It wasn’t long. It only lasted four hundred years. But the beautiful thing is that we can assist to its birth and death. The beautiful thing and the sad thing. It first surfaces in Homer’s Iliad, and it dies with Aristotle, in Aristotle. Strangely, we can presence both events. Yet we can only understand the magnitude of that which lived and died if we don’t approach it as something past, even if it was not received afterwards, even if it was not heard anymore, even if it was deprived of legacy. For the past is never merely past. Its unsaid, unexperienced possibilities reach the present and open the future: where can the unsaid of the said, its still unseen, unmentioned but intuited possibilities, reach us from, if it isn’t from that which has not yet occurred, from that which is ahead of us?
I. Introduction
There is something deeply moving in 5th-century-BCE Attic funerary art which this relief captures beautifully:
(Image: Grave stele of Hegeso, c. 400 BCE. Athens, National Archaeological Museum)
Of the two figures portrayed in it, the one sitting on the right represents the deceased person, an upper-class woman in this case. Standing next to her, a young maid brings her a coffer so that the woman may put back into it the earring she holds in her right hand… or is it the other way round?, is it that she has taken it instead from the coffer? We do not know. But one thing we do know: the earring (if it is an earring, for it could also be a ring, a brooch or a necklace) is not there. It is gone. For the woman – let us remember it – is dead. Hence she can no longer hold anything in her hands. Her life is gone and everything is gone with it. She is no more.
Death is fully accepted here, then. But not as something simply inevitable that, while being its reverse and its opposite, forms, nonetheless, a cycle with life. Death is that of course, and probably no one in 5th-century-BCE Athens would have disputed it. But, at the same time, death is a pity, as it brings and end to what there is and, thereby, it brings sorrow to the living. In fact, Death and Sorrow are among the offspring of Night and Darkness, which are therefore viewed as counter-worldly powers.
In this sense, death must be seen as something both inevitable and undesirable. Undesirable – but inevitable; inevitable – but undesirable. Additionally, death must be seen as something whose domain is, in a way, entirely foreign to that of life, whose negation it represents. Accordingly, nothing can be said to live there where death reigns. The worlds of the living and the dead oppose one another. Whatever dies dies, and it dies forever: it can neither be returned to this life, nor can it enjoy a new life in the realm of death. Life and death are in a relation of mutual exclusion. And this is what 5th-century-BCE Attic funerary art reminds us of.
Consequently, life must be celebrated while it lasts. For we are in the light – that is to say, we are alive – only for a brief period of time. Or between two darkness: the darkness preceding our being and the darkness following it.
Before we were born… what was? We cannot say, as we were not there. After we die… what will be? We cannot say either, as we won’t be there. Seen from our ephemeral perspective, only darkness can be said to inhabit those two, for us elusive, regions. Two dark eternities. Two infinite darkness surround all what lives, with no exception.
And yet Life is light. Light breaking through the darkness. An event. One on which we have formerly written to stress that it demands to be chanted and cared for rather than denied, and to stress that it also demands to be thought.
It is, moreover, the coming of life into being, or the coming of things into the light, that early Greek thought engaged in thinking. By thinking we mean here an activity which, as Heidegger suggests, has far more to do with meditating while crossing the forest through a forgotten path – or while walking nearby the sea in the twilight – than with formulating clear-cut statements. And yet this meditation need not be understood as something vague. Quite the opposite indeed: it may well present us with ideas, which, as we have underlined elsewhere, must be regarded as the fruits of pure thought. But more on this below.
For now, we would like to point to the fact that this radical opposition between life and death – an opposition, therefore, to which 5th-century-BCE Attic grave reliefs bear witness in an impressive manner – was not characteristic of all Ancient- and/or Classical Greek periods. Actually, we can assist to its birth in Homer’s Iliad, hence sometime around the 8th century BCE.
II. Birth
What do all Homeric heroes pursuit? We have seen it already: κλέος (kleos) or “lasting fame” among the living, which amounts to say that they aim at being “remembered” for their brave and noble actions in the war. There is no other way to remain alive, since all which lives dies and all which dies dies forever. We, mortals, can only last despite our dying… but while dying.
