Saturday, July 20, 2013

On the shoulders of giants

12th-century, Bernard of Chartres (d. c. 1130), as quoted by John of Salisbury (c. 1115-1180):
"Bernard of Chartres used to compare us to [puny] dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants.  He pointed out that we see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature." 
Metalogicon (1159) III.4 (PL 199, 900C), trans. Daniel D. McGarry (The Metalogicon of John of Salisbury:  a twelfth-century defense of the verbal and logical arts of the trivium, trans. Daniel D. McGarry (Berkeley, CA:  University of California Press, 1955), 167).
Dicebat Bernardus Carnotensis, nos esse quasi nanos, gigantium humeris insidentes, ut possimus plura eis et remotiora videre, non utique proprii visus acumine, aut eminentia corporis, sed quia in altum subvehimur et extollimur magnitudine gigantea. 
Joannis Saresberiensis postea episcopi Carnotensis opera omnia, ed. J. A. Giles (1848), vol. 5, p. 131.  The reading on p. 136 of Ioannis Saresberiensis Episcopi Carnotensis Metalogicon libri IIII, ed. Clemens C. I. Webb (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1929) differs only in lacking some (though not all) of the commas inserted by Giles, and in substituting u for some vs: 
Dicebat Bernardus Carnotensis nos esse quasi nanos gigantium humeris insidentes, ut possimus plura eis et remotiora uidere, non utique proprii uisus acumine aut eminentia corporis, sed quia in altum subuehimur et extollimur magnitudine gigantea.  
'Et,' ut ait philosophus, 'nos sumus quasi nani stantes super humeros gigantum.' 
Var. in MSS A and B, according to Giles (Webb gives no variants): 
'Et,' ut ait philosophus, 'nos sumus quasi nani stantes super humeros gigantium.' 
Alexander Neckam (Nequam, 1157-1217), De naturis rerum 78 (Alexandri Neckam De naturis rerum libri duo.  With the poem of the same author, De laudibus divinæ sapientiæ, ed. Thomas Wright (London:  Longman, Green, Longman, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1863), 123).  


"To cut off pleasures from the consequences and conditions which they have by nature, detaching, as it were, the precious phrase from its irrelevant context, is what distinguishes the man from the brute and the citizen from the savage."

     "'It wasn't scenery we were looking for,' said John.  'I am trying to find the Island in the West.'
     "'You refer, no doubt, to some æsthetic experience.  There againI would not urge a young man to shut his eyes to that sort of thing.  Who has not felt immortal longings at the lengthening of the shadow or the turning of the leaf?  Who has not stretched out his hands for the ulterior shore?  Et ego in Arcadia!  We have all been fools onceaye, and are glad to have been fools too.  But our imaginations, like our appetites, need discipline; not, heaven help us, in the interest of any transcendental ethic, but in the interests of our own solid good.  That wild impulse must be tasted, not obeyed.  The bees have stings, but we rob them of their honey.  To hold all that urgent sweetness to our lips in the cup of one perfect moment, missing no faintest ingredient in the flavour of its μονόχρονος ἡδονή, yet ourselves, in a sense, unmovedthis is the true art.  This tames in the service of the reasonable life even those pleasures whose loss might seem to be the heaviest, yet necessary, price we paid for rationality.  Is it an audacity to hint that for the corrected palate the taste of the draught even owes its last sweetness to the knowledge that we have wrested it from an unwilling source?  To cut off pleasures from the consequences and conditions which they have by nature, detaching, as it were, the precious phrase from its irrelevant context, is what distinguishes the man from the brute and the citizen from the savage.  I cannot join with those moralists who inveigh against the Roman emetics in their banquets:  still less with those who would forbid the even more beneficent contraceptive devices of our later times.  That man who can eat as taste, not nature, prompts him and yet fear no aching belly, or who can indulge in Venus and fear no impertinent bastard, is a civilized man.  In him I recognize Urbanitythe note of the centre."

     Mr. Sensible, in C. S. Lewis, The pilgrim's regress:  an allegorical apology for Christianity, reason, and romanticism V.4 ((Grand Rapids, MI:  Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1974/1958 [1943/1933]), 84-85).

