Form and Event

Principles for an Interpretation of the Greek World

Carlo Diano, Timothy C. Campbell, Lia Turtas, Timothy C. Campbell, Lia Turtas

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780823287925
  9780823287932
• eBook ISBN:
  9780823287956
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory

Carlo Diano's Form and Event has long been known in Europe as a major work not only for classical studies but even more for contemporary philosophy. Already available in Italian, French, Spanish, and Greek, it appears here in English for the first time, with a substantial Introduction by Jacques Lezra that situates the book in the genealogy of modern political philosophy.

Form and Event reads the two classical categories of its title phenomenologically across Aristotle, the Stoics, and especially Homer. By aligning Achilles with form and Odysseus with event, Diano links event to embodied and situated subjective experience that simultaneously finds its expression in a form that objectifies that experience. Form and event do not exist other than as abstractions for Diano but they do come together in an intermingling that Diano refers to as the "eventic form." On Diano's reading, eventic forms interweave subjectively situated and embodied experiences, observable in all domains of human and nonhuman life.

A stunning interpretation of Greek antiquity that continues to resonate since its publication in 1952, Form and Event anticipates the work of such French and Italian post-war thinkers as Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Roberto Esposito, and Giorgio Agamben.

FORM AND EVENT

CARLO DIANO

The primary and in large part provisional results of my research summarized here arose almost by accident. It had to do with a technical problem in the history of Greek philosophy—namely, the role the syllogism plays for the Stoics in relation to how Aristotle understands the term. How I take the two terms of form and event (and within what limits) will, I hope, become clear in the exposition that follows. The order in which problems came up is respected and begins at the end only to return to the beginning. If, as Aristotle thought, it is the case that every investigation advances along a path that begins with what is closer to us (and, alas, also with what we already know), the path I found myself following—without knowing in any way where it was leading and guided initially only by chance—might have some value as a method.

When asking what a syllogism is, we immediately think of Aristotle. The well-worn example is Peter, but if you prefer a Greek name, there is Coriscus. Coriscus is a man and, because he is a man, someday he is going to die. Where does such a necessity come from? From the essence in which Coriscus has his form. This is a form that contains opposites, and, as is the case for every form in our sublunary world, the form is not real except as the succession of individuals who over time have taken it on. Individuals come and go just as the leaves of similitude in Homer do.

But when Coriscus dies, how does he die? Aristotle does not know and cannot say because Aristotle is a man and not a god: not even a god knows. In Aristotle’s universe no one knows for a very simple reason: the time and manner of Coriscus’s death is an individual event and individual events are based in matter, and thus occur because of efficient causes. They avoid the necessity that properly belongs to form, which is the only necessity that holds true absolutely and that allows for prognosis and syllogism. Individual events allow for only one necessity, that of the fact, once an event has taken place and this because factum infectum fieri nequit [a thing done cannot be undone]. Not even the gods, as Agathon says, can “make undone things that have once been done.”¹ Yet even before the events occur, this necessity is ἐξ ὑποθέσεως [ex hypotheseos] and is expressed by “if.” Translating from Metaphysics: “This man, then, will die by violence, if he goes out; and he will do this if he gets thirsty; and he will get thirsty if something else happens; and thus we shall come to that which is now present, or to some past event.”² This does not get us very far. At a certain point, the series stops: We arrive at an “if” that “no longer depends on another if,” and of the two possibilities that comprise the alternative, ὁποτέρ’ ἔτυχεν [hopoter’ etychen], will be the one that comes to be. And so? That possibility will be the one that occurs. If you prefer to substitute a name for the verb and to speak figuratively, you might say that the possibility that occurs is the one that chance or τύχη [tyche] wants to have happen.

The Stoics fall back on the “if” of this hypothetical necessity that ultimately excludes every necessity and that is established in the pure indeterminacy of the tyche. Yet the Stoics deny that there is tyche. They pay no attention to the syllogism that derives its necessity from form. Their syllogism consists rather in two main figures, the first hypothetical, the second disjunctive. An important fact often overlooked: Terms enunciate events and not concepts. Concepts have no reality. The Stoics are pure nominalists: Only bodies have reality—that is, are real—but not bodies as such, which would mean reverting back to form and so re-availing themselves of concept, which is exactly the case for Epicurus. As the Stoics note, bodies are rather a historical reality to the degree in which they are grasped by sense as events, τὰ τυγχάνοντα [ta tynchanonta] as they say.

Thus we have the doctrine that states that only the present is real and that the predicate is always a verb in every judging, even when the predicate arrives in the form of a name. To say that Socrates is virtuous is the same as saying that Socrates practices his virtue. This is how the Stoics will argue that virtue is a body. Where else would we hope to find virtue if not in this Socrates here with us drinking his hemlock? At this point the Stoics’ most famous and widely misunderstood categories appear on the scene. First, the subject. The pure and simple “this,” which is pointed at, as the Stoics say—with a finger—means nothing other than that of being hic et nunc. Next comes the quality that holds sway over the place of the form, though for the Stoics it is always as a historical quality. The example they give is “Socrates!” The third is πὼς ἔχειν [pos echein]—that is, finding oneself in this or that particular condition, which encompasses everything that for Aristotle and Epicurus is within the sphere of the accidental. The fourth and final category contains all the others. It is only within this category that the other categories become real: the relation, or the category of reality in action, in which the here coincides with everything and the present with forever (what Chrysippus will compare to the moment in which something occurs).³ Thus, this Socrates here and now, who is conversing with Callias: that is an event! And also reality.

