존 버닛. 그리스 철학 (John Burnet - Greek Philosophy)

<John Burnet, Greek Philosophy, Macmillan>

 

*A century saw the true account of eclipses clearly stated, and this led up to the discovery that the earth was a planet. A little later some Greeks even taught that the sun was not a planet, but the centre of the planetary system. Nor must we forget that hand in hand with this remarkable development of mathematical and astronomical science there went an equally striking advance in the study of the living organism. (8)

 

*If we look at Greek philosophy as a whole, we shall see that it is dominated from beginning to end by the problem of reality. In the last resort the question is always, 'What is real?' (9)

 

*the Milesians had drawn the outlines of the theory of matter in the physicist's sense of the word, and these outlines still survive in a recognisable form in our text-books. That, and not the particular astronomical doctrine they taught, is the central thing in the system, and that is why it is reckoned as the beginning of philosophy. It is the earliest answer to the question, 'What is reality?‘ (21)

 

*There are three kinds of men, just as there are three classes of strangers who come to the Olympic Games. The lowest consists of those who come to buy and sell, and next above them are those who come to compete. Best of all are those who simply come to look on. Men may be classified accordingly as lovers of wisdom, lovers of honour, and lovers of gain. (33)

 

*The fateful doctrine of two worlds, the world of thought and the world of sense, in fact originated from the apparent impossibility of reconciling the nature of number with continuity as the Eleatics called it, or the unlimited as the Pythagoreans said. . . .

 

The 'figures' are now regarded, then, not as identical with the numbers, but as likenesses of them, and we shall not be surprised to find that, once the demand for a complete identification had been given up, an attempt was made to explain other things than the elements in this way. (72)

 

*Leukippos was the first philosopher to affirm, with a full consciousness of what he was doing, the existence of empty space. The Pythagorean void had been more or less identified with 'air', but the void of Leukippos was really a vacuum. (77)

 

*'With regard to the gods, I cannot feel sure either that they are or that they are not, nor what they are like in figure; for there are many things that hinder such knowledge, the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life.' (95) (Protagoras)

 

*The Pythagoreans, he <Aristotle> tells us, had only determined a few things numerically, such as opportunity, justice, and marriage, and they had been influenced by superficial analogies; it was Socrates that suggested a systematic search for the universal in other fields than mathematics. (127)

 

*The Pythagorean doctrine of imitation left the sensible and intelligible as two separate worlds; the doctrine of participation makes the sensible identical with the intelligible, except that in sensible things the forms appear to us as a manifold instead of in their unity, and that they are only imperfectly embodied in the particulars. We should not be entitled to predicate the form of the thing unless the form were really in it. (135)

 

*In the Gorgias Sokrates says that goodness is due to the presence of arrangement and order in the soul, and that this can only be produced by knowledge, not by experience or routine. (144)

 

*Plato indicates in the clearest possible manner that Sokrates really owed his death to his political attitude. . . . the real offence of Sokrates was his criticism of the democracy and its leaders. (151)

 

*In the fifth century, the youth of Athens got their higher education from a number of distinguished foreigners who paid flying visits from time to time; in the fourth, the youth of all Hellas came to Athens to sit at the feet of two Athenian citizens, Isokrates and Plato. (174)

 

*Two methods are specially associated with Plato's name, that of Analysis and that of Division. (179)

 

*Now we may say that the present sensation of the individual is the only test by which we can judge what is, but it will not be maintained that it is also the test of what is to be. With regard to that, the belief of the professional or the specialist always carries more weight than that of the layman. Where the future is concerned, it is not everyone, but the man who is wiser than others, who will be the 'measure', and Protagoras himself admits this; (198)

 

*The conclusion of the Theaetetus, then, is that knowledge can neither be sensation nor the work of the mind. Sensation is merely a resultant of motion, and gives us no reality outside itself. Thought alone merely yields combinations of names. (205)

 

*the mature philosophy of Plato found reality, whether intelligible or sensible, in the combination of matter and form, and not in either separately. (270)

 

