W. K. C. Guthrie, The Greek Philosophers: From Thales to Aristotle, Harper & Row (1독)

*W. K. C. Guthrie, The Greek Philosophers: From Thales to Aristotle, Harper & Row

(참고: W. K. C. 거드리, 희랍 철학 입문, 박종현, 종로서적)

 

<감상>

(다행스럽게도--다행스럽다는 말은 내가 추구하는 삶을 살 수 있다는 측면에서이리라--이 책을 다시 정리하는 와중에, 중요한 부분들을 옮겨 적는 도중에, 철학 공부에 대한 의욕이 솟구쳤다. 뭔가를 추구해 나가는 삶.)

우선 그리스 철학을 간략하게 간추린 거스리(Guthrie)의 이 책은 기본서로서의 역할을 충실히 해주고 있다고 할 수 있다. 무엇보다도 중요한 세 단어에 대한 설명은 우리가 영어나 혹은 우리 말로 접할 때 가지게 되는 그릇된 코노테이션(connotation-단어에 함유된 의미)을 방지하는 데 큰 도움을 주었다.

 

*Three Terms

1. dike[justice] 1)the way in which a certain class of people usually behaves, or the normal course of nature(6)

2)[기원전 5세기 경에 뜻이 전이] “What is expected of a man," i. e. that he will act decently, pay his debts and so forth.

2. arete[virtue] 1) a relative term

2) being good at something

3) efficiency

--Arete then meant first of all skill or efficiency at a particular job, and it will be agreed that such efficiency depends on a proper understanding or knowledge of the job in hand. (9)

3. theos[god]--초인간적인 것.

--the Greeks did not, as Christians or Jews do, first assert the existence of God and then proceed to enumerate his attributes, saying 'God is good', 'God is love' and so forth. Rather they were so impressed or awed by the things in life or nature remarkable either for joy or fear that they said 'this is a god' or 'that is a god'. The Christian says 'God is love', the Greek 'Love is theos', or 'a god'.

 

그 다음 우리가 그리스 철학을 생각할 때 가장 핵심 중의 하나라고 볼 수 있는, 그리고 지금까지도 철학의 중요한 쟁점의 하나인 유물론(materialism)과 목적론(teleology, 이것을 유심론으로 바꾸어 생각해도 무방한지)의 발생과 대립, 합일에의 시도 등에 대한 설명이다. 러셀이 유물론의 입장에서 피타고라스와 플라톤을 비난하는 것과는 달리, 거스리는 이들의 철학을 좀더 공정하게 소개하려 하고 있다.

이 양자의 입장을 아직 정확하게 이해하고 있지는 못하지만, 나름대로 이해한 것을 바탕으로 대략적으로 살펴보자면,

 

우리의 현실 세계는 끊임없이 변화하고 있다. 이 계속적으로 변화하는 현실 세계를 어떻게 설명하고 해명할 것인가? 여기에 대해서 유물론자들은 현실 세계의 불완전성과 변화를 받아들이는 측면이고, 목적론자들은 수학적 세계가 보여주는 정확성과 관념성에 바탕하여, 이러한 세계를 실체로 인정하지 않고 실체의 세계가 따로 있다고 상정하는 그런 쪽이다. (나의 이러한 생각이 어느 정도 정확한 파악인지, 아니면 지나친 단순화와, 오해인지는 잘 모르겠다.)

 

그 다음 이러한 유물론과 목적론, 양자에서 파르메니데스가 등장하여 형이상학에 추상적(abstract)한 논리를 개진하고, 이러한 그의 철학은 플라톤에게 큰 영향을 미친 것으로 볼 수 있다.

The significance of Parmenides is that he started the Greeks on the path of abstract thought, set the mind working without reference to external facts, and exalted its results above those of sense-perception. In this the Greeks were apt pupils, so much so that according to some their genius for abstract thought and for neglecting the world of external fact set European science on the wrong track for a thousand years or so. Whether for good or evil, here we see the process at its beginning. (49)

 

플라톤은 궁극적으로 관념론자이고, 거기다 진리에 대한 확신 때문에 러셀의 비난을 받기는 하지만, 한편으로는 유물론과 목적론의 대립 가운데서, 이 둘의 통합을 꾀했다.

 

In coming to a decision on the central question of what was real and what was not, Plato was deeply influenced by two earlier thinkers whose views we have already considered, Heraclitus and Parmenides. The Heracliteans maintained that everything in the world of space and time was continually flowing, as they put it. Change never ceased to operate for a moment and nothing was the same for two instants together. The consequence of this doctrine appeared to be that there could be no knowledge of something which is different at this moment from what it was a moment ago. Knowledge demands a stable object to be known. Parmenides on the other hand had said that there is such a stable reality, which can be discovered only through the activity of the mind working altogether apart from the senses. The object of knowledge must be immutable and eternal, exempt from time and change, whereas the senses only bring us into contact with the mutable and perishable.

