Introduction – Six Features of Thucydides's Text

This chapter focuses primarily on how it is that Thucydides begins a work that discloses a world. The beginning represents the essence of the conjuring trick; it is the lip of the fly-bottle and so it must entice, even as it is comfortably familiar, while all the while it is a step into something very different. Yet before we can lay out the first steps into the fly-bottle, we must have a better grasp of what it is like within or we will not know when we have entered. Our first task then is to identify the features of Thucydides's text that are world-disclosing.

For this task, we first return to Chios and to the passage with which we began:

Introduction

The argument to this point has centered on the Archaeology as the lip of the fly-bottle. The Archaeology itself exhibits all of the features we have identified with a world, especially familiarity and consistency in its portrayal of events. Though Thucydides describes his project in disclosive language so clear that it has taken hundreds of years of modern philosophy to obscure it, it is necessarily the case that the means of disclosure recede into the background. By the time the narration of the war starts, if we are not in the fly-bottle yet, it will not take long. In section 1.24, with the introduction of events at Epidamnus, we are rapidly called upon to see connections emphasized in the Archaeology – for instance, that between wealth, power, and stasis (civil war).

There is, of course, no specific moment in which a world is disclosed, and it would not be fruitful to mimic the text and go through it section by section. To illustrate the worldliness of the world that Thucydides discloses, we will thus discuss an exemplary series of passages, characters, and events centered on the figure of Pericles.

There will presumably be no objection to this insofar as the centrality of Pericles is signaled unambiguously by the text itself, from his three unopposed speeches, to Thucydides's praise of Pericles in his own voice, to the echoes of Pericles found in every speech (and decision) that follows his demise, especially those of his Athenian successors.

Introduction

This book would have been unduly cumbersome if it spent too much time on the underlying philosophical arguments as the main argument about Thucydides's text proceeded. This was actually more than a logistical hurdle, as there seems to be no reason to delve into the finer points of aspect seeing and world creation if it were not first established that these are important to understanding Thucydides's text. And so, I began with some provisional philosophical arguments, sketches really, and postponed more detailed discussion to the appendixes. Of course, the appendixes can hardly do justice to the philosophical positions I am relying upon, but, as in my discussion of the deinon in tragedy, I do hope that the discussions that follow at least move my position out of the domain of mere hand waving and place them in the context of an important tradition. This appendix will address my debt to Wittgenstein, especially as regards aspect seeing and history.

It should be noted at the outset that Ludwig Wittgenstein published only one book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, with which he was later dissatisfied. Parts of a second work, the Philosophical Investigations, were apparently getting close to being presentable to his mind, but the work was not published in Wittgenstein's lifetime. Thus all of the many works of Wittgenstein other than the Tractatus are collaborative efforts between Wittgenstein and his editors – generally former students.

Introduction

The pretragic history of the word deinon is the rich, and surprising, inheritance that the tragedians and Thucydides deploy to make subtle arguments about the human. It is surprising because, though it may be generally granted that the deinon is central to tragedy, it is not seen as particularly important in Homer, much less a term that already describes the uncanny as it relates to logos. In order to support these assertions and to provide still more refinement and content to the argument, this appendix discusses additional issues relating to deinon, including the standard history of the term, and further develops some of the passages discussed in the text, as well as other key passages.

Etymology and History of Interpretation

There are some aspects of the history of the word deinon that are uncontroversial. For instance, deinon is derived from the root δ∊ and the suffix νο. It is also well known that the word deinon is central to tragedy, particularly Sophoclean tragedy, and in some way refers to the features of the human that make tragedy possible. Finally, certainly by the third century b.c., the adjective deinotes (having the characteristic of being deinon) had become a description for a particular type of public speech, namely, the vehement, powerful style.

There is also a standard story about the progression of deinon. In Homer deinon always means “terrible or powerful,” and deinon becomes “uncanny” only in tragedy, particularly in Sophocles. Logos becomes deinon only in the context of the Sophists.

Introduction

In many ways, Heidegger cannot be more different from Wittgenstein. Heidegger published a voluminous number of works in his lifetime. Unlike Wittgenstein's, Heidegger's philosophical writings almost always explicitly engage the philosophical tradition, and Heidegger clearly believes that there are proper philosophical problems about which it is the task of philosophers to think. Furthermore, especially in the work under consideration here, Being and Time, Heidegger's work is extremely systematic.

