How Philosophy Became Possible: IX. When Philosophy Becomes a Way of Living

Philosophy began by asking questions about the world.

What is it made of?

How does it change?

What remains the same?

What makes an explanation coherent?

What can be said about being, knowledge, justice and virtue?

Over time, the field of questioning expanded.

Nature became questionable.

Change became problematic.

Argument became a constraint.

Possibility acquired structure.

Human knowledge and action became objects of inquiry.

Concepts themselves became objects of inquiry.

And concepts became organised into systems of distinctions and relations.

By the time Aristotle had articulated much of this inheritance, philosophy possessed an extraordinary conceptual repertoire.

But a human being does not live by possessing a repertoire.

A human being has to live.

And this introduces a different kind of question.

What difference does philosophical understanding make to a life?

The Hellenistic philosophers inherit the conceptual ecology of classical Greek philosophy, but they encounter it from a new position.

Philosophy is no longer only something one does in order to understand reality.

It can become something one does in order to live.

The world after the polis

The historical circumstances matter.

The classical polis had been a central setting for Greek political and intellectual life. The fourth and third centuries BCE brought profound transformations following the conquests of Alexander and the emergence of the Hellenistic kingdoms.

The old civic world did not simply disappear.

But the scale and character of political life changed.

The individual increasingly found themselves situated within political and cultural worlds much larger than the traditional city-state.

This creates a different existential pressure.

What can a person control?

What cannot be controlled?

What should one desire?

What should one fear?

What constitutes a good life when the surrounding world is unstable?

These are not questions that replace metaphysics, ethics or epistemology.

They bring them together.

The question becomes:

How should a finite human being inhabit the world as we understand it?

Philosophy becomes practice

The Hellenistic schools give very different answers.

The Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics disagree profoundly with one another.

But they share something important.

Philosophy is not merely a collection of propositions.

It is a practice.

The point of philosophical understanding is partly what it enables a person to become.

This changes the meaning of philosophical knowledge.

Knowing that the world has a certain structure is one thing.

Learning how to live in accordance with that understanding is another.

The distinction is particularly clear in Stoicism.

The Stoics develop a conception of a rationally ordered cosmos and ask what it means for a human being to live appropriately within it.

The famous Stoic distinction between what is and is not within our control becomes philosophically significant because it connects cosmology, psychology and ethics.

If the world is not under my control, then my relationship to the world becomes the crucial question.

I cannot simply command events to conform to my wishes.

But I can examine my judgements about those events.

The philosophical problem therefore shifts from:

How can I make the world conform to me?

to:

How can I alter my relation to what happens?

Philosophy has become a practice of reorientation.

Epicurus and the problem of desire

Epicureanism takes a very different route.

Epicurus also develops a natural philosophy, including an atomistic account of the world. But the purpose of understanding nature is closely connected to freeing human beings from unnecessary fear.

The gods need not be feared.

Death need not be feared.

Many desires need not be pursued.

A good life can be found in a carefully limited range of pleasures, friendship and freedom from disturbance.

Here again, cosmology and ethics are not separate enterprises.

Understanding the world changes what one should fear.

Understanding the nature of desire changes what one should pursue.

Understanding mortality changes the significance of the present.

Philosophical explanation becomes therapeutic.

The point is not merely to possess a correct picture of reality.

It is to inhabit reality differently because of that picture.

Scepticism and the suspension of certainty

The Sceptics take yet another path.

If our attempts to establish certainty repeatedly generate competing arguments, perhaps the appropriate response is not to construct another dogmatic system but to suspend judgement where certainty cannot be achieved.

Again, philosophy becomes a way of living.

The suspension of judgement is not merely a theoretical conclusion.

It can become a practical discipline.

Instead of being continually disturbed by the demand to settle questions that cannot be settled, one can learn to live without premature certainty.

This is a striking development because it transforms an epistemological problem into an ethical possibility.

Uncertainty itself becomes something that can be inhabited.

The earlier philosophical tradition had often treated uncertainty as a defect to be overcome.

The Sceptical tradition asks whether our relationship to uncertainty might itself be transformed.

Philosophy changes the question

Something important has therefore happened.

Earlier philosophers often asked:

What is reality?

The Hellenistic philosophers increasingly ask:

Given the kind of reality we inhabit, how should we live?

The difference is not as large as it first appears.

The second question depends upon the first.

Stoic ethics depends upon a conception of nature and reason.

Epicurean ethics depends upon an account of bodies, atoms and sensation.

Scepticism depends upon an account of what human beings can and cannot establish.

But the direction of inquiry has changed.

Philosophical understanding now has to pass through the life of the person who understands.

The questioner is no longer merely an observer of reality.

The questioner is someone who must inhabit the consequences of an answer.

From knowledge to transformation

This may be the most important conceptual development of the Hellenistic period.

A philosophical proposition can now be evaluated partly by asking what kind of life follows from taking it seriously.

Suppose everything outside my control is treated as a source of distress.

A Stoic analysis of control changes the practical possibilities.

Suppose fear of death dominates my life.

An Epicurean analysis of mortality changes those possibilities.

Suppose the demand for certainty generates endless anxiety.

A Sceptical discipline of withholding assent changes the possibilities again.

In each case, philosophy alters the space of possible action.

The concept does not remain in the realm of theory.

It enters practice.

And once it does, the distinction between understanding and living becomes less secure.

The return of possibility

This also brings us back to a theme that has appeared repeatedly throughout this series.

Possibility.

The early natural philosophers asked what kinds of worlds were possible.

The pluralists and atomists explored the possible configurations of nature.

Plato asked how stable intelligibility could be possible amid changing instances.

Aristotle distinguished potentiality from actuality and made possibility part of the structure of things.

The Hellenistic philosophers now turn possibility toward the human agent.

What kind of person can I become?

What responses are available to me?

What desires are worth cultivating?

What fears can be relinquished?

What remains possible when circumstances cannot be changed?

The possible is no longer merely a feature of nature.

It becomes a feature of a life.

Freedom without omnipotence

This is particularly clear in Stoicism.

Freedom does not mean being able to make anything happen.

That would make freedom depend upon control over the world.

Instead, freedom can concern one's relation to what happens.

This is a subtle but powerful redefinition.

A human being remains finite.

