Selected Philosophical Papers by Ludwig Edelstein

Leonardo Tarán

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138697270
• eBook ISBN: 9781315522197
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Philosophy

Ludwig Edelstein (1902-1965) is well-known for his work on the history of anceint medicine and ancient philosophy, and to both of these areas he made contributions of primary importance. This collection, originally published in 1987, makes avaialable Edelstein's main papers to scholars and students, and includes papers from 1931-1965.

Philosophy—
the pilot of life

LUDWIG EDELSTEIN
The Rockefeller Institute
New York City

IN THE BEGINNING, the ideal of Phi Beta Kappa was shrouded in becoming secrecy. The minutes of the first meeting of the Founding Fathers give only the initials of the motto adopted as the name of their society (21, p. 1). Now, the words to be spelled out are well known. Philosophia biou kybernetes, philosophy, the pilot of life: This has, from the very first, been the proud contention, the message of Phi Beta Kappa. The handshake, the brotherly love that one member owes the other, the friendly communion designed "as a recreation to the philosophic mind, satiate with investigating the various springs of human nature and human actions" (21, p. 9; cf. 14)-such an outward sign, such a bond of attachment, and such a community of thought and discussion are but the manifestations of the lofty creed which inspired the founders of the Society, of their conviction that philosophy must be and is, in fact, the true and only steersman of life.

Yet, if we are honest, can we deny that their belief is not ours? To be sure, we still compare human life with traveling on the high seas, but the voyage in our opinion, is guided by altogether different forces. The windows of our bookstores are replete with copies of novels called The Ship of Fools or The Black Ship to Hell. Our historians and sociologists and statesmen, and even most of our philosophers, are no more sanguine than are our novelists. "We sail a bound less and bottomless sea," they are fond of saying, "where there is neither starting point nor appointed destination, and where our sole aim can be to keep afloat on an even keel" (16, p. 22). Our ship has no pilot. And were we to complain, like Odysseus, that we are being sent on a long and dangerous voyage without a steersman "to guide us on our way," the only consolation we would receive (or would accept) is the one given to Odysseus by arce, the sorceress: "The winds will carry you" (Odyssey X, 501 ff.)— that is, in our language, I suppose, ex ternal circumstances and powers other than our own.

The ideal of 1775, engraved on Phi Beta Kappa keys, is, then, no longer engraved on our hearts. We disregard it, we even slight it. Are we right in doing so? This, it seems to me, is a question no one can avoid asking in the present situation as in all times, for it touches upon the fundamental problems of human existence. To give an answer is difficult and hazardous. I venture to prepare the ground for finding it by recall ing what has been said and can be said in favor of the message of the motto. Undoubtedly, the ideals which we reject deserve that much attention. Otherwise, their rejection is in danger of becoming dogmatic and unreasoned.

Philosophy as Reason

Let me begin by tracing the source from which the words philosophia biou ky bernetes were taken, clarifying the teaching they embody and our quarrel with it. Certainly, the saying was not an invention ex nihilo. As has long been recognized, it is probably the Greek adaptation of a phrase of Cicero's, itself taken from a Greek author: O vitae philosophia dux (Tusc. Disp. V, 2, 5), "O philosophy, you leader of life" {6). Speaking of philosophy as "the leader" of life, Cicero thinks of it as the force that civilized men, founded their cities, created their laws, and secured their existence. In short, he thinks of philosophy as the instigator of practical and theoretical life; he defines the task of philosophy in its broadest sense. The Greek rendering that makes of philosophy "the pilot" of life shifts the emphasis not insignificandy and stresses the role that philosophy plays in an individual's life. As our pilot, philosophy gives direction to our voyage; it tells us where we ought to go. It brings us to the port of destination; or, if this proves impossible, it at least tells us what is the right course and makes us follow it. "Let us steer our own ship," says Seneca, "and not allow (outside) powers to sweep us from the course. He is a sorry steersman who lets the waves tear the helm from his hands, who has left the sails to the mercy of the winds and abandoned the ship to the storm; but he deserves praise, even amid shipwreck, whom the sea overwhelms still gripping the rudder and unyielding" (Cons. ad Marc. VI).

