Hegel and Ancient Philosophy

A Re-Examination

Glenn Alexander Magee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351602426
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Hegel's debts to ancient philosophy are widely acknowledged by scholars, and by the philosopher himself. Roughly half of his Lectures on the History of Philosophy is devoted to ancient philosophy, and throughout his work Hegel frequently frames his positions in relation to the thinkers and movements of antiquity. This volume presents original essays from leading scholars dealing with Hegel's debts to ancient thinkers, as well as his own, often problematic readings of ancient philosophy. While around half of the chapters discuss Hegel's treatment of Aristotle—a topic that has long been at the forefront of scholarship—the other half explore his relationship to such ancient figures as Xenophanes, Anaxagoras, Socrates, Plato, Sextus Empiricus, and the Stoics. The essays challenge a number of longstanding scholarly assumptions regarding, for example, Hegel's denigration of the "mythical, " his developmentalist approach to ancient thought, his conception of the state in relation to the Greek polis, his "hermeneutic" of the Platonic dialogues, and his use of Aristotelian concepts in arguments concerning the psyche, the body, and their unity and distinction.?

1 Xenophanes and Presocratic Thought

A Critical Perspective on Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy

Robert Metcalf

The history of philosophy has to do not with what is gone, but with the living present.

—Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy¹

Our access to the earliest Greek philosophers is compromised, first, by the oft-lamented paucity of texts that remain from this period and, second, by the fact that in most cases, these meager textual remains are extant only because they were used to confirm a given interpretation of the Presocratic thinker in question. Often, it was the interpretation presented by Aristotle or a commentator on Aristotle in reviewing what early predecessors said about a chosen philosophical topic, or even interpretations offered much later in antiquity. Indeed, when we examine our sources for the extant texts from Presocratic thinkers, we find that our access to the earliest philosophers is mediated by two layers of interpretation placed upon the so-called Presocratics in the age of Plato and Aristotle, each layer exerting a decisive influence on subsequent interpretations.

The first layer is what I shall call the “Socratic” interpretation—not because it reflects the historical Socrates (though it may, for all we know), but because it reflects the characterization of Presocratic philosophy as a whole in relation to, or by contrast with, the figure of Socrates. According to this interpretation, philosophy before Socrates was principally concerned with phusis, and specifically with an eye to providing an explanation for all coming to be and passing away (or, with the Eleatics, denying that there is any coming-to-be or passing-away), but without regard for the limitations of human knowledge.

The second layer of interpretation is that which is offered by Aristotle in Book One of Metaphysics, wherein he describes all of the earliest Greek philosophers as attempting to explain coming to be and passing away by appealing only to various material causes.² According to this second layer of interpretation, the great contribution and weakness of Presocratic thinking was its approach to phusis by way of the material cause. For Aristotle, and his followers, there is no question that Presocratic thinking had been superseded by Aristotle’s more fully developed natural philosophy. But precisely because these interpretive layers steer our approach to Presocratic philosophy, a careful reexamination of the extant texts must always go hand in hand with a critique of received interpretations, if we have any hope of encountering Presocratic thought in some sense unfiltered by later philosophers. On this latter point, Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy makes significant contributions to the critique of traditional interpretations, for Hegel stresses the methodological imperative that we proceed historically, and “ascribe to philosophy only what is immediately given to us, and that alone [nur dies ihr zuschreiben, was uns unmittelbar angeben wird].”³

Yet these multiple layers through which Presocratic philosophy has been interpreted by tradition and passed down to us are still present in Hegel’s Lectures and are even reinforced conceptually, since Hegel views all of Presocratic philosophy as having been decisively overcome and superseded with the coming-to-consciousness of thinking “subjectivity” in Socrates.⁴ Further, though Hegel does rightfully take issue with Aristotle’s anachronistic ascription of the concept of archē to the earliest Presocratics,⁵ he advances further the “developmentalist” approach to their interpretation, with two implications. First, that “the earliest philosophies are the poorest and the most abstract … they keep merely to generalities not yet realized [sie halten sich nur in Allgemeinheiten, sind nicht erfüllt]” (41/60); and, second, that subsequent philosophies are more developed, richer and more profound. In later philosophy, Hegel writes, “everything which at first seems to be past and gone must be preserved and retained, and it must itself be a mirror of the whole history.”⁶ In what follows, then, we shall critically examine Hegel’s interpretation of Greek thought, and with it the multiple layers of ancient interpretation on which it is based, by focusing on a Presocratic thinker who disrupts the developmentalist schema that has been imposed on Presocratic thought: Xenophanes of Colophon.

For the most part, Xenophanes has played only a marginal role in histories of Greek philosophy, either because he has been regarded as unworthy of serious philosophical attention, or because his significance is thought to lie mainly in his founding of the Eleatic School, the accomplishments of which are better formulated by Parmenides and later Eleatics.⁷ And yet, the extant writings of Xenophanes offer us not only the first questioning of knowledge, but also a philosophical approach to phusis that differs significantly from what we find in the writings of other Presocratic thinkers. While the “Socratic” layer of received interpretation has it that the Presocratics were concerned with the causes of coming-to-be and passing-away for phusis as a whole without regard to the limitations of human knowledge about such things, it turns out that Xenophanes anticipates by more than a century Socrates’s focus on the difference between human knowledge and that proper to the divine. At the same time, Xenophanes’s recognition of human limitations with respect to such knowledge does not lead him to abandon inquiry into nature (historia peri tēs phuseōs) in the way that Socrates does—or says that he did—in Plato’s Phaedo.⁸ Thus, at the very least, Xenophanes’s thinking allows us to reconsider the influential portrait of Presocratic philosophy that was used as a contrast to Socrates’s philosophical activity in the writings of Plato and Xenophon, and which is then carried over into Hegel’s developmental interpretation of Greek philosophy. But let us begin by tracing the contours of this “Socratic” interpretation of Presocratic philosophy, since it informs everything that comes after it.