Events exceed their wishes.

Other people act independently.

Bodies become ill.

Fortune changes.

Death arrives.

Yet within these constraints there remain possibilities of judgement, response and conduct.

Freedom is therefore not the absence of constraint.

It is a way of inhabiting constraint.

That idea has a remarkably long future.

Friendship, community and the good life

The Hellenistic schools also prevent us from reducing philosophy to private self-management.

Epicureanism places extraordinary importance on friendship.

Stoicism develops an expansive conception of human community and shared rational nature.

The philosophical life therefore remains social.

The question is not merely:

How can I become undisturbed?

It can also be:

What kind of relation should I have to other human beings?

This continues an older Greek concern with justice, virtue and political life, but the conceptual setting has changed.

The good life is increasingly understood as a way of organising one's relations—to oneself, to other people, to nature and to the future.

Philosophy becomes practical ecology.

The body enters the argument

There is another important consequence.

If philosophy is a way of living, the body cannot simply be ignored.

The Hellenistic schools are concerned with pleasure, pain, fear, desire, appetite, sensation, health and mortality.

These are not merely distractions from philosophical thought.

They are conditions of human existence.

A philosophy that aims to transform a life must therefore address the creature who actually lives that life.

The abstract philosophical subject begins to disappear.

In its place is a finite embodied organism with desires, vulnerabilities, habits and relationships.

The question is no longer simply what a rational being can know.

It is what a human being can become.

Philosophy becomes a technology of attention

Seen from this perspective, the Hellenistic schools develop something like disciplines of attention.

What should I attend to?

What should I regard as significant?

Which impressions should I trust?

Which desires should I cultivate?

Which fears should I refuse?

Which events should I accept?

These are not merely psychological questions.

They concern the organisation of a person's conceptual and practical world.

To change what counts as important is to change the world one inhabits.

The external events may remain the same.

But the relations among those events, one's judgements and one's responses can change.

Philosophy therefore becomes capable of altering experience without necessarily altering circumstances.

The world does not have to change for one's relation to the world to change.

The question comes full circle

We can now see something about the whole trajectory.

The series began with the world becoming questionable.

That first movement opened a space in which inherited accounts could be examined.

The questioning of nature produced problems of change, permanence and explanation.

Those problems created new conceptual distinctions.

Argument became a constraint.

Possibility acquired structure.

Human beings entered the field of inquiry.

Concepts themselves became objects of investigation.

Those concepts became organised into increasingly systematic relations.

And now those systems return to the human being who lives within the world they describe.

The trajectory is therefore not a simple movement away from myth toward rationality.

Nor is it a march toward modern science.

It is something stranger.

The field of questioning keeps expanding until the questioner can no longer remain outside it.

The world is questioned.

Then the concepts used to question the world are questioned.

Then the life of the questioner becomes something that can be transformed by the questioning.

Philosophy has become reflexive in an even deeper sense.

It does not merely think about thought.

It can become a practice through which the thinker changes their relation to what is thought.

What had to become possible?

Looking back, we can now ask the question with which this series began in a different way.

What had to become possible for philosophy to become possible?

Not one thing.

There was no single invention called “reason” waiting to be discovered.

There was an accumulation of possibilities.

The world could become an object of inquiry.

Change could become a problem.

Relations could become intelligible.

Arguments could constrain explanations.

Nature could be understood as a structured field of possibilities.

Human practices could become objects of reflection.

Concepts could become objects of inquiry.

Differences could be organised into systems.

And finally, philosophical understanding could become something enacted in a life.

At each stage, earlier possibilities remained.

Myth did not disappear.

Religion did not disappear.

Poetry did not disappear.

Political life did not disappear.

Ordinary experience did not disappear.

Philosophy emerged within this larger ecology, transforming some of its possibilities without simply replacing everything that came before.

That may be the most important lesson of the journey.

Philosophy did not become possible because human beings suddenly became rational.

It became possible because new relations among ways of questioning, explaining, arguing, distinguishing and living gradually became available.

And once those relations existed, they changed what could be asked next.

What philosophy became possible for

Perhaps, then, the title of this series has a final ambiguity.

We have asked how philosophy became possible.

But philosophy also made other things possible.

It made possible new ways of questioning inherited concepts.

New ways of distinguishing kinds of explanation.

New ways of examining arguments.

New ways of understanding nature.

New ways of thinking about knowledge, justice, being and possibility.

And, eventually, new ways of asking what it means to live.

The philosophical tradition did not simply accumulate answers.

It accumulated possibilities for asking different questions.

That may be why its emergence remains so consequential.

The Greeks did not invent questioning.

They inherited traditions of questioning that were already rich.

What changed was the ecology in which questions could interact.

One question could destabilise another.

A distinction could create a new problem.

An argument could constrain an explanation.

A concept could become the object of inquiry.

A system could generate new possibilities.

And a philosophical understanding could return to transform the life of the person who held it.

The question had travelled a long way.

It began by turning toward the world.

It turned toward change.

Toward being.

Toward nature.

Toward language.

Toward the human.

Toward concepts.

Toward relations among concepts.

And finally, toward the life of the questioner.

Philosophy became possible when the world could be questioned.

It became a way of living when the questioner discovered that they could be changed by the question.

How Philosophy Became Possible: VIII. When Difference Becomes System

By the time Aristotle begins his philosophical work, Greek philosophy has accumulated an extraordinary number of questions.

What is being?

What is change?

What persists through change?

What is knowledge?

What is the relation between appearance and reality?

What is justice?

What is a concept?

What is the relation between a concept and the things to which it applies?

These questions did not arise independently.

They have begun to form an ecology.

Each distinction creates pressures elsewhere. To ask about being raises questions about change. To ask about change raises questions about what persists. To distinguish knowledge from opinion raises questions about what makes knowledge possible. To distinguish concepts from their instances raises questions about their relation.

Plato had made this increasingly visible.

But Plato's conceptual world also generated a problem.

How are all these distinctions to be related?

Aristotle's great contribution is not simply that he provides answers to particular philosophical questions.

It is that he increasingly treats differences themselves as things that must be organised.

Philosophy begins to acquire something like a system.

Difference is not separation

The word system can be misleading.