These reflections, together with a deep interest in Pythagorean mathematics, were brought by Plato to bear on the questions of definition which Socrates had raised in the ethical field. For him two things were simultaneously at stake, not only the existence of absolute moral standards which was the legacy of Socrates, but also the whole possibility of scientific knowledge, which on a Heraclitean theory of the world a chimera. Plato had a passionate faith in both, and since therefore a sceptical answer was for him unthinkable, he did the only other thing possible. He maintained that the objects of knowledge, the things which could be defined, did exist, but were not to be identified with anything in the perceptible world. Their existence was in an ideal world outside space and time. These are the famous Platonic 'Ideas', so called by a transliteration of the Greek word idea which Plato applied to them, and which meant form or pattern. (87-9)

 

러셀의 [서양철학사]와 이 책에서 읽은 것을 바탕으로 플라톤 철학의 계보 내지는 영향을 추적해보면, 그의 사고는 피타고라스와 파르메니데스의 영향 아래, 헤라클라토스의 철학을 합치시키려고 했던 것으로 파악된다. 문제는 플라톤 철학이 윤리학의 문제에 너무 몰두한 나머지, 종교적 성격을 띠면서, 그것이 교조화 했다는 점이리라. 플라톤 철학의 종교적 성격은 기독교의 사상으로 이어지고 있는데, 이러한 부분을 좀더 구체적이고 정확하게 추적해 보아야 하리라.

이 책의 마지막 부분에서 다루어진 아리스토텔레스는 내가 보기에는 플라톤적인 이원론이 갖고 있는 문제점을 어느 정도 해결했고, 또 플라톤적인 관념론 내지는 윤리*종교적 측면에서 벗어나고 있는 듯하다. (물론 아직 아리스토텔레스의 철학에 대해서는 정말로 이 책에서 접한 내용밖에는 아는 것이 전무한 형편이지만, 그의 철학이 내 귀에 쏙 들어오는 부분들이 있다.)

 

The question whether soul and body are one is no more legitimate than the question whether the wax and the impression of the seal upon it are one, or in general whether the matter of a thing is one with the thing of which it is the matter. (145) [Aristotle's Own Words]

 

In a purely scientific passage of his treatise on the Generation of Animals, he actually concludes that reason, of all the manifestations of life, 'alone enters from outside and is divine', because all the others can be shown to be inseparable from some activity of the body. We may also take into account his exhortations at the end of the Ethics to the life of pure thought as being not only the exercise of our own highest faculty, but also the cultivation of that part in which we resemble God. . . . The description of the thinking part of us in the third book of the De anima makes it clear that there can be no survival of individual personality, no room for an Orphic or Platonic eschatology of rewards and punishments, nor a cycle of incarnations. The doctrine of form and matter has the last word. (146)

 

(삶이라는, 혹은 세계라는 그 크기를 짐작할 수 없을 정도로 어마어마하게 거대한 것 앞에서, 내가 알 수 있는 것과, 또 내 능력은 아주 보잘 것 없다. 그럼에도 알려는 노력마저 하지 않는다면 그것은 인간으로 태어난 특권을 포기하는 불손한 짓이라는 생각을 떨칠 수 없다. 나는 호기심이 꽤 많은 놈이지만, 그 중에서도 문학에 대한 관심이 대단하다. 그리고, 탁구도 상당히 중요한 부분이었다. 철학에 대해서는 호기심에 반해 그다지 열심히 몰두하지는 못했는데, 꾸준히 정진해야할 분야 중의 하나이다.)

 

 

 

 

#Chapter I, Greek Ways of Thinking

*Three Terms

1. dike[justice] 1)the way in which a certain class of people usually behaves, or the normal course of nature(6)

2)[기원전 5세기 경에 뜻이 전이] “What is expected of a man," i. e. that he will act decently, pay his debts and so forth.

2. arete[virtue] 1) a relative term

2) being good at something

3) efficiency

--Arete then meant first of all skill or efficiency at a particular job, and it will be agreed that such efficiency depends on a proper understanding or knowledge of the job in hand. (9)

3. theos[god]--초인간적인 것.

