A Curious Thalesian Tale

Thales of Miletus

Well might he look down

from time to time...

(Image from Livius.org)

In my recent 'literary' diversions touching upon Christmas, Boxing Day, St. Pugnacious, and Islamist song-and-dance, I've detoured from my serious interest in the trial of theoretical curiosity.

As perhaps became apparent from my Ciceronian post, distrust of curiosity for distracting one from more immediate, serious matters did not begin with the Church Fathers, but those fathers were able to mine the rich, classical veins for nuggets of ancient wisdom either explicitly or implicitly critical of curiosity's distractions.

In Plato's dialogue Theaetetus, Socrates criticizes those philosophers who concern themselves with distant, abstract things but neglect practical affairs closer to hand:

[T]he lords of philosophy have never, from their youth upwards, known their way to the Agora, or the dicastery, or the council, or any other political assembly; they neither see nor hear the laws or decrees, as they are called, of the state written or recited; the eagerness of political societies in the attainment of office . . . do not enter even into their dreams. Whether any event has turned out well or ill in the city, what disgrace may have descended to any one from his ancestors, male or female, are matters of which the philosopher no more knows than he can tell, as they say, how many pints are contained in the ocean. Neither is he conscious of his ignorance. For he does not hold aloof in order; that he may gain a reputation; but the truth is, that the outer form of him only is in the city: his mind, disdaining the littlenesses and nothingnesses of human things, is "flying all abroad" as Pindar says, measuring earth and heaven and the things which are under and on the earth and above the heaven, interrogating the whole nature of each and all in their entirety, but not condescending to anything which is within reach. (Plato, Theaetetus, translated by Benjamin Jowett, Part 1, Page 38)

Socrates illustrates this with an anecdote about Thales:

I will illustrate my meaning . . . by the jest which the clever witty Thracian handmaid is said to have made about Thales, when he fell into a well as he was looking up at the stars. She said, that he was so eager to know what was going on in heaven, that he could not see what was before his feet. This is a jest which is equally applicable to all philosophers. For the philosopher is wholly unacquainted with his next-door neighbour; he is ignorant, not only of what he is doing, but he hardly knows whether he is a man or an animal; he is searching into the essence of man, and busy in enquiring what belongs to such a nature to do or suffer different from any other.... (Plato, Theaetetus, translated by Benjamin Jowett, Part 1, Page 39)

The Church Father Tertullian, brilliant rhetorician and skilled lawyer but somewhat neglectful of details, picked up on this anecdote to disparage curiosity:

Now, pray tell me, what wisdom is there in this hankering after conjectural speculations? What proof is afforded to us, notwithstanding the strong confidence of its assertions, by the useless affectation of a scrupulous curiosity, which is tricked out with an artful show of language? It therefore served Thales of Miletus quite right, when, star-gazing as he walked with all the eyes he had, he had the mortification of falling into a well, and was unmercifully twitted by an Egyptian, who said to him, "Is it because you found nothing on earth to look at, that you think you ought to confine your gaze to the sky?" His fall, therefore, is a figurative picture of the philosophers; of those, I mean, who persist in applying their studies to a vain purpose, since they indulge a stupid curiosity on natural objects, which they ought rather (intelligently to direct) to their Creator and Governor. (Tertullian, Ad Nationes, Book II, Chapter 4)

Tertullian knows the story, but he has 'forgotten' that the one who twitted Thales was a Thracian maiden and has substituted, in her stead, an Egyptian. He has also changed the story from one illustrating the point that philosophers ought to apply their intellectual concentration upon practical affairs to one illustrating the point that philosophers ought to direct their curiosity toward God.

Actually, Tertullian's wording has implied that philosophers ought not to "indulge a stupid curiosity on natural objects" but on "their Creator and Governor" -- as the translator has realized and as the Latin original shows:

qui stupidam exerceant curiositatem naturae quam prius in artificem eius et praesidem (Tertullian, Adversus nationes II 4, quoted in Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, p. 629, n. 68)

Tertullian, however, surely did not mean that one ought to "indulge a stupid curiosity" on one's "Creator and Governor," i.e., God, but (like Homer) had simply nodded off -- and was thus also 'off' his otherwise dependable rhetorical brilliance.