Aristotle did not construct a closed machine of propositions from which everything else could simply be deduced. His works are diverse, often exploratory, and sometimes difficult to reconcile with one another. They contain lectures, investigations, classifications, arguments and revisitations of earlier problems.

But across this work there is a striking new concern.

Things differ.

And those differences matter.

A living organism is not a stone.

A stone is not a mathematical object.

A change of place is not the same as coming-to-be.

A potential is not an actuality.

A cause is not the same thing as an effect.

An individual thing is not the same as its species.

A substance is not simply a quality.

These distinctions are not merely labels.

They organise possibilities of explanation.

To say that two things are different is to open a question about how they differ and what follows from that difference.

Difference becomes structurally significant.

The Categories

Aristotle's Categories offers one of the clearest examples.

Things can be spoken of in different ways: substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action and affection, among others.

The precise status of these categories is notoriously difficult to determine. Are they kinds of beings, kinds of predication, kinds of concepts, or some combination?

The difficulty is itself instructive.

Aristotle is not merely compiling a dictionary.

He is investigating the different ways in which things can be distinguished and spoken about.

A quality is not a quantity.

A relation is not a place.

A substance is not an action.

And yet these differences do not produce an unrelated collection.

They coexist within a world of things.

A particular human being may be a substance, have a certain quality, possess a certain quantity, stand in relations to others, occupy a place, act and undergo actions.

The categories therefore begin to provide a map of different dimensions of intelligibility.

Difference does not break the world apart.

It helps articulate it.

The problem of change returns

Yet Aristotle cannot simply organise differences without returning to one of the oldest problems in Greek philosophy.

Change.

Parmenides had made coming-to-be and passing-away conceptually difficult.

Heraclitus had insisted upon the ubiquity of transformation.

The pluralists and atomists had tried to explain change through combinations and rearrangements.

Plato had distinguished changing sensible things from more stable intelligible realities.

Aristotle inherits all of these pressures.

His response is neither to deny change nor to place intelligibility entirely outside it.

Instead, he introduces a distinction that becomes central to his philosophy:

potentiality and actuality.

Something can be what it is now while also having possibilities that it has not yet actualised.

A seed is not a tree.

But it is not simply unrelated to being a tree.

A builder who is not currently building may nevertheless possess the capacity to build.

A piece of bronze can potentially become a statue.

Change can therefore be understood neither as emergence from nothing nor as the transformation of one wholly unrelated thing into another.

It can be understood as a transition involving what something can be and what it is.

This gives possibility a place within an account of being.

Possibility becomes differentiated

This is a particularly important development in the trajectory of the series.

The atomists had already opened a space of possibility: different arrangements of atoms could produce different things.

Aristotle makes the distinction more internal.

Possibility is not merely a set of configurations that happen to be available.

A thing can possess a capacity or potentiality for a particular kind of change.

Not everything can become everything.

An acorn does not have the potential to become a horse.

A stone does not possess the same capacities as a living organism.

The possible is therefore constrained by what something is.

This creates a reciprocal relation between actuality and possibility.

What something can become depends upon what it is; but what it is can also be understood partly through the capacities and activities that belong to it.

Possibility is no longer merely an abstract space surrounding reality.

It becomes part of the structure of things.

Form and matter

The same pressure appears in Aristotle's distinction between form and matter.

A bronze statue consists of bronze, but it is not simply a lump of bronze.

The material provides one dimension of its reality; the form provides another.

Yet form and matter are not simply two independent objects glued together.

The statue is a bronze statue.

Its material and its organisation belong to the same thing.

This allows Aristotle to approach a problem that had haunted Greek philosophy.

How can something remain sufficiently the same to be identifiable while undergoing change?

The answer cannot simply be that nothing really changes.

Nor can it be that change produces something wholly unrelated.

There must be some intelligible continuity through transformation.

Form and matter provide one way of articulating that continuity.

The distinction itself becomes relational.

Four ways of asking why

Aristotle's theory of the four causes extends this movement.

To ask why something is the case can involve different questions.

What is it made of?

What brought it about?

What kind of thing is it?

What is it for?

These are not simply four rival explanations.

They are different dimensions of explanation.

A bronze statue can be explained through its material, the activity that produced it, the form that makes it the kind of thing it is, and the end toward which the activity is directed.

The significance lies partly in the refusal to collapse explanation into a single type.

The world is not intelligible through one master relation.

Different questions disclose different relations.

Difference has become explanatory.

From categories to relations

This is where Aristotle's thought begins to look increasingly systemic.

A distinction is useful only in relation to other distinctions.

Substance relates to qualities.

Form relates to matter.

Potentiality relates to actuality.

Causes relate to one another.

Parts relate to wholes.

Species relate to genera.

Knowledge relates to its objects.

Activities relate to capacities.

The philosophical task increasingly becomes one of understanding patterns of difference and relation.

This is very different from merely possessing a larger vocabulary.

A vocabulary gives us more names.

A system gives us constraints on how the names can relate.

Once a distinction has been established, it changes the possibilities available to subsequent distinctions.

If potentiality is distinguished from actuality, change can be described differently.

If form is distinguished from matter, persistence through change can be described differently.

If causes are differentiated, explanation can be differentiated.

If categories are distinguished, predication can be analysed differently.

The conceptual ecology has become self-organising.

Logic enters the architecture

Aristotle's work on logic makes another aspect of this transformation explicit.

Again, we should resist imagining modern formal logic appearing fully formed in ancient Greece.

That is not what happened.

But Aristotle does something historically remarkable: he investigates patterns of inference and develops a systematic account of syllogistic reasoning.

An argument can now be examined not merely for the truth of its conclusion, but for the relation between its premises and conclusion.

The earlier Eleatic insight—that thought must answer to the consequences of what it says—has acquired a more articulated form.

This matters because a conceptual system can now be tested internally.

If we distinguish A from B, what follows?

If all members of one class have a certain property, and something belongs to that class, what follows?

If a proposition has a particular logical structure, what conclusions can legitimately be drawn from it?

The relations between propositions become objects of investigation.

Difference has entered the architecture of argument itself.

Nature becomes intelligible without becoming static

Aristotle's Physics brings these strands together.

Nature is not a collection of inert objects.

It is a domain of things that move, change, develop and act.

But change is not chaos.

A natural thing has capacities.

It undergoes transformations.

