Attitudes Towards Common Sense in Ancient Greek Philosophy Broadly

Attitudes Towards Common Sense in Ancient Greek Philosophy Broadly speaking, there are two contrasting attitudes towards common sense prevalent in ancient Greek philosophy. On the one hand, there is a dismissive attitude: common sense, understood as what people in general routinely think, is regarded as simply misguided and out of touch with the way things really are. On the other hand, there is a tendency to regard human beings as such as having cognitive capacities that can afford them correct insights – if only they will let these capacities operate as they could or should, without being distracted or misled by various factors that throw them off course. Although these two attitudes are in a clear tension with one another, we frequently find them together in the same philosophers. Indeed, it is not too much to say that we find both strands present, to varying degrees, almost throughout the history of Greek philosophy. Perhaps this is not surprising, at least as regards the early period. In as much as philosophers claimed to be doing something new and distinctive, they inevitably defined themselves to some extent in opposition to what they took to be the ordinary views of the people around them. Yet as long as they wanted to be heard and understood, there was a limit to how far the rejection of common sense could go without becoming self-defeating. In the course of Greek philosophy, we also see the emergence of theorizing about common sense – that is, theories explaining how human beings come to have the (at least roughly correct) picture of the world that they attain by adulthood. Such theorizing is not fully explicit until the post-Aristotelian period, but there are hints of it in both Plato and Aristotle; and it fits more naturally with the second of 2 the two attitudes I have sketched than with the first. Less common – although we see elements of this as well – are explanations for why, as the first of these two attitudes presumes, human beings are so likely to develop mistaken ideas about the world. In what follows, I pursue these themes chronologically. Given the space available, I confine myself to major philosophers who give these matters substantial and explicit attention. These include a selection of thinkers from the Presocratic period, as it usually called (section 1), Plato (section 2), Aristotle (section 3), the Stoics and the Epicureans (section 4), and the Pyrrhonian sceptic Sextus Empiricus (section 5). As already suggested, by ‘common sense’ I shall mean simply the views commonly and unreflectively held by people in general, without regard to their source or subject. This is no doubt a somewhat broader and less precise conception of common sense than those discussed in many essays in this volume. But this is what a wide variety of Greek philosophers have something to say about, and this, if anything, is what gives them a place in a volume about philosophical treatments of common sense. 1. Early Greek Philosophy In the earliest period of Greek philosophy it is clearly the first of the two attitudes I have distinguished, the dismissive one, that is the more visible. As early as Xenophanes (c. 570-c.478 BCE) we find ordinary people’s views about the gods subjected to withering criticism. The ordinary view, ascribed to Homer and Hesiod, but also to ‘mortals’ (brotoi) in general, is stigmatized for its anthropomorphism, as well as for the immorality (by humans’ own standards) that the gods are depicted as 3 displaying (DK 21B11-17). The correct view, according to Xenophanes, is quite different: god1 is quite unlike humans, either physically or mentally, ordering the world not by moving around – that would not befit a being of this stature – but by a kind of telekinesis. We only have a few lines (DK 21B23-6), and the details are not explained, but the contrast is clear: there is the mistaken, everyday view of the divine, and then there is the correct view, and the two are more or less diametrically opposed to one another. There is much more of this kind of attitude as the tradition develops; the singling out of the views of ‘mortals’ for criticism or ridicule becomes a familiar trope. The very first sentence of Heraclitus’ book lambasted human beings in general (anthrôpoi) for failing to comprehend the central principle of the universe – what he calls the logos – even when he explains it to them (DK 22B1); another remark a little later2 expands on this by saying that although this logos is ‘common’ (xunos) to everyone, ‘most people live as if they had private insight’ (hôs idian echontes phronêsin, DK 22B2). At least ten further fragments continue this theme of the cluelessness of almost everyone3, especially for their failure to grasp the logos (DK 22B72) – including, again, Homer and Hesiod (DK 22B40, 42, 57). The closest we come to an explanation of their lack of understanding is a fragment where we 1 Xenophanes says ‘one god, greatest among gods and humans’ (DK 21B23.1). The first two words sound monotheistic, which would heighten still further the contrast with ordinary views of the time. But the rest of the line seems to contradict this. For brief discussion see Lesher 1992: 96-102. 