Therefore, we have the following: If this happens, then this other thing happens . . . or as the Stoics say, substituting numbers for the letters that Aristotle used: If this happens first, then the second happens, because the event exists in time and time is expressed by a number. If this happens . . . As was also the case for Aristotle, this “if” opens a series that at a certain point becomes lost in nothing [nulla]. The same is true for Epicurus in his dodgy doctrine of the atom. We recall how for him the atom, while falling in a straight line, unexpectedly strays off course and breaks the inevitable series of causes. Epicurus is not doing anything but using the Aristotelian theory of the accidental. Both of them will argue that if it were otherwise, everything would have to happen out of necessity. The Stoics at this point rebel. A causal series that gets lost in nothing? And why cannot everything happen because of necessity? What happens to the unity of the world (and with it God and virtue) if events do not take place because they have to? And lastly: Every judgment is either true or false. From out of these opposite and contrary judgments, the Stoics conclude that if one is true, then the other is false. Here we find the disjunctive syllogism at work. Tomorrow Dione will either die or not. One of the two propositions has to be true. At all times everywhere. If this were not the case, then neither true nor false would exist, since truth is nothing other than fact.

For the Stoics everything occurs because it has to. The tyche is nothing but a name the Stoics allow themselves to use but only in the context of the isolated event, when they do not know its cause. Yet a cause can always be found. And where does the series of causes end? In God. And what is God? God is the first of the efficient causes of action. The same is true for Aristotle, but God moves and is not moved⁴ and is completely separated from things, whose existence he ignores. This is because God is a form, the quintessential form, τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι τὸ πρῶτον [to ti en einai to proton]. As form he remains unmovable, outside time, outside space. Moreover, as Plotinius notes, form in Greek, εἶδος [eidos], also means “the thing seen.” God is, in the full and absolute sense of the word, the “thing” as “the thing seen,” in the act in which the very thing itself sees itself “understood and understanding,” as Dante writes.⁵ It is a contemplative activity, a νοῦς [nous], that takes itself as its object.

For the Stoics God does not have a form properly his own nor is he separated from things. He is in them as a body is in a body, a fluid body that can be divided infinitely, whose nature is that of fire. It is “fire gifted with art” and it pervades things and things are God’s forms. He does not contemplate but acts. He is preeminently “the one who does,” τὸ ποιοῦν [to poioun], and if as body God occupies space, his actions take place in time, while his being coincides with acting: Space and time are thus one because reality is event and therefore history—that is, the history of God’s epiphanies. Before it is only him and then gradually, “walking on his path” as Zeno puts it, he makes himself cosmos. Afterwards he reabsorbs it in himself and sets fire to it. The final conflagration.⁶ God returns periodically to do that which he has done, and the series of events returns, always the same. The eternal return. Because necessity means identity, and identity in movement cannot be given except in a circle, which both moves and does not, one and continuous, in which every point, as Heraclitus said, is beginning and end.

This God is the principle of a reality consisting of events. He himself is event, the linking of events, εἱρµός [heirmos], and inasmuch as he is [heirmos] (as the Stoics were wont to say by employing a false etymology, εἱµαρµένη [heimarmene—“the spun thread of destiny”⁷], he is fate). Yet this is no blind fate. Finding his reason for being in the cyclical, God makes every moment identical to the being that was. Yet he is also providence, πρόνοια [pronoia], and the law, νόµος [nomos], that governs him. This is λόγος [logos], discourse. Thus, God, who is as the Stoics note all these things, is more than anything else λόγος [logos]. Not a νοῦς [nous] that sees, but a reason that moves from one term to another. Each of these terms is a verb. An event.

With this in mind we can now understand Aratus’s still-to-be-explicated proem to Phaenomena. “From Zeus let us begin; him do we mortals never leave unnamed; full of Zeus are all the streets and all the market-places of men; full is the sea and the havens thereof; always we all have need of Zeus.”⁸ The streets, the squares, the sea, the ports, but not earth and water and the air we breathe, nor fire, the four elements, and the forms to which the four elements provide matter, but rather the places where people move and where they meet each other, where they arrive and depart, where they find themselves face to face with the event—the places where reality is revealed as event. Just as every proposition exists thanks to the verb and the verb is defined by the event, Zeus, as the beginning of all events, is also the subject of all of our discourses. Every verb that comes out of a mouth implies him. He, precisely, is the one who, without revealing his name, we cannot leave unnamed.

