Aristotle on Pythagoras

Given the prominence offered Pythagoras in Metamorphoses 15, it might be worth noting that Aristotle's early work in the dialogue form, entitled Protrepticus, was preoccupied with the work of that early school of philosophy. The link goes to a new reconstruction of Aristotle's piece, apparently composed while he was still a student at Plato's Academy.

In this snippet from the dialogue, a character named Heraclides is speaking of Pythagoras:

He took a philosophical view of many of the truths of mathematics, and made them part and parcel of his own projects, even the ones handed down to him by others, and made them fit in a suitable arrangement, he conducted the appropriate investigations about them, and produced the same agreement always in all respects, so that it never violates its logical consequence.

And he fashioned them into a starting point for his instruction, which was capable of guiding his listeners, if any of them by sufficient experience could understand the terms sufficiently. Indeed, in the purity, subtlety, and precision of his demonstrations, surpassing every similar type of theoretical observation of other things, he both employs great clarity and sets out from evident facts; and the most beautiful thing in it turns out to be its being high-minded and aspiring to the primary causes, and it both fashions its teachings for the sake of practical affairs and also lays hold of the things in a pure way, the mathematical theorems at times even combining with the theological ones. [68.2]

via rogueclassicism. 

Wondrous conjecture: Marvels in Metamorphoses 15

What returns more than once in Metamorphoses 15 is the theme of wonder, of things that stupify or capture our attention because of their power to shock, surprise, amaze. In a lovely passage, Pythagoras finds in what we normally conceive of as the natural process of birth an instance of how Natura uses her powers as artifex, Daedalian artificer, to escape the trap, the womb, that holds the seed and the hope therein:

fuit illa dies, qua semina tantum

spesque hominum primae matrisque habitavimus alvo.

Artifices natura manus admovit et angi

corpora visceribus distentae condita matris

noluit eque domo vacuas emisit in auras.

Editus in lucem iacuit sine viribus infans;

mox quadrupes rituque tulit sua membra ferarum,

paulatimque tremens et nondum poplite firmo

constitit adiutis aliquo conamine nervis.

Inde valens veloxque fuit spatiumque iuventae

transit

There was a time when we were hidden in our first mother’s womb, only the seed and promise of a human being: nature applied her artificer's hands, and, unwilling for our bodies to be buried, cramped in our mother’s swollen belly, expelled us from our home, into the empty air. 

caesarian

Born into the light, the infant lay there, powerless: but soon it scrambled on all fours like a wild creature, then, gradually, helped by a supporting harness, it stood, uncertainly, on shaky legs. From that point, it grew strong and swift, and passed through its span of youth.

The wonder of Pythagoras will be re-instantiated in the sudden appearance of Hippolytus, in the transformation of Egeria, which is in turn likened to a series of wonders involving Etruscan Tages, Romulus' spear, and the strange reflection of Cipus, before the text turns to Epidaurus for yet another wonder, the translation of Aesculapius.

The tales of Metamorphoses 15 push at the bounds of nature and of art, even as they situate the future momentum of Italy and Rome vis a vis the past of Greece, Phrygia, Crete, Assyria and Egypt. The possibility of a future different from the past -- the promise and seed of something new -- is bound to this motif of wonder, which itself, according to at least one thoughtful mind, is at the root of the love of wisdom:

Human beings philosophize, according to Aristotle, because they find aspects of their experience puzzling. The sorts of puzzles we encounter in thinking about the universe and our place within it—aporiai, in Aristotle's terminology—tax our understanding and induce us to philosophize.

“Human beings began to do philosophy,” he says, “even as they do now, because of wonder, at first because they wondered about the strange things right in front of them, and then later, advancing little by little, because they came to find greater things puzzling” (Met. 982b12). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosphy

Aristotle's term aporia (ἀπορɛία) signifies "lack of resources; puzzlement; doubt; confusion," but its root sense is from a + poros: without passage: impasse.

The mind, confronting its own puzzlement at something it encounters and doesn't understand, is induced to philosophize -- understanding comes when an obstruction is overcome, the mind is no longer trapped. The root is thauma: wonder -- the labors of the mind's native desire to overcome the impasse of ignorance.

We are not far from Pythagoras's understanding of birth. Nature produces the seed, the hope, and the womb, and reaches an impasse. Nature uses her artifices manus to extricate seed and hope from her own trap, hurling them into the "empty air." At the root of "conjecture" is iacere, the word Ovid uses to describe Nature's expulsion of the infant from its hiding place. The poem offers a performative dimension, if you wish, enacting the birth of philosophy in Pythagoras's description of the act of birth.

Figuring Pythagoras

Pythagoras turned geometrical philosophy into a form of liberal education by seeking its first principles in a higher realm of reality. Proclus.

In The Presocratic Philosophers, Kirk and Raven are clear that a teacher named Pythagoras did exist, flourishing around 530 BC:

"There can be no doubt that Pythagoras founded in Croton a sort of religious fraternity or order," they write, adding that Aristotle wrote about his circle as one of the "Italian schools" of philosophy.

