The Laughter of the Thracian Woman

A Protohistory of Theory

Hans Blumenberg, Spencer Hawkins

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781623568535
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

An important work by 20-century philosopher Hans Blumenberg, here translated into English for the first time, The Laughter of the Thracian Woman describes the reception history of an anecdote best known from Plato's Theaetetus dialogue: while focused on observing the stars, the early astronomer and proto-philosopher Thales of Miletus fails to see a well directly in his path and tumbles down. A Thracian servant girl laughs, amused that he sought to understand what was above him when he was not mindful of what was right in front of him. Blumenberg sees the story as a highly sought substitute for our missing knowledge of the earliest historical events that would fit the label "theory." By retelling the anecdote, philosophers reveal their distinctive values regarding absorption in curiosity, philosophy's past, and the demand that theorists abide by sanctioned methods and procedures. In this work and others, Blumenberg demonstrates that philosophers' most beloved images and anecdotes have become indispensable to philosophy as metaphors; that is, as representations whose meanings remain indefinite and invite frequent reinterpretation.

OneTheory as Exotic Behavior

Theory is something that no one sees. While the behavior that constitutes theory does consist of actions that follow intentional rules and lead to complex systems of statements in regulated contexts, these actions are visible as “procedures” only on their surface. To someone uninitiated in their intentionality, who perhaps does not even suspect that they fall under the category of “theory,” these actions must remain puzzling; indeed, they can appear objectionable or even laughable.vii It does not even take the bewildering toil that drives the institutional apparatus of highly specialized scholarship to give that impression. Since the Enlightenment, with its thought experiments about inhabitants of alien worlds who come to visit Earth—as an imaginative step beyond the fictional travel narratives by exotic travelers arriving at the European metropoles—we have become used to imagining the appearance of those procedures that characterize the “modernity” of our life as seen by visitors from other stars. In fact, the more improbable such visits have become, the more some of our contemporaries have decided that they can barely wait for them—so intensely have we imagined them. If extraterrestrials did observe earth, theory—as organized and conducted in masses—might appear as the least intelligible of the rituals that follow the law of our unknown deity.

To those who live in the scientific world and age, the exoticism of the phenomena presented by science has simply become everyday; or concealed. Within scientific institutions, everyone is credited a limine with pursuing meaningful activity, even when others’ high-level specialization makes their work inaccessible: by providing a sphere where everyone is familiar with everyone else’s rules of action, scientists have constructed enclosures that prevent the seemingly ritualized foreignness of their procedures from clashing with the outside world. The figure of the scatterbrained professor has functioned at best to promote tolerance towards theorists, as it presents the fossil of their type to an environment that smiles respectfully, even forgivingly, at them; theorists could largely remove themselves from the public and remain, in every sense, boundviii to their instrumentaria. Even if they produce no “theory” as aggregates of propositions, the transitive sense of the Greek theoriaix authorizes us to think of them as constantly at work on theory.

Another process accompanies this. The more a scientific discipline approaches the “ideal” of exact empiricism, the more exclusively it operates on specimens and measured data that make it independent from the haphazardness of its objects’ appearance. Under the pathologist’s microscope, the sick patient is not to be seen. Our imagination projects the astronomer nightly into his fortress of instruments while he is quietly sleeping and allows the illuminated plate to wake up by itself—when he does not even sit at the display terminal of an overflowing data stream, not even in the next step. No one would perceive the frenzy of arcane and disconcerting activity in him; he can perform his work during normal office hours, while instruments, parabolic antennae, or orbiting satellites deliver him what was once called a “star” but no longer bears any resemblance to the classical “object” of study, because it cannot be grasped by sensory means and can no longer be located from the surface of the earth. As many a mathematician no longer calculates, many an astronomer can no longer point out the old constellations. For him the object has positional data, which are fed into the controlling computer of the instrument: whatever the instrument reports back is then the object.

