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Ancient Greek Philosophia in India As a Way of Life

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Ancient Greek Philosophia in India As a Way of Life CHAPTER 1 ANCIENT GREEK PHILOSOPHIA IN INDIA AS A WAY OF LIFE CHRISTOPHER MOORE 1. Introduction: Studying Philosophical Ways of Life The question animating this essay is whether the Greeks themselves thought of philosophy as a way of life. The answer might be thought an uncontroversial affirmative, and so it may be. But the details are not so clear, and one can imagine a broad range of counter-cases, where ancient practice seems little different from a modern practice not admitted to be a genuine or robust “way of life.” This we see by rearticulating the question in a twofold way: as one concerning the way the Greeks thought of philos- ophoi (“philosophers”); and as one concerning how they thought of the bioi (“ways of life”) that such philosophoi could be thought to have lived. Aristotelian investigation into first principles need not come caparisoned in the garb of a way of life; Cynic unconventionalism need not depend on rational argument. Here I provide new evidence, based on material from Greek historiog- raphy that may be largely unfamiliar to philosophers, that the Greeks did think of philosophia as a distinctive bios, and that, equivalently, they acknowledged a way of life identifiable as that lived by philosophoi. The evidence is that the Greeks recognized philosophia and philosophoi, and explicitly in these terms, in India in the late fourth century BCE among those traditionally called gymnosophists. These were the decades of Alexander and his generals’ conquests in Asia, at just the time of Aristotle’s death, and thus at the very beginning of the Hellenistic period. This rec- ognition illuminates the Greek conception of philosophia by the end of the first centuryCOPYRIGHTED and a half of its use, a period MATERIAL decisive in the discipline’s Philosophy as a Way of Life: Historical, Contemporary, and Pedagogical Perspectives. Edited by James M. Ambury, Tushar Irani, and Kathleen Wallace. Chapters and book compilation © 2021 Metaphilosophy LLC and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. c01.indd 7 01-09-2020 19:07:32 8 CHRISTOPHER MOORE increasingly settled self-understanding. We must allow for much dyna- mism before that point, since the concept and the practices that it incor- porated underwent significant specification, reevaluation, and occasionally technicalization and colloquialization; but while it never grew wholly sta- ble, it came to have canonical connotations by then.1 I show that the Greeks in India identified philosophoi by their practical life, social posi- tion, and cultural-intellectual contributions. That the Greeks did not—in order to admit the Indian intellectuals into the practice of philosophia— have to observe their participation in a shared canon of literature (on the assumption that philosophia means membership in an institutional- disciplinary network) or have to appraise the relevant cognitive or investi- gatory attitudes as theoretical or disinterested in the right way (on the assumption that philosophia means “love of wisdom” in some noninstru- mental sense) shows that philosophia was for them in fact an identifiable “bios,” a livelihood or lifestyle, separable from an individual group (“Greek philosophoi”) or attitude. This does not require that every use of philosophia implies an equally full-bodied way of life. Recent contribu- tions on the conception of philosphia advanced by Aristotle, whose work provides the largest and most contemporaneous corpus of relevant usages, show that he, and thus other Greeks, treated philosophia in a range of ways, from a specific topic of research, namely, of first principles, to the name for the kind of leisure directed more at self-study than mere dissipa- tion (Moore 2019a and forthcoming a). And at a Hellenistic outpost in Afghanistan, Ai Khanoum, one could find—as one could also find at Delphi by the end of the fourth century—public inscriptions of the maxim Philosophos ginou, “Be philosophical”; this appears to have advocated a sort of “think before you act” ethics rather than conversion to a new way of life.2 But philosophia could still generally refer to a bios, and do so in ways not derivative of non-bios conceptions, such as attitude attributions (e.g., “loving wisdom”) or cognitive-content attributions (e.g., “thinking about the conditions of knowledge”). A particular challenge to thinking about “philosophical ways of life” is deciding on the criteria for one’s being philosophical. One criterion might be what we now find common to all cases of philosophy so deemed: for instance, devaluing traditional sources of tradition in the search for knowl- edge or reflection on the nature of reflection (Adamson 2019; Sassi 2018). But our criteria need not have been the criteria of the Greeks, and so they may not track their understanding of philosophia or the way they differen- tiated philosophoi from other practitioners. And