four reasons caused Helen's actions, she was innocent."[18] All four arguments depend on the point that she was abducted by force, and did not elope of her own volition.
The conclusion of the Gorgias' speech does not resolve anything, however; instead it merely raises a paradox. The conclusion is opposed to the initial doctrinal understanding. (While contemporary thought might see problems with Gorgias' reasoning, for example that his argument denies that Helen is at all a moral agent, or that the theory of vision he relied upon is simply not true, let the arguments stand a moment in order to realize that they were powerful for his contemporary Greeks.) Should we accept Gorgias' arguments, we would be faced with the paradox of rhetoric: on one hand we have the tradition of condemning Helen, and on the other powerful arguments that she was innocent. Are we to trust in rhetorical argument when it conflicts with tradition? How may we resolve this paradox?
There are the obvious answers. The conservative Aristophanes condemns Gorgias, rhetoric, Socrates and philosophy while affirming traditional explanation. On the other hand, we may abandon the tradition entirely and succumb to the powers of rhetoric. Note that this abandonment does not necessitate belief in Gorgias' conclusion--we can still believe in the method of rhetoric and think he has made mistakes in his arguments, or relied on doctrines since overturned, and hence dispute his conclusion. But as I have argued with Heraclitus, the true resolution of a paradox does not come about by denying one doctrine or another, but seeking the underlying unity contained in the logos of the paradox.
Consider one of the other surviving fragments attributed to Gorgias, which was preserved by Sextus Empiricus.[19] In this argument--reportedly a summary of Gorgias' book "On Being" or "On Nature"--Gorgias professes to show first that nothing exists, second that if anything exists it is incomprehensible, and third that even if anything is comprehensible it is incommunicable. Granting a moment the argument, proving that nothing exists violates even the possibility of raising an argument in the first place, so why would anyone raise such arguments? At the end of the 'Encomium on Helen' Gorgias answers the question of why he has composed the argument flippantly: "as an amusement for myself."[20] There is more than a kernel of truth in this quip, however. Paradoxes are amusing, especially ones which force us to marvel at their sheer audacity. Yet the proof of nothing existing, while certainly a clever satire of the philosophical projects of the Milesians and Parmenides, is not as threatening a heresy as the heresy of the Encomium. Still, the point of both paradoxes remains the same--we want to simultaneously believe both doctrine and that rhetoric has the power to change which opinions we regard as true.
But does it? I think it may be profitable to read the Gorgian rhetorical paradoxes in another way. Perhaps Gorgias is circumscribing the bounds of argument. Perhaps he is obliquely hinting that rhetoric is simply not due all the credit we would give it. Perhaps rhetoric does not have the power to change minds as forcefully as we might think. Perhaps argument alone should not change our minds. If the paradox can be turned to this end, then perhaps we ought to take Gorgias' sly comments with a grain of salt. Instead of letting truth rest on the conclusion of our arguments, why not identify it with the process of inquiry? Seen in this light, the source of Gorgias' amusement comes clear--he is laughing at those who would confuse his heresies with doctrine, instead of understanding his paradoxes as simply raising questions about the method itself and our faith in the conclusions argument engenders.
The paradox of rhetoric teaches us an important lesson about the bounds of argumentation. Aletheia, as we saw from our study with Anaximander, is that which knows no bounds. Aletheia is an activity of the mind rather than any doctrinal or heretical pronouncement. Rhetoric by itself cannot put boundaries on aletheia, nor can it compel us to believe that a doctrine is (or is not) the truth. The paradox of rhetoric, however, can compel us to regard the conclusive opinion of a legal proceeding or philosophic debate as a temporary way station on the inquiry into truth, but that is not to say that our definite opinions or our argument's conclusions are the same thing as aletheia. That is the nut of the Gorgian paradox: aletheia is boundless; yet rhetoric works best by setting bounds.
Ortega y Gasset argues that the inquiry into the unity of behind paradoxes was authentically reflected in the word aletheia, a word which originates with Parmenides at a time roughly contemporaneous with Heraclitus. The word aletheia, as Ortega y Gasset observes, meant in the vulgar Greek to become naked:
In speculating on some ordinary, prosaic and accepted ideas of reality, he [Parmenides] discovered them to be false but that one could discern behind them the reality itself, appearing as if a concealing crust or veil had been removed, thus allowing the reality to emerge unclothed, naked, and patent. Thus in the thinking process, his mind had performed something akin to undressing, un-covering, removing a veil or covering, re-vealing (= un-veiling), deciphering an enigma or hieroglyphic. This is literally what the word a-letheia meant in popular language--discovery, exposure, denudation, revelation.[22]The bodily sense of aletheia is closely linked to perception--to the sense of becoming naked or making another body naked. To speak in paradoxes, against the current doctrine of the times, mirrors the process of revealing better than the prose of philosophy because it arrests us, stops us, and forces us to think through the thought experiment. The process of approaching a philosopher's paradox becomes a dramatic process in which we are led to re-enact the thought experiment. In re-enacting the process, we come to perceive how philosophers come to their realizations. For a moment we achieve a perfect coordination of the senses and we catch a fleeting glimpse truth in its naked glory. This momentary disclosure reveals the apeiron and boundless nature of the inquiry into truth, where the process of inquiry has no preset or fixed ends such as providing or refuting a particular doctrine, but instead reveals the pleasure of shared rational inquiry. In this way, paradoxes are able to bring us closer to aletheia than descriptive or argumentative prose can alone.
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