Form and the contemplation of form the God of Aristotle, and θεωρία [theoria], contemplation of forms, science. Event and the cyclical, the providential joining up of events—this is the Stoic God and reason or discourse of events [is] science, λόγος [logos]. On one hand, we have the categorical syllogism of the form that ignores events. On the other, we have the hypothetical syllogism of the event that ignores forms. And thus, what Aristotle did not know and so could not say to Coriscus, can the Stoics say it to him? They will not say it as philosophers, but rather as fortune-tellers and astrologists because divination—which had no place in Aristotle (and still less in Epicurus) who thought it useless and even harmful, regardless of whether it was true or false—plays a central role for Zeno as well as for Chrysippus.

Here I think we can make out something no one else has—namely, the historical background informing the attitude of these two philosophers. In On Fate, Cicero, while responding to Chrysippus, will write: “Well then, here is a specimen of the observations of the astrologers: ‘If (for instance) a man was born at the rising of the dogstar, he will not die at sea.’”⁹ “If” . . . In Assyrian-Babylonian works of divination, omens are always introduced by the conjunction shumma, which means “if.” Does the Stoic syllogism originate here? Zeno was Phoenician. Timon called him “a greedy old Phoenician fisherwoman.”¹⁰ Chrysippus was born in Soli in Cilicia, and his father was from Tarsus. They had read these books and they certainly had seen how fortune-telling could be employed syllogistically. Cicero’s later testimony was no mere coincidence.

Yet this is not really the point. Even if it were just a coincidence, the psychological (and thus historical) principle that explains it is actually the same for both: understanding reality as event. Stoicism descends from it and forms of Semitic religiosity largely lead back to it. Only in reality-as-event can divination be explained and nowhere more than in Mesopotamia does it take on such monumental importance.

To finish up with ontology, which was revealed by logic, here is another fact even more important than the first. In the Babylonian conception of destiny one finds not only events but forms as well. It is a god who establishes the nature of the thing together with the name. And it is a god who can always change it, because destiny is a decree that always updates itself. This form-destiny is called nam. “The Babylonian nam,” Giuseppe Furlani writes, “is a preliminary sketch of φύσις [physis] and of the Aristotelian εἶδος [eidos].”¹¹ No, we are light years away from Aristotle: The Babylonian nam is the first hint of the Stoic φύσις [physis] in which the εἶδος [eidos] is quality and not substance, and is rooted in time, and is identified with the event. It is only that their god, unlike the god of the Babylonians, does not hear prayers and cannot be swayed by offerings. Having been translated through the Greek categories of being, this god has hardened into a will that cannot be altered throughout eternity.

In his great work on the stoa, Max Pohlenz reexamined the problem that Edwyn Bevan had posed earlier¹²—namely, the features in Zeno’s and Chrysippus’s works that allow us to recognize the original mentality of their race. Pohlenz will lay out a number features. Our response has already been given: What the two philosophers contributed as the decisive characteristic of the ethnic and cultural sphere to which Zeno and Chrysippus belong was their understanding of reality as event.

They contributed their insight at a specific moment when the event had begun to dominate Greece. It was not a simple case of Greece actually ignoring that reality is an event. That idea is a part of shared human experience, part of its Mediterranean origins. Greece had faced that insight about the notion of reality as event and won it for the first time during the Homeric epoch when Greece had barricaded the insight away in the fortresses of its aristocratic warriors. For a time, Greece managed to contain it in the sixth century B.C., bending it to the law of the cities Apollo and Athena had protected, when, as it dramatically reappeared again, much like the giant Antaeus, born of the earth at the moment, the understanding of reality as event threatened to overwhelm Greece. Then Greece drove it back beyond the sea along with Xerxes’s hordes in the fifth century B.C. The Greeks celebrated the victory of the Olympian gods together with their own.

At this point the forces that had allowed the Greeks to resist were largely spent and outside circumstances had weakened their defenses: the Macedonian hegemony; the pressure exerted on the periphery by the various great states of the time, which were emerging from the dismemberment of Alexander’s empire; the instability in which Greece’s continual wars weighed down the future of public and private life; the slow but noticeable penetration by ethnic groups from the East (which was due to how much of the political and cultural boundaries of the Greek world had been extended, thus opening the way to them while also providing them with weapons). The great age of Hellas had come to an end and the age of Hellenism had begun.

All of the facts historians enumerate to describe the new era stem from the category of the event: there is individualism in which formal difference gives way to existential and numeric difference; a generic and simply quantitative universalism that is its necessary correlate; the use and abuse of the title “Savior,” given to the gods just as it is given to men; the making divine of all those who were seen as messengers of the event—the quintessential examples were to be found in princes; the vogue surrounding the cult of Asclepius, the new god of miracles; the abandoning of more Hellenic divinities for the more esoteric and soteriological ones of the East; the gradual decline of the anthropomorphic conception of the divine and its substitution of the concept of force with that of substance; syncretism, of which such a concept forms its rationale and origins; the belief in demons; the return to vulgar forms of superstition and the spread of magic; and lastly divination, which was of course based on the occult, magic, and astrology. The single most impor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction by Jacques Lezra
• Form and Event
• Illustrations
• Notes