Plato and Aristotle on the Vocation of the Philosopher

CHAPTER ONE PLATO AND ARISTOTLE ON THE VOCATION OF THE PHILOSOPHER Lecture I The enterprise called philosophy appears first in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. It is in the Platonic dialogues and in the treatises or lec- tures of Aristotle that Philosophy is for the first time discussed exten- sively, put forth as the highest and most proper or most worthy human endeavor, and defended against its multitudinous adversaries. Certainly there were philosophers before Plato, but their writings were either non-existent, or have survived only in fragmentary fashion. We learn about them for the most part from what we would call today secondary sources. To what extent Plato and Aristotle are reliable in their reports of their predecessors will forever remain a moot question, notwithstanding the voluminous scholarship which attempts to answer just this question. But there is no gainsaying that not only do all major philosophic problems make their appearance in the writings of the two major Greek philosophers, there is hardly a problem which interests them more and which is always present in their minds—sometimes in the back of their minds—than the question of philosophy itself, and of the vocation of the philosopher. My intention is to discuss the two-fold meaning of the term vocation: vocation as occupation or activity, and vocation as calling or duty. Or if you will, the philosopher’s duty to himself and the philosopher’s duty to others. We all know that philosophy is a problematic term, and we have just been reminded that “vocation” is also an equivocal term. So, of course, are “Plato” and “Aristotle.” We are in possession of many writings of dubious origin, quite likely lecture notes, which form the extant Aristotelian corpus. We are all aware of the extreme difficul- ties attendant upon an attempt to recover Plato’s teaching or teach- ings which are presented in the form of dialogues. Plato’s obscurity is immediately apparent. I think we should beware of the error 6 chapter one often made in believing Aristotle any less obscure: Aristotle is not as systematic a philosopher as the scholastics would have us believe. These remarks are made in order to remind ourselves that we can- not simply cite “Plato” or “Aristotle” on any given problem but must examine with infinite care all their explicit writings on any given topic; and on a subject both as exalted and as all-pervading as the one before us, our task is even more forbidding: we must, as it were, examine the Platonic and Aristotelian writings in their entirety. What is the primary occupation or activity of the philosopher? A con- temporary philosopher—this was perhaps the most “propitious” state- ment he ever made—called it “an irrational passion for dispassionate rationality.”1 Neither Plato nor Aristotle would take exception to these words. Philosophy is not in itself a logos, a speech about a specific facet of the cosmos or of man. It is the passion for logos as such—the thirst for knowledge, the lust for learning. It is in fact the love for wisdom, which is, according to Aristotle, the knowledge about the primary things. This passion, this love, is the principle of the philosopher’s movement or activity. It is, both according to Plato and according to Aristotle, the one activity which is excluded from their general recommendation to temperance (Greek: σωφροσύνη) in the words of the former and the mean, the golden mean, in the words of the latter. It is indeed irrational, a manic activity, a mania. Of course to say an irrational passion is to be redundant. There is no intersection of passion and reason. Is there a rational passion, or in other words does the ratio, the logos , admit of passivity? Is not the ratio the one active principle according to both Plato and Aristotle? And so “dispassionate rationality” is apparently a repetitious phrase as well. All rationality is dispassionate, one might say, by definition. The philosopher’s activity is indeed a movement: it starts with passion and ends with ratio. It is the attempt to move from the realm of the passions, of becoming, to the realm of the intellect, to the realm of being. The philosopher shares the desire for being with every other of the beings, mineral, vegetable or animal. Every being, as Avicenna asserts in his Risāla fil Ishq, his Treatise on Love, is innately and continuously moving toward its specific perfection,2 which Aristotle 1 [ This quote is widely attributed to the economist John Maurice Clark . Clark was referring to economics, not philosophy.—ed.] 2 [See Avicenna , Treatise on Love, Section I. English translation by E. Fackenheim in Mediaeval Studies 7 (1945): 212–4.—ed.].

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