DIVINE MYSTICISM INFLUENCE FROM PRE-GREEK ERA
TO ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY & MYSTICISM
By: Ahmad Y. Samantho, S.IP
Preface
As we believe in Islamic Religion, the truth and wisdom (Sophia /al-Hikmah) that grasped by human thought and consciousness are came from the same source, the Divine Sources, God (Allah) , The Ultimate Knowledgeable. 
Hence, from that conviction, we can eksplore the affirmation proofing in a long history of philosophy, since pre-Greek (Egypt & Bizantium) Civilization era, Ancient Greek era and Islamic Civilization in The Medieval until Now.
Dr. Mulyadi Kartanegara said that Pythagoras (570-497 BC) had learn many things from ‘Shahabah Nabi Sulaeman as.’ (The Best Friends of Prophet & King Solomon), and his follower, Empedocles (495-435 BC ) also learn from Lukman al-Hakim (the ‘Wise Man’ mentioned in al Qur’an), and Socrates (469-399 BC) learn many wise & knowledge from Hermes (Nabiyullah Idris as, the Prophet of God).
However, we can understand why very many Islamic philosophers and scholars can received and absorbed several particular thought (philosophy) from Ancient Greek Philosopher, adopt them, intermingled, syntesized and develop with ‘Islamic Teaching’ (Al Qur’an & Sunnah Rasulullah Muhammad SAAW).
We can see that this chains of philosopher for a long history as follow has a ‘red thread’: Hermes, Pythagoras, Empedocles, Socrates, Plato, Aristoteles, Plotinus, Al-Kindi, Ibn Sina (Avicena), Ibn Rush (Averous), Ibn Arabi, Sukhrawardi, Mulla Shadra, Thabathabai, Ayatullah Imam Khomeini, Murthada Muthahhari, Muhammad 
Taqi Misbah Yazdi, Hairi Yazdi.
Here, in my treatise, I want to shows and look overwiew this kind of mystical path or devine-religious path that came from The Ultimate God a long the history of human kind.
Hermes & Hermetism
A primarily religious amalgam of Greek philosophy with Egyptian and other Near Eastern elements, Hermetism takes its name from Hermes Trismegistus, ‘thrice greatest Hermes’, alias the Egyptian god Thoth. Numerous texts on philosophical theology and various occult sciences, ascribed to or associated with this primeval figure, were produced in Greek by Egyptians between roughly AD 100 and 300, and are a major document of late pagan piety. Reintroduced into Western Europe during the Renaissance by Muslim scholars, they provided considerable inspiration to philosophers, scientists and magicians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Hermetic literature can be divided into philosophical treatises, on God, the world and man, and technical writings on astrology, alchemy and other branches of occult science. The philosophical Hermetica comprise principally: (1) the Asclepius or Perfect Discourse, a longish work surviving in a Latin translation; (2) the Corpus Hermeticum proper, a Byzantine collection of fourteen treatises, translated into Latin by Marsilio Ficino in 1462-3 and published in 1471 under the title Pimander (after Poemandres, its first and most important treatise), to which three further pieces were later added; and (3) some twenty-nine extracts in the anthology compiled in the fifth century AD by John Stobaeus. The Stobaeus Hermetica vary in length from single sentences (12, 27, 28) to an important extract (23, from the Kor0 Kosmou or Pupil of the Cosmos) as long as anything in the Corpus Hermeticum.
The philosophical treatises take the form of dialogues, or rather, since disputation and argument are notably absent from them, of expositions, usually although not always by Hermes himself, to one or more trusting disciples. Their scenery and dramatis personae - Hermes, his son Tat, Asclepius (alias Imouthes or Imhotep), King Ammon and so forth - are Egyptian and ancient, investing these treatises, like so many other writings of the period, with the authority of primeval 0revelation. Their philosophy - that is, their cosmology and metaphysics - is a contemporary ‘Middle Platonism’ (see Platonism, Early and Middle), the only philosophical idiom available in late antiquity to anyone attempting a non-mythological treatment of these subjects. (There are also gnostic and Jewish elements, notably in Poemandres and Corpus Hermeticum III.) Their purpose, however, is not strictly philosophical. A treatise may start with some standard question of school philosophy - for example, motion (II), death (VIII), or intellection and sensation (IX). But the answer, often garbled, is seldom more than a starting point for meditation and homily. The aim is not to offer some new, coherent and discussible account of God, the world and man so much as to satisfy a religious need, common enough in this period, for a saving ‘gnostic’ illumination. The purpose of the Hermetist teacher - and the treatises tend to be stylized as lessons in a course of ever more esoteric instruction - is to generate a gn>sis, an intuitive knowledge of god and self, vouchsafed to very few, an answer in cosmic terms to the perennial question ‘What am I here for? What am I?’. The instruction finds its fulfilment in intellectual illumination, as the pupil becomes aware of being a particle of divine life and light (Poemandres 21) and the teacher can say ‘You have come to know yourself and our common Father’ (Corpus Hermeticum XIII 22).
In this context, doctrinal consistency and lucid theory are minor considerations. There are numerous contradictions between the treatises - one text admits as much (Corpus Hermeticum XVI 1). Some of these go back to Plato’s own works, to the contrast there between the Timaeus, with its picture of mankind placed in a good world by a good god - an optimism strongly endorsed by the Asclepius and by Corpus Hermeticum II, V-VI, VIII-XII, XIV, XVI - and the gloomier account of our human condition in the Phaedo and the Phaedrus, reflected in the severe pessimism of Poemandres, Corpus Hermeticum IV, VII, XIII and Kor0 Kosmou, when they dismiss the material world as a ‘totality of evil’ (Corpus Hermeticum IV 6), into which the soul has fallen as a punishment for original sin (Kor0 Kosmou 24), or in consequence of some primeval blunder (Poemandres 14). But the inconsistencies hardly matter. The Hermetic treatises are documents of spirituality, not philosophy. Scholarship has come increasingly to see them as translations, as products of a native Egyptian religious tradition (the very fact that they are attributed to Hermes-Thoth is confirmation of their author’s religious loyalties) rewritten in the language of Middle Platonism.
Thoth was, among other things, the god of wisdom, knowledge and science. In Roman Egypt numerous works were ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus on technical subjects such as astrology, alchemy and the hidden properties of plants. His name is constantly invoked in magical papyri. These disciplines all rested on a principle, widely held in late antiquity and briefly sketched in the Asclepius (2-7, 19), of cosmic ‘sympathy’. Linking things on earth to each other and to things in heaven is a nexus of largely hidden sympathies and antipathies which can be used to explain, predict and manipulate the course of events. The philosophical Hermetica, where mentioning these occult sciences, give them a high religious colouring. Magic and philosophy alike, says the Kor0 Kosmou (68), nourish the soul. Both are ways to salvation.
Hermes was remembered as a magician, and also as a primeval sage, a younger contemporary of Moses, who foretold the coming of Christianity. During the Middle Ages, numerous works in Arabic and Latin were produced under his name. The arrival of Corpus Hermeticum in the West created something of a sensation: Ficino interrupted his life’s work on Plato and Plotinus to translate it. A vastly older figure than Plato and a vastly purer exponent of the ‘original theology’ (prisca theologia), Hermes lent authority and respectability to the active interest which Ficino, Pico della Mirandola and others took in magic. The broad Hermetic vision of the world as a network of hidden forces waiting to by discovered and exploited by the magus was to be an inspiration to such luminaries of sixteenth-century science as Paracelsus, whose experiments in alchemy led to the discovery of laudanum, and Giordano Bruno, whose Hermetic interests ended
with him burnt at the stake. The antiquity, and hence the authority, of Hermes Trismegistus received a fatal blow in 1614 when Isaac Casaubon demonstrated, on linguistic and other grounds, that the Hermetic writings could only be a late forgery. Hermes still had admirers and readers in the seventeenth century, including the Cambridge Platonists and even Isaac Newton. But Casaubon remained unrefuted; and the Hermetic writings lost their appeal to all save lovers of the occult and, in the twentieth century, historians of religion.
Gnosticism
Gnosticism comprises a loosely associated group of teachers, teachings and sects which professed to offer ‘gnosis’, saving knowledge or enlightenment, conveyed in various myths which sought to explain the origin of the world and of the human soul and the destiny of the latter. Everything originated from a transcendent spiritual power; but corruption set in and inferior powers emerged, resulting in the creation of the material world in which the human spirit is now imprisoned. Salvation is sought by cultivating the inner life while neglecting the body and social duties unconnected with the cult. The Gnostic movement emerged in the first and second centuries AD and was seen as a rival to orthodox Christianity, though in fact some Gnostic sects were more closely linked with Judaism or with Iranian religion. By the fourth century its influence was waning, but it persisted with sporadic revivals into the Middle Ages.
1 Basic doctrines
Gnosticism can best be understood in terms of family likeness. One can identify characteristic features, most of which are found in most Gnostic sects; but the attempts often made to define
Gnosticism in terms of universally present common features can only approximate to the truth.
Characteristic tenets include:
1 A radical dualism, contrasting a transcendent realm of pure spirit with the world of gross matter. The human makeup likewise presents a sharp contrast of spirit and sensuality, with a corresponding distinction between the ‘elect’ or spiritual people and the rest of society, though some systems introduce an intermediate grade.
2 A creator presented as imperfect or evil, though commonly identified with the God of Judaism, and sharply contrasted with the supreme divinity, who is his ultimate source. His existence is explained by various myths depicting events prior to the creation and claiming to show how evil dispositions arose by accumulated lapses among the heavenly powers.
3 The human spirit originated in the higher realm, but is now imprisoned in the form of a soul within the material body. Many Gnostic sects taught that the same spirit can live many lives. But it is often seen as predestined to salvation or the reverse.
4 The Gnostics’ aim was to liberate their spirits from all attachment to material things, and thereby return with the elect minority to ultimate happiness. Most Gnostic sects therefore adopted a puritan ethic, though some held that all physical actions are contemptible and approved licentious conduct as a sign of liberation.
2 Definitions, origins and dating
‘Gnosticism’ is a term coined by modern scholars. Ancient writers allude to ‘gnosis’, that is, knowledge, especially spiritual knowledge or enlightenment. St Paul speaks disparagingly of Christians who laid claim to it (1 Corinthians 8: 1), but it was nevertheless commended by Clement of Alexandria and others. Clement also uses ‘Gnostic’ to mean a devout and instructed Christian. The Gnostic sects themselves had no common self-designation parallel to ‘Jew’ or ‘Christian’, and were commonly named after their founders. Irenaeus (c.130-c.200), however, implies that the term was appropriated by several sects, and its use was soon extended to include all similar schools.
There has been much debate about the origins of Gnosticism, whether Greek, Jewish or Iranian. It now appears that the movement was too diversified for any single-source theory to be acceptable, and many forms of it clearly presuppose an amalgamation of different cultures. Its ablest exponents, including Valentinus and Marcion (fl. c.140-60), inherit the traditions of Hellenistic Judaism, incorporating Christian elements; the rest are unlikely to interest students of
philosophy.
The problem of dating has been complicated by ill-defined terminology. It has been claimed thatGnosticism originated in Iran before the Christian movement emerged. But it now appears that he emergence of systematic Gnostic teaching is roughly contemporaneous with a parallel Christian development, though many of the ideas found in Gnosticism were current earlier. Scholars, especially in Germany, now tend to reserve the term ‘Gnosticism’ for the elaborate systems described by Irenaeus around 180 AD, for example, using ‘Gnosis’ as an inclusive term for its constituent ideas.
Mandaeism, a small Gnostic sect unnoticed by Christian writers, has attracted some attention from scholars, as the sect still survives and has preserved sacred writings of great antiquity. Its claim to derive from John the Baptist is probably unfounded.
3 Sources
For many centuries Gnosticism was known only through the writings of its Christian opponents, notably Irenaeus, Tertullian and Clement, who did however embody quotations from the works they criticized. Some later Gnostic texts of dubious value emerged in the eighteenth century, supplemented by the important Berlin Codex 8502 (discovered 1901, fully edited 1955). But thesituation was transformed by the discovery of forty-four books in codex form at Nag-Hammadi in Upper Egypt in 1944 (though once again publication was delayed). Most are Coptic translations of Greek originals, some of which probably date from the first century AD. Many of them introduce biblical characters, though strongly influenced by Gnostic assumptions. Three may be mentioned in particular: the Apocryphon of John, which abounds in fanciful mythology,but was apparently authoritative and survives in several copies; the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of sayings ascribed to Jesus, isolated from their settings and accompanying actions, but sometimes presenting variant forms of canonical Gospel texts; and the so-called Gospel of Truth (Evangelium veritatis), the one item in the collection which could without absurdity be annexed to the Christian scriptures; it has no marked heretical features and offers an original meditation on the passion of Christ.
The list of sources should be extended by a brief note on Manicheism, a Gnostic sect founded by Mani (Manes, Manichaeus) around 216-76 AD in Iran, and influential especially in the fourth century, when it briefly captured St Augustine (see Manicheism). Earlier patristic and Muslim sources can now be compared with Manichean documents found at Turfan from 1898 and in Egypt from 1930 onwards, including a biography of the founder.
4 Philosophical content and value
Early Christian writers, especially Hippolytus (c.170-c.236), argued that the Gnostics were influenced by Greek philosophy. In most cases this is unlikely, and where such influence existed it has been overlaid by mythology. Some philosophical schools, for example, Sceptics and Epicureans, can be discounted; Stoic influence was slight and indirect. One must also exclude the dominant Platonism, which taught the eternity of the world, taking the Timaeus to symbolize its eternal dependence on creative goodness. But some Gnostic sects echo the Jewish and Christian Platonism that assimilated the early chapters of Genesis with the Timaeus interpreted historically, as it was by Plutarch and Atticus. The Nag-Hammadi texts include an extract fromPlato’s Republic (588a-589b) inaccurately reproduced in Coptic. Pythagorean influence appears in the significance assigned to numbers, already present in the Jewish practice ofGematria, where numbers, commonly expressed by letters, are regrouped to yield significant words; thus 666, ‘the number of the beast’ (Revelation 13: 18), can be split up, it is alleged, to yield the letters NERO CAESAR.
Platonic traits appear clearly in the Valentinian system, which was widely influential and is commonly taken as typical. Valentinus was a gifted man who hoped to be made Bishop of Rome, and so presumably restrained his speculative powers, as his scanty surviving fragments suggest. Yet the Valentinian system, as known only one generation later, presents abewilderingly complex mythology, clearly unacceptable to mainstream Christians.
Note however the following features:
1 Dualism is modified to include an intermediate grade: three levels of being - spirit, soul and matter; and three classes of people - the Gnostic elect, the conventional church member, the unregenerate outsider - which recalls the three classes of citizens in Plato’s Republic.
