Waterfield, 'Studies in Greek Philosophy, Volume I: The Presocratics', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9506
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9506-waterfield-studies

@@@@95.6.17, Vlastos, Studies in Greek Philosophy (I)

Gregory Vlastos, <i>Studies in Greek Philosophy, Volume I: The
Presocratics.</i> Edited by Daniel W. Graham. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1995. Pp. xxxiv + 389. $49.50. ISBN
0-691-03310-2.
     Reviewed by Robin Waterfield -- Teddington, UK.

     This is the first in a set of two volumes collecting all of
Vlastos' essays on ancient Greek philosophy. It is particularly
useful because although most of his essays on the Presocratics
have at one time or another been anthologized, they are still
hard to come by <i>en masse</i>, especially since D.J. Furley and
R.E. Allen's two-volume <i>Studies in Presocratic Philosophy</i>
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970/1975) is apparently out of
print. There is no doubt, given Vlastos' seminal importance in
the field, that the two volumes will between them constitute an
essential advanced course in topics in ancient philosophy.

     The volumes have been put together by Daniel Graham. For our
volume, he has provided immensely useful indexes, a preface,
introduction, and other apparatus such as a list of
abbreviations. The General Index may list only main entries; for
instance, I wanted to check something on Melissus, but only one
out of the three entries--albeit the most important one--is
listed (the others are pp. 220 and 242, by the way). The Index
Locorum, however, seems very thorough.

     The Preface explains the genesis of the book. The
Introduction contains a brief biography and an even briefer
survey of the essays included in the book. The biography is
moderately eulogistic in tone, but no more than Vlastos deserves;
it also squares well with my own memories of the man, gleaned
from a shared term in St Andrews when he was the Gifford Lecturer
there.

     Almost as soon as Vlastos began to devote himself to ancient
philosophy, the Presocratics occupied a great deal of his
attention. So most of the essays in this volume are early or
earlyish pieces, spanning the 1940s to the 1960s. It is hugely to
his credit that despite their age, and despite the fact that
several of them were written as book reviews, every single one of
these essays deserves reading and re-reading, and most of them
have become fundamental to the study of the Presocratic thinker
or topic in question.

     Graham has divided the essays into four categories: 'Concept
Studies', 'Heraclitus', 'The Eleatics', and 'The Pluralists'. The
first section contains 'Theology and Philosophy in Early Greek
Thought', 'Solonian Justice', 'Equality and Justice in Early
Greek Cosmologies', 'Isonomia', and 'Cornford's <i>Principium
Sapientiae</i>'. The second section contains only 'On
Heraclitus'. The third section contains Vlastos' five famous
essays on Zeno, and also 'Parmenides' Theory of Knowledge',
'Fraenkel's <i>Wege und Formen fruehgriechischen Denkens</i>',
and 'Raven's Pythagoreans and Eleatics'. The final section
contains 'The Physical Theory of Anaxagoras', 'Ethics and Physics
in Democritus' and 'On the Pre-history in Diodorus'.

     The only works of Vlastos' on the Presocratics which Graham
decided to exclude (apart from that which occurs incidentally
elsewhere, such as the first chapter of <i>Plato's Universe</i>)
are briefer reviews (such as those in <i>Gnomon</i> 25 (1953),
pp. 166-9, of J. Zafiropoulo, <i>L'ecole eleate</i>, and in
<i>Philosophical Review</i> 59 (1950), pp. 124-6, of F.M. Cleve,
<i>The Philosophy of Anaxagoras</i>), and the article on Zeno
from W. Kaufmann (ed.), <i>Philosophical Classics</i> (Englewood
Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1961), because this was so thoroughly
superseded by Vlastos' later work on Zeno.

     Vlastos used the tools of analytical philosophy and a kind
of passionate curiosity about his subject to solve problems in
ancient philosophy. Several of the solutions proposed in this
volume seem to me to be incontrovertible, and have entered the
secondary literature as such. I am thinking of theses such as the
influence of the political concept of <i>isonomia</i> on the
earliest Presocratics, the balance of theology and philosophy in
the Presocratics, the nature of the influence of the Milesians on
Heraclitus, and the non-existence of Pythagorean 'number-atomism'
as a target of Eleatic criticism, to mention only four. It may be
that some of these theses need a little fine-tuning, but broadly
they do seem pretty secure to me.