(Image: Red-figure volute-krater showing Achilles fighting Hector, with Athena and Apollo next to them respectively. Attributed to the so-called Berlin Painter, c. 490 BCE. London, British Museum)
However, in Book 23 of the Iliad (vv. 19-23) Achilles sacrifices twelve young Trojans before Patroclus’s funeral pyre. He slaughters them so that – like in many other parts of the Ancient world, Egypt for instance – they may accompany the dead (Patroclus in this case) in his voyage through the unknown into the underworld. Here, then, some sort of life seems to await the dead. But this view is incompatible with that which denies the possibility of any life among the dead. We assist here to the clash of two opposing worldviews which merge in the poem due to the latter’s overlapping oral and textual layers. For not everything that we find in the Iliad (or in the Odyssey for that matter) comes from the same time period.
We follow Walter Otto’s claim that the slaughtering of the twelve young Trojans by Achilles during Patroclus’s funeral belongs in a rather-early oral or textual layer of the poem, possible pre-Homeric. One whose implicit worldview (somehow, life continues after death) was suppressed by the later Homeric view that with death all life comes to an end (for which reason it can only be, at most, remembered and only kept alive inasmuch as it is remembered).
A crucial notional shift which constitutes – let this be our thesis – the birth of what one may well call the Ancient-Greek difference. For, as we know, Egyptian culture developed in an altogether different direction. And so did India, in many if not all corners of which reaching immortality by uniting oneself with what will later be called in the West the “world soul” was viewed as the only means to escape the life-and-death cycle and thereby as the highest goal of any human life. As for Ancient Persia, despite its undeniable closeness to Ancient Greece (light and life must be affirmed against the anti-worldly powers of darkness), which we have conveniently highlighted elsewhere, one should not overlook, however, that a luminous transfiguration of the world that would definitely eradicate death was, nevertheless, hoped for by the Ancient Persians, and that this is a most-un-Greek hope(*).
III. Growth
Writing in the 5th century BCE, Pindar is a fabulous exponent of what we have called in the preceding section the Greek difference, which therefore gravitates around the celebration of life as light, and of victory (now in the games rather than the battlefield) over oblivion and forgetfulness. Like Homer, Pindar – whose poems many consider to be the maximum summit of Ancient-Greek poetry – celebrates the translucent-ness of all mortal things before the immortal light of the ever-living gods, for the life powers of the world, the many aspects of Zeus’s pure light, traverse us like lightenings, shelter us, and nurture us while we live – then abandon us when we meet our mortal fate and die and fall back into non-being and darkness.
Similarly, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides – the three greatest Attic tragedians of the 6th and 5th centuries BCE – have their heroes fighting for life, justice, and knowledge, which, using a linguistic metaphor, can all be viewed as light’s declensions. Our Greek difference is at play in them, as well. Thus, for example, Euripides’s Iphigenia says to her father Agamemnon, when she realises that he will have her sacrificed in order to get a favourable wind for the Achaean fleet to be able to depart for Troy: “Father, I wish I had Orpheus’s gift, a voice to charm the stones and make them love me. I would sing to you, but I can’t. What must I do to make you pity me? Should I weep? I weep. Should I beg? I do, on my knees. . . . It is I, Iphigenia. I was the first to call you father. You’d hug me tight and say: ‘Child, shall I live to see you married to a king?’ And I would pull your beard and say: ‘When you’re old, you’ll come to me and get back all the love I got from you.’ . . . Why do you turn away?” And holding her brother Orestes in her arms, she adds: “Look at us! Look at your children here, at your feet. A tender little boy and a girl who longs to live. To live! To walk in the sun! Why should I want to die? It’d bet insane” – Euripides, Iphigenia 1211-1252, after Cacoyannis’s adaptation (our emphasis); Euripides’s own text reads: “To gaze upon light is man’s most treasured gift; for life below is nothingness, and mad whoever longs for death.”
And is it not a gaze upon the way in which light renders forms visible that Ancient-Greek sculpture displays once and again? Seen from today, the bodies sculpted, among others, by Myron, Phidias, Polyclitus, Praxiteles, Scopas, and Lysippus, may look conventionally-realistic to those unable to realise that the Greeks simply lacked any model thereof. Yet they invented a total new way of looking at things that is elsewhere unmatched (compare, for example, the charming vividness of Attic sculpture with the hieratic nature of Ancient-Egyptian statuary).