Very little is known for certain about his teachings, or those of his successors, but the recurrent note is the unusual tension in his work, which appears to have interwoven three strands: (1) a highly abstract contemplative approach to theory, (2) a sense of the cosmos as a stable, orderly universe, and (3) a concern with catharsis, purification, which was especially linked with music. Kirk and Raven cite an ancient text:

 The Pythagoreans, according to Aristoxenus, practised the purification of the body by medicine, that of the soul by music.

The tension within what is considered characteristic of Pythagorean thought has to do with an effort to synthesize cold, rational, changeless mathematical clarity (space) with passionate and intense interest in things developing, moving, changing -- the marvel of the new (time).

         . . . nihil est toto, quod perstet, in orbe.  (177)

         Cuncta fluunt, omnisque vagans formatur imago;

        there is nothing in the whole universe that persists. Everything flows, and is formed as a fleeting image.

If all we can possess are wandering (vagans) images, then, in truth, we can't hold on to truth. The philosopher here seems to be envisioning the world itself as something that can only be an image, and not a stable one -- the critique of knowledge as being ever contingent, limited, and mutable is no longer a critique of knowledge, but rather is in "fact" the world that we can know. The cave of Morpheus is less distant than we thought.

Adding up all this that can never be known yields a sum that is known never to change:

     summa tamen omnia constant. (250)

     the total sum is constant. 

Ancient sources attribute the term Kosmos to Pythagoras -- the idea that there is order in the universe. Given such order, it seemed inevitable to the Greeks that there would be harmony. Pythagoras is believed to have originated the thought of "the music of the spheres." And according to other ancient sources, he was the first to use the term "philosopher."


The figure of Pythagoras brings together the difficult polarities of art and music, the realm of theory and the power of voice, Apollo and Dionysus. According to ancient comment, Pythagoras' initial effort to yoke these contraries broke apart after his death into two separate schools -- one tending toward the mystical, one toward the mathematical. It is this complication, this callida iunctura within Pythagoras, that would have appealed to Ovid. Here was a philosopher who sang the world as if the play of poetic making were not something said about the world, but rather something in and of the world about which philosophers attempt to speak.

If one were to believe the Pythagoreans, with the result that the same individual things will recur, then I shall be talking to you again sitting as you are now, with this pointer in my hand, and everything else will be just as it is now, and it is reasonable to suppose that the time then is the same as now. Porphyrius, Vita Pythagorae. 

Rhetoric as education - nay, seduction!

The field of rhetorical analysis was set out by the Greeks. A treatise compiled by students of Aristotle became a key part of the trivium for students for centuries after.

One of my favorite rhetorical figures is epanorthosis. Here's how Wikipedia describes it:

An epanorthosis is a figure of speech that signifies emphatic word replacement.[1] The example "thousands, no, millions!" is a stock example. More often, however, epanorthosis signifies immediate and emphatic self-correction, and as such often follows a Freudian slip (either accidental or deliberate). 

Examples: 

"The psychologist known as Sigmund Fraud—Freud, I mean!" 

"I've been doing this for six weeks!—er, days, that is. 

"Man has parted company with his trusty friend the horse and has sailed into the azure with the eagles, eagles being represented by the infernal combustion engine—er er,internal combustion engine. [loud laughter] Internal combustion engine! Engine!" – Winston Churchill[2]

What's particularly fine here is how what most innocent listeners (or readers) would experience as something spontaneous and charming turns out to be a device, a sophisticated play with words calculated to achieve a certain disarming effect upon the aforesaid unsuspecting listeners. This is truly an art of speech acts and impacts in which every imaginable form of wordplay is analyzed into multifarious components that are carefully described, defined, codified and illustrated -- and then marketed as the art of persuasion, i.e., seduction.

We noted how Ovid is constantly transforming material through the use of narrative lenses, using distancing to diminish, and close-ups to make more palpable, as in the contrasting murders of children by their mothers - Itys by Procne and Philomela in Book 6, and the children of Jason (we never even learn their names) by Medea in Book 7. This too belongs to the optics and fairy dust of rhetoric, which can make the small appear large, and the large, small.

Quintilian teaching rhetoric

A few resources:

• A good article about Aristotle's Rhetoric from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• The text of the Rhetoric of Aristotle.
• Wikipedia overview of Aristotle's Rhetoric.
• Cicero was a master of legal and political persuasion and wrote about it in his Rhetorica ad Herennium. Full online text here.
• Quintilian, writing his Institutes of Oratory in the first century AD, had the benefit of all the great Roman writers as well as of the Greeks, to set forth as models for students to emulate.
• A good contemporary online reference for tropes and rhetorical figures is Silva Rhetoricae, which offers examples of each figure it defines. Note the long list on the right-hand side of the page.
• Further groupings of figures are here, and categories of schemes and tropes here. Here's Silva's instance of epanorthosis:

I am angry—no, I am furious about the delay.

But the writer who returned to the philosophic consideration of rhetoric both as a saleable technique capable of subverting serious inquiry into truth and the workings of justice, as well as for purposes of manipulating civic and political power, is Plato. See, for example, the Phaedrus, which begins with a dramatic rendition of a sophist's speech. Also the Gorgias, the Symposium and the Republic. But the concern with rhetoric is pervasive in Plato -- via the figure of Socrates, this concern takes on an ethical and epistemological mission: it is the work of the philosopher to expose rhetoric's sorcery and defrock its charms.