2 Evil is traced to defective cognition.
3 The ultimate divinity expands to form a series of powers or ‘Aeons’. The first derivative is God’s self-knowledge (his ‘Ennoia’). But the process goes wrong: in the developed alentinian myth, the primal fault is ascribed to the last in a series of thirty Aeons, who nevertheless bears the prestigious name of Sophia. This may point to an earlier conception in which it is the first derivative, Ennoia-Sophia, who fails. Conversely, Irenaeus describes a further development in which the erring Sophia herself is duplicated.
The myth serves to express a fundamental problem of theology. The ancients commonly thought of knowledge as a process of copying; thus we may be said to know someone when we can recall that person’s features. Thus any knowledge of God must be a kind of replica. But it cannot be perfect, or it would amount to a second divinity. So any attempt to elucidate God must be presumptuous. The most thoughtful treatment of the problem appears in the Tripartite Tractate from Nag-Hammadi. Here God’s nature is expressed in a series of powers which at first appear as impersonal attributes; but to replicate God’s being each one must become a sovereign will; they thus incur a common failure, as each one fails to consider its own incompleteness and its need of the others. This account of the primary fault is clearly more persuasive than the official Valentinian theory, which fixes the blame exclusively on Sophia. But the majority of Gnostic teachers were catering for untrained minds, and sought to impress them with increasingly complex and pretentious mythology, a feature which today baffles and repels many philosophers.
Pythagoras (c.570-c.497 BC)
Pythagoras of Samos was an early Greek sage and religious innovator. He taught the kinship of all life and the immortality and transmigration of the soul. Pythagoras founded a religious community of men and women in southern Italy that was also of considerable political influence. His followers, who became known as Pythagoreans, went beyond these essentially religious beliefs of the master to develop philosophical, mathematical, astronomical, and musical theories with which they tended to credit Pythagoras himself. The tradition established by Pythagoras weaves through much of Greek philosophy, leaving its mark particularly on the thought of Empedocles, Plato, and later Platonists.
1 Life and deeds
Pythagoras, son of Mnesarchus, was born on the island of Samos. For the first half of his life Pythagoras travelled widely, not only in Greece but supposedly also in Egypt, Phoenicia and Babylonia, where he is reputed to have acquired much of his knowledge and religious wisdom. Perhaps to escape the rule of Polycrates, thetyrant of Samos, he emigrated to Croton in southern Italy. His moral stature and eloquence gained him many adherents. With his followers, both men and women, Pythagoras practised a simple, communal life whose goal was to live in harmony with the divine. To that end he prescribed a regimen of purification that included dietary restrictions, periods of silence and contemplation, and other ascetic practices. In addition to the religious and monastic aspects of the Pythagorean society, we hear of Pythagorean political associations (hetaireiai) that played an important role in the public affairs of Croton and other southern Italian cities (it appears they initiated social reforms and supported aristocratic constitutions). After a time their dominance came to be resented and a ‘Pythagorean revolt’ ensued, in the course of which many Pythagoreans were killed or scattered abroad. Pythagoras himself, possibly as a result of this upheaval, moved to Metapontum where he died.
Already during his lifetime Pythagoras was regarded with near religious veneration. It is therefore not surprising that the stories told about him after his death should turn into hagiology and include many fantastic elements: that Pythagoras was the Hyperborean Apollo and had a golden thigh to prove it; that he was seen in two places at one time; that he could converse with animals and control natural phenomena. Pythagoras’ wonder-working clearly belongs to the realm of legend, although it reinforces the picture of him as a ‘shaman’. A more difficult matter is to establish what Pythagoras actually taught, since the oral and then the written traditions attribute to him not only miracles but also sophisticated mathematical and philosophical achievements. This habit of tracing all things back to the master, coupled with evidence of the quasi-religious avoidance of uttering his name, is typified in the expression common among Pythagoreans: ‘he himself said’ (autos epha; Latin ipse dixit). However, because Pythagoras wrote nothing and shrouded his lectures in secrecy, it is impossible to verify all that is ascribed to him. What remains certain is that he was a highly influential religious teacher whose main tenets dealt with the soul and the rites required for its purification and salvation. This made the Pythagorean movement especially popular in Magna Graecia, a fertile soil for mystery cults of all kinds. Pythagoras is also connected with certain ‘Orphic’ writings, since these share eschatological concerns similar to his oral teachings (see Orphism). For these reasons the following account will emphasize those doctrines that accord with Pythagoras’ reputation as an early Greek sage and religious innovator (for the philosophical and scientific theories traditionally associated with his name, see Pythagoreanism).
2 Teachings
Pythagoras believed that the world was animate and that the planets were gods. This view of the universe as living and divine was characteristic of early Greek thought (see Thales §2), but what appears unique with Pythagoras is the corollary he drew on an anthropological level: there is an element in human beings that is related to the universe and that, like the universe in which events recur in eternal cycles, is eternal. This divine, immortal element is the soul (see Psych0). With the death of the body the soul passes into another body, human or animal. An early witness to Pythagoras’ belief in transmigration (or metempsych>sis) is the poet-philosopher Xenophanes (§1), who satirizes him for claiming to recognize the soul of a friend when he heard the voice of a puppy that was being beaten. Pythagoras asserted of himself, as is typical of a religious figure who draws on personal experience, that he had once been the Homeric hero Euphorbus, and he exhorted his disciples to recall their own past lives.
The immortality of the soul underlies many of Pythagoras’ practical teachings, for the soul, as the most important element within a person, required nurture to ensure not only equanimity in this life but also a better incarnation in the life to come. These ends could be achieved by bringing the soul into harmony with the divine, cosmic order (according to a disputed doxography, Pythagoras was the first to pronounce the world a kosmos, a term that in Greek combines the ideas of adornment, beauty and order). In so far, however, as the soul resided in a body, it needed to be freed from the turmoils and corrupting influences of the body. Hence Pythagoras preached a strict way of life that centred on purification (see Katharsis) and asceticism. Furthermore, he practised a form of musical therapy for both body and soul. He valued friendship highly as a means of promoting equality and concord; the love of friends was a specific instance of the universal sympathy existing in the cosmos.
The rules of Pythagoras found expression in short, pithy sayings known as akousmata, a term that implies oral transmission, or, more frequently, as symbola. The latter most likely functioned as secret passwords for Pythagorean initiates but, as the name suggests and their often esoteric and oracular nature prompted, they were also subjects for ‘symbolic’ interpretation. The symbola range from primitive religious taboos to simple moral precepts and various dietary prohibitions (abstinence from certain parts of animals and the famous ban on eating beans).
3 Legacy
Pythagoras, according to Plato (Republic X 600b), handed down to his followers a distinctive way of life (bios) ‘they call Pythagorean to this day’. By Plato’s day the Pythagorean life meant, besides purifications of the soul, inquiries in philosophy, mathematics, astronomy and music. Did Pythagoras bequeath these enterprises as well? Empedocles (§2), who was greatly influenced by Pythagoras, praised him as a man of surpassing knowledge, with a vast wealth of understanding, capable of all kinds of wise works. Heraclitus (§1), while agreeing that Pythagoras ‘practised inquiry beyond all other men’, saw the result as a peculiar wisdom consisting of polymathy and evil artifice. From both witnesses, however, Pythagoras emerges as
a figure active in a wide variety of fields and therefore likely at least to have dabbled in those studies for which Pythagoreans were known in Plato’s time. Still, the only sure legacy of Pythagoras is the immortality of the soul. Although this was primarily a religious belief, it carried philosophical import. By singling out the immortal soul as the essential element of life Pythagoras foreshadowed the Parmenidean/Platonic distinction between eternal being and changeable becoming and, in general, the dualism of mind and matter that informs so much of Western philosophy.
Pythagoreanism
Pythagoreanism refers to a Greek religious-philosophical movement that originated with Pythagoras in the sixth century BC. Although Pythagoreanism in its historical development embraced a wide range of interests in politics, mysticism, music, mathematics and astronomy, the common denominator remained a general adherence among Pythagoreans to the name of the founder and his religious beliefs. Pythagoras taught the immortality and transmigration of the soul (reincarnation) and recommended a way of life that through ascetic practices, dietary rules and ethical conduct promised to purify the soul and bring it into harmony with the surrounding universe. Thereby the soul would become godlike since Pythagoras believed that the cosmos, in view of its orderly and harmonious workings and structure, was divine.
Pythagoreanism thus has from its beginnings a cosmological context that saw further evolution along mathematical lines in the succeeding centuries. Pythagorean philosophers, drawing on musical theories that may go back to Pythagoras, expressed the harmony of the universe in terms of numerical relations and possibly even claimed that things are numbers. Notwithstanding a certain confusion in Pythagorean number philosophy between abstract and concrete, Pythagoreanism represents a valid attempt, outstanding in early Greek philosophy, to explain the world by formal, structural principles.
Overall, the combination of religious, philosophical and mathematical speculations that characterizes Pythagoreanism exercised a significant influence on Greek thinkers, notably on Plato and his immediate successors as well as those Platonic philosophers known as Neo-Pythagoreans and Neoplatonists.
1 History
In the second half of the sixth century BC, Pythagoras founded a community in the southern Italian city of Croton whose members were united by the belief in the transmigration of the soul, an ascetic way of life that centred on the purification of the soul, and a political outlook that aimed at social reform along aristocratic lines. Pythagorean associations (hetaireiai), which also formed in other cities of Magna Graecia, acquired considerable political authority, but their dominance eventually met with opposition, both during the lifetime of Pythagoras and later again about 450 BC. In the wake of these anti-Pythagorean movements the followers of Pythagoras were scattered throughout the Greek world, so that by the time of Plato there is little evidence of formal Pythagorean societies. Individual Pythagoreans, however, continued to be recognized, some by their distinctive lifestyle in matters of food, dress and purificatory practices, others by the additional pursuit of various philosophical, mathematical and musical theories with which they credited Pythagoras. Later tradition refers to these two types of Pythagoreans as ‘hearers’ (akousmatikoi) and ‘learners’ (math0matikoi). The distinction supposedly goes back to the original society in which some members were only fit to accept the oral teachings of Pythagoras without arguments and proofs, while those with more leisure and perhaps philosophical ability were further instructed in the rational foundations of the master’s teachings. Whatever differences there may have been between groups of Pythagoreans, and even among individual math0matikoi, all professed allegiance to Pythagoras.
From the time of Pythagoras to Plato there were several famous Pythagoreans - Hippasus, philolaus and Archytas. Aristotle, in his extant works, speaks only generally of the Pythagoreans (‘some Pythagoreans say… ’); his special treatise on Pythagorean beliefs unfortunately no longer survives. In the third and second centuries BC we do not hear of philosophers who were known as or called themselves Pythagoreans, but interest in ‘Pythagoreanism’ continued, as is evidenced by the wealth of apocryphal writings in prose and verse on Pythagorean themes that mostly date from this period. The actual practice of Pythagoreanism experienced a revival in the Roman world from the first century BC to the first century AD; Latin writers such as Cicero, Ovid and Seneca testify to its popularity. In the first two centuries AD the theoretical side of Pythagoreanism marked certain philosophers to the extent that they may be called Neo-Pythagoreans (see Neo-Pythagoreanism) and these in turn influenced later Platonic philosophers (see Neoplatonism).
2 Music, mathematics, and cosmology
Plato says of the true philosopher, whose mind is on the higher realities (that is, the Platonic Forms): he looks unto the fixed and eternally immutable realm where… all is orderly and according to reason, and he imitates this realm and, as much as possible, assimilates himself to it… and by association with the divine order becomes himself orderly and divine as far as a human being can… (Republic VII 500c)
Plato’s philosophic ideal, as well as one of the methods he prescribed to achieve it - namely mathematics - owes much to Pythagoreanism. Pythagoras had taught that life should be in harmony with the divine cosmos (see Pythagoras §2). In Pythagoreanism harmony (harmonia) became a central tenet and was explained through numerical relations, possibly in connection with musical theory. For example, the Pythagoreans thought that the motions of the orbiting planets produced a sound which, given the belief that the intervals between the heavenly bodies corresponded to musical ratios, was harmonious. So Aristotle explains the ‘music of the spheres’ - one of several explanations offered for this famous Pythagorean image. Of seminal importance for illustrating the coherence of music and number was the discovery of musical ratios - that music should result when the first four integers of the numerical system, used as components in the harmonic ratios of the octave ( ), the fifth ( ) and the fourth ( ), were imposed upon thecontinuum of sound. Whether or not Pythagoras, as tradition holds, was the ‘discoverer’ of the musical concords, the Pythagoreans fixed upon the first four numbers as the building blocks of nature. These four sufficed to give extension and shape to bodies in the sequence of point-line-surface-solid:
Moreover, the first four integers add up to ten, which the Pythagoreans considered a perfect number and represented in a figure called the tetraktys.
From whatever angle one approached the tetraktys in counting, the addition always resulted in ten, the basis of the decimal system. The tetraktys also produced an equilateral triangle, the simplest plane figure, and a pyramid, the simplest three-dimensional shape.
The Pythagoreans viewed the tetraktys as a sacred symbol and used it in the following oath: ‘By him [Pythagoras] who handed down to us the tetraktys, source and root of everlasting nature’. In short, the Pythagoreans supposed the nature of things could be understood numerically; indeed, some of them apparently went so far as to say that things are numbers: ‘…they assumed the elements of numbers to be the elements of all things that exist, and the whole universe to be harmonia and number’ (Aristotle, Metaphysics 986a2).