It has a form.

It belongs to a kind.

Its activities have characteristic patterns.

Its development can therefore be understood without reducing becoming to mere rearrangement.

This is one of the places where Aristotle departs significantly from the atomists.

For the atomists, explanation tends toward configurations of basic constituents.

For Aristotle, the organisation of a thing cannot simply be treated as an accidental arrangement.

The difference between a living body and a heap of its materials matters.

The organisation is part of what the thing is.

Once again, relation and structure become central.

Life changes the question

Aristotle's biological investigations make this especially clear.

A living organism is not simply matter that happens to be moving.

Its parts exist in relations to the activities of the whole.

The heart, lungs, limbs and other organs have functions within an organised living system.

This does not mean that Aristotle possesses modern biology.

He does not.

But he is exploring a conceptual possibility that matters enormously:

that the properties of something can depend upon the organisation of its relations.

A hand separated from a living body remains recognisably hand-shaped, but its function is no longer fully intelligible in isolation.

The organism cannot simply be reconstructed by listing its parts.

The whole changes the significance of the parts.

This is another way in which difference becomes system.

The system is not closed

Yet Aristotle's achievement should not be mistaken for the completion of Greek philosophy.

Indeed, his system generates new questions.

If everything has a cause, what explains the causes?

If things have characteristic ends, how are those ends related to natural processes?

If potentiality is real but not actual, what kind of being belongs to possibility?

If substance is primary, how are relations to be understood?

If knowledge concerns universals but experience concerns particulars, how do the two connect?

If different kinds of explanation are legitimate, how are they to be integrated?

A system does not eliminate questions.

It produces new ones.

This is perhaps one of the most important features of conceptual development.

When distinctions become organised, the relations among them become a new source of possibility and constraint.

The conceptual ecology becomes richer, but also more demanding.

What has changed?

We can now look back across the series and see something that would have been difficult to see at the beginning.

The Milesians made the world questionable.

Heraclitus and Parmenides made change and being problematic.

The Pythagoreans explored stable relations beneath changing instances.

The Eleatics made argument a source of constraint.

The pluralists and atomists opened a structured space of natural possibilities.

The Sophists and Socrates turned inquiry toward human knowledge, language and action.

Plato made concepts themselves objects of inquiry.

Aristotle asks what happens when these distinctions must coexist within an articulated structure.

The result is not simply more philosophy.

It is a different kind of philosophical possibility.

Philosophy can now investigate not only individual concepts, but the relations among concepts.

Difference is no longer merely something to notice.

It becomes something to organise.

And organisation creates structure.

The next possibility

Yet Aristotle's system still leaves one question hanging.

What is philosophy for?

Not merely what does philosophy investigate?

Not merely how should concepts be organised?

But what does it mean for a human being to live within a world that has become philosophically intelligible?

The question matters because philosophy has been changing the human position all along.

The human being began as the questioner of nature.

Then the questioner became an object of inquiry.

Then the concepts used by the questioner became objects of inquiry.

Then those concepts became organised into increasingly elaborate systems.

But a human being does not live inside a conceptual system as though it were a diagram.

A human being must act.

Choose.

Suffer.

Desire.

Hope.

Fear.

Cooperate.

Compete.

And die.

The Hellenistic philosophers inherit the conceptual resources of classical Greece, but they confront a different question.

What does philosophy become when the problem is no longer only to understand the world, but to find a way of living within it?

That is where the question turns once more.

When philosophy becomes a way of living.

How Philosophy Became Possible: VII. When Concepts Become Objects of Inquiry

The Greeks had learned to question the world.

They had questioned change, permanence, number, motion, multiplicity and the structure of nature. They had learned that explanations could be tested by argument, that apparently obvious features of experience could conceal conceptual difficulties, and that competing accounts of reality could occupy the same intellectual field.

Then the question turned toward the human.

What is justice?

What is virtue?

What is knowledge?

What is courage?

What is beauty?

At first, these might seem simply to be questions about human affairs.

But something more radical is happening.

The question is no longer only about whether a particular person is just, or whether a particular action is courageous, or whether someone possesses knowledge.

It is about what justice, courage or knowledge themselves are.

A concept that had previously functioned as a resource for thinking becomes something that can itself be thought about.

This is one of the great turns in Greek philosophy.

And Plato stands at its centre.

From examples to what they have in common

Consider the Socratic question: What is justice?

Someone might answer by giving an example.

This action is just.

Or perhaps this law is just.

Or this person is just.

But an example does not yet explain what makes the example an instance of justice.

The same difficulty appears with courage.

A soldier may be courageous.

A citizen may be courageous.

Someone may endure pain courageously.

But what makes all these different cases instances of the same thing?

The question therefore moves.

It is no longer:

Which things are just?

It becomes:

What is it about justice that allows different things to count as just?

This is a deceptively large change.

The concept is no longer merely being used.

It has become an object of inquiry.

The problem of the many

The earlier history of the series now becomes relevant.

The philosophers of nature had encountered a problem of unity and multiplicity.

How can many changing things belong to an ordered world?

The Pythagoreans had explored the possibility that stable relations could underlie changing instances.

The Eleatics had forced thought to confront the conditions under which multiplicity and change could be coherently described.

The pluralists and atomists had responded by constructing accounts in which persistent elements could enter into different configurations.

Now a related problem appears in a different domain.

There are many just actions.

Many beautiful things.

Many courageous people.

Many instances of knowledge.

Yet we use the same concept to talk about them.

What accounts for this unity?

The question is not merely linguistic.

If the concept of justice applies to many different actions, what makes those actions recognisably instances of justice?

If beauty is found in many different things, what makes them beautiful?

If knowledge appears in many different forms, what makes them all knowledge?

The problem of unity and multiplicity has moved from nature into conceptual thought.

The Forms

This is where Plato's Forms enter the philosophical landscape.

It is tempting to present the Forms as a simple doctrine: there is an eternal world of perfect objects somewhere beyond the changing physical world.

But that picture can obscure what the philosophical problem is doing.

The deeper issue is the possibility of stable intelligibility amid changing instances.

The things we encounter change.

They come into being and pass away.

They differ from one another.

Our opinions about them can also change.

And yet we can apparently recognise something as just, beautiful or equal across different circumstances.

