W. K. C. Guthrie. The Greek Philosophers. [거스리. 그리스 철학자들](재독)

*W. K. C. Guthrie, The Greek Philosophers, Harper

 

 

Ch. 1. Greek Ways of Thinking

 

*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'. (10)

 

*they <philosophers' results> are the reaction of a certain temperament to the external world as it presents itself to that particular man, influenced, in the case of most philosophers, by reflection on the remains of previous thinkers. (19)

 

*Suppose the question to be 'What is this desk?' and consider which of the two following answers appeals to you as the most immediately relevant: a) wood, b) something to put books and papers on. The two answers, it will be seen, are not contradictory. They are of different kinds. And the immediate and instinctive choice of one rather than the other shows one to be by temperament inclined to materialism or to teleology. (20-21)

 

*This division of philosophers into materialists and teleologists--matter -philosophers and form-philosophers--is perhaps the most fundamental that can be made in any age, our own included. (21)

 

 

Ch.2. Matter and Form (Ionians and Pythagoreans)

 

*The lifetime of Socrates saw a reaction against physical speculation and a shifting of philosophical interest to human affairs. (22)

 

*'There seems to be a deep-rooted tendency in the human mind to seek . . . something that persists through change. Consequently the desire for explanation seems to be satisfied only by the discovery that what appears to be new and different was there all the time. Hence the search for an underlying identity, a persistent stuff, a substance that is conserved in spite of qualitative changes and in terms of which these changes can be explained. . . . Central is the faith that beneath the apparent multiplicity and confusion of the universe around us there exists a fundamental simplicity and stability which reason may discover. (24)

 

*With Anaximander human reason asserted itself and produced what, right or wrong, was for the most part an account in purely natural terms of the origin of the world and life. (29)

 

*What we must try to understand is a state of mind before matter and spirit had been distinguished, so that the matter which was the sole and unique fount of all existence was itself regarded as endowed with spirit of life. (33) (Anaximander--Aristotle?)

 

*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 of bird which you eat may haply be inhabited by the soul of your grandmother. (34-5)

 

*In short the world may be called a kosmos, an untranslatable word which combined the notions of order, fitness, and beauty. Pythagoras is said to have been the first to call it by this name. (37)

 

*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 differs 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. Structure is the essential thing, and this structure could be expressed numerically, in terms of quantity. (40)

 

 

Ch.3. The Problem of Motion (Heraclitus, Parmenides and the Pluralists)

 

*For Heraclitus, movement and change were the only realities; for Parmenides, movement was impossible, and the whole of reality consisted of a single, motionless and unchanging substance. (47)

 

*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] was indicted for saying that the sun was not a divinity, but only a white-hot stone rather larger than the Peloponnese.

 

. . . The important thing for us to notice here is that with him for the first time a clear distinction was explicitly drawn between matter and mind. he 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. (54-5)

 

*Empedocles had also said, by regarding them <natural objects> 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. (58)

 

*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)

 

 

Ch4. 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)

 

 

Ch.5. Plato

 

*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. (87)

 

*The Heracliteans maintained that everything in the world of space and time was continually flowing, as they put it. Change never ceases 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 this world, since one cannot be said to have 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. (88)

 

*he <Plato> shared with Socrates those two fundamental characteristics, a faith in the possibility of knowledge and a conviction of the need for absolute moral standards. (91-2)

 

*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)

 

*the Platonic Republic may be described as in origin a natural aristocracy. As time 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, transfer between the classes may be effected. (111)

 

*Nor can anyone understand Plato if he does not appreciate the elements of poetry and religion, as well as of philosophy, which the dialogues contain. (120)

 

 

Ch.7. Aristotle

 

*The hallmark of Aristotle as a philosopher is a robust common sense, which refused to believe that this world anything but fully real. Philosophy, as it appeared to him, was an attempt to explain the natural world, and if it could not do so, or could explain it only by the introduction of a mysterious, transcendental pattern-world, devoid of the characteristically natural property of motion, then it must be considered to have failed. His comment on the Platonic Ideas is typical: 'But to call them patterns, or speak of the other things as sharing in them, is to talk in empty words and poetic metaphors.'(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 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 or life have left the concrete object and been replaced in it by something else. (129-30)

 

*The dilemma of Parmenides was as much as anything the result of the immaturity of logic and language in his day, and the way to escape had already been pointed out by Plato. Aristotle paraphrased the dilemma as follows: 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)

 

*Form is essence, or the true nature of a thing, and the full possession of form is equivalent to the proper performance of function. (134)

 

*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 the 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)

 

*In fact not only is soul itself a unity, but so is the whole living creature, soul and body together. Hence theories of the transmigration of a soul into different bodies are absurd. The two are logically distinguishable--soul is not by definition the same thing as a body, or life the same as matter--but, says Aristotle, it is as if the body were the instrument through which a particular life or soul expresses itself. (143)

 

*'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 himself>

 

*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. (146)

 

*The description of the thinking part of us in the third book of the Deanima 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. In 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 hepothesi 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 or 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. (150-1)

 

*'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.' (151) <Aristotle himself>

 

*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 himself>

 

*According to this doctrine all faults consist in excess or defect of a quality which if present to the right, that is to a moderate, degree will be a virtue. Thus courage is a mean between cowardice and foolhardiness, temperance a mean between abstinence and self-indulgence, generosity between meanness and extravagance, proper pride between abjectness and arrogance.