--the Greeks did not, as Christians or Jews do, first assert the existence of God and then proceed to enumerate his attributes, saying 'God is good', 'God is love' and so forth. Rather they were so impressed or awed by the things in life or nature remarkable either for joy or fear that they said 'this is a god' or 'that is a god'. The Christian says 'God is love', the Greek 'Love is theos', or 'a god'.

 

#Chapter 2, Matter and Form

*On its religious side, the core of Pythagoreanism was a belief in the immortality of the human soul, and its progress through a series of incarnations not only as man but also in the bodies of other creatures. With this is connected the most important of Pythagorean taboos, their abstention from animal flesh. For the beast or bird which you eat may haply be inhabited by the soul of your grandmother. (34-5) [피타고라스 유파의 생각이 불교의 윤회설과 유사함을 알 수 있는 부분. 또 육식을 하지 않는 부분도 주목할 필요가 있음.]

*Just as the Universe is a kosmos, or ordered whole, so Pythagoras believed that each one of us is a kosmos in miniature. We are organisms which reproduce the structural principles of the macrocosm. (37)

*Each separate thing was what it was not because of its material elements (which were common to all), but because of the proportion in which those elements were mixed; and since it is in this element of proportion that one class of things differ from another, so they argued that this, the law of its structure, was the essential thing to discover if one wanted to understand it The emphasis is shifted from the matter to the form. (40) [Pythagoreans' notion]

 

#Chapter III, The Problem of Motion

*The significance of Parmenides is that he started the Greeks on the path of abstract thought, set the mind working without reference to external facts, and exalted its results above those of sense-perception. In this the Greeks were apt pupils, so much so that according to some their genius for abstract thought and for neglecting the world of external fact set European science on the wrong track for a thousand years or so. Whether for good or evil, here we see the process at its beginning. (49)

*He<Anaxagoras-quoter> was indicted for saying that the sun was not a divinity, but only a white-hot stone rather larger than the Peloponnese. (54)

*He<Anaxagoras-quoter> boldly said, not only, like Empedocles, that there must be a moving cause apart from the matter which was moved, but that whatever was not matter must be mind. Mind rules the world and has brought order into it out of confusion (55) [A clear distinction between matter and mind]

*Their <atomists-quoter> basic idea, like those of Empedocles and Anaxagoras, arose directly out of his [Parmenides] contention that there could be no coming-into-being or destruction of anything real. Consequently the apparent birth and perishing of natural objects must be explained, as Empedocles had also said, by regarding them as no more than chance combinations of a multiplicity of elements which alone can be supposed to deserve the name of existents. To explain them thus, they hit upon the truly brilliant conjecture (for as such it must be described) that the elements, or only true realities, were tiny solid bodies, far too small to be perceived by our senses, clashing and recoiling in endless motion through a boundless space. These atomoi--ironically enough, as it seems to-day, the word means 'unsplittable'--were the smallest extant particles of matter, solid, hard and indestructible. (57--8)

*The finest and most perfectly spherical, and hence the most mobile and volatile, of all the atoms form the souls of animals and men; so thoroughgoing was the materialism of Democritus. (59)

 

#Chapter IV. The Reaction towards Humanism (The Sophists and Socrates)

*Truth is purely relative. Protagoras, however, allowed room for conventional views of truth and morals by adding that although no one opinion is truer than another, one opinion may be better than another. If to the eye of a man with jaundice all things appear yellow, they really are yellow for him, and no man has the right to tell him they are not. But it is worth while for a doctor to change that man's world by altering the state of his body so that things will cease to be yellow for him. Similarly if any man sincerely believes that it is good to steal, then that statement is true for him so long as he believes it. But the great majority for whom it both seems and is bad, ought to endeavour to change the state of his mind and lead it to beliefs which are not indeed truer, but better. The test by truth or falsehood is abandoned, and replaced by the pragmatic test. (69)

 

#Chapter V. Plato (i) The Doctrine of Ideas

*In coming to a decision on the central question of what was real and what was not, Plato was deeply influenced by two earlier thinkers whose views we have already considered, Heraclitus and Parmenides. The Heracliteans maintained that everything in the world of space and time was continually flowing, as they put it. Change never ceased to operate for a moment and nothing was the same for two instants together. The consequence of this doctrine appeared to be that there could be no knowledge of something which is different at this moment from what it was a moment ago. Knowledge demands a stable object to be known. Parmenides on the other hand had said that there is such a stable reality, which can be discovered only through the activity of the mind working altogether apart from the senses. The object of knowledge must be immutable and eternal, exempt from time and change, whereas the senses only bring us into contact with the mutable and perishable.