Plato's Forms provide a way of thinking about this stability.

The Form of Justice is not simply one more just action among other just actions. The Form of Beauty is not simply another beautiful object. The Form provides, in some sense, what allows the many instances to be understood together.

The language of Forms therefore gives philosophical expression to a possibility that has been developing for some time:

that intelligibility need not have the same structure as the things that instantiate it.

This is a remarkable conceptual move.

The changing world does not have to contain a single physical object called Justice in order for justice to be something that can be understood.

The relation between concept and instance can itself become a philosophical problem.

But what is a Form?

Plato's dialogues do not make this question easy.

Indeed, one of their remarkable features is how often Plato allows proposed answers to become unstable.

The Meno asks what virtue is.

The Euthyphro asks about piety.

The Lysis asks about friendship.

The Republic investigates justice.

The Theaetetus investigates knowledge.

The Symposium investigates love and beauty.

Again and again, the dialogue does not simply present a definition and move on.

The concept resists.

A proposed definition works in some cases but not others.

A distinction produces an unexpected consequence.

An answer turns out to depend upon an assumption that has not itself been examined.

The philosophical object is therefore not merely a thing waiting to be described.

It has to be approached through a network of distinctions and relations.

This is important because it changes the role of philosophical dialogue.

The dialogue becomes a space in which concepts can be made to reveal their internal pressures.

The concept acquires a history

Something else happens here.

A concept can now be separated, at least analytically, from the particular situations in which it is ordinarily used.

People use the word justice in courts, politics and ordinary conversation.

But philosophy can ask what justice means across those different uses.

People distinguish knowledge from opinion in everyday life.

Philosophy can ask whether knowledge really can be distinguished from opinion, and if so, how.

People call things beautiful.

Philosophy can ask whether beauty is simply a property of beautiful things, a response in the observer, a relation, or something else entirely.

The concept acquires a kind of independence.

It can be lifted out of the immediate context in which it normally operates and subjected to examination.

This is not abstraction in the sense of simply removing detail.

It is a new relation between use and reflection.

The concept that helps us navigate the world can itself become something we navigate.

The danger of separating the concept from the world

Yet Plato's move creates a problem of its own.

If the Forms provide stable intelligibility, what is their relation to the changing things we encounter?

How does the Form of Justice relate to particular just actions?

How does Beauty relate to beautiful things?

How does knowledge relate to particular acts of knowing?

The very distinction that makes stable intelligibility possible threatens to separate intelligibility from experience.

Plato himself seems aware of this pressure.

The dialogues repeatedly ask how the intelligible and the sensible are related.

The later dialogues become especially concerned with problems generated by the theory of Forms: participation, sameness and difference, being and non-being, relation and predication.

The concept has become an object of inquiry, but that creates a new question.

What kind of relation can hold between a concept and the things to which it applies?

This is not a minor technical difficulty.

It is the beginning of a philosophical problem that will persist for centuries.

The philosopher and the concept

The figure of the philosopher also changes.

The philosopher is no longer simply someone who possesses knowledge about the world.

The philosopher becomes someone who can examine the structures through which knowledge is possible.

This helps explain the significance of Plato's recurring distinction between knowledge and opinion.

Opinion can be correct by accident.

Knowledge requires something more stable.

But what that “something more” consists in becomes itself a philosophical question.

The philosopher therefore occupies an unusual position.

The philosopher does not simply stand outside ordinary understanding and replace it with a superior stock of answers.

Instead, philosophy examines the assumptions embedded in ordinary understanding.

It asks what we thought we knew before we began asking whether we knew it.

The philosophical activity becomes reflexive.

Knowledge can be questioned.

The concept of knowledge can be questioned.

And the criteria by which the questioning is conducted can themselves become problematic.

The ecology of inquiry is becoming increasingly self-aware.

When being becomes a concept

The consequences extend beyond ethical and epistemological concepts.

Plato's dialogues increasingly bring the most fundamental philosophical terms into view.

What does it mean for something to be?

What does it mean for something to be the same?

What does it mean for things to be different?

Can something that is not be spoken of?

Can difference itself have being?

These questions are especially visible in the Sophist.

Here the old Eleatic problem has been transformed.

Parmenides had made non-being extraordinarily difficult to think.

Plato asks whether non-being might instead be understood as difference.

To say that one thing is not another need not mean that it is nothing.

It can mean that it is different from it.

This is a profound conceptual development.

The problem of being and non-being becomes a problem of relations among concepts.

Being, difference, sameness, identity and negation can themselves become objects of philosophical investigation.

The conceptual field is no longer merely a vocabulary for describing reality.

It has become a domain in which philosophical problems can arise.

A new kind of possibility

At this point, something new has become possible.

A philosophical question need no longer require a visible object.

We can ask:

What is justice?

What is beauty?

What is knowledge?

What is being?

What is difference?

The objects of inquiry can be conceptual structures.

This does not mean that philosophy has escaped the world.

Quite the opposite.

It means that philosophy can now investigate the distinctions through which the world becomes intelligible to us.

The earlier philosophers had discovered that the world could be questioned.

The Sophists and Socrates had helped reveal that human practices of knowing, speaking and judging could also be questioned.

Plato takes another step.

The concepts organising those practices can themselves become questionable.

And once that possibility exists, philosophy acquires an extraordinary new territory.

It can ask not only what things are, but what it means for something to count as a thing.

Not only whether an action is just, but what justice is.

Not only whether someone knows, but what knowledge is.

Not only what exists, but what being means.

The question has become capable of turning upon its own instruments.

But there is a price

There is a danger in this new freedom.

Once concepts become objects of inquiry, philosophy can become detached from the changing world that gave the concepts their significance.

The search for stable intelligibility can become a search for entities or structures that seem to stand outside change altogether.

And the more successful philosophy becomes at distinguishing concepts, the more urgent becomes the question of how those distinctions relate to the world in which things actually happen.

Plato does not finally resolve this tension.

Perhaps more importantly, he makes the tension impossible to ignore.

The problem of the relation between intelligibility and becoming will continue.

So will the problems of universals and particulars, knowledge and opinion, being and difference, form and instance.

The philosophical ecology has expanded again.

The world is questionable.

Human beings are questionable.

And now the concepts through which both are questioned are questionable too.