As regards the word "philosophy," neither Cicero nor he who translated him into Greek does, I believe, use it in its formal sense.¹ Both think of philosophy as the representative of reason, the reason which is able to discern the truth. He for whom philosophy is the pilot steers his ship by the light of those stars which shine in the world of true knowledge, "visible only to the mind, the pilot of the soul," as Plato has it (Phaedrus 147 C). On the square medal of Phi Beta Kappa, devised "for the better establishment and sanctitude of our unanimity," there is, in addition to the Greek letters, "an index imparting a philosophical de sign. extended to the three stars, a part of the planetary orbit" (21, p. 1). These stars are, I take it, the Sun, the Moon, and Venus, the triad distinguished as the most brilliant of the planets, the great rulers of the zodiac (4, p. 47; cf. pp. 79, 22). They symbolize the regular and undeviating course of the heavenly signs in which the eternity of truth becomes manifest to our bodily eye, and which, as the Timeaeus (90 B tf.) puts it, our souls are destined to imitate as far as possible-the eternal truth of the heavenly abode from which the soul has come into the world here below (41 D ff.).

I hasten to add that the young men who adopted the motto, though young, can hardly have been naïve in their endorsement of reason, in their belief in its power as a pilot. Almost half a century before, a very different view of reason had been expressed, one still widely acclaimed at the end of the eighteenth century, and one of which they cannot have been ignorant. As Pope says in his Essay on Man (11, 107 f.),

On life's vast ocean diversely we sail,
Reason's the card, but Passion is the gale.

Here reason and insight have no power. "The card, the compass, neither propels the ship nor determines the direction in which it is to sail." It merely enables the mariner to know in which direction he is moving. It is the passions that provide "the sole dynamic factor in human behavior." And these passions are not only diverse, they are antagonistic to one another. "Every individual's will is dominated by some obsessing 'Master Passion,' which is the 'mind's disease':

Reason itself but gives it edge and pow'r,
As Heaven's blest beam turns vinegar

more sour"

(13, P 43).

How modern is the theory, even though the conclusion is not! For this chaos of individual passions in the end becomes a cosmos of harmonious living; the selfishness of the one individual is counteracted by the selfishness of the others; taken together, they mysteriously create an "according music," "the joy, the peace, the glory of mankind." For God has so ordained things; his invisible hand has arranged them in such a way that private vices become public virtues.

Vision of Greatness

This was perhaps the basic belief also of the fathers of the American Constitution (13, pp. 46 ff.). It was not the belief that brought the founders of Phi Beta Kappa together to discuss the problems they were interested in, "remembering that everything transacted is transacted sub rosa and detested is he that discloses it" (21, p. 10). Their questions were youthful questions-whether duelling is to be abolished, whether it is advantageous to a scholar to be in love-as well as questions, if not of greater depth, at least of more general concern-for instance, whether public education is preferable to private education, whether stealing in extreme want is morally permissible, whether there is anything more dangerous to civil liberty than a standing army in peace time, whether Brutus was justified in killing Caesar, whether all affections and principles are not in some measure deducible from self-love (21, pp. 13 f.; 58). In asking such questions, they sought for the true, the right, the better, for what the individual ought to do; and they hoped to ascertain it through reason, through continuous and reasonable argumentation. For they believed in what has been called the Heavenly City of the eighteenth-century philosophers (1). To them, man, guided by the light of reason, seemed capable of finding out what is the good life and thus of achieving it. Certainly, he can fail in his efforts if the circumstances are against him. Even then, however, he has the consolation of knowing that he is doing the right thing, persevering in it so that his cause may have another day—here or there. Those who founded Phi Beta Kappa subscribed to Seneca's verdict that "no fortune can shut off the wise man, the reasonable man from action ... he is ready for either outcome: If it brings goods, he controls them; if evils, he conquers them ... neither poverty, nor pain, nor anything else that deflects the inexperienced and drives them headlong restrains him from his course" (Ep. 85, 38 f.).