These reflections, together with a deep interest in Pythagorean mathematics, were brought by Plato to bear on the questions of definition which Socrates had raised in the ethical field. For him two things were simultaneously at stake, not only the existence of absolute moral standards which was the legacy of Socrates, but also the whole possibility of scientific knowledge, which on a Heraclitean theory of the world a chimera. Plato had a passionate faith in both, and since therefore a sceptical answer was for him unthinkable, he did the only other thing possible. He maintained that the objects of knowledge, the things which could be defined, did exist, but were not to be identified with anything in the perceptible world. Their existence was in an ideal world outside space and time. These are the famous Platonic 'Ideas', so called by a transliteration of the Greek word idea which Plato applied to them, and which meant form or pattern. (87-9)

*We may say then that in one way Plato elevated to the status of philosophical doctrine, and defended as such, what many of us in our conversation and writing unconsciously assume; that is, the existence of something invariable corresponding to the general terms that we use, over and above the varying individual instances which are all that the term in fact covers. The difference is that whereas the ordinary man is still in very much the position in which Socrates found him, of throwing general terms about freely without pausing to think whether he knows what they mean, Plato's consciously held belief that they stood for a metaphysical reality was intended to endorse the lesson of Socrates that we would never get anywhere unless we did that very thing--i. e. take the trouble to find out exactly what they mean. (93-4)

*Philosophy is, in the words of the Platonic Socrates, 'a preparation for death', in that its business is to fit the soul to stay permanently in the world of the Ideas instead of being condemned to return once more to the limitations of a mortal frame. (96)

*We may take it that the existence of the Ideas, the immortality of the soul, and the view of knowledge as recollection were all seriously held philosophic doctrines. (98)

 

#Chapter VI. Plato (ii) Ethical and theological answers to the Sophists

*the Platonic Republic may be described as in origin a natural aristocracy. As times goes on it will be largely an aristocracy of birth, for Plato thinks it overwhelmingly likely that the children of each class will both by heredity and environment incline to resemble their parents and develop into suitable members of the same class. He adds however that machinery must be provided whereby if an exceptionally gifted child should appear among the lowest class, or one of the highest show himself unworthy to be trained as a ruler, transfers between the classes may be effected. (111)

 

#Chapter VII. Aristotle (i)The Aristotelian Universe

*The hallmark of Aristotle as a philosopher is a robust common sense, which refused to believe that this world was anything but fully real. (125)

*As a young man he accepted the whole of Plato's two-world philosophy--the doctrine of Ideas, the immortality and transmigration of the soul, and the view of earthly knowledge as a gradual recollection of knowledge from another world. If he later felt compelled, as an independent thinker, to give up the mystical doctrines of the Ideas and the kinship of the soul with things beyond, there were parts of the soul with things beyond, there were parts of the legacy which never left him. (126)

*Since perceptible things change, and change was conceived of by the ancients as taking place between two opposites or extremes--from black to white, hot to cold, small to large and so on--Aristotle made use of the term which had been employed by the earliest Greek philosophers and called the forms also the 'opposites'. The reason why his predecessors had found the problem of change so difficult of logical explanation, he said, was that they had argued as if it demanded assent to the proposition that these opposite qualities could change into one another. They confused the statement 'this cold thing has become hot' with the statement 'heat has become coldness'. The latter statement is a violation of the law of contradiction and is impossible, as Parmenides had been acute enough to perceive. Hence the need to postulate the substratum, which is in itself (though of course it never exists naked and alone) quite qualitiless. Given this substratum--given, that is, what seems to us the elementary distinction between substance and attribute--one can explain a process of change--e. g. cooling, fading, or death--by saying, not that heat, darkness in colour, or life have changed into their opposites, cold, lightness, death, but that the heat, darkness or life have left the concrete object and been replaced in it by something else. (129-30)

*There is no such thing as becoming, since neither will that which is become (for it already is), nor can anything come to be out of what is not. (133) [Parmenides가 처한 딜레마에 대한 아리스토텔레스의 해설]

*This demand for an external mover is satisfied in each separate act of change within the physical world. But it must be satisfied also for the Universe as a whole. There must be a cause external to it, and since its framework is everlasting the cause must be eternal. A perfect being is demanded, the 'best' by which all the 'better' and 'worse' in this world of matter and imperfection are assessed, a first cause to which all the causes of motion and change within the world ultimately owe their being. Such a cause it must be which keeps in motions the wheeling heavenly bodies, on whose regularity depends the due succession of night and day, summer and winter, and therefore ultimately the life of all things on earth. Being eternal and perfect, it contains no element of unrealized potentiality, and hence cannot suffer motion in the philosophic sense, which is the progress from potency to actuality. We thus arrive at the concept of God as the Unmoved Mover. (136)

*God, as we know, goes through no processes. He is pure mind, which can contemplate in a single instant, and does so eternally, the whole realm of true being.