Since numbers functioned as the constituent elements of the cosmos, it is iimportant to see how the Pythagoreans understood the nature and generation of number itself. Aristotle again offers the best starting-point:
The elements of number are the even and the odd, the latter limited, the former unlimited. The One is composed of both of these (for it is both even and odd) and number comes from the one; and numbers… are the whole universe. (Metaphysics 986a17)
How the One can be both odd and even is best explained in the sense that the One, as the first number, is the principle of both odd and even numbers (zero was unknown in Greek mathematics). Thus ‘number comes from the One’, and the generation of number was simultaneously a cosmogonical process since ‘numbers… are the whole universe’. Although in its origin the Pythagoreans viewed the One as both odd and even, limited and unlimited, in its practical application, that is, in its interaction with other numbers, they treated it as odd and limiting. This can be seen in the schema by which the Pythagoreans illustrated the correspondence of odd/even to limited/unlimited. Gnomons (carpenter squares) were placed around an arrangement of points (or pebbles) as follows: When a gnomon is placed around one point, and the process is continued in sequence, the resulting figure is always of ‘limited’ shape, that is, always a square, whereas when it is placed around two points, the result is a series of oblongs whose sides stand in an ‘unlimited’, that is, an infinite variation to each other. In this scheme the One, as a single unit or point, is equated with the odd. The One is also ranked with limited and odd in the Pythagorean table of ten opposites:
The position of limited/unlimited at the beginning is not accidental, for their opposition, embodied in the original composition of the One, was considered primal and basic to the development of number and the universe, while the opposition between odd and even can be generally subsumed under this fundamental distinction. The connection of the One with the limited reappears in another Pythagorean text (Aristotle, Metaphysics 1091a17), where it is said that the limited (tantamount to the One) ‘breathes in’ and is thus penetrated by the unlimited. In this cosmological fragment the unlimited is equated with the void, to be thought of as infinite space and serving as a dividing principle. The One now becomes a Two (reminiscent of the mythological separation of heaven and earth), which in effect marks the beginning of number, plurality and the existence of discrete physical bodies. The cosmogonic process is sometimes put the other way round: the unlimited is limited (or penetrated) by the limit. This way of stating it brings to the fore the characteristic Greek feeling that what is unlimited, without bounds, is without order and somehow evil (hence ‘bad’ is listed under the unlimited in the above table) and therefore needs to be curtailed and bounded by limit and measure (as the limits of harmonic ratios must be imposed upon the limitless range of sound to produce music). The result, in cosmological terms, is then precisely a kosmos, an orderly and structured universe. In so far as the perfected and integral cosmos represents a harmonia, a unity stemming from a reconciliation of opposites, Pythagoreanism has a monistic aspect, yet in its source theory it remains essentially dualistic: number comes from the One, and the One is composed of limited and unlimited. From these first two principles everything derives, even though the One, when identified with limit, odd, male, and so on, was felt to be the ‘good’ element in this cosmic dualism. (There can be no question of positing the One as the sole ultimate principle without imposing Platonic and Neo-Pythagorean notions upon early Pythagoreanism.)
Limited und unlimited are the principles of number. Numbers do not merely express the substance, shape and quantitative differences of things but actually appear to constitute bodies of physical dimension. The identification of things with numbers confuses physical bodies with abstractions, or, in Aristotelian terms, the material causes of things with their formal causes. Here Pythagoreanism connects with much of Presocratic thought according to which the source and informing element of the universe was thought of as some kind of matter, be it water, air, fire, earth, or a combination of these (see Arch0). At the same time the numerical theories of the Pythagoreans represent a true advance in the history of Greek philosophy: the attempt to explain the nature of things by numbers is a valid philosophical striving to understand the world by its formal or structural principles, even if the Pythagoreans then equated these with the things themselves. And while the Pythagoreans’ interest in numbers was often infused with a mystical element (their solemn veneration of the tetraktys) and a primitive number symbolism that blurred distinctions between abstract and concrete (a moral concept such as justice wasconsidered the embodiment of four, a square number of ‘just’, that is, equal reciprocity), no less an authority than Aristotle acknowledged that the Pythagoreans were pioneers and made advances in the mathematical fields (arithmetic, astronomy, harmonics and some geometry). For the ‘Pythagorean theorem’, although long known to Babylonian mathematicians, the Pythagoreans are generally considered to have found the proofs and, although in the wake of this theorem they discovered that the ratios of geometrical figures to each other cannot simply be expressed by a series of rational integers - the discovery of irrational numbers and the principle of commensurability upset the Pythagorean notion that the world is harmony and number - their very setbacks contributed to subsequent work in Greek mathematics. Plato valued mathematics as a useful discipline to train the philosopher in the perception of eternal and transcendent truth, since in his mind it dealt essentially with invisible and eternally valid realities. By divorcing number from physical substance Plato transforms Pythagorean mathematics, yet few doubt that his interest in number, arithmetic and measure largely rests upon Pythagorean foundations (consider the mathematical model of the universe in his Timaeus (see Plato §16). Plato’s immediate successors in the Academy were steeped in Pythagorean number theory (see Speusippus §2; Xenocrates §2).
3 Soul and ethics
Perhaps in no other ancient Greek philosophy is the human being as intimately linked to the cosmos as in Pythagoreanism. Although the correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm, the individual and the universe, is found in much of Greek thought, it received a particularly sharp outline in the Pythagorean view that bby assimilation to the divine cosmos the self would come to reflect the cosmic order and harmony. The true self of every person was the soul (see Psych0), the essential element in the partnership of body and soul. Pythagoras’ teaching that the soul survived the dissolution of the body and reappeared in other bodies was steadfastly adhered to throughout the history of Pythagoreanism, even if it was sometimes eclipsed by other interests. The doctrine of the immortality and transmigration of the soul translated into a practical and clearly defined way of life that combined ritual purity with high ethical standards and whose precepts were embodied in sayings known as akousmata and symbola (see Pythagoras §2). The belief in the kinship of all life, as a corollary to the belief in transmigration, imposed a great moral responsibility towards parents, children, friends and fellow citizens, and generally entailed a respectful attitude towards all forms of life in which soul may be embodied; hence the Pythagoreans were, to varying degrees, vegetarians. Their dietary laws were also intended to free them from bodily pollution. The body was seen as a prison, even as a grave (Plato, Gorgias 493a) from which the soul was to rise, ever achieving superior reincarnations and culminating in a state of divinity. Thus the Pythagoreans postulated three kinds of rational creatures: ‘gods, men, and such as Pythagoras’. Pythagoras was thought to have achieved semi-divine status, which in Greek could be expressed by ‘daemon’. It is in a Pythagorean vein that Empedocles (§2) proclaims human beings to be fallen ‘daemons’. (A complex ‘daemonology’ was to become an ingredient of Neo-Pythagoreanism.) The recognition of the religious and moral mandates of the Pythagorean life and of its eschatological meaning constituted wisdom (sophia) and the lover of such a life was a philosophos, a term that in this sense, as certain traditions report, was first
coined in Pythagorean circles.
Empedocles (c.495-c.435 BC)
Empedocles, born in the Sicilian city of Acragas (modern Agrigento), was a major Greek philosopher of the Presocratic period. Numerous fragments survive from his two major works, poems in epic verse known later in antiquity as On Nature and Purifications.
On Nature sets out a vision of reality as a theatre of ceaseless change, whose invariable pattern consists in the repetition of the two processes of harmonization into unity followed by dissolution into plurality. The force unifying the four elements from which all else is created - earth, air, fire and water - is called Love, and Strife is the force dissolving them once again into plurality. The cycle is most apparent in the rhythms of plant and animal life, but Empedocles’ main objective is to tell the history of the universe itself as an exemplification of the pattern.
The basic structure of the world is the outcome of disruption of a total blending of the elements into main masses which eventually develop into the earth, the sea, the air and the fiery heaven. Life, however, emerged not from separation but by mixture of elements, and Empedocles elaborates an account of the evolution of living forms of increasing complexity and capacity for survival, culminating in the creation of species as they are at present. There followed a detailed treatment of a whole range of biological phenomena, from reproduction to the comparative morphology of the parts of animals and the physiology of sense perception and thinking.
The idea of a cycle involving the fracture and restoration of harmony bears a clear relation to thePythagorean belief in the cycle of reincarnations which the guilty soul must undergo before it an recover heavenly bliss. Empedocles avows his allegiance to this belief, and identifies the primal sin requiring the punishment of reincarnation as an act of bloodshed committed through ’trust in raving strife’. Purifications accordingly attacked the practice of animal sacrifice, and proclaimed prohibition against killing animals to be a law of nature.
Empedocles’ four elements survived as the basis of physics for 2,000 years. Aristotle was fascinated by On Nature; his biology probably owes a good deal to its comparative morphology. Empedocles’ cosmic cycle attracted the interest of the early Stoics. Lucretius found in him the model of a philosophical poet. Philosophical attacks on animal sacrifice made later in antiquity appealed to him as an authority.
1 Life and work
The first lines of Empedocles’ poem Purifications give a flavour of the man:
Friends, who live in the great city of the yellow Acragas, up on the heights of the citadel, caring for good deeds, I give you greetings. An immortal god, mortal no more, I go about honoured by all, as is fitting, crowned with ribbons and fresh garlands. (fr. 115)
Men and women followed him in their thousands, Empedocles says, wanting prophecies or remedies for diseases. Not surprisingly there accumulated in antiquity a huge conglomeration of fact and fantasy about the life and death of such a figure, summarized by Diogenes Laertius (VIII 51-75). A cautious sifting yields the following picture.
Empedocles was born of aristocratic family, a little after Anaxagoras. He died aged sixty. He was active in the political life of Acragas as a fierce opponent of oligarchy and tyranny. He had a reputation as an orator: Aristotle even makes him the inventor of rhetoric. He is described as a physician, but despite his profound interest in human physiology, anecdotes of his miracle working and the supernatural powers he claimed his teaching would impart (fr. 111) both strongly suggest a practitioner of magic, an activity doubtless to be seen in the context of his Pythagorean religious beliefs.
Among various writings ascribed to him, the two most important were On Nature and Purifications, hexameter poems probably in three and two books respectively. On Nature was at the time of its composition very likely the longest work of philosophy ever written and Empedocles’ fragments constitute the largest corpus of original extracts to survive of any Presocratic. Scholars disagree about which of the fragments belong to which of the two major works - the sources seldom supply specific information on this point. In the age of Victorian rationalism it was supposed that On Nature presented a sober materialist philosophy of nature, subsequently abandoned in Purifications for the intoxications of mystery religion.
Fragments were assigned to the two poems accordingly. The basis for this division of the has long since collapsed, and more recent study (notably by Kahn 1960) has suggested that On itself draws religious morals from a philosophy which was always conceived in religious terms. Indeed, it has been argued that the great majority of the fragments, including those on religious themes, belong to On Nature, Purifications being simply a collection of oracles and ritual prescriptions designed to satisfy the desire for healing and salvation Empedocles mentions in its opening verses.
2 Pythagoreanism
Empedocles praises Pythagoras as a man of surpassing knowledge and ’wise works’, with powers of foresight extending to ten or twenty generations ahead (fr. 129). What prompted this extravagant admiration was evidently Pythagoras’ analysis of the human condition: to atone for sin the soul is subject to a cycle of reincarnations into a variety of living forms (since all life is akin) until release is eventually achieved (see Pythagoras §2). On this view animal sacrifice counts as unwitting slaughter of one’s kin. Empedocles dramatizes the implication in some gothic hexameters:
Father lifts up a beloved son changed in form, and butchers him with a prayer, helpless fool…. Similarly son seizes father and children their mother, and tearing out the life they consume the flesh of those they love.(fr. 137)
Further verses spell out the penalty bloodshed incurs, invoking an ’oracle of Necessity’ which condemns guilty spirits (daimones) to wander apart from the blessed for 30,000 years, in all manner of mortal forms.
They conclude with a dramatic confession: ‘Of these I too am now one, an exile from the gods and a wanderer, having put my trust in raving Strife’ (fr. 115).
Fragment 115 is said by Plutarch to have formed part of the preface to Empedocles’ philosophy. Is this a reference to Purifications (the usual supposition)? ’Philosophy’ rather suggests On Nature; and Empedocles announces the recovery of his divinity at the start of Purifications (see §1). On the basis of comparison with the proem to Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things Sedley (1989) argues persuasively that the entire sequence of fragments just summarized helped to launch On Nature. Whether this is right or not, Empedocles’ Pythagoreanism is the best clue we have to his intentions in On Nature. The poem should be seen as an attempt to exhibit the cycle of incarnation as an instance of a general pattern of repetition governing all change: plurality is converted into unity by the power of Love and unity is then broken into plurality by Strife, until the process is reversed and conversion of plurality into unity begins once again. What On Nature works out in detail is the realization of this pattern in the rhythms of plant and animal life and the design and dissolution of the body, but above all in the history of the universe itself (seePythagoreanism §3).
3 The cycle of change
The cycle of change is announced in fragment 17.1-2: ’A twofold tale I shall tell: at one time they grew to be one alone out of many, at another again they grew apart to be many out of one’. These lines deliberately echo and defiantly contradict the assertion of Parmenides (§3) that there is only one tale to tell, that of changeless and timeless being and unity (fr. 8.1-6). The language of growth is not accidental. Empedocles has already indicated that the subjects of the dual process are what he calls the ’roots’: earth, air, fire and water. Subsequent philosophy would speak of these as ‘elements’, but Empedocles chooses a designation which captures the idea that they are not merely the basis of everything else, but themselves have a potentiality for development. He is emphatic in his agreement with the Parmenidean thesis that nothing comes into being from non-existence or perishes into it: mixture and separation of roots are what humans mistakenly call birth and death (frs 8-12).
After amplification of the twofold tale Empedocles continues: ‘And these things never cease their continual interchange, now through love all coming together into one, now again each carried apart by strife’s hatred’ (fr. 17.6-8). Mixture and separation would not occur without the agency of forces bringing them about. Are Love and Strife physical or psychological forces? For us it is counterintuitive to envisage earth or fire as capable of psychological responses. But On Nature is permeated with expressions of the hatred the roots have for each other, of their desire for one another. Empedocles does not write as though he wants the reader to construe them metaphorically. On the other hand, the operation of Love in creating mixtures of the roots is often also described in the language of craftsmanship: she welds (frs 34, 96) and rivets (fr. 87) and fires like a potter (fr. 73). Here Love seems to represent whatever physical force makes for the assimilation of things. However we are to conceive of Love and Strife, they are certainly treated as existing independently of the roots. But there is a difference between them: Love is ‘among’ the roots, Strife ’apart from’ them (fr. 17.19-20). The implication is presumably that Love works with the grain, Strife against it: roots have a natural tendency to join together, whether earth with earth or in mixture with air, fire and water, whereas their separation is unnatural (fr. 22). Aristotle, however, found Empedocles thoroughly confusing on this issue (Generation and Corruption II 6).
Fragment 17.9-13 sums up the two key features of change - its oscillating duality and its ceaseless repetition - in a surprisingly Heraclitean conclusion (compare Heraclitus §3):
So insofar as they have learned to grow one from many, and again they grow many as the one grows apart, thus far do they come into being and have no stable life; but insofar as they never cease their continual interchange, thus far they exist always, changeless in the cycle.
The implication is that Parmenides looked for changeless existence in the wrong place: it is not to be found in being (not even the being of the roots), but in the regularity of the cycle of unending flux.
4 The Biological Paradigm
The initial presentation of the cycle of change in fragment 17 is entirely general and abstract in its formulations. The evidence for the structure and content of the following section of On Nature is inadequate, although newly discovered fragments may clarify the matter (see Martin and Primaveri 1997). However Empedocles seems to have taken the creation of plants and animals as a paradigm of the way mixture of roots generates a huge variety of other forms. He appealed to the analogy of a painter, using a few pigments with many potentialities:
When they seize pigments of many colours in their hands, mixing in harmony more of some and less of others, they produce from them forms resembling all things, creating trees and men and women, beasts and birds and water-bred fish, and long-lived gods, too, highest in honour.