The next possibility

This leaves philosophy with an extraordinary inheritance.

It now possesses a growing repertoire of distinctions: being and becoming, unity and multiplicity, appearance and intelligibility, knowledge and opinion, sameness and difference, particular and universal.

But a collection of distinctions is not yet a system.

Indeed, every new distinction creates further relations.

If concepts are related to one another, what kinds of relations are possible between them?

If a thing can be understood through several different categories, how should those categories be ordered?

If something becomes what it is, how can being and change be understood together?

If something has a potential that it does not yet actualise, what kind of reality belongs to what is possible but not yet actual?

The conceptual field is becoming dense enough that another transformation is approaching.

Philosophy has learned to make concepts into objects of inquiry.

The next question is what happens when those concepts begin to form a system of differences and relations.

That is where Aristotle enters.

The question has discovered the concept.

Now the concept must discover its relations.

How Philosophy Became Possible: VI. When the Question Turns Toward the Human

So far, the question has increasingly been directed toward the world.

What is the world made of?

How can change be possible?

What remains the same through change?

What kind of order can number disclose?

What must an explanation survive in order to be coherent?

How can multiplicity and change exist without abandoning the constraints imposed by argument?

With the pluralists and atomists, nature has become something like a field of constrained possibilities. Things can combine, separate, move, interact and transform, but not arbitrarily. The possible has a structure.

Yet there is a question that has been waiting in the background.

What about the beings who are asking all these questions?

The Greeks had never ignored human beings. Poetry, law, religion, politics and tragedy had long concerned themselves with human action and human fate. What changes in the fifth century BCE is not that the human suddenly becomes interesting.

Rather, the human becomes increasingly difficult to leave out of the question.

And once that happens, something important changes.

The inquiry that had been directed toward nature begins to turn upon the conditions of human knowledge, language, action and judgement.

The question becomes reflexive.

The human as a problem

The Sophists occupy an important place in this transition.

They are often presented as the enemies of philosophy: rhetoricians who cared more about persuasion than truth, teachers who charged money for instruction, relativists who undermined certainty.

That picture is too simple.

The Sophists belonged to a world in which public speech had become extraordinarily consequential. In the democratic institutions of the Greek polis, political and legal decisions could depend upon the ability to argue, persuade and respond. Questions of justice, law, education and civic competence were no longer merely matters of inherited authority.

They had become matters for public contest.

This created a new conceptual environment.

If arguments can persuade different audiences, what makes an argument good?

If different communities have different customs, what makes something just?

If language can make the same matter appear differently, what is the relationship between language and reality?

If human beings can be educated into different ways of thinking and acting, what is knowledge?

These are not simply questions about human psychology.

They are questions about the conditions under which human judgement becomes possible.

The turn toward the human therefore does not abandon the earlier philosophical project. It extends it.

The world had become questionable.

Now the questioner becomes questionable too.

Protagoras and the measure

Protagoras gives this turn one of its most famous formulations: human beings are the measure.

Whatever precisely Protagoras meant—and the surviving evidence makes certainty difficult—the statement matters because it shifts the location of the problem.

Instead of asking only what the world is, we can ask how the world is available to a human being as something known, judged or experienced.

This does not necessarily mean that reality is simply whatever an individual happens to think.

It means that knowledge cannot be discussed without somehow accounting for the knower.

A similar pressure appears in the Sophistic concern with convention and nature.

Some things appear to belong to physis, nature; others to nomos, convention, law or custom. But once the distinction is made, an enormous conceptual space opens.

Is justice natural or conventional?

Are political institutions expressions of human nature or historical arrangements?

Are values discovered or established?

Does language correspond to things, or does it participate in constructing the world humans inhabit?

The point is not that the Sophists answered these questions consistently. They did not.

Their importance lies partly in making such questions difficult to avoid.

The human world is not simply given in the way a stone might appear to be given.

It is organised through practices, institutions, conventions, language and persuasion.

Human beings inhabit a world that they also participate in organising.

That is a very different kind of problem from the problems faced by the Milesians.

When language becomes consequential

Language had, of course, always mattered.

Homeric poetry, religious formulae, political speech and legal language were already powerful forms of social action. But the Sophistic environment makes language itself increasingly visible as an object of investigation.

This creates another conceptual shift.

Earlier philosophers had used words to ask what the world is.

Now it becomes possible to ask what happens when words are used to make claims about the world.

The distinction is subtle but profound.

An argument can fail because the world is not as the argument says.

But an argument can also fail because its concepts are confused, its terms shift meaning, or its conclusion does not follow from its premises.

The Eleatics had already pushed thought toward this second possibility.

The Sophists bring it into the human domain of language, persuasion and social practice.

The question is no longer simply:

What is true?

It can become:

What makes something count as a claim to truth?

And that question leads directly toward philosophy's increasing concern with concepts themselves.

But before Plato, there is Socrates.

Socrates and the demand for an account

Socrates is difficult to reconstruct because almost everything we know about him comes through other writers, especially Plato and Xenophon, and because the historical Socrates cannot simply be identified with Plato's philosophical character.

Nevertheless, a recognisable pattern emerges.

Socrates repeatedly asks people to explain what they mean.

What is justice?

What is courage?

What is virtue?

What is knowledge?

What is piety?

And when someone offers an answer, Socrates asks questions about it.

The importance of this practice is not merely that Socrates was inquisitive.

It is that giving an account becomes part of what it means to know something.

Someone may behave courageously without being able to say what courage is.

Someone may make persuasive arguments about justice without being able to explain what justice itself consists in.

Someone may possess a skill without understanding the concept that supposedly unifies its instances.

The gap between knowing how and knowing what begins to matter.

This gives the question a new direction.

Instead of asking only whether a particular action is just, Socrates can ask what justice would have to be for particular actions to count as just.

Instead of asking whether someone is courageous, he can ask what courage is.

The question moves from the instance toward the concept.

Ignorance becomes productive

There is another important shift here.

Socratic ignorance is not simply an admission of defeat.

It can become a method.

To discover that one does not know what justice is may be intellectually more productive than possessing an unexamined definition of justice.

Ignorance creates a space in which inquiry can occur.

This resembles something we have already seen.

The Eleatic arguments created constraints by showing that certain ways of thinking about being and change generated difficulties.