     Et ego in Arcadia!  "‘And I too in Arcadia’; a tomb inscription, of disputed interpretation, often depicted in classical paintings, notably by Poussin in 1655" (Oxford dictionary of phrase and fable, 2nd ed., ed. Elizabeth Knowles, (2005)); "The Latin tag familiar from seventeenth-century pastoral paintings, et in Arcadia ego, often translated as ‘I too [have lived] in Arcadia’, may more correctly mean ‘I [am found] even in Arcadia’, and refer to death" (Oxford companion to classical literature, 3rd ed., ed. M. C. Howatson (2011)); "the grim intrusion of death into the pastoral world" (Oxford companion to Hardy, ed. Norman Page (2001), s.v. pastoralism, by R. P. Draper); "And I too in Arcadia.  tomb inscription, of disputed meaning, often depicted in classical paintings, notably by Poussin in 1655; E. Panofsky ‘Et in Arcadia ego’ in R. K. Klibansky and H. J. Paton (eds.) Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to E. Cassirer (1936)" (Oxford essential quotations, ed. Susan Ratcliffe (2012)); etc.
     μονόχρονος ἡδονή  momentary pleasure.  Cf. the μονόχρονος εὐδαιμονία of Aristippus ap. Ath[enaeus Grammaticus] 12.544a (LSJ).  Yet, contra LSJ, there is only one occurrence of μονόχρονος in the whole of Aristippi et Cyrenaicorum fragmenta, ed. Erich Mannebach (Brill, 1961), no. 207 (on p. 48), where "Athen. XII p. 544 a-b" is again the citation and what appears is "μονόχρονον αὐτὴν (sc. τὴν ἡδυπάθειαν[, pleasant living or luxury])", with a reference back to no. 157, where "Athen. XII p. 544 a" (but not μονόχρονος) again appears.  Cf. Loeb classical library 327 =Athenaeus VI, ed. & trans. S. Douglas Olson (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 164-165 (=Athenaei Navcratitae Dipnosophistarvm libri XV, ed. Kaibel, vol. 3 (Leipzig:  Teubner, 1890), p. 199):
     Entire philosophical sects laid claim to the idea of organizing one's life around luxury, for example the so-called Cyrenaic sect, which originated with Socrates' student Aristippus (frr. 157, 207 Mannebach = SSR IV A 174), who expressed his approval of a life of luxury, and said that this is what one should aim for, as well as what happiness is based on.  He also argued that pleasure exists only in the individual moment [(ὃς ἀποδεξάμενος τὴν ἡδυπάθειαν ταύτην τέλος εἶναι ἔφη καὶ ἐν αὐτῇ τὴν εὐδαιμονίαν βεβλῆσθαι·  καὶ μονόχρονον αὐτὴν εἶναι, who, approving of pleasure [(τὴν ἡδυπάθειαν)], was saying that this [(ταύτην = τὴν ἡδυπάθειαν)] is the aim and that happiness [(τὴν εὐδαιμονίαν)] has been founded on it, and that it [(αὐτὴν = either τὴν εὐδαιμονίαν or τὴν ἡδυπάθειαν)] is momentary)]. . . .
The point being that either either τὴν εὐδαιμονίαν or τὴν ἡδυπάθειαν could be the referent of the αὐτὴν associated with μονόχρονον (to the vindication of LSJ).
     Cf. the reference to hedupatheia here:  "Aristippus welcomed the experience of pleasure (hedupatheia), and said it is the end, and that happiness is founded on it. And he said that it was for a single time only (monochronos). Like prodigal people, he thought that neither the memory of past gratifications nor the expectation of future ones was anything to him, but he discerned the good by the single present time alone. He regarded having been gratified and being about to be gratified as nothing to him, on the ground that the one no longer is and the other is not yet and is unclear--just like what happens to self-indulgent people, who suppose that only what is present benefits them. (Athenaeus, Deipn. xiv 514a)" (T.H. Irwin, "Aristippus against happiness," Monist 74, no. 1 (January 1991):  55-82).

Friday, July 19, 2013

"those who have preceded us and who were wrong about the truth have bequeathed to their successors the occasion for exercising their mental powers, so that by diligent discussion the truth might be seen more clearly."

"one man assists another to consider the truth in two ways—directly and indirectly.
     "One is assisted directly by those who have discovered the truth; because, as has been pointed out, when each of our predecessors has discovered something about the truth, which is gathered together into one whole, he also introduces his followers to a more extensive knowledge of truth.
     "One is assisted indirectly insofar as those who have preceded us and who were wrong about the truth have bequeathed to their successors the occasion for exercising their mental powers, so that by diligent discussion the truth might be seen more clearly.
     "288. Now it is only fitting that we should be grateful to those who have helped us attain so great a good as knowledge of the truth. Therefore he says that 'It is only right that we should be grateful,' not merely to those whom we think have found the truth and with whose views we agree by following them, but also to those who, in the search for truth, have made only superficial statements, even though we do not follow their views; for these men too have given us something because they have shown us instances of actual attempts to discover the truth. By way of an example he mentions the founders of music; for if there 'had been no Timotheus,' who discovered a great part of the art of music, we would not have many of the facts that we know about melodies. But if Timotheus had not been preceded by a wise man named 'Phrynis,' he would not have been as well off in the subject of music. The same thing must be said of those philosophers who made statements of universal scope about the truth of things; for we accept from certain of our predecessors whatever views about the truth of things we think are true and disregard the rest. Again, those from whom we accept certain views had predecessors from whom they in turn accepted certain views and who were the source of their information."

     St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle II.1.Comm nos. 15-16 =287-288 cumulative, trans. John P. Rowan (St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, trans. John P. Rowan, Library of living Catholic thought (Chicago:  Henry Regnery Company, 1961), vol. 1, p. 119, as reproduced at http://dhspriory.org/thomas/Metaphysics2.htm).
      The Latin (taken from the Marietti edition of 1950) is here:  http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/cmp02.html#81853.
     I was put on to this by Jean-Pierre Torrell, "Saint Thomas et l'histoire:  état de la question et pistes de recherches," Nouvelles recherches thomasiennes, Bibliotheque thomiste 61, ed. L.-J. Bataillon, O.P, and A. Oliva, O.P. (Paris:  Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 2008), 151 (131-175) =Revue thomiste 105 (2005):  355-409.
     Torrell goes on to cite also Commentary on the Metaphysics XII.9.Comm no. 14 =2566 cumulative:

"And since in choosing or rejecting opinions of this kind a person should not be influenced either by a liking or dislike for the one introducing the opinion, but rather by the certainty of truth, he therefore says that we must respect both parties, namely, those whose opinion we follow, and those whose opinion we reject. For both have diligently sought the truth and have aided us in this matter. Yet we must 'be persuaded by the more certain,' i.e., we must follow the opinion of those who have attained the truth with greater certitude"