Nitpicking aside, let us turn to Hans Blumenberg, who also notes the Thalesian anecdote and Tertullian's use of it:

The first philosopher to live in Athens, Anaxagoras, could be accused of impiety because he had maintained that the sun was a glowing mass; and even if this accusation was only an explicit formula for the demythologizing of philosophy that he definitively carried out, it was nevertheless certainly not accidental that it became the central charge against him. Perhaps the anecdote about Thales that Plato hands down also has a similar background; the laughter of the Thracian maid over the philosopher who fell in the well while sauntering and observing the stars may represent not only the malicious pleasure of the unfree in observing the consequences of idleness, but also an understanding of the revenge taken by her tellurian gods on the Milesian who devoted his attention entirely to the stars. In the patristic polemics, the gaze upward is still contrasted, as the one capable of transcendence, to the downward gaze of the heathens, who are in the power of material idols. But the Thracian maid's ridicule of the protophilosopher Thales also hints at a further motif, which was to reappear in the course of the process through which the theoretical attitude became questionable: the conflict between the distant and the nearby, between that which has no immediate effect in life and the daily duties of a citizen in a community. He knows his way about the heavens, but he does not see what lies before his feet, sneers the slave girl. (Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, pp. 245-246)

Although Blumenberg implicitly acknowledges that he is speculating in suggesting that the Thracian maid inferred that Thales was being divinely punished for his (curious) attention to the stars instead of to the gods closer to hand, the speculation allows Blumenberg more readily to draw out the implications of the tale for Tertullian:

[F]or Tertullian . . . [curiosity] has scarcely anything to do with the Augustinian "pleasure of the eyes" but exhibits a more 'literary' character, comparable to the vanity of education and the pleasure of dialectical activity. To this the simplicity of the anima idiotica [uneducated soul] is contrasted. To the extent that the cognitive appetite directs itself at nature, it is reprehensible not on account of the nature of its objects but rather because it prefers the inferior realm of the dependent and the conditioned to the immediacy of its relation to its author. Thales's astronomical curiosity is reprimanded for this metaphysical short-sightedness. (Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, p. 302)

Tertullian thus draws out the implication of divine displeasure that Blumenberg has imputed to the Thalesian tale and criticizes philosophers for their "stupid curiosity" about contingent things rather than an intelligent curiosity about the ground of all contingent things, i.e., God.

Augustine, as we have seen, suspects that not merely stupidity but something more demonic is at work in the attractions toward which curiosity leads, but unlike Tertullian, Augustine went through a Gnostic phase, and Blumenberg thinks that he carried over into his orthodox Catholicism a continuing Gnostic distrust of the cosmos.

I'm not sure, however, that Augustine's Manichaean brand of Gnosticism would explain this, but more on that another time.

Blumenberg: Cicero on Curiosity as Distraction

Marcus Tullius Cicero

"...when the burden of care is relaxed"

(Image from Wikipedia)

On the ornate steps leading up to the Medieval Christian understanding of curiosity as a vice stands the figure of Cicero in all his ambivalence.

Why ambivalence? Like Augustine -- as Blumenberg explains -- Cicero feels the tug of curiosity but resists:

The naturalness of the cognitive drive is thus both a justification and a danger....

Cicero portrays the danger threatening the curious man by the Homeric image of Odysseus lured by the Sirens, not only by their song but also by the promise of knowledge of all earthly things . . . . Odysseus's conflict in view of the enticements of the Sirens is not a conflict between the aesthhetic and the ethical in our sense but rather between his theorectical curiosity and his native country. Although Odysseus does not succumb to their enticements, it is suggested by the length of his wanderings alone that knowledge was more important to him than his native country. In this context there emerges, in connection with the term curiosus, the negative characterization of curiosity as the longing to know everything. However, this negativity is seen as quite close to the quality of greatness, since being driven by the perception of sublime objects to desire knowledge is characteristic of important men. (The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, p. 281-282)

But as Blumenberg notes, "Cicero himself is marked by the conflict he describes" (Legitimacy, p. 282). For Cicero, curiosity -- albeit a natural drive -- threatens ever to draw him away from his practical duties, so he consoles himself with the promise of an afterlife of study:

Alleviation of doubt about the tasks to which life should be devoted can only come through being convinced of an immortality that promises compensation for everything that curiosity's self-restraint denies itself in view of political duties. Even this Platonizing solution has acquired a different function in Cicero than it could have had in the Greek world. The renunciation of theory seems to be something one can perform without prejudice to one's political and practical capability, so that relegation to the Beyond really can resolve the problematic: ". . . as happens now, when the burden of care is relaxed, we feel the wish for an object of our observation and attention, this will happen much more freely then, and we shall devote our whole being to sudy and examination, because nature has planted in our minds an insatiable longing to see truth; and the more the vision of the borders only of the heavenly country, to which we have come, renders easy the knowledge of heavenly conditions, the more will our longing for knowledge be increased." [cf. "Cicero, Tusculanae disputationes I 44; translation by J. E. King (London and New York: Loeb Classical Library, 1927), pp. 53-54)," Blumenberg, Legitimacy, p. 626, n. 11]

