People say that [Homer] died on the island of Ios when he found himself undone because he could not solve the riddle of the fishing boys. The riddle was: “We left whatever we caught and carry whatever we didn’t”.
They were obscuring in riddle the fact they actually had discarded whichever of the lice they had caught and killed; but they would still be carrying the lice they did not catch in their clothing. Because he was not able to interpret this, Homer died because of despair.
– Excerpts from two Homeric lives.
The ancient Greeks loved riddles and ruses. Giorgio Colli stresses that with their enigmas the gods challenged men, and that by attempting to interpret such enigmas men fought for wisdom. (⊕) One could object to this that, since the Greek gods – as we have repeatedly highlighted (here for instance, see esp. note [Δ]) – are not beings one should take for granted, one must ask what does it mean that the “gods” address enigmas to those whose very life depends on their success in interpreting them, like in Oedipus case (on which see here). But let’s assume Colli’s insight, overall, as a good one.
Colli is also right, moreover, in that riddles abound from Homer to Plato, but then decline: they become a pastime. But to the role of enigmas in Plato we shall return another day. For we should like to consider three additional remarks which Colli makes.
The first remark is that, rather often, the triviality of the formulation contrasts with the seriousness of the issue at stake.
The second one is not so much a remark as the quotation, provided by Colli, of Aristotle’s definition of the riddle in Poetics, 1458a, according to which a riddle its “to say real things by means of the admixture of impossible [i.e., contradictory] things” – think e.g. in the Sphinx’s riddle: “What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?”
The third remark runs thus: “already in the Indian Upanishads we read: ‘For the gods are fond of riddles and distaste that which is apparent’” (emphasis added).
The apparent triviality of the riddle’s formulation contrasts the seriousness of its content. Indeed. This, furthermore, hints at the fact that any riddle must be broken into two co-implied sides or dimensions, A and B, which are thus indissociable from one another.
Enters Aristotle’s definition: of these dimensions, one (A, the trivial formulation of the riddle) displays an apparent paradox which, one is temped to add, is automatically cleared up, and hence dissolved, when the other dimension (B, the content) is successfully guessed. Therefore, there is both symmetry (or continuity) and asymmetry (or discontinuity) between both sides or dimensions, in the sense that A, which a priori seems to be consistent despite its paradoxical nature (there is, one must presume after all, something that does walk on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening), can be said to reflect B (for it is the key to find out what that something is), but then, once the transposition from A to B is made when B is correctly guessed, A can be said to lose its apparent consistency (there is actually nothing which changes biologically its number of legs and that does so in the time span of a single day) in favour of B’s (man’s ages, of which, ultimately, A is a metaphor).(⦿)
But then, regardless of the fact that in some cases, though by no means in all cases, enigma and hostility may go together,(⊛) how can one suggest, as Colli’s third remark with its reference to the Upanishads does, that A provokes the gods’ distaste or repulsion: “a gli dèi ripugna ciò che è manifesto.”(⊗) Heraclitus (DK B93) expressly contends otherwise: Apollo speaks through signs, which neither affirm openly nor conceal their meaning! It would seem Colli goes off the mark here, that he confuses ancient Greece with India. In India, the domain of the apparent is illusory by definition: one must discard it, one must remove oneself from and renounce to it to reach the truth, which does not only lie beyond the appearances but in opposition to them, as well. Thus the figure of the sadhu, the ascetic to whom what we are willing to call a logic of illumination corresponds (like in Christianity if in a different way, as the Christian is also taught to renounce to the apparent on behalf of something else). Conversely, ancient Greek culture is characterised by what we have called, apropos Dionysus and Apollo, dual affirmation: not B against A, but B as A’s other side, and vice versa; not the truth in lieu of the appearances, but within these; not the permanence of being contra the infirmity of becoming, but the former in spite of the latter which must not, for it cannot, be denied – and certainly not the discovery of that supplementary dimension of the real as an experience, for all experience is subject to becoming, but as knowledge instead.(⦶)
But the logic of enigma does not only oppose that of illumination: it also opposes the demonstrative logic that, from Aristotle onwards, philosophy has mostly adopted. The riddle excites the mind and turns it inquisitive and playful. And this has as little to do with the logic of illumination, which narcotises it (“Now that you’ve reached the truth, there’s no need for you to think anymore!”), as with the logic of demonstration, which leads it into a conquest (“Move from the premise to the consequence so as to gain control of the knowledge process!”). Put differently, an Ancient Greek philosopher is neither an Indian ascetic nor a Roman soldier; in the last instance, his dual logic evokes the binary qualities of what Lévi-Strauss calls “savage thought”(⭐︎) and Roy Wagner illustrates thus:
“Imagine a tree whose top foliage cuts the shape of a human face against the sky,” say the Tolai people of East New Britain, in Papua New Guinea, “and fix the shape of that face in your mind, so that it appears as a real face, and not just a profile. When you have finished, go back to the tree, and visualize it as a free-standing object without reference to the face. When you have both images firmly fixed in your mind, just hold them in suspension and keep shifting your attention from one to the other: tree/face, face/tree, tree/face, and so on.”
“That is what we call a tabapot. Man is a tabapot. For you see the human being is encased within the boundaries of their own body, but they want what is outside of their own body. But when they get what is outside of their own body, they want to be encased back in the body again.”
(⊕) Giorgio Colli, La nascita della filosofia (Milan: Adelphi, 1975), p. 47-57.
(⦿) On metaphor and meaning see here, here, and here.
(⊛) Compare Colli’s contrasting references to Aeschylus’s Prometheus and to Plato’s Symposium thereof.
(⊗) Colli, La nascita della filosofia, p. 49.
(⦶) Cf. Emanuele Severino, Il giogo. Alle origine della ragione: Eschilo (Milan: Adelphi, 1989), p. 99-109.
(⭐︎) Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (La Pensée sauvage) (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966).
(⦼) Roy Wagner, The Logic of Invention (Chicago: HAU Books, 2020), p. 1.
Oedipus and the Sphinx. Attic red-figured kylix, c. 470 BCE.
Gregorian Etruscan Museum, Rome