With the separation of instrument and observer, the outward appearance of “theory” as a procedure becomes more normal, and this trend increases the more science intentionally withdraws from the field of what the average person is willing and able to comprehend. Most importantly, this also means that the everyman can no longer empathize with what it is about those “objects” that can absorb a working life. To counteract this divergence from people’s familiar experiences, growing swarms of publicists try to keep theory and theorists “interesting” to a paying public. Meanwhile—how could it be otherwise?—professional theorists are most readily accepted when they approach the phenotype of the now universally familiar bureaucrat and thereby lay claim to the seriousness that mainly comes with dealing in large amounts of money.

None of this lends support to apocalyptic sentiments about science’s finalisms.x Science may wither from disinterest, vanish by completing its task, or continue on and on, operating under its normal conditions—all that matters here is the view that science offers of the world- and time-spanning distance from its beginning’s imago, about which Heidegger, in his unhappiest hour, said that “the beginning of this greatness remains what is greatest.”1,xi

To put it more simply, this beginning has less formative (prägende) than memorable (einprägsame) force through the imago that it offered or, more correctly, drew towards itself. The interaction between the protophilosopher and the Thracian maidservant was not, but rather became the most enduring prefiguration (Vorprägung) of all the tensions and misunderstandings between the lifeworldxii and theory, tensions which would determine both realms’ inexorable histories.

There are no beginnings in history; they are “assigned” as such. When Thales of Miletus turned into the protophilosopher, he might have recommended himself for the position, by marking myth’s finale with the proposition that now “everything is full of gods.”xiii This was not pulled out of thin air in Miletus, for a city with the renowned oracle of Didyma nearby could afford many gods; at the May procession, honor was rendered continuously to the divine statues mounted alongside the “Sacred Street” between Miletus and Didyma for no fewer than sixteen kilometers. So Thales knew what he was talking about and what he meant by “full.”xiv His transition from myth to philosophy was by no means executed inconsiderately; his “new solution” to the riddle of the world—that everything emerged from the water and is therefore still on top of it—was well attested on Homer’s authority. In the Iliad, the river god Oceanus is the “sire of the gods,” just as he is the “origin of us all.”xv Annexing the world that comes from water and rests on it to the world of the gods hardly constituted the first bold move of reason. If we knew more about how Thales had done it, we would perhaps be reminded more of the exegesis of a canonical text than of the founding of a philosophical system.

What became more important for the future and for the reputation of the protophilosopher was that he had presented theory’s first spectacular success to the Greeks—though he may have hailed from Phoenician stock—by announcing a solar eclipse before the fact. No matter which facts and methods may be attributed to the prognosis (above all, how he determined the eclipse’s site of visibility)—once the position of protagonist fell to him he simply had to attract significances of all sorts. Reception would thus smile on him, but also leave him exposed. In this regard, it can remain open what was primary and what was secondary material in equipping this inaugural figure. In any case, Thales the astronomer had become important for appraising what a philosophical implementation of theory could mean; theory’s “achievement” could be identified as lessening human anxiety. Precisely for that end, there needed to be a successful beginning.

We can determine what the astronomer had to see, in order to provide progress for his science; what he actually saw in order to be shackled to his theoria, we do not know. We can only think abstractly about this beginning or idealize it; how it is intertwined with the world’s divine saturation remains inaccessible to us. For the Thracian maid, who sees the Milesian wandering around at night in the most inadvisable posture, it would be obvious to assume that she had spied him caught up in the cult of his gods. Then, he fell down justly, since his gods were the wrong ones. That unintelligible behavior could be a symptom of seeing a god—and even had to be if the degree of bizarreness escalated to the point of madness—was common knowledge not only among the Greeks, who were reminded repeatedly by Homer that a god can become visible to just one person and no one else, as when Athena restrains Achilles from drawing his sword against Agamemnon. Everyone else resists the exclusivity of the relationship of an individual to his or her special vision, the modern public just like the Thracian maid. In the direction of the starry heavens, where Thales had fixed his gaze, there were no gods that she knew from home. They were down there, where the Greek would now tumble. On those grounds, her Schadenfreude was allowed.