If this is how art achieves its effects, why should we look for any other explanation of the way nature produces the originals copied by the painter?
It may be that the paradigm of animal creation, once established, was subsequently invoked in later sections of the poem. For example, the following lines from fragment 20 might well have been written to support the notion expressed in fragment 31 of the disintegration of the limbs of the cosmic sphere:
This is well-known in the mass of mortal limbs: at one time, in the maturity of a vigorous life, all the limbs that are the body’s portion come into one through love; at another time again, torn asunder by evil strifes, they wander, each apart, on the shore of life. So it is too for shrubs and water-housed fish and mountain-laired beasts and wing-progressing gulls.
5 Cosmic history
Mention of the cosmic sphere brings us to Empedocles’ boldest application of the concept of a cycle of change: to the history of the universe. He conceived that just as harmonization by Love and decomposition by Strife constitute the common pattern for the biological development of plants and animals, there must be a similar story to tell about the universe as a whole. But here he supposed that the unity achieved at one pole of the cycle and the division at the other took more radical and absolute forms than in the biological realm. When - as he described first as usual - the influence of Love is at its strongest, all distinctions disappear as reality becomes a perfect divine sphere (frs 27-9). Strife for its part generates a vortex which not only breaks the sphere down into its constituent roots, but achieves their complete separation. It is under Strife’s domination that the world as we are familiar with it comes into being (A37, 42).
Empedocles’ account of this development was evidently extensive, and included full discussions of all the topics by now traditional in philosophical cosmogony: notably, the formation of the earth, the sea, and the heavenly bodies, and the evolution of life. Strife divides the roots into four great isolated masses. What happens next is obscure, but the key process was physical interaction between these masses: some of its effects inevitable, some pure chance (see, for example, fr. 53). In particular, misty air heated by fire rises up and forms a nocturnal hemisphere balanced by a diurnal counterpart of fire. The sun is a reflection of this fire, the moon compacted air. The earth too sweats under the heat of the sun, which is the origin of the sea (A30, 49, 66).
The power of Strife is clearly not what it was, but we hear nothing yet of Love. Its influence begins to be apparent with the emergence of life. A clear example is the creation of bone, ascribed to harmonia, one of Empedocles’ synonyms for Love: ‘And kindly earth received in its broad melting-pots two parts of the gleam of Nestis [water] out of eight, and four of Hephaestus [fire], and they became white bones, marvellously joined by the gluing of harmonia’ (fr. 23). The creatures to which bodily parts such as this belonged were described subsequently, in Empedocles’ memorable theory of evolution:
Empedocles held that the first generations of animals and plants were not complete, but consisted of separate limbs not joined together; the second, arising from the joining of these limbs, were like creatures in dreams; the third was the generation of whole-natured forms. The fourth arose no longer from the homogeneous substances such as earth or water, but by intermingling, in some cases as the result of the compacting of their food, in others because female beauty excited the sexual urge. And the various species of animal were distinguished by the quality of the mixture in them. (A72)
Surviving fragments give vivid details of the bizarre beings of the first three stages (frs 57-62). From these it is clear that in the first two especially chance was made responsible for a great deal. Empedocles may have talked in this context of the survival of the fittest: a remarkable anticipation of Darwinism, although criticized by Aristotle for its inability to account for the regular teleological patterns of nature (Physics II 8).
It is only with the animals of the fourth (that is, present) stage that Love begins to exercise a control over the whole structure and pattern of life (fr. 71). The evidence suggests that at this point in the poem Empedocles included a full-scale comparative biology of plant and animal species, focused on explanation of the formation and function of the parts of the body.
Ultimately all this diversity would be reabsorbed into the divine sphere. On Nature may have concluded with some verses which foreshadow this, speaking of god as a mind, ’holy and beyond description, darting through the whole universe with swift thoughts’ (fr. 134).
Aristotle sometimes talks as if he thinks two cosmogonies were envisaged: one occurring as Strife grew more powerful, another as its influence ebbed. He then complains that Empedocles said and could say nothing about the second (A42). Some modern commentators have reinforced this idea of a double cosmogony, adding a double zoogony and appealing to some obscure lines which speak of a ‘double birth and double failing of mortal things’ (fr. 17.3-5). But it seems likely that this is just a reference to the growth of unity, then of plurality, both ’mortal’ conditions persisting only for a while. In any event, the reduplicating interpretation is hard to reconcile with the shape of the cosmic history as it emerges from the rest of the fragments.
Another way of reading Empedocles’ history of the universe is as an arbitration and synthesis between two approaches to cosmogony adopted by different among his philosophical predecessors. Broadly speaking, the Ionians from Anaximander on explain the emergence of a world or worlds as the outcome of separation from an original undifferentiated condition, and of the consequent interaction between the physical forces released by the separation. By contrast, in the cosmological part of his poem Parmenides had posited an original duality of fire and night, and explained the development of cosmic order and life on earth as the work of Aphrodite mixing the two basic forms (Parmenides fr. 13). Empedocles implies that each strategy is half right: separation produces a differentiated universe, but mixture the biosphere.
There is in fact reason to think that Empedocles wanted to be read as among other things an encyclopedist of previous thought. For example, the forms generated in the early phases of evolution are not just the stuff of dreams, but also recapitulate and rationalize myth. Most notable of these is the figure of the Minotaur, surely the model of Empedocles’ ‘ox-headed man-natured’ being (fr. 61). At the opposite extreme, his verses describing the divine sphere deliberately recall Xenophanes’ god (see Xenophanes §3) - ‘No twin branches spring from his back, no feet, no nimble knees, no fertile parts’ (Empedocles, fr. 29) - and that of Parmenides’ being - ‘Thus he is held fast in the close obscurity of harmonia, a rounded sphere rejoicing in joyous solitude’ (Empedocles, fr. 27).
Biological explanations
The power of Empedocles as a thinker and his gifts as a poet are most happily married in the surviving extracts of his biology, where he shows an extraordinary capacity to get the reader to see the kinship of all nature. Sometimes parts of animals with homologous functions are just listed: ‘The same things are hair and leaves and close-packed wings of birds and scales, coming into being on sturdy limbs’ (fr. 82). Sometimes metaphor makes the point: ‘Thus do tall trees lay eggs: first olives… ’ (fr. 79). Other animals are armed with horns or teeth or stings, but ‘Sharp-speared hairs bristle on hedgehogs’ backs’ (fr. 83).
Perception was explained by an ingenious theory of pores and effluences. It occurs when pores in the sense organ are just the right size to admit effluences of shape, sound, etc. given off by things (A92). The theory was employed to account for other phenomena also, such as chemical mixture (frs 91-2, A87) and magnetism (A89). Only like things (or things made like by Love) could have symmetrical pores and effluences. Empedocles posits fire in the eye for perception of light colours, a resounding bell in the ear to account for hearing, and breath in the nose for smelling (A86). Little of this material survives in his own words, except for an extended simile:
As when someone planning a journey through the wintry night prepares a light, a flame of blazing fire, kindling for whatever the weather a linen lantern, which scatters the breath of the winds when they blow, but the finer light leaps through outside and shines across the threshold with unyielding beams: so at that time did she [Aphrodite] give birth to the round eye, primeval fire confined within membranes and delicate garments, and these held back the deep water that flowed around, but they let through the finer fire to the outside.(fr. 84)
Empedocles made thinking a function of blood around the heart (fr. 105). Of all physical substances blood comes closest to an equal blending of all the elements, even though its origin still owes something to chance (fr. 98). This is what equips it to grasp the nature of things: earth with earth, and so on - but also Love with Love and Strife with Strife (fr. 109).
7 Sacrifice
Empedocles relates his guilt over bloodshed to ’trust in raving strife’ (fr. 115). As all creation of plants and animals is due to the power of Love, so Strife is the invariable cause of their issolution and death. It is in his account of blood that Empedocles describes the mixture of the roots as anchored in the perfect harbours of Kypris [Love]’ (fr. 98). Hence to kill by spilling blood is to act against the principle that makes for all that flourishes and enjoys harmony. It is no surprise that Empedocles conceives it as madness.
Theophrastus tells us that in his account of ’sacrifices and theogony’, usually taken to belong to Purifications, Empedocles portrayed a golden age when humans recognized only Love as a god: ‘They did not count Ares a god nor Battle-cry, nor was Zeus their king nor Kronos nor Poseidon, but Kypris [that is, Aphrodite] was queen’ (fr. 128). There was no animal sacrifice:
Her they propitiated with holy images, with paintings of living creatures, with perfumes of varied fragrance and sacrifices of pure myrrh and sweet-scented frankincense, throwing to the ground libations of yellow honey. The altar was not drenched with the unspeakable slaughters of bulls, but this was held among humans the greatest defilement - to tear out the life from noble limbs and eat them. (fr.128, continued)
Empedocles envisages this golden age as a time when humans were in fact friends with the rest of animal creation: ‘All things were tame and gentle to humans, both beasts and birds, and friendship burned bright’ (fr. 130). Is the image of harmony painted in these passages intended as part of the cosmic history? According to Empedocles’ theory of evolution Strife was more, not less, dominant in the past. We should infer that like most pictures of primal bliss, this too is designed to function principally as an ideal measure of contemporary misery and wickedness.
What Empedocles lays down for all time is a moral rule against killing living things, whose expression led Aristotle to treat it as a paradigm of how natural law is to be conceived: ‘That which is the law for all extends unendingly throughout wide-ruling air and the boundless sunlight’ (fr. 135). Particular Pythagorean injunctions against touching beans and laurel leaves are recorded as Empedoclean (frs 140-1). As for the future, other verses promise the repentant sinner eventual release from the burden of reincarnation entailed by committing bloodshed:
At the end they come among humans on earth as prophets, bards, doctors and princes; and thence they arise as gods highest in honours, sharing with the other immortals their hearth and table, without part in the sorrows of men, unwearied. (frs 146-7)
Empedocles no doubt found the killing of other humans as horrific as animal sacrifice - the lines in which he represents sacrifice as infanticide etc. trade on a particular form of revulsion on the part of the reader. But he directs his outrage at violence to life as such, and more specifically at the assumption that blood-shedding can form part of a proper form of worship. In other words, his protest aims both to broaden our moral horizons and to reform religion. It should be seen as a radical challenge to the entire cultural framework of the ancient Greek city-state.
Socrates (469-399 BC)
Socrates, an Athenian Greek of the second half of the fifth century BC, wrote no philosophical works but was uniquely influential in the later history of philosophy. His philosophical interests were restricted to ethics and the conduct of life, topics which thereafter became central to philosophy. He discussed these in public places in Athens, sometimes with other prominent intellectuals or political leaders, sometimes with young men, who gathered round him in large numbers, and other admirers. Among these young men was Plato. Socrates’ philosophical ideas and - equally important for his philosophical influence - his personality and methods as a ‘teacher’ were handed on to posterity in the ‘dialogues’ that several of his friends wrote after his death, depicting such discussions. Only those of Xenophon (Memorabilia,Apology, Symposium) and the early dialogues of Plato survive (for example Euthyphro, Apology, Crito). Later Platonic dialogues such as Phaedo, Symposium and Republic do not present the historical Socrates’ ideas; the ‘Socrates’ appearing in them is a spokesman for Plato’s own ideas.
Socrates’ discussions took the form of face-to-face interrogations of another person. Most often they concerned the nature of some moral virtue, such as courage or justice. Socrates asked what the respondent thought these qualities of mind and character amounted to, what their value was, how they were acquired. He would then test their ideas for logical consistency with other highly plausible general views about morality and goodness that the respondent also agreed to accept, once Socrates presented them. He succeeded in showing, to his satisfaction and that of the respondent and any bystanders, that the respondent’s ideas were not consistent. By this practice of ‘elenchus’ or refutation he was able to prove that politicians and others who claimed to have ‘wisdom’ about human affairs in fact lacked it, and to draw attention to at least apparent errors in their thinking. He wanted to encourage them and others to think harder and to improve their ideas about the virtues and about how to conduct a good human life. He never argued directly for ideas of his own, but always questioned those of others. None the less, one can infer, from the questions he asks and his attitudes to the answers he receives, something about his own views.
Socrates was convinced that our souls - where virtues and vices are found - are vastly more important for our lives than our bodies or external circumstances. The quality of our souls determines the character of our lives, for better or for worse, much more than whether we are healthy or sick, or rich or poor. If we are to live well and happily, as he assumed we all want to do more than we want anything else, we must place the highest priority on the care of our souls. That means we must above all want to acquire the virtues, since they perfect our souls and enable them to direct our lives for the better. If only we could know what each of the virtues is we could then make an effort to obtain them. As to the nature of the virtues, Socrates seems to have held quite strict and, from the popular point of view, paradoxical views. Each virtue consists entirely in knowledge, of how it is best to act in some area of life, and why: additional ‘emotional’ aspects, such as the disciplining of our feelings and desires, he dismissed as of no importance. Weakness of will is not psychologically possible: if you act wrongly or badly, that is due to your ignorance of how you ought to act and why. He thought each of the apparently separate virtues amounts to the same single body of knowledge: the comprehensive knowledge of what is and is not good for a human being. Thus his quest was to acquire this single wisdom: all the particular virtues would follow automatically.
At the age of 70 Socrates was charged before an Athenian popular court with ‘impiety’ - with not believing in the Olympian gods and corrupting young men through his constant questioning of everything. He was found guilty and condemned to death. Plato’s Apology, where Socrates gives a passionate defence of his life and philosophy, is one of the classics of Western literature. For different groups of later Greek philosophers he was the model both of a sceptical inquirer who never claims to know the truth, and of a ‘sage’ who knows the whole truth about human life and the human good. Among modern philosophers, the interpretations of his innermost meaning given by Montaigne, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche are especially notable.