Socratic questioning creates constraints by exposing contradictions, ambiguities and unsupported assumptions in human claims.

In both cases, a question becomes productive because an apparently adequate answer no longer holds.

But there is a difference.

The earlier philosophers were largely asking what reality must be like.

Socrates asks what we must be able to say if our claims about reality—or about ourselves—are to make sense.

The questioner has entered the field.

From nature to practice

This also changes the kinds of things philosophy can investigate.

Nature remains important. But now justice, virtue, knowledge, education, friendship, rhetoric, law and political life become legitimate philosophical problems.

The human world is no longer merely the setting in which philosophy happens.

It becomes one of philosophy's objects.

And yet even that formulation is not quite adequate.

For human beings are not objects in the same way that atoms or elements are objects.

They interpret.

They deliberate.

They make distinctions.

They respond to reasons.

They alter their behaviour in response to accounts of what they ought to do.

A philosophical account of human action can therefore become part of the very world it describes.

The conceptual ecology begins to acquire a reflexive character.

A concept of justice can change how people understand justice.

A theory of education can change educational practice.

An account of political legitimacy can become part of political argument.

An argument about virtue can alter the standards by which virtue is judged.

The question does not merely describe its object.

It can participate in changing the conditions under which the object exists as a social reality.

That possibility will become increasingly important.

The discovery of disagreement

There is another consequence.

Once human practices become objects of inquiry, disagreement becomes harder to dismiss as simple error.

Different cities have different laws.

Different cultures have different customs.

Different speakers can give competing accounts of justice.

Different teachers can claim to possess different kinds of knowledge.

The conceptual ecology therefore becomes more plural.

But plurality creates a new pressure.

If there are competing accounts, how are they to be evaluated?

If persuasion is powerful, is whatever persuades thereby true?

If customs differ, does justice become merely conventional?

If human beings are the measure, what happens to a reality that exceeds any individual perspective?

The problem is not solved by simply choosing one side.

Indeed, the very proliferation of alternatives makes the problem more acute.

Philosophy now has to ask not only what is the case? but also what distinguishes a better account from a worse one?

The question of explanation has become a question about the standards of explanation.

A new kind of reflexivity

Something has therefore changed since the Milesians.

At first, the world became questionable.

Then change became problematic.

Then permanence, number, argument and possibility entered the field.

Now the activity of questioning itself begins to become visible.

The Greeks are no longer asking only:

What is the world?

They are increasingly asking:

What can we know?

What can we say?

What counts as a good reason?

What is justice?

What is virtue?

What makes an account adequate?

This is not yet the fully articulated philosophical investigation of concepts that we will find in Plato.

But the conditions for it are forming.

The human being has become both participant and object of inquiry.

And this produces a peculiar new possibility.

A concept can now be turned back upon the practices and assumptions through which concepts are used.

Knowledge can become an object of knowledge.

Language can become an object of reflection.

Justice can become something to be investigated rather than merely enacted or inherited.

The question can begin to question the questioner.

The next possibility

This may be one of the most consequential developments in the emergence of Greek philosophy.

The early philosophers had made the world available to inquiry.

The Sophists and Socrates help make the conditions of inquiry itself available to inquiry.

The result is not a rejection of the natural philosophers.

It is an expansion of the field.

The things that matter to human beings—justice, virtue, knowledge, language, persuasion—can now be investigated with something like the same seriousness previously applied to nature.

But this creates a further possibility.

If we can ask what justice is rather than merely whether an action is just, then perhaps the concept of justice itself can become an object of inquiry.

If we can ask what knowledge is rather than merely whether someone knows something, then perhaps knowledge can itself become a philosophical problem.

The question has turned toward the human.

And in doing so, it has begun to turn toward the concepts through which the human understands the world.

The next question is no longer simply what things are.

It is what the concepts by which we ask what things are might themselves be.

How Philosophy Became Possible: V. When Nature Becomes a Field of Possibilities

The Eleatic challenge left Greek thought in an uncomfortable position.

Experience presents us with change, multiplicity and motion.

Argument appears to show that these things are not as straightforward as they seem.

If something cannot come from what is not, how can anything come into being?

If what is cannot become what is not, how can anything perish?

If motion requires traversing infinitely divisible distances, how can anything ever arrive?

The temptation is to choose.

Perhaps change is real and our reasoning must be mistaken.

Or perhaps reasoning is right and change is an illusion.

But Greek thought takes another path.

What if the alternatives themselves are incomplete?

What if we can preserve something from the Eleatic insight while also accounting for the changing world of experience?

This is where the pluralists and atomists become important.

They do not simply solve the problem.

They transform the space in which the problem can be addressed.

Nature becomes a field of possibilities.

The problem of preserving change

Consider the Eleatic argument about coming into being.

If something genuinely comes into existence, it must come either from what already exists or from what does not exist.

Neither seems satisfactory.

But perhaps we have made an assumption that does not need to be made.

Perhaps things do not come into being from nothing at all.

Perhaps what appears to be coming into being is actually a new combination of things that already exist.

And what appears to be destruction is their separation.

This possibility allows change to occur without requiring being itself to emerge from non-being.

It is a remarkably simple conceptual move.

But it depends upon a new distinction.

The things we encounter in experience may change their relations and configurations without their underlying constituents coming into existence or passing away.

The problem of change has been shifted.

We no longer need to explain how being becomes non-being.

We need to explain how persistent constituents can enter into different relations.

Empedocles: four roots

Empedocles offers one influential version of this possibility.

The world consists of four basic “roots”: earth, air, fire and water.

These do not come into being or perish.

Instead, they combine and separate under the influence of Love and Strife.

Whatever we think of the physical theory, its conceptual significance is striking.

The world can change because relations among persistent elements change.

A tree grows.

An animal develops.

A body decays.

But perhaps none of these processes involves something emerging from absolute nothingness.

The constituents persist.

Their organisation changes.

This offers a way of reconciling permanence with becoming.

The world can be genuinely dynamic without requiring fundamental entities themselves to be generated from nothing.

Change has not been eliminated.

It has been re-described.

Anaxagoras: everything in everything

Anaxagoras proposes a different response.

He too resists the idea that things simply come into existence from nothing. But his account is radically more complicated.

