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.

Hans Blumenberg: "The 'Trial' of Theoretical Curiosity"

Sandro Botticelli, Augustine of Hippo

Studious, not Curious

(Image from Wikipedia)

Hans Blumenberg has a wonderful chapter in his Legitimacy of the Modern Age, titled "Curiosity Is Enrolled in the Catalog of Vices," which shows the significance of Augustine of Hippo in classifying "curiositas" as a vice.

As we saw yesterday, Aquinas accepted this classification but strove to justify inquiry as a virtue. Indeed, he opposes curiosity to studiousness in his Summa Theologica, for in the "Second Part of the Second Part: Question 166," Aquinas states in "Objection 2" that "studiousness is opposed to curiosity," a distinction that still receives serious attention today, as shown in an article by Alice Ramos, "A Secular Contract, A Sacred Calling" (pdf) for Pi Lambda Theta's journal educational HORIZONS (Volume 83, Number 4, Fall 2005).

Blumenberg situates Augustine's classification of curiosity as a vice within Augustine's turn away from Manichaean Gnosticism toward orthodox Christianity and argues that Augustine retained a Gnostic distrust in the cosmos as an intricate structure within which mankind can remain trapped. For the Gnostics, the trap was set by an ignorant demiurge (though in Manichaean Gnosis, this view is somewhat ameliorated, a point that Blumenberg apparently missed), whereas for Augustine's Christian theology, the problem lies rather in the fallenness of the cosmos, which can distract the curious man away from the proper attention to his salvation.

According to Blumenberg:

Curiositas is indeed a category applied in turning away from Gnosticism, but the world in which it can become a possible cardinal vice is no longer the cosmos that is open to man and symmetrically intelligible in all directions from the center but rather a sphere filled with Gnostic attributes in which man is [literally] 'eccentric' -- for nowhere in Augustine either does Stoic geocentrism play a role relevant to man's understanding of himself.

Augustine's world is not fulfilling but seductive, and curiositas is a 'temptation' (forma tentationis) in the double sense that to test oneself on and with what is resistant and uncommon (tentandi causa) is at the same time to be tempted (tentatio). In its extreme form this 'tempted attempt' of the appetite for experience and knowledge directs itself at God Himself, since even in religion there is hidden the attempt -- the 'experiment' with God -- to demand signs and miracles not as promises of salvation but merely to satisfy curiosity. In this attitude God is taken into service and made into a means to the enjoyment of purely worldly experience. This makes clear what it means when Augustine again and again insists in his thinking on a strict differentiation between enjoyment and usefulness, between frui and uti. He sees the basic character of the world in its utilitas [usefulness] as the instrumentality ad salutem [for salvation], whereas a fulfilled and fulfilling existential relation is only to be expected from the fruitio [enjoyment, delight] directed at God. The ordering principle of human life, which can be spelled out in the form of the ethical virtues, is fixed in the maxim that one should correctly distinguish between the usefulness and the enjoyment of things. At the same time there emerges a criterion for the positively evaluated attitude to which curiositas is contrasted: All theory is concerned with disclosing the instrumental relevance of the things in the world, the serviceability inherent in them. But this means that the Augustinian interpretation of knowledge of the world is no longer the 'pure' theory of Hellenistic philosophy.

Curiosity violates this ordering principle of use and enjoyment and betrays its content of disorder precisely by the fact that in its extreme and logical consequence (as Augustine defines it), it subjects even God to the criterion of utilitas, so as to be able to seek fruitio in the human self alone. (Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, pages 312-313)

In short, curiosity as a vice overturns the established order of things by making God 'useful' for human beings 'enjoyment' of themselves and thereby distracting them from a proper concern with their salvation and entangling them in improper pursuit for frivolous knowledge of a world whose fallenness serves as a temptation to mankind's equally fallen mind.

Augustine is not the sole word on this subject, for we've already seen Aquinas put Augustine in his proper place. Moreover, the early Medival Christians were greatly concerned with knowledge and its transmission, as a recently published book promises to show:

No period in the intellectual history of North-Western Europe has been so formative as the early Middle Ages, when missionaries transferred the learning accumulated for centuries in the Mediterranean basin to recently founded centres of religious scholarship in the ever expanding Christian world. The aim of this scholarship focused, first and foremost, on a proper understanding of the Bible as God's Word and Nature as God's Creation. During this period the foundations of medieval learning were laid in the monasteries and schools by men from distant shores who considered it their calling to entrust this precious knowledge to future generations of indigenous scholars. In this process, Syrians ended up in England, Irishmen in Italy, and Anglo-Saxons in Frisia and Bavaria and thus helped build a common intellectual culture in Europe. Even though the memories of these missionaries were fed with vast amounts of reproducible knowledge far beyond the capacity of modern man, the most important means of storing and conveying knowledge was the written word stored in what was then modern technology: the parchment codex. The composition of these books reflect the extent and diversity of early medieval learning. Sometimes they contain a single work, but often enough they contain compilations of diverse material which at first sight shows little coherence to the modern reader, and rightly so. In a way such miscellanies are mini-libraries. Nevertheless, they are storehouses of wholesome learning in their own right; further study reveals a rationale in such collections that leads us to a monastic learning environment, in some cases even to the classroom. The present volume demonstrates how the study of texts and manuscripts combined opens up windows on the early medieval world of learning as represented by glossaries, proto-encyclopedias, biblical companions, hagiographical guides, didactic verse, or descriptions of the world in word and image. The essays demonstrate that scholars have too often concentrated on the study of single texts, but especially that the compilations of manuscripts and libraries reflect the kind of knowledge that was required of monks, ministers and missionaries for the contemplation, celebration and promulgation of the Christian message.

Such is the promise contained in the blurb for Foundations of Learning: The Transfer of Encyclopaedic Knowledge in the Early Middle Ages, a book of articles edited by R.H. Bremmer Jr. and K. Dekker as book 9 in the Mediaevalia Groningana New Series (Peeters Publishers).

Clearly, then, the early Medieval Christians, perhaps despite Augustine, were greatly 'curious' about the knowledge amassed over the centuries of the then fading Graeco-Roman world and were transmitting it to northwestern Europe through a process in which "Syrians ended up in England" -- though this sort of intellectual exchange was soon to be cut off by Islamic conquest of the Near East.

But this is enough heavy reading for today, and for those who wish to indulge their idle curiosity, feel free to visit this site to satisfy your ocular and aural desires both. For those who wish not to do so, consider this a test of your resolve and do not go there.