1 Life and sources
Socrates, an Athenian citizen proud of his devotion to Athens, lived his adult life there engaging n open philosophical discussion and debate on fundamental questions of ethics, politics, religion and education. Going against the grain of the traditional education, he insisted that personal investigation and reasoned argument, rather than ancestral custom, or appeal to the authority of Homer, Hesiod and other respected poets, was the only proper basis for answering these questions. His emphasis on argument and logic and his opposition to unquestioning acceptance of tradition allied him with such Sophists of a generation earlier as Protagoras, Gorgias and Prodicus, none of whom was an Athenian, but all of whom spent time lecturing and teaching at Athens (see Sophists). Unlike these Sophists Socrates did not formally offer himself or accept pay as a teacher. But many upper-class young Athenian men gathered round him to hear and engage In his discussions, and he had an inspirational and educational effect upon them, heightening their powers of critical thought and encouraging them to take seriously their individual responsibility to think through and decide how to conduct their lives. Many of his contemporaries perceived this education as morally and socially destructive - it certainly involved subverting accepted beliefs - and he was tried in 399 BC before an Athenian popular court and condemned to death on a charge of ‘impiety’: that he did not believe in the Olympian gods, but in new ones instead, and corrupted the young. Scholars sometimes mention specifically political motives of revenge, based on guilt by association: a number of prominent Athenians who were with Socrates as young men or were close friends did turn against the Athenian democracy and collaborated with the Spartans in their victory over Athens in the Peloponnesian war. But an amnesty passed by the restored democracy in 403 BC prohibited prosecution for political offences before that date. The rhetorician Polycrates included Socrates’ responsibility for these political crimes in his Accusation of Socrates (see Xenophon, Memorabilia I 2.12), a rhetorical exercise written at least five years after Socrates’ death. But there is no evidence that, in contravention of the amnesty, Socrates’ actual accusers covertly attacked him, or his jurors condemned him, on that ground. The defences Plato and Xenophon constructed for Socrates, each in his respective Apology, imply that it was his own questioning mind and what was perceived as the bad moral influence he had on his young men that led to his trial and condemnation.
Socrates left no philosophical works, and apparently wrote none. His philosophy and personality were made known to later generations through the dialogues that several of his associates wrote with him as principal speaker (see Socratic dialogues). Only fragments survive of those by Aeschines of Sphettus and Antisthenes, both Athenians, and Phaedo of Elis (after whom Plato’s dialogue Phaedo is named). Our own knowledge of Socrates depends primarily on the dialogues of Plato and the Socratic works of the military leader and historian Xenophon. Plato was a young associate of Socrates’ during perhaps the last ten years of his life, and Xenophon knew him during that same period, though he was absent from Athens at the time of Socrates’ death and for several years before and many years after.
We also have secondary evidence from the comic playwright Aristophanes and from Aristotle. Aristotle, although born fifteen years after Socrates’ death, had access through Plato and others to first-hand information about the man and his philosophy. Aristophanes knew Socrates personally; his Clouds (first produced c.423 BC) pillories the ‘new’ education offered by Sophists and philosophers by showing Socrates at work in a ‘thinkery’, propounding outlandish physical theories and teaching young men how to argue cleverly in defence of their improper behaviour. It is significant that in 423, when Socrates was about 45 years old, he could plausibly be taken as a leading representative in Athens of the ‘new’ education. But one cannot expect a comic play making fun of a whole intellectual movement to contain an authentic account of Socrates’ specific philosophical commitments.
However, the literary genre to which Plato’s and Xenophon’s Socratic works belong (along with the other, lost dialogues) also permits the author much latitude; in his Poetics Aristotle counts such works as fictions of a certain kind, alongside epic poems and tragedies. They are by no eans records of actual discussions (despite the fact that Xenophon explicitly so represents his). Each author was free to develop his own ideas behind the mask of Socrates, at least within the limits of what his personal experience had led him to believe was Socrates’ basic philosophical and moral outlook. Especially in view of the many inconsistencies between Plato’s and Xenophon’s portraits (see §7 below), it is a difficult question for historical-philosophical interpretation whether the philosophical and moral views the character Socrates puts forward in any of these dialogues can legitimately be attributed to the historical philosopher. The problem of interpretation is made more difficult by the fact that Socrates appears in many of Plato’s dialogues - ones belonging to his middle and later periods (see Plato §§10-16) - discussing and expounding views that we have good reason to believe resulted from Plato’s own philosophical investigations into questions of metaphysics and epistemology, questions that were not entered into at all by the historical Socrates. To resolve this problem - what scholars call the ‘Socratic problem’ - most agree in preferring Plato to Xenophon as a witness. Xenophon is not thought to have been philosopher enough to have understood Socrates well or to have captured the depth of his views and his personality. As for Plato, most scholars accept only the philosophical interests and procedures, and the moral and philosophical views, of the Socrates of the early dialogues, and, more guardedly, the Socrates of ‘transitional’ ones such as Meno and Gorgias, as legitimate representations of the historical personage. These dialogues are the ones that predate the emergence of the metaphysical and epistemological inquiries just referred to. However, even Plato’s early dialogues are philosophical works written to further Plato’s own philosophical interests. That could produce distortions, also; and Xenophon’s relative philosophical innocence could make his portrait in some respects more reliable. Moreover, it is possible, even probable, that in his efforts to help his young men improve themselves Socrates spoke differently to the philosophically more promising ones among them - including Plato - from the way he spoke to others, for example Xenophon. Both portraits could be true, but partial and needing to be combined (see §7). The account of Socrates’ philosophy given below follows Plato, with caution, while giving independent weight also to Xenophon and to Aristotle.
2 Life and sources (cont.)
Xenophon’s Apology of Socrates, Symposium and Memorabilia (or Memoirs) may well reflect knowledge of Plato’s own Apology and some of his early and middle period dialogues, as well as lost dialogues of Antisthenes and others. Xenophon composed the Memorabilia over many years, beginning only some ten years after Socrates’ death, avowedly in order to defend ocrates’ reputation as a good man, a true Athenian gentleman, and a good influence upon his young men. The same intention motivated hisApology and Symposium. Anything these works contain about Socrates’ philosophical opinions and procedures is ancillary to that apologetic purpose. Plato’s Apology, of course, is similarly apologetic, but it and his other early dialogues are carefully constructed discussions, strongly focused upon questions of philosophical substance. Plato evidently thought Socrates’ philosophical ideas and methods were central to his life and to his mission. Xenophon’s and Plato’s testimony are agreed that Socrates’ discussions consistently concerned the aretai, the recognized ‘virtues’ or excellences of character (see Aret0), such as justice, piety, self-control or moderation (s>phrosyn0), courage and wisdom; what these individual characteristics consist in and require of a person, what their value is, and how they are acquired, whether by teaching or in some other way. In his Apology and elsewhere Plato has Socrates insist that these discussions were always inquiries, efforts made to engage his fellow-discussants in coming jointly to an adequate understanding of the matters inquired into. He does not himself know, and therefore cannot teach anyone else - whether by means of these discussions or in some other way - either how to be virtuous or what virtue in general or any particular virtue is. Furthermore, given his general characterization of virtue (see §§4-5), Plato’s Socrates makes a oint of suggesting the impossibility in principle of teaching virtue at all, by contrast with the Sophists who declared they could teach it. Virtue was not a matter of information about living or rote techniques of some sort to be handed on from teacher to pupil, but required an open-ended personal understanding that individuals could only come to for themselves. Xenophon, too, reports that Socrates denied he was a teacher of aret0, but he pays no attention to such issues of philosophical principle. He does not hesitate to show Socrates speaking of himself as a teacher (see Apology 26, Memorabilia I 6.13-14), and describes him as accepting young men from their fathers as his pupils (but not for a fee), and teaching them the virtues by displaying his own virtues to them for emulation, as well as through conversation and precepts. Perhaps Socrates did not insist on holding to strict philosophical principles in dealing with people on whom their point would have been lost.
In his Apology Plato’s Socrates traces his practice of spending his days discussing and inquiring about virtue to an oracle delivered at the shrine of Apollo at Delphi. Xenophon also mentions this oracle in his Apology. A friend of Socrates’, Chaerephon, had asked the god whether anyone was wiser than Socrates; the priestess answered that no one was. Because he was sure he was not wise at all - only the gods, he suspected, could actually know how a human life ought to be led - Socrates cross-examined others at Athens with reputations for that kind of wisdom. He wanted to show that there were people wiser than he and thus discover the true meaning of the oracle - Apollo was known to speak in riddles requiring interpretation to reach their deeper meaning. In the event, it turned out that the people he examined were not wise, since they could not even give a self-consistent set of answers to his questions: obviously, true knowledge requires at least that one think and speak consistently on the subjects one professes to know. So he concluded that the priestess’s reply had meant that of all those with reputations for wisdom only he came close to deserving it; he wisely did not profess to know these things that only gods can know, and that was wisdom enough for a human being. Because only he knew that he did not know, only he was ready earnestly to inquire into virtue and the other ingredients of the human good, in an effort to learn. He understood therefore that Apollo’s true intention in the oracle had been to encourage him to continue his inquiries, to help others to realize that it is beyond human powers actually to know how to live - that is the prerogative of the gods - and to do his best to understand as far as a human being can how one ought to live. The life of philosophy, as led by him, was therefore something he was effectively ordered by Apollo to undertake.
We must remember that Socrates was on trial on a charge of ‘impiety’. In tracing his philosophical vocation back to Apollo’s oracle, and linking it to a humble recognition of human weakness and divine perfection, he was constructing a powerful rebuttal of the charges brought against him. But it cannot be literally true - if that is what he intended to say - that Socrates began his inquiries about virtue only after hearing of the oracle. Chaerephon’s question to Apollo shows he had established a reputation in Athens for wisdom before that. That reputation cannot have rested on philosophical inquiries of another sort. In Plato’s Phaedo Socrates says he had been interested as a young man in philosophical speculations about the structure and causes of the natural world, but he plainly did not take those interests very far; and in any event, his reputation was not for that kind of wisdom, but wisdom about how to lead a human life. In fact we do not hear of the duty to Apollo in Xenophon, or in other dialogues of Plato, where we might expect to find it if from the beginning Socrates thought Apollo had commanded his life of philosophizing. However, we need not think Socrates was false to the essential spirit of philosophy as he practised it if in looking back on his life under threat of condemnation for impiety he chose, inaccurately, to see it as initially imposed on him by Apollo’s oracle.
Despite its impressiveness, Socrates’ speech failed to convince his jury of 501 male fellow citizens, and he died in the state prison by drinking hemlock as required by law. His speech evidently offended the majority of the jurors by its disdain for the charges and the proceedings; Xenophon explains his lofty behaviour, which he thinks would otherwise have been lunatic – and damaging to his reputation - by reporting that he had told friends in advance that as a 70-year-old still in possession of his health and faculties it was time for him to die anyhow, before senility set in. Furthermore, his ‘divine sign’ - the ‘voice’ he sometimes heard warning him for his own good against a contemplated course of action - had prevented him from spending time crafting a defence speech. (This voice seems to have been the basis for the charge of introducing ‘new’ gods.) So he would do nothing to soften his manner in order to win his freedom. Even if this story is true, Plato could be right that Socrates put on a spirited, deeply serious defence of his life and beliefs - one that he thought should have convinced the jurors of his innocence, if only they had judged him intelligently and fairly.
3 Socratic elenchus, or refutation
In cross-examining those with reputations for wisdom about human affairs and showing their lack of it, Socrates employed a special method of dialectical argument that he himself had perfected, the method of ‘elenchus’ - Greek for ‘putting to the test’ or ‘refutation’. He gives an example at his trial when he cross-examines Meletus, one of his accusers (Plato, Apology 24d-27e). The respondent states a thesis, as something he knows to be true because he is wise about the matter in question. Socrates then asks questions, eliciting clarifications, qualifications and extensions of the thesis, and seeking further opinions of the respondent on related matters. He then argues, and the respondent sees no way not to grant, that the original thesis is logically inconsistent with something affirmed in these further responses. For Socrates, it follows at once that the respondent did not know what he was talking about in stating his original thesis: true knowledge would prevent one from such self-contradiction. So the respondent suffers a personal set-back; he is refuted - revealed as incompetent. Meletus, for example, does not have consistent ideas about the gods or what would show someone not to believe in them, and he does not have consistent ideas about who corrupts the young, and how; so he does not know what he is talking about, and no one should take his word for it that Socrates disbelieves in the gods or has corrupted his young men.
In many of his early dialogues Plato shows Socrates using this method to examine the opinions of persons who claim to be wise in some matter: the religious expert Euthyphro on piety (Euthyphro), the generals Laches and Nicias on courage (Laches), the Sophist Protagoras on the distinctions among the virtues and whether virtue can be taught (Protagoras), the rhapsodist Ionon what is involved in knowing poetry (Ion), the budding politician Alcibiades on justice and other political values (Alcibiades), the Sophist Hippias on which was the better man, Odysseus or Achilles (Lesser Hippias), and on the nature of moral and aesthetic beauty (Greater Hippias). They are all refuted - shown to have mutually inconsistent ideas on the subject discussed (see Plato §§4, 6, 8-9).
But Socrates is not content merely to demonstrate his interlocutor’s lack of wisdom or knowledge. That might humiliate him into inquiring further or seeking by some other means the knowledge he has been shown to lack, instead of remaining puffed up with self-conceit. Thatwould be a good thing. But Socrates often also indicates clearly that his cross-examination justifies him and the interlocutor in rejecting as false the interlocutor’s original thesis. Logically, that is obviously wrong: if the interlocutor contradicts himself, at least one of the things he has said must be false (indeed, all of them could be), but the fact alone of self-contradiction does not show where the falsehood resides. For example, when Socrates leads Euthyphro to accept ideas that contradict his own definition of the pious as whatever pleases all the gods, Socrates concludes that that definition has been shown to be false (Euthyphro 10d-11a), and asks Euthyphro to come up with another one. He does not usually seem to consider that perhaps on further thought the additional ideas would seem faulty and so merit rejection instead.
Socrates uses his elenctic method also in discussion with persons who are not puffed up with false pride, and are quite willing to admit their ignorance and to reason out the truth about these important matters. Examples are his discussions with his long-time friend Crito on whether he should escape prison and set aside the court’s death sentence (Plato, Crito), and with the young men Charmides, on self-control (Charmides), and Lysis and Menexenus, on the nature of friendship (Lysis). Socrates examines Crito’s proposal that he escape on the basis of principles that he presents to him for his approval, and he, together with Crito (however half-heartedly), rejects it when it fails to be consistent with them. And he examines the young men’s successive ideas about these virtues, rejecting some of them and refining others, by relying on their own acceptance of further ideas that he puts to them. Again, he is confident that the inconsistencies brought to light in their ideas indicate the inadequacy of their successive proposals as to the nature of the moral virtue in question.
In many of his discussions, both with young men and the allegedly wise, Socrates seeks to know what some morally valuable property is - for example, piety, courage, self-control or friendship (see §5). Rejecting the idea that one could learn this simply from attending to examples, he sisted on an articulated ‘definition’ of the item in question - some single account that would capture all at once the presumed common feature that would entitle anything to count as a legitimate instance. Such a definition, providing the essence of the thing defined, would give us a ‘model’ or ‘paradigm’ to use in judging whether or not some proposed action or person possesses the moral value so defined (Euthyphro 6d-e). Aristotle says (in Metaphysics I, 6) that Socrates was the first to interest himself in such ‘universal definitions’, and traces to his interest in them Plato’s first impetus towards a theory of Forms, or ‘separated’ universals (see Plato §10).