2 Our information on the placing of these two fragments comes from Sextus Empiricus, M 7.132-3; except for these two, we have no reliable information about the order of the surviving fragments in Heraclitus’ book. 3 The only named persons receiving his praise are Bias of Priene (DK 22B39), generally included as one of the Seven Sages, and a certain Hermodorus, apparently of his own town of Ephesus (DK 22B121). 4 are told that ‘they trust the people’s singers and take the crowd as their teacher, not knowing that most people are bad and few are good’ (DK 22B104); but if this is meant as an explanation (assuming that, as commonly in Greek philosophy, goodness and badness have a cognitive as well as an ethical dimension), it scarcely advances beyond tautology. Parmenides, too, makes the mistaken views of ‘mortals knowing nothing’ (DK 28B6.4) a central focus of his work. There is the true path of wisdom, leading to insights concerning the unchanging character of what truly is; and then there are ‘the opinions of mortals, in which there is no true trust’ (DK 28B1.30). One of the most baffling aspects of the work is that it seems to advance both of these, even while emphasizing that the second is not to be trusted. While the interpretation of Parmenides’ thought is deeply controversial, for this and other reasons, I think we can venture to say that the mistake of mortals consists in their taking the everyday world of changing objects at face value and as being without qualification real. And in Parmenides’ case we do have something of an explanation of this error: it stems from an uncritical reliance on the senses as opposed to reason (DK 28B7). Xenophanes, Heraclitus and Parmenides are probably the most outspoken among the early Greek thinkers in their denunciations of common sense, although they are not the only ones4. But at least in the case of Heraclitus and Parmenides, and perhaps in Xenophanes’ case too, one can also find signs of the second, more 4 Empedocles and Anaxagoras both criticize ordinary people for speaking as if things come into being and perish. In reality, what look like the coming into being and perishing of ordinary objects are the mixing and separation of elements that themselves enjoy permanent existence (DK 31B8-12, 59B17). But the error involved here does not appear to be particularly deep, and correcting it does not seem to require wholesale revision of everyday views. 5 conciliatory attitude I identified at the outset. In addition to all the disparaging remarks, the fragments of Heraclitus include the following: ‘thinking (to phronein) is common to all’ (DK 22B113) and ‘All humans have a share in knowing themselves and thinking soundly (sôphronein)’ (DK 22B116). At least in the second of these, the emphasis seems to be more on how to act than on the nature of the world; sôphronein , ‘thinking soundly’, is the verb corresponding to sôphrosunê, the word for one of the central Greek virtues, which is usually translated ‘moderation’ or ‘temperance’, and the reference to ‘knowing themselves’ supports the idea of a mainly practical orientation. Nonetheless, we have here a much more positive estimation of the shared intellectual capacities of humans in general than we might have expected from the dismissive fragments. It is purely a matter of guesswork how these and the dismissive fragments might have been combined in Heraclitus’ thinking. Nonetheless, it does look as if the condition of being out of touch with how things are – the normal human condition, according to the two opening fragments and others like them – is not necessarily the whole story concerning common sense, and is perhaps not even inevitable or permanent. In Parmenides, too, there is at least a serious question how deep the error of ordinary people is supposed to go. While many scholars have taken Parmenides to be arguing that the everyday world perceived by the senses is simply an illusion, and ordinary thinking therefore mistaken through and through, this is by no means the only possibility. On one alternative view, the mistake of ‘mortals’ is to suppose that the world as shown us by the senses is the only reality there is, and that it can be understood on its own terms. In fact, there is a deeper level of explanation 6 afforded by true reflection about what is, and this is what one would need to employ for a proper understanding of the world as we perceive it.

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