That Presocratic philosophy was principally a matter of investigating phusis is something widely agreed on by ancient authors, even while they disagree as to whether Socrates had himself engaged in such investigations. Most provocative among these ancient accounts is the absurd caricature of Presocratic thought in Aristophanes’s Clouds, where Socrates’s “thinkery” is presented as a place where young men go to learn a form of persuasion that is informed by the ongoing study of phusis—e.g., “the heavens are a stove, and we are charcoal,” etc. (lines 94–99). Socrates is portrayed there as investigating what might be called “natural causes” for phenomena traditionally attributed to the will of the gods, thereby rejecting the traditional gods in favor of novel, quasi-materialistic deities.⁹ In Plato’s Apology, on the other hand, Socrates recalls this comedic portrait of him as a philosopher and emphatically denies having ever pursued an “investigation into things below the earth and in the heavens [zētōn ta te hupo gēs kai ourania]” (19b-d), for he did not lay claim to any wisdom beyond the human sort that is aware of its own limitations. Xenophon, too, echoes this denial in his Memorabilia, where he asserts that Socrates was never seen doing anything impious or irreverent or heard uttering such things:

For he did not discuss the nature of all things [peri tēs tōn pantōn phuseōs]—that which was the focus of investigation for most of the others, what the sophists call the kosmos, and by what determinants each part of the heavens comes to be (I.1.11).¹⁰

Of course, the terms by which Xenophon offers this testimony on Socrates have the effect of deepening the suspicions widely held that Presocratic philosophy was involved in a project both audacious and impious.

However fitting it may or may not be to describe Presocratic philosophy as a whole according to the characteristics just noted—namely, as investigating things below the earth and in the heavens, studying the phusis of all things in order to know the causes of coming to be and passing away, jettisoning traditional religious beliefs as they pertain to phusis, etc.—it cannot be doubted that these characteristics apply fairly well to the spirit and letter of Xenophanes’s writings. Xenophanes pursues, as candidly as any Presocratic thinker, the debunking of traditional, religious accounts of phenomena, in favor of what we might well call a “naturalistic” approach. Consider, for example, the following texts:

FRAGMENT 32: “And she whom they call Iris, this too is by nature a cloud, purple and red and greenish-yellow to behold.”¹¹

FRAGMENT 30: “Sea is the source of water, and the source of wind, for without the great sea there would be no wind nor streams of rivers nor rainwater; but the great sea is the begetter of clouds, winds and rivers.”¹²

TESTIMONIUM 32: “He says that the sun and the stars come from clouds.”¹³

As James Lesher has argued, “Without explicitly announcing their banishment, Xenophanes has dispatched an array of traditional sea, river, cloud, wind, and rain deities (hence Zeus himself) to the explanatory sidelines.”¹⁴ Furthermore, in the fragments that are perhaps most familiar to us from this early thinker, Xenophanes explicitly criticizes traditional ideas about the gods—for example, the idea that the gods are born, have bodies and wear clothes;¹⁵ that the gods are flat-nosed and black (as believed by the Ethiopians), or red-haired and blue-eyed (as believed by the Thracians);¹⁶ and finally, that the gods engage in deception or in other actions that would be thought immoral if done by human beings.¹⁷ Interesting for our purposes is the fact that Hegel takes these fragments criticizing traditional representations of the gods as implying a critique of the world of sense-perception altogether. He writes: “The manner in which [Xenophanes] expresses himself towards the sensuous world and finite thought-determinations is seen most clearly in his opposition to the Greek mythological conceptions of the gods.”¹⁸ But the fragments themselves do not compel such a reading. Rather, what is more striking is the way in which Xenophanes brings together in his writings both the philosophical critique of inherited religious beliefs and the naturalistic inquiry that obviates the need for religious explanations of phenomena like rainbows, rain, sun and stars, eclipses, etc.¹⁹

We encounter Xenophanes’s philosophical “naturalism” very clearly in his famous lines about earth and water:

FRAGMENT 27: “for all things are from the earth and to the earth all things come in the end.”²⁰

FRAGMENT 29: “All things which come into being and grow are earth and water.”²¹

FRAGMENT 33: “For we all come into being from earth and water.”²²

Given the influence of Aristotle’s interpretation of the “earliest philosophers,” it is tempting to read these fragments as identifying what Aristotle called the archē.²³ On this way of reading the fragments, whereas Thales identified ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abbreviations and Conventions
• Acknowledgments
• Editor’s Introduction
• 1 Xenophanes and Presocratic Thought: A Critical Perspective on Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy
• 2 On the Speculative Significance of Anaxagoras in Hegel’s Lectures
• 3 Hegel on the Trial of Socrates and the End of Aesthetic Democracy
• 4 How Hegel Read the Platonic Dialogues
• 5 The Platonic Dimension of Hegel’s System
• 6 Mens Divina as Lebendigkeit: Hegel’s Interpretation of Metaphysics 1072b26–27
• 7 The Way Past the Stripping Argument in Hegel and Aristotle
• 8 The Aristotelian Metaphysics of Hegel’s “Soul”
• 9 Parts and Souls
• 10 On Contradiction: Hegel versus Aristotle, Sextus Empiricus, and Kant
• 11 On Theory and Praxis: Hegel’s Reformulation of an Aristotelian Distinction
• 12 Ethical Life, Politics, and the Actualization of Freedom: Hegel and Aristotle’s Politics
• 13 Hegel’s Critique of Stoicism
• Contributors
• Index