it is their understanding of and distinctions made about philosophia that could become the object 1 An argument developed in Moore 2019b. 2 For the finding and its connection to Delphi, see Robert 1968; Moore 2015, 28–30, and 2019b, 291–97; Verhasselt forthcoming. c01.indd 8 01-09-2020 19:07:32 ANCIENT GREEK PHILOSOPHIA IN INDIA AS A WAY OF LIFE 9 of reflection for the Greeks, which could influence their ongoing thinking about philosophia—and thus, arguably, our own. The evidence from the Greek experience in India, beyond its intrinsic fascinations and unfamiliarity, speaks to these distinctions. Perhaps more starkly than anywhere else in the fourth century we see in it what it means to live a life “philosophically,” as a philosophos. To be sure, there is other evidence, for example from the middle comic dramatist Alexis and in a fragment of prose comedy in an Oxyrhynchus papyrus, but both, while important, are perhaps overstylized.3 Plato’s dialogues may seem stylized in the other direction; they also have a supremely complex relationship with the ongoing development of the discipline.4 The historiographical reports about India have unique value in their claim to descriptive neutral- ity, concerned to report sociological categories rather than exhort or dis- suade people to or from any ethical or intellectual commitments. None of this entails an ease of interpretation; the reports exist mainly as Roman-era paraphrases or excerpts of late fourth-century BCE writings, where the later historians do not particularly care about the philosophical status of the philosophoi they discuss. Many pertinent questions remain unanswered, or are hardly even asked. On the upside, new questions get raised, encour- aging further research or speculation about philosophy as a way of life. This essay serves, then, as a first entry into and protreptic toward comple- menting the usual topics of study for “philosophia as a way of life”—the Hellenistic/Socratic school authors and their reception—with such fourth- century writers as Megasthenes, Nearchus, and Onesicritus (cf. Hadot 2002; Cooper 2012). 2. Megasthenes’ Indica and the Social Class of Philosophoi After the death of Alexander the Great in 323, his generals continued the job of imperial expansion and consolidation. Seleucus I Nicator (c. 358– 281 BCE) sought to secure the tenuous eastern reaches of Macedon and, forgoing conquest there, settled on border negotiations with northern India. As part of his 303 BCE peace settlement with that region’s political leader, Chandragupta Maurya, Seleucus (or possibly Sibyrtius, a satrap of western India) sent a Greek named Megasthenes as ambassador. Megasthenes came to write a four-book study of India, the Indica.5 The influence and endurance of that work was so great as to have large parts 3 Alexis frr. 37, 140, 247 PCG, with discussion of dating in Arnott 2011 and context in Battezzato 2008; Oxyrhynchus Papyri 3659, with attribution to the mid‐fourth century (Aris- totle’s Protrepticus?) by Hutchinson and Johnson 2018. For both see Moore 2019b, 297–306. A list of abbreviated titles appears in the Appendix below. 4 See, e.g., Nightingale 1995 and 2004, with qualifications in Moore 2019b, 221–59. 5 A convenient version of the fragments, based on Jacoby, is Roller 2008. The newest edi- tion is in preparation by Richard Stoneman. For a recent introduction to the man, see Stone- man 2019, 129–85 and passim; see also Karttunen 1989, 96–99, and 1997, 69–93. c01.indd 9 01-09-2020 19:07:32 10 CHRISTOPHER MOORE relied upon by three major Roman-era historians: Diodorus Siculus (mid- first century BCE), Strabo (end of the first century BCE), and Arrian (mid- second century CE). This influence was earned not only by the eyewitness testimony of Megasthenes and by his extensive reliance on local inform- ants but also by his incisive theoretical structure framed by the leading anthropological, naturalistic, and political theories of his century.6 Megasthenes is the earliest Greek author explicitly quoted to refer directly to contemporaneous non-Greeks as participating in philosophia.7 The verb appears in a cross-cultural comparison quoted by Clement of Alexandria: “Yet everything the ancients said about nature was also said by people philosophizing outside Greece, namely the Brahmins in India and the so-called Ioudaioi [Jews] in Syria.”8 Clement, a Christian apolo- gist, is quoting Megasthenes in partial support of his thesis that Greek philosophia followed, and even derived from, non-Greek philosophia. While this passage does not directly corroborate the derivation thesis (Clement focuses on it in adjacent sentences), it provides a condition for its truth. The distinctive doctrines about the world found in earlier Greek writings are not unique to Greece. Here “philosophizing” involves speak- ing about nature in a way characteristic enough to allow for the cogency of identifying specifically cross-cultural influence; it is not merely the kind of talk that would occur at any time and any place.
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