(Image: Hypnos. Roman copy of a Hellenistic original attributed to the school of Praxiteles, early 3rd century BCE. Madrid, Prado Museum)
IV. Fulfilment
An analogous spirit pervades the beginnings of philosophy, and therefore the beginnings of Western thought, where such a spirit may be said to achieve its maximum expression. We find it in the three major pre-Platonic thinkers we know of: Anaximander (7th-to-6th centuries BCE), Parmenides (6th to 5th), and Heraclitus (6th to 5th like Parmenides). More exactly, we find it in their in-one-sense diverse, in-another-sense-common, treatment of “that which is.”
Let us quickly add, by way of clarification, that the question of being (what does it mean to be, what is the property of being, and how should being be thought?) is not only the first question around which philosophy revolved in its origins, but also the very question philosophy has never ceased to ask thereinafter in different ways according to different concerns and in different contexts. Indeed there is no other philosophical question. From Plato’s study on the difference between what is and what seems to us to be apparent, to Aristotle’s examination of the various ways in which being can be said, to Kant’s inquiry into the being of our knowledge, to Marx’s interrogation on the being of political economy, to Deleuze’s definition of the being of time and the density of the past in Wells’s cinema – to mention but a few examples – the question of beings hunts the history philosophy as its ever-recurring ghost. Thus Althusser’s lucid claim: philosophy does not really have a history, even if it has one.
Heidegger, moreover, can help us to easily understand how this question was originally envisaged by Anaximander, Parmenides, and Heraclitus. And, thereby, what the question itself is ultimately about and whether after these three major thinkers it became an altogether different question, thus losing its fascinating depth and its freshness.
We use the verb to be to say something of something else: “the leaf is green.” But what happens when we say: “the leaf is”? Are we merely attributing existence to something (a leaf). Is to be to be there, to be available? Consider too Goethe’s famous verses: “Über allen Gipfeln / Ist Ruh”? Rendering them: “Over all the hilltops / Is quiet now” (Longfellow’s translation, our emphasis) banalises miserably the force of the German original, which lacks the adverb “now.” A better translation would be: “On every mountain peak (or hilltop) / Peace is.” But then again, what does is mean here? That there is peace on every mountaintop and that it is somehow there at hand for us?
It is not difficult to perceive that there is something troubling and excessive, in the sense that we do not get to fully grasp what it is, in the employment of the verb to be in the latter two cases, and, more generally, whenever being does not only mean possession (“the book is yours”), condition (“I am sick”), time (“it is five in the morning”), provenance (“she is from Beijing”), location (“this is the place”), size (“our flat is too small”), material constitution (“the vase is made out of silver”), etc.
Anaximander, Parmenides, and Heraclitus think such excess as an event: the event of being. Anaximander in terms of an “unbounded opening.” Parmenides in terms of a “sheltering disclosure.” And Heraclitus in terms of a “luminous emergence.” The light-gaze therefore traverses their thought, as well. Variously. But in an undeniably-similar way at the same time.
Why an event, though? Because while being can be said to mean to be present, being is not some-thing present. Being, we can say, is presencing – in short, something active: be-ing. Yet this does not mean that being is processual. When we say, for example, “Sarpedon is brave,” or “the bell is sonorous,” “brave” and “sonorous” are not like stickers we were just to stick onto Sarpedon and the bell, respectively. Nor do they necessarily remain forever attached to what they qualify. Sarpedon is “brave” in the battlefield when the time comes: “Ah my friend,” he says to Glaucus, “if you and I could escape this fray and live forever, never a trace of age, immortal, I would never fight on the front lines again or command you to the field where men win fame. But now, as it is, the fates of death await us . . . and not a man alive can flee them or escape – so in we go for attack! Give our enemy glory or win it for ourselves!” (Iliad 12.322-8, Fagles trans.) Likewise, the bell is “sonorous” when it is made to sound. In both cases, being is an event – it happens(**).
Furthermore, Parmenides adds that all truly-essential thinking has that event not so much as its object (in the sense of something standing before something else: ob-jectum) but as its source. And that thinking is ultimately one with it: τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι (to gar auto noein estin te kai einai), “sameness hence – thinking, being”(***). Which means that he views thinking as an event, as well.