I need not say that such an attitude is the very antithesis of the attitude which, in our time, tends more and more to be endorsed in matters of private and public concern. As individuals, we hardly trust in life until we can control it. Our mood is not to judge situations but to work them out by giving particular answers to particular problems. Sorrow and mental anguish, we have learned, need not be conquered by the mind; they can be removed from the domain of the mind once it is tranquillized by drugs. Even at the death of those whom we love, we shrink from dying a little ourselves, from withdrawing from the world of the living. This at least is the wisdom we are disposed to cherish. It is the wisdom of adjustment. We live in the moment and for it. Reality, as we call it, takes precedence over principle.

And concerning affairs of the common weal, we are wont to say that the less man clogs the free play of his mind with political doctrine and dogma, the better for his thinking. Some, to be sure, still complain of a "tired lull" and the absence at present of argument on general politics and are disturbed by the fact that programs and ideals are forgotten by all parties. Many more, I am afraid, will agree that it is a token of greater national maturity to be undisturbed by the workings of political philosophy, hoping that we will long continue to be undisturbed by them (15, pp. 5-7). We are empiricists; we are practical, and we take pride in both. We are determined by events, not by intellectual movements. Our criterion is success or, if you prefer, "what works best." Pregnant failures, not unknown in history, which turn out to have made vital contributions to the achievement of tomorrow, go without acclaim (2, p. 171).

Man and Nature

In short, neither in private nor in public life do we trust in the pilot of the ship who says, to quote Plato's famous parable (Republic, VI), that he must give his attention not only to the ship and its present condition, but also to the time of the year, the seasons, the sky, the winds, the stars, and all that pertains to his art, if he is to be a true ruler of a ship (489 D-E). Such a pilot, to us, is "in very deed ... a star-gazer, an idle babbler, a useless fellow" (E). For there is no art or science of life or politics that prescribes "the right course." It is not that we argue that a ship "navigated in the happy-go-lucky manner could ever arrive into port" (3, ch. 1). We question whether there is a port into which we are destined to arrive, and whether, if there were one, we could discover it.

The Platonic parable, the plea that the ship be steered by a "true ruler" (497 D), announced a new enterprise, a new adventure in human history. Through Greek philosophy, man, for the first time, saw and experienced himself as entirely different from nature; for the first time, he understood that he had a possession peculiarly his own, reason or spirit or however you wish to translate the Greek tenn logos (18, pp. 66, 71). Thus philosophers, as the Greeks would say, invented, or as we would put it, proposed the interpretation of man as a rational being. Their belief in his rationality was to constitute the common ground of the metaphysical systems that reigned through the ages up to the eight eenth century, while the counterargument of the materialists and biologists remained a weak undercurrent (19, p. 63). The nineteenth century became doubtful of the Greek venture. We are convinced—and it is not a matter of mere whim—that it has failed. For the proud claim of the past, we hold, has been shown, by stubborn and irrefutable facts of nature and history, to be an illusion. This is our mature judgment, in which, despite a feeling of superiority, there is perhaps, as so often in the judgment of the aged and the more mature, an overtone of regret, of sadness that the dreams of youth should have proved to be dreams.

Are we right in our contention? I would surely go beyond all bounds of propriety, and far beyond the limits of my knowledge, were I now to indulge in a metaphysical discourse on idealism and naturalism. But there are certain experiences that have given rise to the concept of the homo sapiens, the rational being, just as others have given rise to other interpretations of human nature, such as the concept of the homo faber, man the maker, the empirical, positivistic, pragmatic being, and to many more which the philosophical anthropologist, the student of man's self-interpretations, is fond of distinguishing. And I stay within my province, I think, in raising the question of whether the data which the concept of man as a rational being summarizes are not still data to which no other concept of his self-interpretation does equal justice.