Everything contains portions of everything else, in varying configurations. What we call a thing is determined by what predominates within its organisation.

Again, the precise interpretation is difficult, but the conceptual move matters.

The world is not necessarily composed of a small number of simple substances.

It may be composed of a multiplicity of constituents whose combinations produce the things we experience.

What appears to be qualitative transformation can therefore be understood through changes in organisation.

The distinction between thing and relation becomes increasingly difficult to keep apart.

What something is depends partly upon how its constituents are organised.

The world is beginning to look less like a collection of fixed objects and more like a dynamic system of configurations.

The many as a response to the one

The pluralists therefore respond to the Eleatic challenge by accepting part of its premise.

Something fundamental must persist.

But they reject the conclusion that change is therefore impossible.

Instead, they multiply what can persist.

There is not one unchanging reality from which apparent diversity must somehow be derived.

There may be many persistent realities whose combinations account for the diversity of experience.

This is an important conceptual development.

The problem is no longer:

One or many?

It becomes:

How can many persistent things generate changing configurations?

That is a much more productive question.

The alternatives have not simply been reconciled.

They have been reorganised.

The atomists go further

Leucippus and Democritus take the possibility of persistent constituents in a different direction.

Reality, they propose, consists of atoms and void.

Atoms are indivisible, ungenerated and imperishable.

Yet they can move, collide, combine and separate.

The enormous variety of the experienced world can therefore emerge from differences in arrangement and motion.

Here the conceptual strategy becomes especially clear.

If change is difficult to explain at the level of ultimate constituents, perhaps change should be understood at the level of relations among constituents.

The same atoms can participate in different configurations.

The same underlying reality can therefore generate different appearances without itself being created or destroyed.

The world becomes a space of possible arrangements.

And that phrase—possible arrangements—is crucial.

Nature is no longer conceived simply as a collection of things with fixed properties.

It becomes something like a combinatorial field.

Given these constituents, what configurations are possible?

What configurations are impossible?

What conditions make one arrangement more likely than another?

What explains the transition from one arrangement to another?

These questions anticipate a style of inquiry that will recur throughout later science.

Possibility acquires structure

This is perhaps the most important conceptual shift in the whole development so far.

At first, the Greeks asked what the world is made of.

Then they asked how change is possible.

Now they can ask:

What configurations of reality are possible, and what relations make them possible?

That is a different kind of question.

Possibility is no longer simply whatever we can imagine.

A world composed of atoms and void does not permit every imaginable state.

The properties of the constituents and the relations among them constrain what can happen.

The possible therefore has a structure.

Some transformations are available.

Others are excluded.

Some combinations are stable.

Others cannot persist.

The conceptual field has acquired something resembling an internal topology: possibilities are not equally accessible, and they are not independent of one another.

One possibility can depend upon another.

A change can open or close further possibilities.

A configuration can make another configuration easier or harder to reach.

Nature begins to look less like a fixed inventory and more like a space of constrained becoming.

Constraint does not eliminate creativity

This is an important connection with what we have already seen.

The Eleatic arguments constrained the possibilities available to Greek thought.

But the constraint did not stop inquiry.

It generated new possibilities.

The pluralists and atomists show how productive such constraint can be.

Once coming-to-be from nothing is rejected, thinkers are forced to consider combination.

Once fundamental constituents must persist, their relations become more important.

Once relations become important, organisation and configuration become explanatory.

A constraint has therefore changed what can be conceived.

This is not unlike what happened with the Pythagorean discovery that numerical relations could reveal structures not obvious in individual things.

The conceptual ecology is becoming increasingly relational.

Things are understood through what they are made of.

What they are made of is understood through how those constituents relate.

And change is understood through changes in those relations.

But a new question appears

There is, however, a difficulty.

If atoms simply move and combine, why do they move at all?

What accounts for the order of their movements?

How does a cosmos arise from initially unorganised constituents?

The atomists provide naturalistic accounts, but the problem of order remains.

An explanation of what things are made of does not necessarily explain why they form the organised structures we encounter.

This question will become increasingly important.

The Greeks are discovering that there are several different kinds of explanation.

We can ask what something is made of.

We can ask what relation produces a change.

We can ask what structure something has.

And we can ask why it has that structure rather than another.

The word “why” is beginning to divide into different questions.

This is another sign that the conceptual ecology is becoming richer.

From substances to possibilities

The pluralists and atomists therefore represent more than competing physical theories.

They expand what it means to give an account of nature.

Nature can now be understood as a system in which persistent constituents enter into changing configurations.

The actual world is one configuration among possibilities.

This does not mean that every possibility is equally real.

Nor does it mean that nature is infinitely malleable.

Quite the opposite.

Possibilities are constrained by the structures of the world itself.

But that is precisely what makes them philosophically interesting.

A possibility can be real without being actual.

It can belong to the structure of what the world permits even though it is not currently instantiated.

That distinction will become enormously important later in Greek philosophy.

The ecology has changed again

Let us pause and look at the path we have travelled.

The Milesians made the world questionable.

Heraclitus made change philosophically significant.

Parmenides and the Eleatics showed that apparently obvious processes could generate profound conceptual difficulties.

The Pythagorean tradition revealed the possibility that stable relations could underlie changing phenomena.

The Eleatic challenge then forced explanations to survive argument.

Now the pluralists and atomists respond by generating new conceptual possibilities within those constraints.

The result is not a single solution.

It is a proliferation of possible accounts.

Empedocles has four roots.

Anaxagoras has innumerable constituents.

The atomists have atoms and void.

Each attempts to preserve something important while solving problems created by the others.

The conceptual ecology is therefore becoming populated.

Ideas are no longer appearing one at a time.

They are beginning to form a field of alternatives.

And once a field of alternatives exists, another transformation becomes possible.

The question of nature is no longer the only question worth asking.

What about the people doing the asking?

What is knowledge?

Can language represent reality?

Can argument persuade independently of truth?

What makes a good life?

What is justice?

What happens when the very activity of inquiry becomes an object of inquiry?

The focus of Greek thought will begin to turn.

Not because nature has ceased to matter.

But because the human beings who question nature have discovered that they too belong to the field of questions.

The question will turn toward the human.

And with the Sophists and Socrates, philosophy will begin to ask not only what the world is, but what it means to be a person capable of asking what the world is.