Plato follows Parmenides in this. Plus he, too, thinks the disclosure of being by means of a visual metaphor: just as the light of the sun allows us to see all we see, argues Plato, the light of being – which, he adds, amounts to its intrinsic goodness – illuminates all that is, bringing it to the fore and permitting us to think it.
(Image: Parmenides describes metaphorically the sheltering, well-enclosing, nature of being’s disclosure in spheric terms, which has led to the misinterpreting that he thought of being as a sphere. Plato, in turn, thinks being’s supreme determination (i.e. being’s goodness) through a light-metaphor, identifying it with the light of the sun. Photograph of the sun by the NASA)
Yet the light of the sun, while it allows us to see everything by making everything visible to us, cannot be seen in turn: disclosing or un-concealing being, it conceals itself. The same with being, for being is no-thing, and as such it cannot be seen like things are seen. Being is both an event by which all things come into the light and the condition of possibility of their being-seen: the light that makes them present. Yet it withdraws from the horizon of their presence while not exactly abandoning it, for although it is always there accompanying the disclosure of what there is (how could it not, given that it is their disclosure?), it cannot be pointed at with a finger – in short we cannot say: “I can seen it, it is there, like this and that is there.”
In short, being belongs in the circle of its own enigma. On how Enigma is at the heart of Ancient-Greek culture, the legend has it, for example, that both Calchas and Homer died out of despair for not having solved an enigma; see also our recent post on Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex(****).
The question of being must be viewed as a purely-Greek question; and philosophy in its original form, thereby, as a purely-Greek game, based on a conceptual opening made possible by the Greek language. When, little more than 1,000 years ago, the first Muslim philosophers, writing in Arabic, came across the texts of Plato and especially Aristotles, and found in them the term “being,” they could not render it in Arabic, as there is no verb “to be” in this language. So they translated einai as وجود (wujud), which means “the being-there of things,” and on as موجود (mawjud), which denotes “that which can be found as being there before us” in the sense of “in front of us.” Later, the medieval Christian philosophers, writing in Latin, came across the Arabic terms wujud and mawjud and translated them as existence and existent, respectively. In this way, they banalised being, transforming it in the “being-there” of things in the sense of their “being at hand” for us. Furthermore, they defined the “existence” of anything as being an accident, a mere addendum to what as thing is, to its essence. For them, what was important was to know what things are; they took their existence for granted as something bestowed upon them by God.
V. Death
Yet it can be affirmed that the difference whose profile we have delineated by meandering on the shores of Ancient-Greek mythology, tragedy, and poetry, the “savage anomaly” (to borrow Negri’s expression) that reached its climax with the birth of philosophy, out of the waters of enigma, in the words and works of Anaximander, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Plato, came to an abrupt end long before the Muslim and Christian philosopher of the Middle Ages, with Aristotle, in whom we already find the interpretation of being as “that which is at hand.”
We have seen how death’s silence dissolves Bach’s unfinished Fuga a 3 Soggetti (Contrapunctus XIV, BWV 1080). In like manner, one can assist face to face to the death of philosophy in Aristotle’s Metaphysics.
Certainly, Aristotle, like Plato, is aware that the question of being, or, to put it in more forceful terms, the question concerning “being as being” (Greek: ὄν ᾗ ὄν, on he on), is, above any other, the question of philosophy. Hence Aristotle asks: τὶ τὸ ὄν (ti to on), “what is being?” Till that moment, philosophy remains alive in Aristotle. But then… it vanishes. For Aristotle answers his question as follows: τὸ ὄν λεγεται πολλαχῶς (to on legetai pollachos), “being is said in many ways.” It is said, he adds, of that which is substantial and of that which is accidental, it is said of that which is actual and of that which is potential, and it is said of that which is true and of that which is false. Being now becomes this and that in light of all its possible determinations. Otherwiseit can only be viewed as an universal and empty concept – as too abstract a notion.
This is the reason why Aristotle then proceeds to the study of the different types of being that can be found in the different regions of the world: physical beings like this “flower,” metaphysical beings like the “prime unmoved mover” or “final cause” of everything which he identifies with Plato’s idea of Good, logical beings like such or such “proposition,” ethical beings like those things called “virtues,” etc. Aristotle’s regional ontology lays the foundations of an authentic encyclopaedia of being, understood as that which is “at hand.”