*Plato brought the idea of god into philosophy for the first time, and the form the doctrine took in his mind was that God was a living soul and that God was good. So much as that, but no more, he believed himself to have established by strictly scientific reasoning. (273)

 

*At any rate, it does not admit of doubt that Plato conceived the function of Astronomy to be the discovery of the simplest hypotheses which would account for the apparent complexity of celestial phenomena. (282)

 

*'Plato in his old age repented of having given the earth the central place in the universe, to which it had no right'. . . . It does not follow from it, however, that Plato adopted the heliocentric hypothesis. (283) (Theophrastos)

 

 

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버닛의 이 책은 처음에는 쉬워 보였지만, 후반부는 상당히 난해했다. 철학을 한다는 것이 어려움을 다시 한 번 절감하게 해준 책이라고나 할까? (어려움은 언제나 언어라는 장벽과, 생각의 한계라는 장벽, 이 두 가지 측면에서 동시에 작용한다.) 이 책보다는 거스리의 책이 입문서로서 좀더 명료하게 그리스 철학에 들어설 수 있게 해준다고 할 수 있다. 그렇지만, 거스리의 책 역시 이 책에 많은 부분을 빚지고 있다는 점도 사실이다.

 

철학의 출발이 ‘실재(reality)’에 대한 관심이고(다시 말하자면 ‘대상이나 사물, 혹은 제 현상에 대한 체계적이고 조리 있는 설명’이라고 할 수 있지 않을까?), 그 관심은 이 고대의 철학자(혹은 과학자)들로 하여금, 엉성하기는 하지만 나름대로 대답을 내놓게 하였다. 그러나, 인간의 인지가 발달해가는 가운데, 이 철학자들은 우리가 생활에서 경험하는 것과, 우리의 사고가 생각해 낸 것(이를테면 수학적 체계) 사이에 넘어설 수 없는 괴리감 같은 것을 발견하게 되었다.

 

 

The fateful doctrine of two worlds, the world of thought and the world of sense, in fact originated from the apparent impossibility of reconciling the nature of number with continuity as the Eleatics called it, or the unlimited as the Pythagoreans said. . . .

 

The 'figures' are now regarded, then, not as identical with the numbers, but as likenesses of them, and we shall not be surprised to find that, once the demand for a complete identification had been given up, an attempt was made to explain other things than the elements in this way. (72)

 

 

철학자들은 이 두 세계의 배타성 때문에 어느 한 쪽을 선택하지 않을 수 없는 입장에 놓이고 말았는데, (거칠고 단순하지만 내가 이해한 바로는) 이 양립할 수 없는 것을 조화시키려는 시도가 플라톤 철학의 큰 뿌리라고 할 수 있다.

 

the mature philosophy of Plato found reality, whether intelligible or sensible, in the combination of matter and form, and not in either separately. (270)

 

 

전체적으로 사실 이 책은 플라톤 철학의 발생과 그 배경, 핵심 내용을 소개한 책이라고도 볼 수 있는데, 그것은 그리스 철학의 제 문제와 해결책이 플라톤에 집결되기 때문일 것이다. 플라톤에 이르러(물론 그 이전 철학자들의 저작들이 온전히 남아있지 않은 탓이기도 하지만) 인간의 지력은 그 때까지의 한계를 뛰어넘어, 새로운 도약을 하게 된 것으로 보인다(플라톤의 사상에 소크라테스가 미친 영향력을 간과해서는 안 되겠지만). (플라톤에 대한 글은 너무나 난해하여 나로서는 소화하기에 벅차기 짝이 없었지만, 앞으로 남은 플라톤의 대화편을 읽어 나가면서, 참조하고 도전해 볼 수 있으리라 본다.)

 

철학이 아직 미분화된 학문이었던 이 시점에서 좀더 분명하게 드러나는 것은 철학이라는 학문이, 언어학, 논리학(논리학은 철학의 한 분과라고 봐야겠지만)과 불가분의 관계라는 점이다. 그래서, 어학과 사고를 명료하게 하는 것의 중요성이 더욱 두드러진다.