Donatella Di Cesare - The Political Vocation of Philosophy

Philosophy does not come after science – it precedes it. It is already there, at the beginning. It has a much vaster dominion – a varied, blurry, jagged landscape of arduous ascents, of a series of turning points and switchbacks, where paths can suddenly break off. Even if she does make it to the top, whoever philosophises finds no satisfaction in the understanding she did not have before, in the solution to the problem. Rather, she is even more troubled and tormented, because from atop that promontory, which she imagined to be a lofty summit, she more clearly sees everything that is in the dark. And yet she continues on, troubled and perturbed. The philosopher’s wonder is not naive. It is not satisfied by seeing some previously unknown thing which she finally seems able to grasp. Hers is an intensified wonder, almost another passion. Why is there something and not nothing?

Thus, the philosopher’s path is anything but a straight line. On closer inspection, it is not even an outward journey, but a return home. Once the gaze has turned away from things which it leaves up to science, it curves, turns, folds in a different direction, to focus in on questions which are and will remain both ultimate and primary. This veering move can be called reflection, a change of course which reawakens from dreamlike sleep.

This path of return proceeds from the aporia of non-knowledge and heads toward clarity. But it never truly arrives at this destination, since whatever is sought hides and draws further away. It is on the philosopher’s path that there comes into view the limit proper to human finitude, the limit of a mortal existence unable to tie the end to the beginning. Understanding the whole is precluded. How, then, can one not aspire to clarity, not desire it, love it? Hence why the Greek phileîn assumes such a decisive role in Plato, in indicating philosophy (see Symposium , 203b-204b). Love is a passion far more overwhelming than wonder, and it ends up supplanting it. Or rather, sophía itself is subordinated to philía . For what matters is the outburst of desire, the unstoppable restlessness, the misery, which together make philosophy into a vocation.

1 1. See Plato, Lysis 218a-b; Symposium, 204a; Phaedrus, 278d.

2 2. In Thomas Hobbes’s translation.

3 3. See Plato, Theaetetus, 155d; Aristotle, Metaphysics, 980a 21–982a 3. On this theme, see Jeanne Hersch, L’étonnement philosophique: une histoire de la philosophie, Paris: Gallimard, 2017.

On a night when the face of the heavens seemed brighter than ever, an astronomer who ventured out to watch the stars each night ended up falling into a well. Such was the story as Aesop told it in one of his Fables (65). But there are also other versions of this anecdote. The most famous is that offered by Plato, who has Thales of Miletus instead of the astronomer.

The doxography has only scant knowledge of Thales. The founder of the Ionian school and a citizen of Miletus, ‘after politics’ – Diogenes Laërtius writes – he dedicated himself to the study of natural phenomena (I, 23-A1). He discovered new constellations, inspected the movements of the stars, calculated solstices and equinoxes; he must have been a talented geometrist, indeed, if he really managed to measure the height of a pyramid on the basis of the shadow it cast. He was perhaps the first to consider the soul immortal. Obscure – and controversial – is his connection with the hylozoistic doctrines that saw ‘life’, zoé , in all ‘matter’, húle . It seems that, when he observed a piece of amber or a magnet, Thales recognised a certain ‘soul’ even in what seemed to be inert. And he thus came to say that ‘everything is full of gods’ (B 22). His name is also attached to water qua first principle – indeed, he identified water as the source and the wellspring of all things.

But it was Plato who granted Thales everlasting fame thanks to the anecdote narrated in his Theaetetus . While Thales was ‘watching the stars’, astronomoûnta , and ‘looking up high’, áno bléponta, he ‘fell in a well’, phréar . Plato says nothing about the context for this incident. It is not known whether it happened in the middle of the countryside, if this learned man had ventured there, heedless, in order to contemplate these astral bodies in their regular orbits, or if it instead took place next to some orchard, already almost at the edges of the city, or even in some run-down street of Miletus itself. What is certain is that if Thales had stayed at home and studied the sky from his window, he would have avoided this pratfall. The origin of this inauspicious event lay in the fact that he left his home, went out – the horizontal movement punished, so to speak, by a vertical plunge. This punishment would stand as a warning for future philosophers who too unscrupulously dare to venture into a kinetics of external latitude. For there are wells, precipices and ravines lying in ambush.

The story has other surprises in store. The spotlight is snatched from the wise man by a woman, no less – chronologically, she appears as the second protagonist but she is, perhaps, the decisive one. She is the legendary ‘Thracian slave girl’, the spectator to this tragicomic tumble. Could anyone not share in her mirth? Even Plato seems to do so, as he comes close to taking sides with this ‘neat, witty’ young woman. Indeed, he writes that she makes fun of Thales, telling him that ‘he was so eager to know the things in the sky that he could not see what was there before him at his very feet’. 1

This clashes somewhat with the version provided by Diogenes Laërtius. He tells the story after underlining an ugly, distasteful aspect of Thales, who – according to this malign tradition – was thankful for his lot in life on three counts: ‘to be a man and not a beast, male and not female, Greek and not barbarian’ (I, 34-A1). If this is what he thought of women, then it must be admitted that fate gave him his just deserts. As Thales groans in a ditch, he is reproached by ‘an old woman’ who had accompanied him; her words are similar to the young slave girl’s, just the other way around: ‘Do you, O Thales, who cannot see what is under your feet, think you shall understand what is in heaven?’ From this version more clearly emerges the intention and resolution to observe – it is said that Thales went ‘out of the house to study the stars’. Was it perhaps because of this eagerness, itself almost fussy and methodical, that he ended up falling? Or was it all unforeseeable? It is, after all, possible that as Thales went along his way he was suddenly enraptured by the beauty and the perfection of the cosmos at night, and thereby plunged into the hole. In short, it is uncertain if the object of scorn, here, is Thales’ obstinate focus on his research – so absolute that it leads him to neglect the immediacy of what he has right in front of him – or precisely his capacity for wonderment, that enviable passion, so intense that it drags him along even at the risk to his own safety.

Hans Blumenberg reconstructed the immense success of this anecdote; it was destined to become the scene of the very dawn of philosophy, given the influence it had over its history. 2Indeed, it was in many ways prophetic. The conflict between the philosopher and the city is prefigured within the latent tension. The mocking reproach, of which the ‘slave girl’ here becomes the spokeswoman, is the same one which common sense would incessantly level against the philosopher: that he claims to know that which is distant, but is unable to acknowledge that which is close at hand; that he looks up high and ends up plunging down into a pit. What use are stars if you do not even know how to walk down on earth? How can such an unbalanced and foolish type – anything but a sage or a wise man – have anything to teach to others?