Here the transcendant deferment of the satisfaction of theoretical curiosity, whose pursuit in the circumstances of civic life could only be an exceptional situation like that of Cicero's enforced leisure, does not yet have the Christian visio beatifica's essential differentiation from all earthly access to truth. It is only a matter of degree, a drawing near and improvement of the standpoint of the knower, with, in fact, a clear opposition to the immanence of the Stoa, according to which the human observer was guaranteed the favored standpoint of contemplator caeli [observer of the heavens] by his central position in the universe. At the same time the text makes clear, with the antithesis of care (cura) and contemplation (contemplatio), the basis on which the new formation of curiositas comes about: In illegitimate curiosity the place of the civic/practical concerns and chores is occupied precisely by the theoretical attitude, so that this latter, contrary to its nature, itself becomes a care dominating one's life. (Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 282-283)

Blumenberg's basic aim here is to show how curiosity came to be seen as a natural drive that tempts us away from our duty. For Cicero, a natural drive is not inherently bad, but in this life, we have other cares that concern us, duties that we must fulfill. For Augustine, natural drives are inherently suspect due to the fallenness of our human nature, so curiosity as a putative 'natural' drive becomes a sinful distraction from our duty to God and thereby places our soul in mortal danger.

Enough for now. I must turn from this curious distraction and return to my grading...

Augustine: Curiosity in the Catalog of Vices...

Aristotle, Copy of Lysippos

Louvre Museum

"All men by nature desire to know."

(Image from Wikipedia)

Let us look again today into Hans Blumenberg's chapter "Curiosity Is Enrolled in the Catalog of Vices" (The Legitimacy of the Modern Age), in which Blumenberg discusses St. Augustine's classification of "curiositas" as a vice.

I want to reflect on a couple of paragraphs in which Blumenberg notes that Augustine criticizes that cupidity (cupiditas) of vain desire in the appetite of our insatiable curiosity (curiositas) to seek knowledge beyond our proper limits, i.e., beyond either utility (utilitas) or self-knowledge:

When we return . . . to the central passage, book 10, chapter 35 of the Confessions, some light is shed on the catalog of the levels of curiositas: After amusment as a mutilated corpse, theatrical shows are mentioned, and from here a transition to investigation of nature and to the magical arts is found. The riddles of nature, to which the mere desire to know applies itself, are characterized as objects that lie praeter nos [beyond us], in the double sense that neither are they seen from the point of view of their utilitas nor do they relate to man's self-knowledge. Investigation of the things that nature does not make openly accessible to man is of no use to him. This proposition involves the teleological assumption, familiar from Cicero, that the degree of a thing's theoretical accessibility indicates its 'natural' relevance for man. When he goes beyond this region of what lies open to him, he obeys the cognitive appetite that is justified by no other interest.

The appeal to nature proves itself here, as so often, to be an ambiguous type of argumentation, whose self-contradiction Augustine seeks to avoid by not attributing a natural status to man's inherent cognitive appetite but instead interpreting that appetite -- as always where cupiditas is applied -- as a consequence of the condition of man having fallen away from his original nature as a result of his original sin. The first sentence of Aristotle's Metaphysics has become, through the omission of "by nature," a description of man's status defectus [failed, defective condition]. On this assumption, confirmation by the "predilection for sense experience" can no longer be a "sign" from which the vindication of the disinterested purity of the theoretical attitude "independent of need" can be obtained. The grasp at the 'tree of knowledge' caused the unregulated cognitive appetite to degenerate into the vana cura [futile care] of a godless state of being fallen into the power of the world. (Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, page 314)

The famous first sentence of Aristotle's Metaphysics states:

All men by nature desire to know. (Aristotle, Metaphysics (350 B.C.), translated by W. D. Ross)

Blumenberg's point is that Augustine, despite his appeal to the teleological point about not going beyond what nature has laid open to our senses, cannot consistently accept even Aristotle's assumption, grounded in nature, of our cognitive right to any knowledge, for our original nature has been distorted, as has been nature itself.

Augustine may rely upon Aristotle to critique our 'busybody' tendency to inquire into nature's riddles, a realm beyond that which is teleologically fit for us to know, but Augustine's views on the double aspect of fallenness -- mankind and the world both being fallen -- entail that the teleological fitness of mankind to the world no longer holds since sin has entered the world through Adam and Eve and ruined God's creation.

For Augustine, therefore -- if he were to be consistent -- curiosity about the cosmos would inevitably lead reason into the coils of error through any attempt whatsoever to study nature, given its deceptive, quasi-Gnostic appearance, let alone a foolhardy attempt to investigate the even more recondite riddles of nature.