It is a splendid thought, but unfortunately we have not finished with the philosophic conscience. 'The whole realm of true being'--yes, but of what does this realm consist? The conclusion is that the only possible object of the eternal thought of God is himself, the one full and perfect being. There is no way by which he could include in his thought the creatures of the physical world, without abandoning the initial postulate on which all his nature depends. He could not be free from movement (kinesis) himself if he applied his thought to objects which are themselves subject to kinesis. Thus all possibility of divine providence is excluded. God cannot care for th world: he is not even aware of it. St. Thomas tried to soften this conclusion by arguing that God's knowledge of himself must include knowledge of the world, which owes its being to him, but as Sir David Ross says: 'This is a possible and a fruitful line of thought, but it is not that which Aristotle adopts.' (139)

 

#Chapter VIII: Aristotle (ii)Human Beings

*The question whether soul and body are one is no more legitimate than the question whether the wax and the impression of the seal upon it are one, or in general whether the matter of a thing is one with the thing of which it is the matter. (145) [Aristotle's Own Words]

*In a purely scientific passage of his treatise on the Generation of Animals, he actually concludes that reason, of all the manifestations of life, 'alone enters from outside and is divine', because all the others can be shown to be inseparable from some activity of the body. We may also take into account his exhortations at the end of the Ethics to the life of pure thought as being not only the exercise of our own highest faculty, but also the cultivation of that part in which we resemble God. . . . The description of the thinking part of us in the third book of the De anima makes it clear that there can be no survival of individual personality, no room for an Orphic or Platonic eschatology of rewards and punishments, nor a cycle of incarnations. The doctrine of form and matter has the last word. (146)

*We know that one effect of his general doctrine was to draw the bonds between soul and body much tighter than previous accounts had done. We cannot understand the soul if we neglect the body through which it manifests itself. So with a particular sense; we cannot understand sight unless we examine the structure and working of the eye. Sight and the eye are not the same--they are logically distinguishable--but together they form but one living, active organ and must be studied as such. This gives to Aristotle's work on sensation a much more modern tone than anything said by his predecessors. It is nearer biology and farther from metaphysics, or guessing. (147)

*In the first book of his Ethics he attacks the Platonic Ideas (although, he says, 'it is uphill work to do so, seeing that the authors of the doctrine are our friends'). There is not just one thing, 'the good'. There is a different good for different classes, a different aim for different types of action. Moreover the aim of ethical study is practical, not scientific; and if our aim in it is to make men and their actions better, then ex hypothesi the material of our study is that which can be changed. But where the object of study is not immutable, the philosophic aim of truth of knowledge is unattainable. Truth and knowledge are strangers to the realm of the contingent. Again and again he is at pains to point out that ethics is not really a part of philosophy at all. . . . 'It is the duty of an educated man to aim at accuracy in each separate case only as far as the nature of the subject allows it: to demand logical demonstration from an orator, for example, would be as absurd as to allow a mathematician to use the arts of persuasion.' (150-1)

*Virtue is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean relative to ourselves, determined by a rational principle and in the way in which the man of practical wisdom would determine it. (154) [Aristotle's own definition]

*The ergon of every creature is to attain its own form and perform its proper activity. It cannot and should not do more. Aristotle would say of a horse, as he says of man, that its ergon was to live according to the highest that is in it. But he does not say, nor should we expect him to, that this means 'to aim at humanity as far as lies in its power'--to try to attain to the life of the class above it. It has functions which it shares with man--growth, reproduction, sensation--yet the best and most characteristic function of man is lacking. Its highest activity is yet in a different world from the highest activity of man. The relations between man and God are different. Man no doubt is clogged with matter; he has imperfections and hindrances which are lacking to the untroubled perfection of God. Therefore he cannot exercise without constant interruption the highest that is in him. But not even the supreme Being possesses a faculty which is lacking in man, as man possesses a faculty which is lacking in other creatures. We have a privilege and a responsibility. We shall not indeed make the most of these by trying to ignore the body and its needs, nor the community life to which they logically point. For the body is as much a part of us as the mind. Each of us is a unity, as the study of the psyche, the science of life, has taught. Therefore in a complete life the moral virtues must have their place. But the moral virtues(and here I quote Aristotle's own words) are secondary. It is the creed of the unrepentant intellectualist. 'The activity of the mind is life.' (159-60)