But what did Aristotle get wrong? And why? This, too, we can tentatively reconstruct. Our hypothesis is that, after studying for almost two decades with Plato, he misinterpreted Plato and thought that the latter was searching for the εἴδη (eide, sing. εἶδος, eidos, “idea”) of this and that in an attempt to determine what things truly are. But we know that such was not Plato’s goal. Plato aimed at questioning what we take all good things to be (beauty, courage, love, perfection) so as to show that there is something they all participate in but cannot exhaust, a sort of a priori idea of the Good (see our recent post on Plato here).
(Image: In his fresco The School of Athens (1509-1511), of which we reproduce here but its central detail, Raphael depicts Plato (left) and Aristotle (right) according to their conventional, Aristotelian-inspired, distinction, that makes of Plato an idealist and of Aristotle a realist; consequently, the former points with his right hand to the sky where, as per Aristotle’s accusation, he had placed his Ideas, whereas the latter rejects to such gesture and extends his right hand over the earth instead. Apostolic Palace, Vatican City)
VI. Oblivion & Remembrance
Therefore, with Aristotle being becomes everything and nothing: everything because it names the collection of what there is, nothing because the word being loses its past relevance. And so the game changes.
What will the new, modern, game be about? About choosing which particular being (God?, Man?…), or which particular aspect of a given being (God’s rationality?, God’s will?, human rationality?, human desire?…), can be said to prevail over all the others. Consequently, the question of being will be replaced by the search of a a ground. The ground may be God (the Christian God), Descartes’s cogito, Spinoza’s Substance, Kant’s transcendental subject, Fichte’s self-positioning I, Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, Marx’s class struggle, Nietzsche’s will to power, Freud’s unconscious or Sartre’s humankind. It matters little, as a matter of fact. The “forgetting of being” (which Heidegger calls “metaphysics”) opens – opened – innumerable possibilities.
Alternatively, the new game may be declared all-too boring. And the search of a ground (Grund in German) be replaced by that of an un-ground (Abgrund). Deleuze’s “One and All” (Ἓν καὶ Πᾶν), which amounts not so much to a being as to the unbounded totality of all possible becomings (or as the movements of an infinitely-self-extending substance), responds to that reactive counter-quest (although it simultaneously winks to Spinoza and Nietzsche). Derrida’s deconstructionism (its Platonic reminiscences notwithstanding) is another option in the postmodern/poststructuralist search for an Abgrund, an sceptic rather than materialist option.
Before all this, Heidegger’s voice claims in the desert. What!? Does not everyone speak of Sein und Zeit [Being and Time] (1927) as one of the founding texts of contemporary philosophy? Sure, but, after publishing it, Heidegger remained active for forty years, produced his most important works and rejected (as early as 1932!) his early writings, Sein und Zeit included, due to their philosophical immatureness. Yet who really cares about Heidegger’s so called “late” (!) philosophy? For one thing is to study it, and there are indeed many studies on it, but another thing is to do something with it. And Heidegger’s return to Greece has proven intolerable to everyone, it would seem(*****).
And yet we may need to go back to Ancient Greece, or at least to what we have repeatedly overlooked about it, and to meander inquisitively on its shores, and to learn from it, in order to escape the capitalist ruins – the infinitely-commodified unworld, the rotten corpse, the nihilist domain – we now dwell in.
For we must fight back the necropolitics of capitalism by re-insufflating life to what is permanently seized, disempowered, controlled, redressed, exchanged, and finally abandoned and replaced on the altar of the now-fully-achieved disponibility of being, which is the symbol of capitalism’s overwhelming lethality. In other words, we need animism.
We must recover the sensible, which has also been sacrificed throughout the history of Western metaphysics under the command to dominate, appropriate, calculate, and use the given. And so we need the body.
We need to explore extra-modern indigenous worlds to understand how unnecessary, terribly damaging, and elsewhere-unmatched Western metaphysics, and its offshoot: modernity, are.