 

But this mean is not a rigid arithmetical middle. It is 'a mean relative to ourselves', differing for people of different temperaments and under different conditions. (154--5)

 

*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 his 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)

 

 

--재독을 마치고

 

내가 그리스에 발을 들여 놓은 지도 벌써 햇수로 3년이 지나가고 있다. 그 중 한 반 년 이상은 [성서]를 읽느라고 시간을 보냈고, 그 밖에 고흐 번역이나, 다른 책의 번역 등등으로 공부 진도가 많이 늦어졌다. 그렇긴 하지만, 지금에 와서는 시위를 떠난 화살처럼 가는데 까지는 가야한다는 생각뿐이다.

 

2001년 9월에 이 책을 처음으로 읽었으니까, 꼭 만 2년 만에 다시 이 책을 잡고 끝낸 셈이다. 그 동안 내 철학 공부에 얼마나 진전이 있었는지, 뭐라고 말하기에는 내 공부가 터무니없이 부족하지만, 어쨌거나, 공부의 길로 들어선 것만은 누구도 부인할 수 없다.

 

 

이 책은 크게 두 가지 이야기를 하고 있다고 할 수 있다. 우선 ‘철학하는 행위의 의미’에 대한 답변이다. 그것은 ‘보편성과 본질의 추구’라고 직접적이지는 않지만, 그렇게 말하고 있다는 인상이다. 그 다음에는 철학하는 방법을 크게 볼 때 이분법적으로 볼 수 있다는 걸 지적하고 있다.

 

 

Suppose the question to be 'What is this desk?' and consider which of the two following answers appeals to you as the most immediately relevant: a) wood, b) something to put books and papers on. The two answers, it will be seen, are not contradictory. They are of different kinds. And the immediate and instinctive choice of one rather than the other shows one to be by temperament inclined to materialism or to teleology. (20-21)

 

 

This division of philosophers into materialists and teleologists--matter -philosophers and form-philosophers--is perhaps the most fundamental that can be made in any age, our own included. (21)

 

 

유물론과 목적론의 대립과 변증법적 통합, 이것이 철학의 큰 흐름이라는 지적은 꼭 명심할 필요가 있다. (이 진술이 갖는 의미에 대해서는 앞으로 많은 공구가 따라야 할 것이다.)

 

그러나, 그리스 철학과 관련지어서 명심해야 한다고 거스리가 지적하는 바는 그리스 철학의 요소, 즉 사상이나 배경, 언어 등에 대해서 당대의 입장을 제대로 이해하지 못하고 현대적인 시각에서 파편적으로 이해해서는 안 된다는 점이다. (그렇기 때문에 그리스 철학을 제대로 하려면 그리스 어를 배워야 하지만, 그것은 나에게는 무리한 요구이다. 그리스 철학이 내 철학 공부의 종착지가 아니라, 거쳐 가야할 역이기 때문이다.)

 

거스리는 탈레스로부터 시작된 그리스 철학을 버닛보다는 좀더 명료하게(물론 버닛의 영향이 많이 드러나고 있는 것은 사실이지만), 그러나 깊이 면에서는 좀 얕게 제시하고 있다. 그리스 철학은, 어림잡아 말한다면, 우리의 현상계와 그 현상계 이면에 있을 본질에 대한 추구, 또 그 두 가지 방향의 갈등, 아직 해결되지 않은 언어적 혼란 등의 범벅이라고 할 수 있을 것이다. 이러한 문제는 플라톤을 일생 괴롭힌 문제였고, 플라톤은 많은 부분에서 그러한 혼란을 해결했지만, 어떤 부분에서는 지나치게 목적론적인 태도를 취한 과오도 없지 않다고 할 수 있다. 그러한 플라톤의 지나친 태도는 아리스토텔레스를 만나 한풀 꺾인 것으로 짐작이 되는데, 아직 아리스토텔레스는 공부를 하지 않은 상태이므로 뭐라고 단정 지을 수는 없다.

 

 

본질적으로 철학은 좀더 깊이 있는 사고를 요청한다.