In none of his discussions in Plato’s early works does Socrates profess to think an adequate final result has actually been established - about the nature of friendship, or self-control, or piety, or ny of the other matters he inquires about. Indeed, on the contrary, these works regularly end with professions of profound ignorance about the matter under investigation. Knowledge is never attained, and further questions always remain to be considered. But Socrates does plainly think that progress towards reaching final understanding has taken place (even if only a god, and no human being, could ever actually attain it). Not only has one discovered some things that aredefinitely wrong to say; one has also achieved some positive insights that are worth holding onto in seeking further systematic understanding. Given that Socrates’ method of discussion is elenctic throughout, what does he think justifies this optimism?
On balance, our evidence suggests that Socrates had worked out no elaborate theory to support him here. The ideas he was stimulated to propound in an elenctic examination which went against some initial thesis seemed to him, and usually also to the others present, so plausible, and so supportable by further considerations, that he and they felt content to reject the initial thesis. Until someone came up with arguments to neutralize their force, it seemed the thesis was doomed, as contrary to reason itself. Occasionally Socrates expresses himself in just those terms: however unpalatable the option might seem, it remains open to someone to challenge the grounds on which his conclusions rest (see Euthyphro 15c, Gorgias 461d-462a, 509a, Crito 54d). But until they do, he is satisfied to treat his and his interlocutor’s agreement as a firm basis for thought and action. Later, when Plato himself became interested in questions of philosophical methodology in his Meno, this came to seem a philosophically unsatisfactory position; Plato’s demand for justification for one’s beliefs independent of what seemed on reflection most plausible led him to epistemological and metaphysical inquiries that went well beyond the self-imposed restriction of Socratic philosophy to ethical thought in the broadest sense. But Socrates did not raise these questions. In this respect more bound by traditional views than Plato, he had great implicit confidence in his and his interlocutors’ capacity, after disciplined dialectical examination of the issues, to reach firm ground for constructing positive ideas about the virtues and about how best to lead a human life - even if these ideas never received the sort of final validation that a god, understanding fully the truth about human life, could give them.
4 Elenchus and moral progress
The topics Socrates discussed were always ethical, and never included questions of physical heory or metaphysics or other branches of philosophical study. Moreover, he always conducted his discussions not as theoretical inquiries but as profoundly personal moral tests. Questioner and interlocutor were equally putting their ways of life to what Socrates thought was the most important test of all - their capacity to stand up to scrutiny in rational argument about how one ought to live. In speaking about human life, he wanted his respondents to indicate what they truly believed, and as questioner he was prepared to do the same, at least at crucial junctures. Those beliefs were assumed to express not theoretical ideas, but the very ones on which they themselves were conducting their lives. In losing an argument with Socrates you did not merely show yourself logically or argumentatively deficient, but also put into question the very basis on which you were living. Your way of life might ultimately prove defensible, but if you cannot now defend it successfully, you are not leading it with any such justification. In that case, according to Socrates’ views, your way of life is morally deficient. Thus if Menexenus, Lysis and Socrates profess to value friendship among the most important things in life and profess to be one another’s friends, but cannot satisfactorily explain under pressure of elenctic investigation what a friend is, that casts serious doubt on the quality of any ‘friendship’ they might form (Plato, Lysis 212a, 223b). Moral consistency and personal integrity, and not mere delight in argument and logical thought, should therefore lead you to repeated elenctic examination of your views, in an effort to render them coherent and at the same time defensible on all sides through appeal to plausible arguments. Or, if some of your views have been shown false, by conflicting with extremely plausible general principles, it behoves you to drop them - and so to cease living in a way that depends upon accepting them. In this way, philosophical inquiry via the elenchus is fundamentally a personal moral quest. It is a quest not just to understand adequately the basis on which one is actually living, and the personal and moral commitments that this contains. It is also a quest to change the way one lives as the results of argument show one ought to, so that, at the logical limit of inquiry, one’s way of life would be completely vindicated. Accordingly, Socrates in Plato’s dialogues regularly insists on the individual and personal character of his discussions. He wants to hear the views of the one person with whom he is speaking. He dismisses as of no interest what outsiders or most people may think - provided that is not what his discussant is personally convinced is true. The views of ‘the many’ may well not rest on thought or argument at all. Socrates insists that his discussant shoulder the responsibility to explain and defend rationally the views he holds, and follow the argument - reason - wherever it may lead.
We learn a good deal about Socrates’ own principles from both Plato and Xenophon. Those were ones that had stood up well over a lifetime of frequent elenctic discussions and had, as he hought, a wealth of plausible arguments in their favour. Foremost is his conviction that the virtues - self-control, courage, justice, piety, wisdom and related qualities of mind and soul - are essential if anyone is to lead a good and happy life. They are good in themselves for a human being, and they guarantee a happy life, eudaimonia - something that he thought all human beings always wanted, and wanted more than anything else. The virtues belong to the soul - they are the condition of a soul that has been properly cared for and brought to its best state. The soul is vastly more important for happiness than are health and strength of the body or social and political power, wealth and other external circumstances of life; the goods of the soul, and pre-eminently the virtues, are worth far more than any quantity of bodily or external goods. Socrates seems to have thought these other goods are truly good, but they only do people good, and thereby contribute to their happiness, under the condition that they are chosen and used in accordance with virtues indwelling in their souls (see Plato, Apology 30b, Euthydemus 280d-282d, Meno 87d-89a).
More specific principles followed. Doing injustice is worse for oneself than being subjected to it (Gorgias 469c-522e): by acting unjustly you make your soul worse, and that affects for the worse the whole of your life, whereas one who treats you unjustly at most harms your body or your possessions but leaves your soul unaffected. On the same ground Socrates firmly rejected the deeply entrenched Greek precept to aid one’s friends and harm one’s enemies, and the accompanying principle of retaliation, which he equated with returning wrongs for wrongs done to oneself and one’s friends (Crito 49a-d). Socrates’ daily life gave wit.
Socratic schools
For approximately one and a half centuries after Socrates’ death in 399 BC, several Greek philosophical schools and sects each claimed to be the true intellectual heirs of Socrates. Later doxographers emphasized the Socratic pedigree of each of these schools by establishing an uninterrupted succession (diadoch0) between its alleged founder, who was invariably a member of Socrates’ own entourage, and the philosophers who succeeded him as leaders of the school.
Leaving aside Plato, the founder of the Academy, the members of the Socratic circle who left a succession behind them are Antisthenes, Aristippus of Cyrene, Euclides of Megara, and Phaedo of Elis, considered respectively the founders of Cynicism, and of the Cyrenaic, Megarian and Elian schools. It is these groupings, plus several of their offshoots, that are conventionally known as the‘Socratic schools’. All can be seen as, in their own ways, developing Socrates’ ethical outlook, and several were concerned with exploring the logical and metaphysical implications of his dialectical principles.
1 Cynics, Cyrenaics, Megarians and Dialecticians
The Cynic movement appears intermittently for a period of about ten centuries, from the fourth century BC to the sixth century AD. Its archetypal figure was Diogenes of Sinope, whose bohemian lifestyle and beggarly appearance exemplified the unity of principle and practice governing early Cynicism. Although Antisthenes (§1) was looked back on as the founder of Cynicism, his connection with the movement is problematic. Lacking any institutional structure, it could not, in any formal sense, have a founder. Nor can he be considered the forerunner of the kind of philosophical instruction practised by the Cynics, since unlike Antisthenes they ndermined curricular education, preferred practical example to philosophical argumentation and adopted informal means of instruction (see Cynics §1).
However, there is a sense in which the claims that Antisthenes is the predecessor of the movement and that the Cynics as a Socratic school are legitimate. Antisthenes is often considered the closest associate of Socrates, as reflected in both his logic and his ethical doctrine. In ethics, he shared the intellectualism of the Platonic Socrates, in that he considered virtue an understanding which, once acquired, amounts to wisdom and cannot be lost. But he also stressed the importance of physical and mental exercise, and the strength of character by which one overcomes one’s weaknesses and achieves virtue. This moderated version of Socratic intellectualism provides a substantial common ground between the doctrine of Antisthenes and those of various Cynics.
The Cyrenaic school clearly counted as Socratic because founded by an associate of Socrates, Aristippus of Cyrene, whose own descendants succeeded him as the leaders of the school. Philosophically however, its doctrines have often been considered un-Socratic. For in ethics the Cyrenaics held various versions of hedonism, and several of them maintained that the bodily pleasure experienced at the present moment is the moral end. Again, in epistemology they developed a radical scepticism regarding our knowledge of the properties of external objects, whereas much of the evidence for Socrates suggests that, at least in the period in which Aristippus would have known him, he was concerned primarily with ethics. None the less, there were ways in which the Cyrenaics could reasonably claim that they remained faithful to the spirit of Socratic philosophy (see Cyrenaics §5; Aristippus the Elder).
The Socratic pedigree of the Megarian school is secured through Socrates’ friend Euclides, who founded the school in his native Megara, although it is widely held to have been influenced also by the Eleatic philosopher Parmenides. Its doctrines were ethical and metaphysical, and also oncerned philosophical methodology and logic. Euclides taught an ethical monism related to the doctrine of the unity of virtue held by the Platonic Socrates and, perhaps, to the belief of Xenophon’s Socrates in a providential universe that, presumably, is wholly good (see Megarian school).
The Megarians overlapped for about fifty years with the rival school of the Dialecticians, linked with Socrates via its founder, Clinomachus of Thurii, himself a pupil of Euclides. Although this school’s speciality was apparently the development of dialectical skills for their own sake, it was classified as one of the ten ethical sects which developed the ethical part of philosophy that originated with Socrates (see Dialectical school).
2 The Elian and Eretrian schools
The Elian school was founded by Socrates’ associate, Phaedo of Elis, soon after Socrates’ death. Its founder is recorded as the author of several Socratic dialogues, of which only the Zopyrus and Simon were certainly his own works (see Socratic Dialogues §1). The evidence suggests that both dialogues explored ethical subjects. The Zopyrus, named after a fifth-century physiognomist, probably aimed to modify the principle that there is an intrinsic relation between natural disposition and bodily form by arguing that the first can be entirely transformed - as in Socrates’ own life - by the power of philosophy. Simon may have discussed various conceptions of virtue and its relation to pleasure, and perhaps defended a position according to which certain joys or pleasures are compatible with virtue. The themes linking the two works and securing a Socratic pedigree for Phaedo are the healing and reformative power of philosophy, its appropriateness for every person in every condition, the gradual and imperceptible effects of good and evil habits, and the importance of spiritual freedom with regard to external circumstances.
Phaedo’s immediate successor was Plestanus of Elis, otherwise unknown. Anchipylus and Moschus, also from Elis, are listed as members of the Elian school, although Cynic features are attributed to them as well. But the most important philosophical heir of Phaedo was Menedemus of Eretria, after whom the school was relabelled the ‘Eretrian school’. His criticisms of Plato, of Xenocrates, of the Cyrenaic Paraebates, of the Megarian Alexinus and of Aeschines suggest that he too was bidding for the mantle of Socrates. Even the testimony that he wrote nothing and did not adhere firmly to any doctrine may point to deliberate imitation of Socrates. However, a number of logical, metaphysical and ethical tenets are attributed to him. Reportedly, he accepted affirmative propositions and simple propositions but disallowed negative, complex or conditional statements. Although the point of this position is unclear, it may have been related to his beliefs that each thing can only be called by its own name, and that nothing must be at once one and many.
These led him to remove the verb ‘to be’ from sentences such as ‘that man is pale’ and to remodel them with a periphrasis involving no use of the copula. In these respects, as well as in the commendation of tautologies, Menedemus’ doctrine approaches Antisthenes’ logic (see Antisthenes §4). Although he argued with great keenness and occasionally used paradoxes, he rejected Megarian eristics; on this account too Menedemus could claim to be faithful to the spirit of Socrates.
In ethics, Menedemus maintained that virtue is one thing called by many names, and probably implied that names which conventionally designate the different virtues are in fact synonyms - a point on which the Platonic Socrates is notoriously ambiguous. He espoused Euclides’ position concerning the unity of the good (see §1) and he probably identified the good with virtue. He shared the intellectualism of other Socratics in that he placed the supreme moral good in the soul and believed that it can be achieved only by means of philosophical education which, therefore, is the single most important activity. But his bodily habits indicate that, like Antisthenes and the Cynics (see §1), he attributed moral importance to physical training as well. His proneness to superstition may suggest that he believed in a providential universe and, perhaps, in a divine creator. If so, his beliefs are comparable to those of Xenophon’s Socrates and of Euclides. He took an active part in politics (a fact much resented by the Cynics), but similarly to many Socratics he kept his dignity, frankness and spiritual independence in the face of the powerful men of his day. His end, sadly, is reminiscent of Socrates’ own: he was unjustly denounced for treason but, unlike Socrates, he left Eretria and died in exile by his own hand.
3 How Socratic are the Socratic schools?
Apart from the fact that the Socratic schools are founded by the entourage of Socrates, one should perhaps not attempt to find one single common thread unifying them. The links between them consist rather in family resemblances, between Socratics of the same generation or of different generations, many of them attributable with greater or lesser plausibility to Socrates himself. For example: Antisthenes and Aristippus stressed the importance of self-mastery and self-control regarding pleasure; Antisthenes and Phaedo considered some pleasures entirely compatible with virtue; Aristippus and the Cynics adopted the political attitudes of cosmopolitanism and of detachment from obligations to any particular city; Menedemus veered towards the ethics of the Cynics, and also held similar positions to Antisthenes in logic; the Megarians and the Dialecticians also worked on similar logical topics, such as modality, although their inquiries differed in scope and depth; Antisthenes, Stilpo, Menedemus and, perhaps the Dialecticians, subscribed to various forms of the doctrine that each thing has only one essence and that there is only one logos describing it (see Logos §1).
Some of the schools appear more formally organized than others. Aristippus and Phaedo probably ran proper schools, Antisthenes had a steady number of followers identified as ‘the Antisthenians’; the Cynics and the later Cyrenaic sects were dispersed; and Menedemus was entirely informal in his teaching. Nevertheless, the label ‘Socratic’ is to a certain extent justified. The doctrinal links both with each other and with the views attributed to the historical Socrates are symptomatic of the competition, widespread in the fourth century BC and after, to recover and expound Socrates’ authentic teachings.