Let's return to this tomorrow...

The 'Gypsy' talks with an old friend...

Cicero, Treatises on Friendship and Old Age

Not that we're getting old...

(Image from Wikipedia)

Regular readers may recall that through a series of somewhat remarkable coincidences, my old Baylor University friend Margaret got in touch with me last year. We've since kept in contact, giving news about events and our respective families, occasionally engaging in idle banter about old times mixed with idle chatter about new times ... plus the occasional brilliant insight, of course.

Because Margaret currently works in the loan business, despite her degree in chemistry, she and her family have been affected by the recent subprime crisis, and for a couple of weeks, I hadn't heard anything but had been too busy to check in, so she checked in with me herself when she found some space to breathe. I'd like to post here the dialogue that ensued between us, partly to save it for my own interest, partly as a reflection on friendship -- about which I'll make a few remarks after the posted dialogue.

Anyway, listen in on our conversation as it moseys along and muses on our friendship and related things ... or opt out if it gets too boring, for not all dialogue is consistently scintillating:

Margaret: "Holding on and moving forward" (9/18/2007):

To bring you up to date, I recently had my resume worked on by a friend who is a resume writer, and will be aggressively sending it out starting this week. I will continue to work mortgages at night and on weekends, and whenever else I am free, but need a predictable cash flow. I am a little scared and excited at the same time of what the future holds.

Gypsy Scholar: "Keep on a-Holding on ... and moving forward (which tends, unfortunately, to stretch one's arms ...)" (9/18/2007):

Thanks for writing. I've been busy but was thinking only yesterday that I ought to write and find out how you are doing.

I've taken a look at your resume. Your friend managed to get a lot of information onto two pages without the result looking cluttered. Maybe I need to find a resume expert for myself...

Anyway, seeing the scope of your development was interesting for me. All those years that we didn't have much contact, you were doing various things. That sort of revelation always makes me feel oddly out of touch -- as though I'm living in the past because my memories are of another time. This must result from moving around a lot and retaining somewhat static images of other people's lives from a brief stage in their lives. I only really knew you for about 9 months, I suppose, and that seemed like a lot at the time, but its really a very tiny fragment of your life.

Moving around a lot, as I've done, one lives on the surface of things. A life in depth comes from being in one place for years, perhaps. But if I dwell on these thoughts too long, I'll grow too somber. I've chosen my way, and it has its rewards...

I have no doubt that you'll find a good job ... in whatever area you're looking for one. This is the right time to start looking for something else since the housing market may be depressed for a while, and your talents and skills are broader than the work that you've been doing, I suspect.

I have to stop now. I'm teaching two interesting courses today -- one on British and American Culture (focus on multiculturalism), the other on War, Religion, and Civilization (on Western, Islamic, and Jewish Civilization) -- so I need to prepare. Not that one can really prepare for such courses...

Margaret: "Definitely stretching" (9/18/2007):

When I look back over my life, and consider the choices I made, the direction I took, a whole lot does not make sense. What ever possessed me to think that I should get a degree in science? Then to stick with it for about 15yrs after college! I must be crazy. Yours appears to make more sense, and a bit more adventuresome. Please don't get somber on me. I hope your classes went well today, and that the students were engaging, you deserve nothing less.

Gypsy Scholar: "Your crazy, scientific mind trumps my crazy, unscientific mindlessness ..." (9/19/2007):

Well, I always admired you for you scientific mind even if you eventually came to see that you had other interests and abilities. Of course, I thought that you were a genius and could do anything...

That doesn't preclude your being crazy, of course, and I wouldn't want to contradict you if you're really sure that you "must be crazy." My mother was crazy and brilliant. I inherited some of the former and little of the latter. Fortunately, my strong willpower got me through by brute force...

My life makes sense? Yeah, in the sense that every development followed from the one before, but there were some serious missteps...

But enough of that...

My classes went well enough but need to go better. I hope that your day was productive. Perhaps you'll even strike it rich by playing the stock market. If so, teach us how.

Margaret: "Mr. Noze brother" (9/20/2007):

I always thought you were the genius, Mr. Noze brother. I like to be around people who are more intelligent than me, it gives me something to reach for beyond my limitations. It's odd to me that you thought I was the genius, and could do anything. Well, I grew up thinking I could do anything, that is what my parents always told me my whole life, but I failed miserably in my own efforts to succeed at everything I put my whole heart into in college. I thought I was going to be a pediatrician, but could not get accepted to medical school, therefore I was a failure in college .... but anyway how we define success in our own mind is critical. I am still trying to frame a definition of what success means to me personally. I ... desire to be set free of every wrong thought that has shaped my perception of me and my life. I also, tend to accomplish a lot by my tenacity, so we have a lot in common.