No—in Rational Thunder

To start with, I shall quote two texts that describe what in the parlance of modem philosophy is called the human situation. I have selected them not from poetry or novels, for the poets and the novelists, though to be sure the Muses have given to them to tell the truth, are not infrequently also tellers of lies, as the old proverb has it. Nor do my examples come from philosophical textbooks, which one may suspect of bias. They are taken from the book of reality. They are simple records of what happens, not, to be sure, in times of prosperity, not in happy times when men usually recoil from facing the ultimate questions, but in situations where they act under the duress of conflict, of that life-and-death struggle which, since the First World War, has been faced almost daily in some parts of the world by people put in prisons, in concentration camps. In short, my examples are taken from accounts of members of the Gennan and French Resistance.

The last words of one of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Introduction
• Contents
• 1. "Philosophy—The Pilot of Life." (Phi Beta Kappa Address at Columbia University). Teachers College Record 65 (1964).
• 2. "The Greco-Roman Concept of Scientific Progress." ITHACA, Actes du Xeme Congrès International d'Histoire des Sciences 26 VIII-2 IX 1962. (Paris: Hermann, 1965).
• 3. "Motives and Incentives for Science in Antiquity." A. C Crombie (editor), Scientific Change. Historical studies in the intellectual, social and technical conditions for scientific discovery and technical invention, from antiquity to the present. (New York: Basic Books, 1963).
• 4. "The Golden Chain of Homer." Studies in Intellectual History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1953).
• 5. "The Relation of Ancient Philosophy to Medicine." Bulletin of the History of Medicine 26 (1952).
• 6. Review of M. Pohlenz, Hippokrates und die Begründung der wissenschaftlichen Medizin. American Journal of Philosophy 61 (1940).
• 7. "The Function of the Myth in Plato's Philosophy." Journal of the History of Ideas 10 (1949).
• 8. "Platonic Anonymity." American Journal of Philology 83 (1962).
• 9. "The Role of Eryximachus in Plato's Symposium." Transactions of the American Philological Association 76 (1945).
• 10. "Randall on Aristotle, a Review." Journal of Philosophy 59 (1962).
• 11. "Aristotle and the Concept of Evolution." Classical Weekly (now Classical World) 37 (1944).
• 12. Review of W. Jaeger, Diokles von Karystos. Die griechische Medizin und die Schule des Aristoteles. American Journal of Philology 61 (1940).
• 13. Review of F. Wehrli, Die Schule des Aristoteles, Texte und Kommentar. Heft IV: Demetrios von Phaleron. Heft V: Straton von Lampsakos. Heft VI: Lykon und Ariston von Keos. Heft VII: Herakleides Pontikos. American Journal of Philology 76 (1955).
• 14. Review of K. Deichgräber, Die griechische Empirikerschule. Deutsche Literaturzeitung 24 (1931).
• 15. Review of M. Pohlenz, Die Stoa. American Journal of Philology 72 (1951).
• 16. Review of M. van Straaten, Panétius, sa vie, ses écrits et sa doctrine avec une édition des fragments. American Journal of Philology 71 (1950).
• 17. Review of L. Labowsky, Die Ethik des Panaitios. American Journal of Philology 59 (1938).
• 18. "The Philosophical System of Posidonius." American Journal of Philology 57 (1936).
• 19. "Primum Graius Homo (Lucretius 1. 66)." Transactions of the American Philological Association 71 (1940).
• 20. Review of P. Boyancé, Études sur le Songe de Scipion. American Journal of Philology 59 (1938).
• 21. "Cicero: De Natura Deorum, II." Studi Italiani di Filologia Classica n. s. 11 (1934).
• 22. Review of R. Walzer, Galen on Medical Experience. The Philosophical Review 56 (1947).
• 23. Review of E. O. Wallace, The Notes on Philosophy in the Commentary of Servius on the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the Aeneid of Vergil. American Journal of Philology 65 (1944).