     By fine-tuning, I mean, for instance, that in one respect
Vlastos may have over-estimated the influence of Anaximander on
Heraclitus. He is concerned (p. 143, during the essay 'On
Heraclitus') to attribute Heraclitus' idea that there is always
justice or equilibrium in the world, however much flux or strife
there may be, to the influence of Anaximander's famous fragment.
Whereas Anaximander had suggested that the opposites encroach
upon one another, until they are 'punished', Heraclitus denied
the possibility of such encroachment, if that is seen as a kind
of excess. There can be no excess, because justice is, for
Heraclitus, universal. But why should we attribute this insight
to the influence of Anaximander? Why should not both thinkers be
reflecting, in slightly different ways, on the common Greek view
of justice as a system of checks and balances? Dike is something
that is given and received by the parties involved. The fact that
the words DI/KH and XREW/N crop up in both Heraclitus B80 and
Anaximander B1 is neither here nor there: only the use of XREW/N
<i>may</i> be significant, since it is hard to see what word
other than DI/KH they or anyone else might have used.

     But this is a minor point, the merest quibble. Broadly, as I
say, it is clear that many of Vlastos' theses have weathered
well. Now, it is hard in the space of a review to comment fairly
on a work of this scope and complexity. Thorough criticism of
even a single essay is well beyond my brief here. It will be more
useful to focus on general trends, and what I choose to do is
comment primarily on a tendency Vlastos displays, which is the
tendency to exaggerate. Once in a while, I find myself thinking
that a solution he has proposed to a problem may be elegant, but
is also somewhat far-fetched, or at least removed from the
primary evidence. It is as if, in Socratic fashion, he has been
carried by the <i>logos</i> he has created to a conclusion which,
considered baldly, is implausible.

     A clear case of this tendency comes in the essay
'Parmenides' Theory of Knowledge'. Vlastos collates evidence from
Theophrastus and elsewhere that for Parmenides memory-loss is
caused by dark beginning to dominate light, and that his theory
of sense-perception depends on the presence in us of both light
and dark. In short, any admixture of darkness falls short of
knowledge. Vlastos therefore concludes that for Parmenides true
knowledge is involved with nothing but light. 'The mind's power
to think Being must imply just such a power ... to merge itself
wholly with the light, and thus be as changeless as light' (pp.
158-9).

     Surely this goes too far. Such a person could only be
discarnate, or perhaps a god, but not a mortal human being. But
B8.35-6 certainly offers us mortal humans the possibility of
'thinking Being', despite the fact that Parmenides recognizes
that as mortals we are inextricably bound up with both light and
darkness (B16.1-2).

     One piece of evidence Vlastos draws on in support of his
hypothesis is the Proem, which he sees as an allegorical journey
from darkness to light (pp. 159-60). But has Vlastos got the
direction of the journey right? If W. Burkert ('Das Prooemium des
Parmenides und die Katabasis des Pythagoras', <i>Phronesis</i> 14
(1969), pp. 1-30) and others are right, the Proem describes a
<i>katabasis</i>, in which case it may actually be a journey away
from light (see also J. Mansfeld, <i>Die Offenbarung des
Parmenides und die menschliche Welt</i> (Assen: Van Gorcum,
1964), chapter 4; D.J. Furley, 'Notes on Parmenides', in E.N. Lee
<i>et al.</i> (eds), <i>Exegesis and Argument</i> (Assen: Van
Gorcum, 1973), pp. 1-15, at pp. 1-5; M.C. Nussbaum, 'Eleatic
Conventionalism and Philolaus on the Conditions of Thought',
<i>Harvard Studies in Classical Philology</i> 83 (1979), pp.
63-108, at pp. 68-9; D. Gallop, <i>Parmenides of Elea</i>
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984, pp. 6-7). One
possible implication of this is that the goal of Parmenides'
journey may ultimately transcend both light and darkness. What
makes this interpretation all the more plausible is that we are
constantly warned by Parmenides not to cut Being up, since it is
all one. Parmenides' insight, then, should be into a realm of
unity, not one where one of the opposites is dominant. So the
basic implausibility of Vlastos's interpretation lies in the fact
that he is completely separating darkness from light, which in
fact, so far from being something knowledge does, is more likely
to be an effort of <i>doxa</i>. As human beings, it is precisely
because we consist of both light and dark that we have the
possibility of transcending both. For further evidence from early
Greek thought of the compatibility between light and darkness and
of the origins of light in darkness, see P. Kingsley, <i>Ancient
Philosophy, Mystery and Magic</i> (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995), chapter 5.