Funny you would joke about the stock market, I want the savvy to dabble there. Of course, any insight I gain is yours, I promise.

Hope your students rise to your expectations today.

Gypsy Scholar: "My diagnosis ..." (9/20/2007):

I believe, Ms. Spelling Bee Semifinalist of Texas, that that's spelled "NoZe Brother" ... but that's just my 'judgement' of the matter, and who's checking anyway?

As for your 'failure' at Baylor... At the time, of course, I believed you when you said that you wanted to get into Medical school and become a doctor, but your desire to become a doctor didn't seem that strong to me even then. You didn't seem driven by it. In fact, you seemed to be searching for what you really wanted to do. So, I don't think that you really failed in that, for I doubt that you really, strongly desired to become a doctor.

At any rate, I'm sure that your parents had full reason to be proud of you. You resisted your innate rebelliousness (as you once called it) and finished your degree, not an easy degree, either, and you had your life ahead of you. They were right to have pride and confidence -- and to believe in you. Life isn't easy, and some of us don't get the lucky breaks but life's hard licks. You've overcome a lot of adversity, and I'm sure that your parents would both be proud of you today. I don't doubt that you'll overcome the remaining hard challenges, for you have the strength, the intelligence, the drive, and the winsome character to do so.

Margaret: "Doctor, Doctor ..." (9/20/2007):

I presume you are keeping a record of my misspellings...you really know how to cut me down to size. Now, if you knew soo much, why on earth didn't you tell me that I was delusional about becoming a doctor....

On a serious note, you have a lot of heart, and I was touched by your kind diagnosis of healing words.

You really are a good friend and a rare gem.

Gypsy Scholar: "My sincere apologies ..." (9/20/2007):

Yes, I keep lists of everything. Just kidding. I'm hardly anywhere near so organized at that.

Let's see, now ... you're complaining because I didn't call you delusional? Schizophrenic? Bonkers? Crazy? A space cadet? Well, I thought that you knew! I'm really sorry about that. Growing up with a delusional mother, who once told me of having watched dancing mice cavorting around a toilet, I just assumed that everyone was delusional now and then, so I thought nothing of it. I expected you to grow out of it. Soon. If only I had known...

But I'll be sure to let you know in the future. For the moment, you seem to be facing up to the reality principle rather directly.

Except for calling me a "gem," that is. That's hardly realistic. Well, okay, I am an Arkansas diamond in the rough, but merely a flawed stone -- one cracked by the Gymnasium of hard knocks.

I wish that I were better, smarter, easier on the eyes, but I'm stuck with the Jeff that I am...

Despite these limitations, which one of my own brothers unsubtly implied, I still managed to get the good, brilliant, and lovely Ms. Sun-Ae Hwang interested in me. One just has to read the right literature and use the right lines, I suppose, but for that story, you'd better click that unsubtle link.

Anyway, in reflecting upon friendships made in college, I did some websearching and came upon a 'finding' by Purdue University communication expert Glenn Sparks:

"Friendship that begins during college days last for a lifetime, a new study has revealed."

[F]or those no longer in college, Sparks says there is indirect evidence from this study that lapsed friendships may be restarted successfully even after a lull in communication for years.

That's reassuring, I suppose, and perhaps sheds some light on why Margaret and I are still close friends after all these years, but I'm not especially impressed by the good doctor's remark that "making friends is like managing a bank account," though if I'm charitable, I can read Sparks as meaning that one must nurture a friendship carefully. True care, however, can go far beyond the attention given to one's bank account:

"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." (John 15:13)

Would one lay down one's life for a bank account? But rather than read too much into the analogy made by Sparks, I prefer to reflect upon the definition of friendship proposed by Cicero in his treatise "On Friendship":

Now friendship may be thus defined: a complete accord on all subjects human and divine, joined with mutual goodwill and affection. And with the exception of wisdom, I am inclined to think nothing better than this has been given to man by the immortal gods. (Section 6, Marcus Tullius Cicero, "On Friendship," translated by E.S. Shuckburgh)

Cicero, I take it, is speaking of the closest of friendships, the rare case of a complete accord on all subjects, but I think that we can relax his restriction to allow for some differences of opinion among friends. At any rate (and I don't mean interest), a friendship is not really comparable to a bank account.

I would add that a good friendship, along with close accord on many subjects, also requires a shared sense of humor, as the dialogue above perhaps reveals...