Mystical philosophy in Islam
Mystical philosophy has an intimate connection with the mainstream of Islamic philosophy. It consists of several main strands, ranging from Isma‘ili thought to the metaphysics of al-Ghazali and Ibn al-‘Arabi, and with a continuing powerful presence in the contemporary Islamic world. Although mystical thinkers were aware that they were advocating an approach to thinking and knowledge which differed from much of the Peripatetic tradition, they constructed a systematic approach whichwas often continuous with that tradition. On the whole they emphasized the role of intellectual intuition in our approach to understanding reality, and sought to show how such an understanding might be put on a solid conceptual basis. The ideas that they created were designed to throw light on the nature of the inner sense of Islam.
1 Mystical philosophy as Islamic philosophy
It is important at the outset to ask what is meant by mystical philosophy in the context of the Islamic philosophical tradition. The term in Arabic closest to the phrase ‘mystical philosophy’ would perhaps be al-hikmat al-dhawqiyya, literally ‘tasted philosophy or wisdom’, which etymologically corresponds exactly to sapience from the Latin root sapere, meaning to taste. As understood in English, however, the term ‘mystical philosophy’ would include other types of thought in the Islamic context, although al-hikmat al-dhawqiyya was at its heart. Al-hikmat al-dhawqiyya is usually contrasted with discursive philosophy, or al-hikmat al-bahthiyya. Mystical philosophy in Islam would have to include all intellectual perspectives, which consider not only reason but also the heart-intellect, in fact primarily the latter as the main instrument for the gaining of knowledge. If this definition is accepted, then most schools of Islamic philosophy had a mystical element, for there was rarely a rationalistic philosophy developed in Islam which remained impervious to the distinction between reason and the intellect (as nous or intellectus) and the primacy of the latter while rejecting altogether the role of the heart-intellect in gaining knowledge.
This entry concentrates on those schools which not only include but emphasize noesis and the role of the heart-intellect or illumination in the attainment of knowledge. We shall therefore eave aside the Peripatetic school, despite the mystical elements in certain works of al-Farabi, the ‘oriental philosophy’ of Ibn Sina (Nasr 1996b) and the doctrine of the intellect adopted by the Muslim Peripatetics (mashsha’un) in general. Instead, the discussion will concentrate primarily upon the Isma’ili philosophy so closely connected with Hermetic, Pythagorean and Neoplatonic teachings, the school of Illumination (ishraq) of al-Suhrawardi and his followers, certain strands of Islamic philosophy in Spain and later Islamic philosophy in Persia and India. However, it would also have to include the doctrinal formulations of Sufism and its metaphysics from al-Ghazali and Ibn al-‘Arabi to the present.
2 Isma‘ili and Hermetic philosophy
Isma‘ili philosophy was among the earliest to be formulated in Islam going back to the Umm al-kitab (The Mother of Books) composed in the second century AH (eighth century AD). It expanded in the fourth century AH (tenth century AD) with Abu Hatim al-Razi and Hamid al-Din Kirmani and culminated with Nasir-i Khusraw (Corbin 1993, 1994). By nature this whole philosophical tradition was esoteric in character and identified philosophy itself with the inner, esoteric and therefore mystical dimension of religion. It was concerned with the hermeneutic interpretation (ta’wil) of sacred scripture and saw authentic philosophy as a wisdom which issues from the instructions of the Imam (who is identified on a certain level with the heart-intellect), the figure who is able to actualize the potentialities of the human intellect and enable it to gain divine knowledge. The cosmology, psychology and eschatology of Isma‘ilism are inextricably connected with its Imamology and the role of the Imam in initiation into the divine mysteries. All the different schools of Isma‘ili philosophy, therefore, must be considered as mystical philosophy despite notable distinctions between them, especially, following the downfall of the Fatimids, between the interpretations of those who followed the Yemeni school of Isma‘ilism and those who accepted Hasan al-Sabbah and ‘The Resurrection of Alamut’ in the seventh century AH (thirteenth century AD).
Two of the notable philosophical elements associated with Shi‘ism in general and Isma‘ilism in particular during the early centuries of Islamic history are Hermetism and Pythagoreanism, the presence of which is already evident in that vast corpus of writings associated with Jabir ibn Hayyan, who was at once alchemist and philosopher. Thephilosophical dimension of the Jabirian corpus is certainly of a mystical nature, having incorporated much of Hermeticism into itself, as are later works of Islamic alchemy which in fact acted as channels for the transmission of Hermetic philosophy to the medieval West. When one thinks of the central role of Hermeticism in Western mystical philosophy, one must not forget the immediate Islamic origin of such fundamental texts as the Emerald Tablet and the Turba Philosophorum, and therefore the significance of such works as texts of Islamic mystical philosophy. Obviously, therefore, one could not speak of Islamic mystical philosophy without mentioning at least the Hermetical texts integrated into Islamic thought by alchemists as well as philosophers and Sufis, and also Hermetic texts written by Muslim authors themselves. It should be recalled in this context in fact that the philosopher Ibn Sina had knowledge of certain Hermetic texts such as Poimandres and the Sufi Ibn al-‘Arabi displays vast knowledge of Hermeticism in his al-Futuhat al-makkiyya (The Meccan Illuminations) and many other works (Sezgin 1971).
As for Pythagoreanism, although elements of it are seen in the Jabirian corpus, it was primarily in the Rasa’il (Epistles) of the Ikhwan al-Safa’ in the fourth century AH (tenth century AD), who came from a Shi‘ite background and whose work was wholly adopted by later Isma‘ilism, that one sees the full development of an Islamic Pythagoreanism based upon the symbolic and mystical understanding of numbers and geometric forms (Netton 1982) (see Ikhwan al-Safa’). What is called Pythagorean number mysticism in the West had a full development in the Islamic world, and was in fact more easily integrated into the general Islamic intellectual framework than into that of Western Christianity (see Pythagoreanism).
3 Illuminationist philosophy
Perhaps the most enduring and influential school of mystical philosophy in Islam came into being in the sixth century AH (twelfth century AD) with Shihab al-Din al-Suhrawardi, who founded the school of ishraq or Illumination. Al-Suhrawardi’s basic premise was that knowledge is available to man not through ratiocination alone but also, and above all, through illumination resulting from the purification of one’s inner being. He founded a school of philosophy which some have called theosophy in its original sense, that is, mystical philosophy through and through but without being against logic or the use of reason. In fact, al-Suhrawardi criticized Aristotle and the Muslim Peripatetics on logical grounds before setting about expounding the doctrine of ishraq. This doctrine is based not on the refutation of logic, but of transcending its categories through an illuminationist knowledge based on immediacy and presence, or what al-Suhrawardi himself called ‘knowledge by presence’ (al-‘ilm al-huduri), in contrast to conceptual knowledge (al-‘ilm al-husuli) which is our ordinary method of knowing based on concepts (Ha’iri Yazdi 1992).
In his masterpiece Hikmat al-ishraq (The Philosophy of Illumination), translated by the foremost Western student of al-Suhrawardi, Henry Corbin, as Le Livre de la Sagesse Orientale (The Book of Oriental Wisdom), the Master of Illumination presents an exposition of a form of mystical philosophy which has had a following up to the present day.
Based upon the primacy of illumination by the angelic lights as the primary means of attaining authentic knowledge, the school of ishraq in fact was instrumental in bestowing a mystical character upon nearly all later Islamic philosophy, which drew even closer to Islamic esotericism or Sufism than in the earlier centuries of Islamic history without ever ceasing to be philosophy. Although the wedding between philosophy and mysticism in Islam is due most of all to the gnostic and sapiential nature of Islamic spirituality itself, on the formal level it is most of all the school of Illumination or ishraq which was instrumental in actualizing this wedding, as eight centuries of later Islamic philosophy bears witness (see Illuminationist philosophy).
4 Philosophy in the Maghrib and Spain
TThe rise of intellectual activity in the Maghrib and, especially, Andalusia was associated from the beginning with an intellectual form of Sufism in which Ibn Masarra was to play a central role. Most of the later Islamic philosophers of this region possessed a mystical dimension, ncluding even the Peripatetics Ibn Bajja and Ibn Tufayl. The former’s Tadbir al-mutawahhid (Regimen of the Solitary), far from being a political treatise, deals in reality with man’s inner being. Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan (Living Son of the Awake), interpreted by many in the West in naturalistic and rationalistic terms, is a symbolic account of the wedding between the partial and universal intellect within the human being, a wedding which results consequently in the confirmation of revelation that is also received through the archangel of revelation, who is none other than the objective embodiment of theuniversal intellect. Moreover, this mystical tendency is to be seen in its fullness in less well-known figures such as Ibn al-Sid of Badajoz who, like the Ikhwan al-Safa’, was devoted to mathematical mysticism, and especially the Sufi Ibn Sab‘in, the last of the Andalusian philosophers of the seventh century AH (thirteenth century AD), who developed one of the most extreme forms of mystical philosophy in Islam based upon the doctrine of the transcendent unity of being (wahdat al-wujud) (Taftazani and Leaman 1996).
Andalusia was also the home of the greatest expositor of Sufi metaphysics, Ibn al-‘Arabi ((see §6).
5 Illuminationist thought in the East
In eastern lands of the Islamic world and especially Persia, which was the main theatre for the flourishing of Islamic philosophy from the seventh century AH (thirteenth century AD) onward, primarily mystical philosophy was dominant during later centuries despite the revival of the discursive philosophy of the mashsha’is, such as Ibn Sina, by Khwajah Nasir al-Din al-Tusi and others. It was in the East in the seventh and eighth centuries AH (thirteenth and fourteenth centuries AD) that the doctrines of ishraq with its emphasis on inner vision and illumination were revived by al-Suhrawardi’s major commentators, Shams al-Din al-Shahrazuri and Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi, who was also a master of Ibn Sinan philosophy. The next three centuries saw mystical ideas and doctrines become ever more combined with the philosophical theses of the earlier schools, and figures such as Ibn Turkah Isfahani sought consciously to combine the teachings of Ibn Sina, al-Suhrawardi and Ibn al-‘Arabi.
This tendency culminated in the tenth century AH (sixteenth century AD) with the establishment of the School of Isfahan by Mir Damad and the foremost metaphysician of later Islamic thought, Mulla Sadra, in whom the blending of ratiocination, inner illumination and revelation became complete (Corbin 1972). In this school the most rigorous logical discourse is combined with illumination and direct experience of ultimate reality, as seen so amply in Mulla Sadra’s masterpiece al-Asfar al-arba‘ah (The Four Journeys). This later Islamic philosophy is certainly mystical philosophy, relying as it does on ‘experiential’ knowledge and direct vision of ultimate reality and the angelic worlds, a vision that is associated with the eye of the heart (‘ayn al-qalb orchism-i dil). However, it is also a philosophy in which the categories of logic are themselves seen as ladders for ascent to the world of numinous reality in accordance with the Islamic perspective, in which what would be called Islamic mysticism from a Christian perspective is of a gnostic (‘irfani) and sapiental nature, Islamic mysticism being essentially a path of knowledge of which love is the consort, rather than a way of love exclusive of knowledge.
In any case it was this type of philosophy, associated especially with the name of Mulla Sadra, that has dominated the philosophical scene in Persia during the past few centuries and produced major figures such as Hajji Mulla Hadi al-Sabzawari and Mulla ‘Ali Zunuzi in the thirteenth century AH (nineteenth century AD), both of whom were philosophers as well as mystics. It is also this type of philosophy that continues to this day and has in fact been revived during the past few decades. Nearly all philosophers in Persia associated with the school of Mulla Sadra, which is also known as al-hikmat al-muta‘aliya (literally the ‘transcendent theosophy’), have been and remain at once philosophers and mystics.
In India likewise, Islamic philosophy began to spread only after al-Suhrawardi and during the past seven centuries most Islamic philosophers in that land have been also what in the West would be called mystics. It is not accidental that the school of Mulla Sadra spread rapidly after him in India and has had expositors there to this day. Perhaps the most famous of Muslim intellectual figures in India, Shah Waliullah of Delhi, exemplifies this reality (see Shah Wali Allah). He was a philosopher and Sufi as well as a theologian, and his many writings attest to the blending of philosophy and mysticism. It can in fact be said that Islamic philosophy in India is essentially mystical philosophy, despite the attention paid by the Islamic philosophers there to logic and in some cases to natural philosophy and medicine.
6 Sufism and the Akbarian tradition
No treatment of mystical philosophy in Islam would be complete without a discussion of octrinal Sufism and Sufi metaphysics, although technically speaking in Islamic civilization a clear istinction has always been made between philosophy (al-falsafa or al-hikma) and Sufi metaphysics and gnosis (al-ma‘rifah, ‘irfan). However, as the term ‘mystical philosophy’ is understood in English, it would certainly include Sufi metaphysical and cosmological doctrines which were not explicitly formulated until the sixth and seventh centuries AH (twelfth and thirteenth centuries AD) although their roots are to be found in the Qur’an and hadith and the sayings and writings of the early Sufis. The first Sufi authors who turned to an explicit formulation of Sufi metaphysical doctrines were Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali in his later esoteric treatise such as Mishkat al-anwar (The Niche of Lights) and al-Risalat al-laduniyya (Treatise on Divine Knowledge), and ‘Ayn al-Qudat Hamadani who followed a generation after him.
The writings of these great masters were, however, a prelude for the vast expositions of the master of Islamic gnosis Muhyi al-Din Ibn al-‘Arabi, perhaps the most influential Islamic intellectual figure of the past seven hundred years. Not only did he profoundly influence many currents of Sufism and establish an ‘Akbarian tradition’ identified with such later masters as Sadr al-Din Qunawi, ‘Abd al-Rahman Jami and, in the last century, Amir ‘Abd al-Qadir and Shaykh Ahmad al-‘Alawi. He and his school also influenced formal philosophy to such an extent that a figure such as Mulla Sadra would not be conceivable without him. The Ibn al-‘Arabian doctrines of the transcendent unity of being, the universal man, the imaginal world and eschatological realities are not only esoteric and mystical doctrines of the greatest significance in themselves for the understanding of the inner teachings of Islam, but are also sources of philosophical meditation for generations of Islamic philosophers to the present day, who have cultivated diverse and rich schools of mystical philosophy during the past eight centuries and brought into being currents of philosophical thought that are still alive in the Islamic world. One need only think of such fourteenth century AH (twentieth century AD) figures as ‘Alalamah Tabataba’i in Persia and ‘Abd al-Halim Mahmud in Egypt to realize the significance of the wedding between philosophy and mysticism in the Islamic intellectual tradition, not only over the ages, but as part of the contemporary Islamic intellectual scene (see Islamic philosophy, modern).
References and further reading
Copenhaver, B.P. (ed.) (1992) Hermetica: The Greek ‘Corpus Hermeticum’ and the Latin ‘Asclepius’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.(English translation, with notes and a useful introduction.)
