SINGULAR THINGS AND TIMELESS TRUTHS

Featuring the Curiosa

One of the very earliest occurrences of the agentive term "philosopher" is found in a fragment of Heraclitus, in which, evidently, he is mocking the school of the Pythagoreans with this term. In fragment 35, the Greek philosopher writes that "men who are philosophoi must be inquirers into many things indeed." The author, whom we now think of as one of the founders of the tradition of philosophy, expresses uncertainty and bemusement as he attempts to understand who exactly the philosophers are. Our own confusion will only be heightened when we learn that the term translated here as "inquirers" is, in the original, historas, which might also be translated as "historians," in the sense of people who are interested in singular things, and in telling "stories," or giving accounts that range over the actual, rather than over the possible, thus in contrast to both poetry and philosophy in Aristotle's later understanding.

Heraclitus is writing long before Aristotle would offer us his definition of "history" in contrast with poetry, already considered in the introduction. We might see Heraclitus's uncertainty about the scope of the term "philosopher" as a simple consequence of the unsurprising imprecision of a term that has just come into existence and has no established patterns of usage. But in fact something very much like an assimilation of "philosopher" to "historian," where a historian is understood simply as the person who inquires into many things, or the person with an appetite for singular facts about nature or society, continues beyond the archaic era and well into the golden age of Greek philosophy. Most of us are familiar, for example, with the accusations leveled against Socrates by his peers at the Athens court, that he sought to make the weaker argument the stronger, and that he had corrupted the youth of the city and denied its gods. But there is another accusation, corollary to the denial of the gods, that is often passed over without comment but that might be the most significant of all of them — namely, that Socrates has an excessive interest in the physical causes of phenomena that happen in the heavens above and in the earth below. In other words, the great philosopher is accused of being what would later be called a "natural historian." He is too curious about particulars and believes that by their investigation we can understand the workings of nature. It is in this connection that Aristophanes will lampoon the character of Socrates as holding, for example, that thunderclouds in the heavens function no differently than flatulence in human beings.

Certainly, Socrates's accusers are wrong about him: he is no more a curious investigator of nature than he is a Sophist, and he does not appear to care much about what goes on in the heavens or below the earth. Yet while we are all familiar with the defenses of Socrates against the accusation of sophistry, the accusation of supporting natural-scientific inquiry passes under our radar, for we no longer even understand why such an accusation would be in any way damaging. But the historical record could not be clearer: until well into the early modern period, the people who were called "philosophers" were regularly accused of the transgression of looking into the workings of the heavens and of earth no less often than they were accused of making the weaker argument the stronger. Particularly when the term "philosopher" was used pejoratively (and we may say with confidence that the majority of its occurrences throughout history have been at least moderately pejorative), it was understood to suggest the activity of a "curiosus naturae," someone who is curious about the particular workings of nature, about the formation of clouds and icicles and will-o'-the-wisps. Consider, for example, Laurent Lange's 1735 description of the disposition of the "curious" practitioners of natural philosophy in their study of mammoth remains in Siberia:

They say that [the mammoth] has a great horn in front, of which it makes use for pushing the earth in front of it and carving a path, and that the bones of which we have just spoken are nothing other than this horn, which has much in common with the tooth of the elephant that is found in Siberia. Some curious practitioners of natural philosophy [Des curieux dans la Philosophie naturelle] maintain that this Mammoth is the Behemoth mentioned in chapter 40 of [the Book of] Job, and whose description agrees so well with this beast: for its jaws are of a substance that appears externally to be false copper, and as hard as a stone.

Lange, following an established convention, intends a slightly mocking sense of "natural philosophy," as straying too far from the very concrete matter of describing paleonto-logical remains in order to speculate on matters of biblical exegesis. But still, he also takes for granted that mammoth bones are within the normal purview of the natural philosopher, and that it is the virtue of curiosity that drives the natural philosopher to study them. By contrast the negative connotation of "philosopher" today is more often one of pure windbaggery, speculation detached from a concrete referent in the real world, the capacity to blow hot air about meaningless abstractions, to invent words that no one, including their inventor, could possibly understand, and so on. It is not a connotation of excessive curiosity. The reason for this shift has very much to do with the rise of modern science.

Philosophy seems to have effectively distanced itself fairly early on from sophistry (bracketing, for now, the compromising fact that professional philosophers continue to accept remuneration), and its relations with the institutions of religious faith have generally been too unstable for these two to be confused for very long. But the shared ancestry of philosophy and what would eventually be called "science" is a good deal more complicated, and in many respects the effort to understand the overlap between these two human endeavors continues to define what philosophy is. We might venture in a preliminary way that philosophy, or at least the tradition that descends from Philosophia, consists in the tension between Socratic disengagement from the world in search of adequate knowledge of fixed and unchanging concepts, on the one hand, and, on the other, the curious inquirer's investigation of what goes on in the heavens above and the earth below. If we leave this latter half out, if we pass too quickly over this part of the accusation against Socrates (whether it was justified or not), we will misunderstand much of what philosophy has been all along. In so doing, we will fail to understand what philosophy is.

One of the most significant developments in philosophy since the eighteenth century, to which we have already alluded, is that it has...