Note

1Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” 8. A speech held at the official assumption of rectorship at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau on May 27, 1933. “The beginning still is. It does not lie behind us, as something that was long ago, but stands before us … The beginning has invaded our future. There it stands as the distant command to us to catch up with its greatness.”

TwoSocrates is Transferred into Protohistory

“Theory” already had a history—just a short two centuries—when it came across an activity beloved again and again over the course of this history: returning to its origins, or at least re-examining them. It had just begun to be worthwhile to measure contemporary luminaries by their archaic prototypes when Plato confronted the fate of his teacher Socrates by comparing him to the figure of the protophilosopher. In the corpus of Aesopic fables, which were familiar to every Greek from childhood, and which the condemned Socrates had still grabbed after from within his cell before death, a pertinent morsel appears concerning an astronomer who meets his downfall through the self-forgetting entailed by his theoretical activity:

An astronomer (astrologos) was in the habit of going out regularly in the evening to observe (episkopēsai) the stars. Once as he was strolling through the outskirts of the town with his attention (ton noūn holon) completely fixed on the heavens, he fell into a well before he knew what was happening to him. While he was howling and shouting, a passer-by who heard his pitiful tones came up and, as soon as he found out what had happened, remarked, “My good fellow, while you’re trying to watch things in the heavens, you don’t even see things on the earth.”1

In the Theaetetus dialogue, Plato lets his Socrates transfer this story to Thales of Miletus. The formerly unnamed astronomer turns into the founder of philosophy; the equally anonymous witness of his fall becomes the Thracian woman in the status of domestic slave for Milesian citizens. The figures of the confrontation have gained concreteness and background:

The story is that Thales, while occupied in studying the heavens above and looking up, fell into a well. A good-looking and whimsical maid from Thrace laughed at him and told him that while he might passionately want to know all things in the universe, the things in front of his very nose and feet were unseen by him.2

As befits the structure of the fable, to which Plato unmistakably refers, he lets himself immediately supply the moral of the story: “The jest also fits all those who become involved in philosophy.” This epimythium cannot have been the fable’s original one; the wisdoms tacked on after fables are generally not of the same origin (gleichurspünglich) as the fables.xvi There is no basis for reading anything into Plato’s version about humanity in general, but only about the philosopher’s bizarreness on its way to becoming tragic.

Of course, it is not Thales who is the reference point in the Platonic context, but Socrates. When the dialogue was written, the philosopher’s unbearability had already reached its limit among Socrates’ contemporaries, and the polis had punished him with death. What had been announced in the laughter of the maid reached its conclusion in hatred. At this point, the Socrates of the dialogue cannot be identical with the historical figure whom the reader and author have in mind; as a literary figure, he still has his end ahead of him and does not even imagine it when he makes fun of himself and philosophy’s particular form of “realism” through the image of the Milesian philosopher. For Plato and his public, theory is introduced as fate; fate binds theory’s prototype to the figure of its culmination, who had become unsurpassable in understanding the world and the human. From Plato’s perspecti...

Table of contents

• New Directions in German Studies
• Volumes in the series:
• Title
• Contents 
• About this Book
• 1 Theory as Exotic Behavior
• 2 Socrates is Transferred into Protohistory
• 3 Knowledge about Heaven and Competence on Earth
• 4 The Theorist between Comedy and Tragedy
• 5 Reoccupations
• 6 Astrological Predominance
• 7 Applause and Reproach from the Moralists
• 8 In the Grip of Historical Criticism
• 9 From Cursing Sinners to Reproaching Creation
• 10 Tycho Brahe’s Coachman and the Earthquake in Lisbon
• 11 Absentmindednesses
• 12 Where Thales had Failed, According to Nietzsche
• 13 How to Recognize what Matters
• 14 Interdisciplinarity as Repetition of Protohistory
• Afterword: Reading into the Distance
• Note on Translation and Annotations
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright