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There Is Not Just a War: Recalling the Therapeutic Metaphor in Western Metaphilosophy

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Abstract

This paper offers a critical response to the claims of Sivin and Lloyd (2002) and Mattice (2014) to the effect that Greek and Roman philosophy was characterised by a predominance of combat metaphors. Drawing on Plato and Plutarch, as well as contemporary studies led by Nussbaum (1993), I argue that a host of different metaphors was demonstrably used in the Greek tradition to describe philosophy and its subjects, led by the therapeutic or medicinal metaphor of philosophy as ‘therapy of desire’ or of desiderative opinion. I propose that it was the sophists like Protagoras, at least as they are depicted by Plato, who sought to conceive of philosophising as a strategic, warlike activity. In conclusion, I reflect on the invisibility of the medicinal metaphor, outside of certain dedicated studies in the history of ideas, in contemporary thinking about Western philosophy and its past.

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Notes

  1. Plato, Gorgias, 479d.

  2. This passage, from an August 1934 letter of Heidegger to Bauch, is cited and considered by Gaëton Pégny, “Polysemie et Equivoque: Pour Une Philologie Numerique du Corpus Heideggerien (L’exemple du Terme Dasein”, Études Romano de BRNO, 35: 1, 2014, at pp. 132–133

  3. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors we Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 5.

  4. Sivin & Lloyd, Way and Word: Science and Medicine in Early China and Greece, 127

  5. Martin Heidegger, “The Essence of Truth Lecture Series Winter 1933–34”, in Being and Truth, edited and translated by Gregory Fried and Geffrey Polt (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2010), 75. Heidegger is interpreting Heraclitus fragment 53 “War is the father of all and the king of all; and some he has made gods and some men, some bondsmen/serfs and some free”. Cf. Emmanuel Faye, Martin Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy translated by Michael B. Smith, (Yale: Yale University Press 2009), p. 169

  6. “Philosophy: … And, Parrhesiades, here is a test for you; you know how young eagles are supposed to be tested by the sun; well, our candidates [for true philosophy] have not got to satisfy us that they can look at light, of course; but put gold, fame, and pleasure before their eyes; when you see one remain unconscious and unattracted, there is your man for the laurel; but when one looks hard that way, with a motion of his hand in the direction of the gold, first off with his beard, and then off with him to the brander. …

    Parrhesiades/Frank-talker: Philosophy; you will soon find most of the faces tattooed with foxes and apes, and just a handful topped with wreaths. If you like, by god, I’ll even get some of them up here for you to see. … Oh yes, if the priestess will lend me the line I see there and the Piraean fisherman’s votive hook; I will not keep them long.

    Priestess. You can have them; and the rod to complete the equipment.

    Par. Thanks; now quickly, please, a few dried figs and a handful of gold …

    Philos. What is all this about?

    Priestess. He has baited his hook with the figs and gold, and is sitting on the parapet dangling it over the city.

    Philos. What are you doing, Parrhesiades? do you think you are going to fish up stones from the abandoned wall?

    Par. Shush! I wait till I get a bite. Poseidon, holy God of the catch, and dear Amphitrite, I pray you—send me lots of fish …”

    Lucian, “The Fisherman”, in Selected Satires of Lucian, edited and translated by Lionel Casson (London: W.W. Norton, 1968 358.

  7. Michael Power, The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

  8. Paul D. Janz, “Radical Orthodoxy and the New Culture of Obsucurantism”, Modern Theology, Volume 20, Issue 3, pages 363–405, July 2004.

  9. Both of these texts can be found readily online through word searches, and I forbear from giving the relevant links out of respect for the people involved. But compare the practice of Socrates, extolled by Epictetus in Epictetus, Discourses IV.8:”So Socrates was not known to be a philosopher by most persons; and they used to come to him and ask to be introduced to philosophers. Was he vexed then as we are, and did he say, “And do you not think that I am a philosopher?” No, but he would take them and introduce them, being satisfied with one thing, with being a philosopher; and being pleased also with not being thought to be a philosopher, he was not annoyed …” (cf. III.5 and III.23)

  10. Joseph Owens, “Aristotle’s Notion of Wisdom”, Apeiron: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science, Vol. 20, No. 1 (1987),pp. 1–16.