We need not to join a rather-long ecological de-intoxication programme to understand how much has been put by modernity on the verge of extinction, and to learn about sustainable livability from numerous earthly ecosystems.
But we may also need to go back to Ancient-Greek tragedy to understand the complex relations existing between life and death and to understand that things must be cared for. We may need to go back to Ancient-Greek poetry to understand that to be cared for things must be sung. We may need to go back to Ancient-Greek enigma to understand what thought is ultimately about. We may need to go back to Ancient-Greek mythology (including the inter-connectedness of Apollo and Dionysos) to be able to put all this into due perspective, since mythological symbols constitute the axiological core of human culture and the complex intersections and transformations of cultural dynamics that we call human history cannot dispense with putting such symbols at play in new ways (see further here). And, again, we may need to stop thinking that going back means going back: it means to move in unfathomed creative directions.
VII. Conclusion
It wasn’t long. It only lasted four hundred years. But it’s still with us, since we can still remember it. And our future – that is to say, the possibility of a future not circumscribed to the repetition of the present world-image that declares everything to be there available for us or else an inhabitable chaos (nihilism’s two faces) – our future may well depend on that we do, before it’s too late.
But why Ancient Greece, why those four hundred years of Ancient Greece? Because they provide responses to the questions we pose today. Because, like animism and the recovery of the body, they supply an antidote to monotheism, modernity, and capitalism.
Someone may ask, tough: In these days in which many academic minds are coming to grips with the issues, challenges, and perplexities dealt with by post-colonial- and Anthropocene studies, ontological turns, and various posthumanisms, why do we additionally need to think what Ancient Greece may still offer to us? Because, their extraordinary relevance notwithstanding, what all the aforementioned approaches lack is a framework capable of providing us an attitude to thought in its original form (which is what Heidegger means by “essential thinking”) as well as an attitude to life and death that may help us remember what we have lost and forgotten… although we once had it and can point to it as lying not so far away from us.
(*) Judaism and Christianity declined, albeit differently, this same hope. It looks as though only the Mesopotamian and Old Israelite (i.e. pre-Jewish) views of the afterlife (shadowy and deprived of consistency) came somehow close, in typological terms, to the Homeric one; yet the light stuff is missing on them.
(**) Thus Heidegger’s well-known definition of being as das Ereignis or “the (das) most (er-) genuine/proper (Eigen) happening/event (Ereignis),” and his rendering of Parmenides’s founding phrase: ἔστίν γὰρ εἶναι (esti gar einai), “being (therefore) is,” as es gibt Sein, “being (Sein) gives (gibt) itself (es),” which only too-inexactly can be translated as “there is being” (cf. our reservations above on identifying being with “that which is there” at hand).
(***) Literally: “the same (τὸ αὐτὸ, to auto) is to think (νοεῖν, noein) and to be (εἶναι, einai).”
(****) Cf. too the reference in Heraclitus, fr. 30, to “what was, is, and will be” with the speech of Calchas, the seer, in Iliad 1.70. Heraclitus allusion to Apollo’s oracle in fr. 93 is most eloquent, as well. See furthermore what we have written on Heraclitus’s fr. 62 (“Mortals immortals, immortal mortals…”). As for Parmenides, the goddess in his poem, too, proves often oracular (“Know that only two paths can be thought. One, that is and cannot not be . . . Another one, that is not and that it must be not . . .”). And so does Anaximander’s sentence: “Whence they surge, therein they retreat . . . ,” etc.
(*****) There are a few components of Heidegger’s “late” philosophy that have been reworked over the past four or five decades, like its interpretation of the epochs of the history of Western metaphysics as forming intrinsic part of the history of being’s self-concealment, which has led Vattimo to adopt a convalescent rather than rupturist attitude vis-à-vis modernity; or its emphasis on being’s inherent self-concealment, on which Harman explicitly draws – somewhat peculiarly, to say the least, by mixing Heidegger with Meillassoux non-correlationism – when he stresses that we live surrounded by inapprehensensible objects. Yet Heidegger’s Greek voice, if we can put it thus, remains virtually ignored. At best, it is signaled out as a symptom of German Hellenophilia and Romantic naivity. At worst, it is suspected as a symptom of mythopoetic para-Nazism. We cannot write about this here, but we will definitely return to it in a future post.