     Here is another instance of the same tendency in Vlastos. In
this case, carried along by the conviction of his own insight, he
tries to foist it on us rather dogmatically. Close to the
beginning of his important discussion of Anaxagoras' 'seeds', he
delivers his interpretation, which is that every seed contains in
minute portions every substance, and that the particular
character of any particular seed is given by the predominance
within it of some single substance. In other words, seeds are
basic ingredients of the cosmogonic process. All the materials of
the finished world existed in the cosmic matrix as seeds. My
point is that Vlastos tells us, about SPE/RMATA PA/NTWN XRHMA/TWN
in B4, 'Wherever the expression "all things" occurs in the
fragments, it means just what it says; it would be forcing the
texts to take it in any other way' (p. 306). Of course, this
dogmatic certainty is not the only argument Vlastos produces in
support of his theory, but it sets the tone. And as a matter of
fact, it is not the only possible reading of the expression in
B4; see especially M. Schofield, <i>An Essay on Anaxagoras</i>
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 123-32.

     Perhaps all I'm saying here is that Vlastos's aims
occasionally clash with his style of presentation. He would not
want us to be carried along, or carried away, by the force of his
own conviction and clarity. More realistically, he is asking us
to examine and re-examine evidence. That was his special forte.
He was a brilliant exegete of ancient philosophical texts, but
also a modest man--modest enough to listen to others' views and
to modify his own.

     I conclude this topic with a couple of worries--by which I
mean that I cannot here fully articulate the reasons for these
worries. The first worry has to do with Zeno. Reading Vlastos's
essays on Zeno one is almost overwhelmed by the intelligence that
has gone into the reconstructions of particular fragments. All
the same, I worry that Vlastos's Zeno sometimes seems 100 years
ahead of his time. In 'A Note on Zeno's Arrow', for instance,
Vlastos has Zeno come up with a sense of <i>topos</i> as 'a space
fitting so tightly the thing's own dimensions as to leave it no
room to move' (p. 207).

     Now, it seems to me that this is more or less identical with
the definition of <i>topos</i> as 'the limit of the containing
body' that Aristotle had to work pretty hard to achieve
(<i>Physics</i> 212a6). If so, it is implausible to suggest that
Zeno was just taking it for granted 100 or so years earlier.
Vlastos might perhaps reply that what he was attributing to Zeno
was in fact not Aristotle's finished definition of <i>topos</i>,
but one of Aristotle's six axioms about <i>topos</i>
(210b32-211a7), namely that <i>topos</i> is 'the immediate
container of that of which it is the <i>topos</i>'
(210b34-211a1). In this case it might be plausible to suggest
that Zeno is precisely Aristotle's source for this axiom. But the
notion of an 'immediate container' is purposely vague, and
certainly doesn't satisfy the 'fitting so tightly ...' aspect of
what Vlastos attributes to Zeno. An 'immediate container' could
be at a little distance from the object it contains, thus leaving
the arrow room to move.

     If it is implausible to suggest that Zeno anticipated
Aristotle's defintion of <i>topos</i>, perhaps all we need, to
generate the paradox, is the looser expression paraphrased by
Aristotle as E)/STI A)EI\ TO\ FERO/MENON E)N TW=| NU=N KATA\ TO\
I)/SON (<i>Physics</i> 239b6), which is in itself not to say much
more than 'at any given moment a thing is where it is'. For a
less sophisticated Zeno than Vlastos's, with a less sophisticated
audience, that may have been enough to get the paradox (if not
the arrow!) moving. It also reinstates time as an important
element in the paradox, rather than making place alone the
critical factor, as Vlastos does (on this issue see J. Lear, 'A
Note on Zeno's Arrow', <i>Phronesis</i> 26 (1981), pp. 91-104).

     To argue fully that Zeno is a less elaborate thinker (though
no less acute) than we find in the pages of Vlastos could be the
subject of a book, and is certainly unsuited to a review. I here
only mention the worry, and point out, <i>ad hominem</i>, that
elsewhere (pp. 233-7) Vlastos allows Zeno to make a relatively
simple error. In B1 Vlastos rightly has Zeno assume that 'The sum
of every infinite set whose every member has finite size must be
infinitely large.' We can take a passage from Aristotle
(<i>Physics</i> 206b7-9) to show what is wrong with this: 'If, in
a finite magnitude, you take a determinate amount and add to it
not by taking the same fraction of the whole, but the same
proportion of what remains, you will never traverse the finite
magnitude.' Vlastos concludes, with obvious regret, 'Our clever
Zeno has walked into a booby trap.' If even Vlastos's Zeno is
capable of relatively simple errors, it is worth remembering, I
believe, that Aristotle, our best witness to Zeno, finds him
arguing (in A21, at least) FORTIKW=S.

     So I worry about the level of sophistication in Vlastos's
Zeno. This dovetails with my second worry, which is far more
general. It has to do with the degree to which all the
Presocratics, or all aspects of any single Presocratic, may be
susceptible to the hard analytic tools that Vlastos brings to
bear on them. Personally, where Heraclitus is concerned, for
instance, I find myself more sympathetic to the approach C.H.
Kahn adopts (in <i>The Art and Thought of Heraclitus</i>
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979)), which allows for
linguistic density and meaningful ambiguity in the fragments as
well as hard and interesting philosophy, and seems to have come
up with productive results. Vlastos, however, is always trying to
pin Heraclitus down. It is worth remembering how Mourelatos
masterfully unpacks even the apparently super-logical Parmenides
(at B16, at any rate) into three distinct legitimate translations
(A.P.D. Mourelatos, <i>The Route of Parmenides</i> (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 253-9). As I have argued
elsewhere (<i>Before Eureka</i> (The Bristol Press, 1989)), some
Presocratic thought is poetic and visionary rather than a
forerunner of analytical philosophy. Still, the results obtained
by the analytical approach to ancient philosophy are often
rewarding, and no one is better at extracting these rewards than
Vlastos.

     I have to end this review with two pedantic complaints.
First, an editorial decision has been taken to transliterate 'the
shorter Greek passages' (p. xi). But this is often completely
pointless. Who on earth is the following sentence supposed to
help (it is one of a great many examples in the book)? '[Kirk]
argues this at length in his commentary on B30, KO/SMON TO/NDE,
TO\N AU)TO\N A(PA/NTWN, O)/TE TIS QEW=N OU)/TE A)NQRW/PWN
E)POI/HSEN etc., to condemn <i>ton auton hapanton</i> as a gloss'
(pp. 132-3). Obviously it takes just as much knowledge of Greek
to understand the transliteration, since it refers to the Greek
just quoted, as it does to read the Greek itself.

     My second complaint is that there are too many misprints in
the book--far more than one would expect from a university press.
True, sometimes these have merely been inherited from the
original source of the reprinted essay; but that is no excuse,
and even argues for a degree of carelessness at some stage in the
editorial process. I cannot claim to have caught all such errors
(I certainly haven't checked bibliographic references or the
indexes), and many of them are pretty trivial; but mistakes in
this quantity, however trivial, are irritating, and so I feel
moved to list them in the hope that such a list may be of some
help to readers of the first edition, and to Princeton University
Press in preparing the soft-cover edition which will undoubtedly
follow in due course.[[1]]

NOTES

[[1]]  The full list, sent to the Press, includes 23, n.84.2
'politics' not 'polities'; 24, n.89.11 'no' not 'so'; 97, n.37.1
'he' not 'be'; 134, n.19.16 'this' not 'thus'; 135, n.24.2 'this'
not 'thus'; 197, n.30.5 'flagrantly' not 'fragmently';  262.29
'1953' not '1933'; 271, n.22.2 insert 'that' between 'says' and
'at'; 274.24 insert 'of' between 'proof' and 'not-P'; 335.13
insert 'thought' vel sim. before 'is still'; 353, n.14.6
'onomatos' not 'nomatos'.