Festugière, A.-J. (1944-54) La révélation d’Hermès Trismégiste, Paris: Gabalda, 4 vols. (Indispensable in-depth study.)
Fowden, G. (1986) The Egyptian Hermes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Important or the historical and social background of the Hermetica.)
GGrafton, A. (1983) ‘Protestant Versus Prophet: Isaac Casaubon on Hermes Trismegistus’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 46: 78-93.(On Casaubon’s seminal redating of the Corpus Hermeticum.)
Kingsley, P. (1993) ‘Poimandres: The Etymology of the Name and the Origins of the Hermetica’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 56: 1-24.(Seeks to vindicate as authentically Egyptian the main content of the treatises.)
Nock, A.D. and Festugière, A.-J. (eds) (1945-54) Hermès Trismégiste, Budé series, Paris: Belles Lettres, 4 vols. (Text, French translation and notes.)
Yates, F.A. (1964) Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.(Important study of the Renaissance tradition.)
Aristotle (c. mid 4th century BC) Metaphysics, trans. in J. Barnes (ed.) The Complete Works of Aristotle, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. (A primary source on early Pythagoreanism.)
Burkert, W. (1972) Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, trans. E.L. Minar, Jr, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.(A scholarly examination of the sources of Pythagoreanism and a critical analysis of Pythagorean teachings; a prerequisite for all serious work on the subject.)
Diels, H and Kranz, W. (eds) (1952) Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Fragments of the Presocratics), Berlin: Weidmann, 6th edn, vol. 1, 96-113 and 375-480.(The standard collection of the ancient sources containing the main sources on Pythagoreanism.)
Guthrie, W.K.C. (1962-78) A History of Greek Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 6 vols.(A comprehensive and readable discussion of early Pythagoreanism can be found in volume 1, pages 146-340; emphasizes the harmony between its religious and philosophical-scientific elements.)
Huffman, C.A. (1993) Philolaus of Croton: Pythagorean and Presocratic, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.(Examines the fragments of a notable Pythagorean; pages 57-64 argue that ‘all things are number’ was not an actual claim of the Pythagoreans but rather Aristotle’s summary of their number theory.)
Kahn, C.H. (1974) ‘Pythagorean Philosophy before Plato’, in A.P.D. Mourelatos (ed.) The Pre-Socratics, Garden City, NY: Doubleday; repr. 1993.(A short but useful introduction.)
Kingsley, P. (1995) Ancient Philosophy, Mystery and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.(Examines Pythagoreanism against the background of Greek mystery and magic; also discusses the influence of Pythagoreans on the myths in Plato.)
Navia, L.E. (1990) Pythagoras: An Annotated Bibliography, New York and London: Garland. (Includes the literature, up to 1989, not only on Pythagoras but also on all aspects of Pythagoreanism.)
Philip, J.A. (1966) Pythagoras and Early Pythagoreanism, Toronto, Ont.: Toronto University Press.(An examination, based principally on Aristotle, of the major doctrines of Pythagoreanism; in regard to cosmology, holds that the Pythagorean opposites are not the first principles of a dualistic cosmos, but rather, given a creation in time, the constituents of one physis, one world-nature.)
Plato (c.380-367 BC) Republic, trans. P. Shorey, Plato: Republic, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and London: Heinemann, 1930, 2 vols.(Much Pythagorean influence in books VI-VII.)
Foerster, W. (ed. and trans.) (1972, 1974) Gnosis, Oxford: Clarendon Press.(An English translation of Gnostic texts in two volumes: 1, Patristic Evidence: 2, Coptic and Mandaean Sources.)
Grant, R.M. (ed. and trans.) (1961) Gnosticism, An Anthology, London: Collins. (Good introductory collection.)
Jonas, H. (1958) The Gnostic Religion, Boston, MA: Beacon Press.(Authoritative brief survey.)
Koester, H. (1990) Ancient Christian Gospels, their History and Development, London: SCM Press.(Compares the canonical Gospels with Gnostic parallels.)
Layton, B. (ed. and trans.) (1987) The Gnostic Scriptures: A New Translation, London: SCM.(Complete English version of the Nag-Hammadi texts.)
Pagels, E.H. (1975) The Gnostic Paul, Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press.(Introduces Gnostic biblical scholarship.)
Pagels, E.H. (1979) The Gnostic Gospels, New York: Random House; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.(Introduces Gnostic biblical scholarship.)
Robinson, J.M. (ed. and trans.) (1988) The Nag-Hammadi Library, Leiden: Brill. (Complete translation of the collection.)
Rudolph, K. (1983) Gnosis, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.(Authoritative, comprehensive study.) Stead, G.C. (1969) ‘The Valentinian Myth of Sophia’, Journal of Theological Studies 20: 75-104.(Examines the growth of a Gnostic myth).
Wilson, R.M. (1968) Gnosis and the New Testament, Oxford: Blackwell.(Fairly simple in Treatment, but totally reliable.)
Yamauchi, E. (1973) Pre-Christian Gnosticism, London: Tyndale Press.(Discusses the question whether Gnosticism antedates Christianity.)
Bollack, J. (1965-9) Empédocle, Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 4 vols.(An edition of fragments of On Nature and associated testimonia, with Greek text, French translation and commentary; champions the interpretation of the cosmic cycle adopted here; sometimes eccentric, but contains a wealth of insight, particularly on Empedocles’ vocabulary.)
Empedocles (c.495-c.435 BC) Fragments, in H. Diels and W. Kranz (eds) Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Fragments of the Presocratics), Berlin: Weidemann, 6th edn, 1952, vol. 1, 276-375. (The standard collection of the ancient sources, both fragments and testimonia, the latter designated by ’A’; includes Greek text of the fragments with translations in German.)
Guthrie, W.K.C. (1962-78) A History of Greek Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 6 vols.(The most detailed and comprehensive English-language history of early Greek thought; the long and sympathetic account of Empedocles, in volume 2 pages 122-265, is still the best treatment in English.)
Kahn, C.H. (1960) ’Religion and Natural Philosophy in Empedocles’ Doctrine of the Soul’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 42: 3-35; repr. in A.P.D. Mourelatos (ed.) The Pre-Socratics, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974, 397-425.(A seminal article on the coherence of Empedocles’ thought.)
Kirk, G.S., Raven, J.E. and Schofield, M. (1983) The Presocratic Philosophers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn.(A valuable survey of Presocratic philosophy, including texts and translations; the account of Empedocles presented in the biographical entry largely follows its interpretations.)
Kingsley, P. (1995) Ancient Philosophy, Mystery and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition, Oxford: Clarendon Press.(On Empedocles’ physical system and its connection with Pythagorean traditions.)
Martin, A. and Primaveri, O. (1997) L’Empédocle de Strasbourg, Berlin: de Gruyter.(An edition of papyrus fragments of Empedocles in the possession of the library of the University of Strasbourg.)
Sedley, D.N. (1989) ’The Proems of Empedocles and Lucretius’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 30: 269-96.(An attractive reconstruction of the proem to On Nature; revises the allocation of fragments between On Nature and Purifications.)
Solmsen, F. (1965) ’Love and Strife in Empedocles’ Cosmology’, Phronesis 10: 123-45; repr. in R.E. Allen and D.J. Furley (eds), Studies in Presocratic Philosophy, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, vol. 2, 221-64.(The best argument for the single-cosmogony interpretation.)
Wright, M.R. (1981) Empedocles: The Extant Fragments, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press.(An edition with translations, commentary and glossary; an indispensable aid to deeper study; contains a useful statement of the double-cosmogony interpretation.)
Zuntz, G. (1971) Persephone, Oxford: Clarendon Press.(A study of western Greek mystery religion; part 2 pages 181-274 re-edits Purifications and offers a powerfully suggestive interpretation.)
Aristophanes’ (c.423 BC) Clouds, ed. K.J. Dover, Aristophanes Clouds, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968; trans. A.H. Sommerstein, Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1982; trans. A.H. Sommerstein, Aristophanes: Lysistrata, The Acharnians, The Clouds, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.(Classic comic portrayal of Socrates. Dover is an editio of the Greek text with explanatory notes; Sommerstein’s 1982 translation also includes the Greek text and explanatory notes.) Aristotle (c. mid 4th century BC) Metaphysics I 6, XIII 4, Nicomachean Ethics VII 2-3, Sophistical Refutations 34, Magna Moralia I 1, Poetics 1, in J. Barnes (ed.) The Complete Works of Aristotle, revised Oxford Translation, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1984, 2 vols.(Important testimony on Socrates. The Magna Moralia is possibly by a follower of Aristotle, and is of uncertain date.)
Benson, H.H. (ed.) (1992) Essays on the Philosophy of Socrates, New York: Oxford University Press.(Reprints fifteen of the best journal articles of the 1970s and 1980s on Socrates and Socratic philosophy; broad coverage of topics, full bibliography.)
Cicero, M.T. (late 45 BC) Tusculan Disputations, trans. J.E. King, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and London: Heinemann, 1927.(Parallel Latin text and English translation.)
Giannantoni, G. (1990) Socratis et Socraticorum Reliquiae (The Fragments of Socrates and the Socratics), Naples: Bibliopolis, 4 vols.(Volumes 1 and 2 contain the surviving Greek and Diogenes Laertius ( c. early 3rd century AD) Lives of the Philosophers, trans. R.D. Hicks, Diogenes Laertius Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925, 2 vols.(Greek text with English translation; see especially book II on the Socratics and book VI on Antisthenes and the Cynics.)
Giannantoni, G. (1990) Socratis et Socraticorum Reliquiae (The Fragments of Socrates and the Socratics), Naples: Bibliopolis.(The standard collection of Greek and Latin testimonies on the Socratic schools.)
Vander Waerdt, P. (1994) The Socratic Movement, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.(Collection of essays.)
Zeller, E. (1869-82) Die Philosophie der Griechen (The Philosophy of the Greeks), 3rd edn, Leipzig:
Reisland; relevant part available in English trans. by O.J. Reichel, Socrates and the Socratic Schools, Leipzig: Fues’ Verlag (Reisland), 3rd edn, 1988.(Still in most ways the best overall account.)
Diogenes Laertius ( c. early 3rd century AD) Lives of the Philosophers, trans. R.D. Hicks, Diogenes Laertius Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925, 2 vols.(Greek text with English translation; see especially book II on the Socratics and book VI on Antisthenes and the Cynics.)
Giannantoni, G. (1990) Socratis et Socraticorum Reliquiae (The Fragments of Socrates and the
Socratics), Naples: Bibliopolis.(The standard collection of Greek and Latin testimonies on the Socratic schools.)
Vander Waerdt, P. (1994) The Socratic Movement, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.(Collection of
essays.)
Zeller, E. (1869-82) Die Philosophie der Griechen (The Philosophy of the Greeks), 3rd edn, Leipzig: Reisland; relevant part available in English trans. by O.J. Reichel, Socrates and the Socratic Schools, Leipzig: Fues’ Verlag (Reisland), 3rd edn, 1988.(Still in most ways the best overall account.)
Chittick, W. (1989) The Sufi Path of Knowledge, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.(The standard account of the nature of mystical knowledge.)
Chittick, W. (1994) Imaginal Worlds: Ibn al-‘Arabi and the Problem of Religious Diversity, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.(An analysis of the concept of the mundus imaginalis.)
Chodkiewicz, M. (1993) Seal of the Saints - Prophethood and Sainthood in the Doctrine of Ibn ‘Arabi, trans. L. Sherrard, Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society.(Close account of the key concepts of prophecy and sainthood.)
Corbin, H. (1972) En Islam iranien (On Persian Islam) Paris: Gallimard.(The most important collection of sources of Persian philosophy.)
Corbin, H. (1980) Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, trans. W. Trask, Houston, TX:Spring Publications.(Ibn Sina’s account of mystical perception.)
Corbin, H. (1993) The History of Islamic Philosophy, in collaboration with S.H. Nasr and O. Yahya, trans. P. Sherrard, London: Kegan Paul International.(The first history to lay proper emphasis on Persian philosophy.)
Corbin, H. (1994) Trilogie ismaélienne (Isma‘ili Trilogy), Paris: Verdier.(Discussion of some of the most important Isma‘ili texts.)
Cruz Hernández, M. (1981) Historia del pensamiento en el mundo islámico (History of Thought in the Islamic World), Madrid: Alianza Editorial.(Excellent general account of Islamic philosophy.)
Ha’iri Yazdi, M. (1992) The Principles of Epistemology in Islamic Philosophy - Knowledge by Presence, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.(The best account of ‘ilm al-huduri, knowledge by presence.)
Knysh, A. (1993) ‘The Diffusion of Ibn ‘Arabi’s Doctrine’, in S. Hirtenstein and M. Tiernan (eds) Muhyiddin ibn ‘Arabi - A Commemorative Volume, Shaftesbury: Element, 307-27.(Discussion of the influence of Ibn al-‘Arabi.)
Nanji, A. (1996) ‘Isma‘ili Philosophy’, in S.H. Nasr and O. Leaman (eds) History of Islamic Philosophy, London: Routledge, ch. 9, 144-54.(Examination of Isma‘ili philosophy including the influence of Neoplatonism.)
Nasr, S.H. (1975) Three Muslim Sages, New York: Delmar.(Excellent introductions to Ibn Sina, al-Suhrawardi and Ibn al-‘Arabi.)
Nasr, S.H. (1978) Islamic Life and Thought, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (General introduction to the role of mysticism in Islamic culture.)
Nasr, S.H. (1996a) ‘Ibn Sina’s Oriental Philosophy’, in S.H. Nasr and O. Leaman (eds) History of Islamic Philosophy, London: Routledge, 247-51.(Argument for the existence and importance of the ‘oriental philosophy’.)
Nasr, S.H. (1996b) The Islamic Intellectual Tradition in Persia, Richmond: Curzon Press.(Deals with the Persian contribution to philosophy and mysticism.)
Netton, I. (1982) Muslim Neoplatonists: An Introduction to the Thought of the Brethren of Purity, London: Allen & Unwin.(The standard account of the Ikhwan al-Safa’.)
Sezgin, F. (1971) Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums (History of Arabic Literature), vol. 4, Leiden: Brill.(Sources on Hermetism in Islamic literature.)
al-Suhrawardi (1154-91) Hikmat al-ishraq (The Philosophy of Illumination), trans H. Corbin, Le livre de la sagesse orientale, Paris: Verdier, 1986.(Very important illuminationist text.)
Taftazani, A. and Leaman, O. (1996) ‘Ibn Sab‘in’, in S.H. Nasr and O. Leaman (eds) History of Islamic Philosophy, London: Routledge, 346-9.(Discussion of the significance of the thought of Ibn Sab‘in.)
Ziai, H. (1990) Knowledge and Illumination, Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press.(Very clear account of the links between illuminationist philosophy and epistemology.)