  11. Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, Translated by Robert L. Savage (Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library, 2010).

  12. Sarah Mattice, Metaphor and Metaphilosophy: Philosophy as Combat, Play, and Aesthetic Experience (USA: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), 23–25.

  13. Francis Bacon, “The Refutation of Philosophies” [unpublished, pr. dating: early 1600s], in Benjamin Farrington, The Philosophy of Francis Bacon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964)

  14. Aristophanes, Wasps ed. Eugene O’Neill, Jr., The Complete Greek Drama Volume II (New York: Random House, 1938); The Old Oligarch, being the Constitution of the Athenians ascribed to Xenophon, trans. J. A. Petch (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1927).

  15. Paul Slomkowski, Aristotle’s Topics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

  16. For a systematic synopsis of the place of dialectic in the different ancient schools, see Pierre Hadot, “Philosophie, Dialectique, Rhétorique dans L’Antiquité”, in Études de Philosophie Ancienne, 159–193.

  17. See George A. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition, from Ancient to Modern Times 2nd edition (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 26–29.

  18. C. D. C. Reeve, “Aristotle’s Philosophical Method,” in Christopher Shields ed. The Oxford Handbook of Aristotle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

  19. Aristophanes. Clouds. The Comedies of Aristophanes. William James Hickie. London. Bohn. 1853; reproduced with Greek text at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc = Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0241, last accessed September 2015.

  20. Cicero, more interested in oratory as a means to defend Roman political liberty, sees it as necessary to strongly advocate for the better cause. (Cicero de orat. III.LXXX)

  21. Marcel Detienne, Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece trans. by Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone books, 1996).

  22. Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant. Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society. Trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

  23. Martha Nussbaum, Therapy of Desire (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1993); John Sellars, The Art of Living: the Stoics on the Nature and Function of Philosophy (London: Ashgate, 2003); Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996), André-Jean Voelke, La philosophie comme thérapie de l’âme (Freiburg: Academic Press; Paris, Ėditions de Cerf, 1993).

  24. Compare Nussbaum on Seneca’s role as councillor-therapist to his brother in De Ira, and the therapeutic setup of that dialogue in Nussbaum, Therapy of Desire, 402–438.

  25. “… continue to remember what you have often heard, that an aristocratic shoe does not rid us of the gout, nor an expensive ring of a hangnail, nor a diadem of a headache.” Plutarch On Tranquility 465a, etc.

  26. Both of these models are well-equipped to furnish a polemical conception of ratiocination. In their Dialectic of Enlightenment, for instance, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer describe ‘reason’ as both instrumental toward the external world, and predicated on internal repression (a more or less violent control of both outer and inner nature). Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by John Cumming (NY: Continuum, 1989).

  27. We say “if”, as this seems to be an unsustainable historicising blanket-word, little more critically helpful than talk of ‘modern philosophy’ en bloc in appreciating the plurality and complexities involved in a philosophical culture spanning at least eight centuries.

  28. Michel Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France, 1981–1982, trans. Graham Burchell, edited by Frédéric Gros (New York: Picador 2006).

  29. See Robert C. Bartlett, “Political Philosophy and Sophistry: An Introduction to Plato’s Protagoras Author(s): American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 47, No. 4 (2003), 612–624, to which I am indebted here.

  30. Francis Bacon, ‘Of Cunning’, The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral, of Francis Ld. Verulam Viscount St. Albans reproduced online, 2003, at www-site http://www.authorama.com/essays-of-francis-bacon-23.html, last accessed September 2015.

  31. Bernard Williams, ‘Do Not Disturb’, Vol. 16 No. 20 20 October 1994, 25–26

  32. “But can we really believe that philosophy, properly understood in terms of rigorous argument, could be so directly related to curing real human misery, the kind of suffering that priests and doctors and—indeed – therapists address? How deep an insight do we have into a culture in which this could be believed? How many people can really have believed it?”, Williams, “Do Not Disturb”, 26.

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    Matthew Sharpe

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Sharpe, M. There Is Not Just a War: Recalling the Therapeutic Metaphor in Western Metaphilosophy. SOPHIA 55, 31–54 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-016-0516-2

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