Despite the differences, it has become increasingly common to see connections between the two thinkers. The Philosophical Investigations and Being and Time are the twentieth century's two great attacks on Cartesianism. In both cases, that of Heidegger as well as that of Wittgenstein, much emphasis is placed on the fact that the Cartesian picture of isolated subjects is phenomenologically false, and thus the key is to remind us of what we already know. In the case of Wittgenstein, as we saw, the method used was that of short aphoristic sayings meant to reveal the blind spots our philosophical ideas and jargon have obscured. For Heidegger in Being and Time, the task is more ambitious. Heidegger's goal is to redescribe our everyday experience in a manner that is not Cartesian.

From Heidegger's more historical perspective, we are not bound to fall into Cartesianism, as Wittgenstein's more modest therapeutic approach would seem to imply. Not only is Cartesianism not phenomenologically true or philosophically coherent, it is a relatively special perspective on the world, even within Western intellectual history.

Restoring the Wonder of Thucydides

In 411 b.c., the city of Chios revolted from the Athenian Empire. In the midst of narrating this revolt, Thucydides states the following:

This does not appear to be a very remarkable passage in any sense. Both the facts, such as that the Chians were completely under siege despite their initial strength, and the analysis, namely, that Athens's resilience was surprising, seem fairly simple.

Because the means by which a world is disclosed are hidden and, indeed, withdraw from view, there are several issues in the key programmatic sections of 1.21–3 that I believe have been consistently misunderstood. There is no better way further to illustrate the subtle workings of Thucydides's Archaeology than to dissolve some of the errors that surround it. The issues I will discuss relate to “unconcealedness” (aletheia), “what is appropriate” (ta deonta), “pre-text” (prophasis), “compulsion” (ananke), and “kind” (toioutos).

Unconcealedness (Aletheia)

Thucydides does seem interested in aletheia, which is usually translated as “truth.” Truth is understood conventionally as positing a correspondence between word and world, and so, this interpretation maintains, when Thucydides discusses the importance of aletheia, he is emphasizing the importance of matching up his language to events (logos to ergon). Yet Thucydides uses neither aletheia nor to alethes particularly often in these opening sections (or generally, especially not in his own voice). He does, as we have seen, employ numerous visual words, such as to saphes, at crucial places. These words are in turn often translated in terms of “truth,” even “historical truth,” but such translations put the cart before the horse. The converse seems far more apt; that is, aletheia should be understood in terms of to saphes and other visual terms rather than the other way around.

In Thucydides's Archaeology visual metaphors dominate vis-à-vis truth claims.

Introduction

It has now been demonstrated that Thucydides's text shares many features with tragedy and that a key feature that is shared also explains why tragedy is not just one genre among many from which Thucydides draws. Rather, the deinon, as demonstrated in tragedy, is precisely that feature of the world that demands to expand beyond the tragic stage and into the world of the polis, just as Hegel's interpretation of the essence of tragedy suggested that it must. The functioning of the deinon in Thucydides also justifies our appeal to tragic temporality as structuring the world that Thucydides discloses. We have seen some examples of this tragic temporality, as in the plight of the Thebans at Plataea or of the Athenians in connection with the story of Harmodius and Aristogeiton. In this chapter we will develop other examples and deepen what is meant by tragic temporality. Tragic temporality is the answer to the question of why Thucydides's text founds a world rather than merely discloses one. This is to say that we have seen in Chapters 1 and 2 that Thucydides self-consciously discloses a world, and Chapter 3 justifies our description of this world as “tragic.” Yet returning to the Introduction, our task is to explain the extraordinary success of this text in founding a world.

It is standard to claim that Thucydides's continued celebrity has to do with the “timelessness” of his work, and one often hears similar comments about tragedies, like Oedipus Rex.

In Part III, I argued that in elaborating his own accounts of two critical Aristotelian moral virtues, magnanimity and legal justice, Aquinas places an increased and more explicit emphasis on the “common” aspect of ethical virtue, with a view to personal internal disposition as well as external conduct. He thus effectively situates moral virtue at the nexus point between personal and common goods and presents moral virtue itself as a common or sharable good, further moderating the classical emphasis on self-sufficiency and superiority. With regard to legal justice, Aquinas lays greater stress than did Aristotle on the common good as the end “informing” this virtue, as he does also in his explication of magnanimity. Moreover, I argued that Aquinas's theory of natural law provides a higher measure, simultaneously divine and human, whereby legal or general justice can be considered both properly legal and universally virtuous, responding to a critical problem in Aristotle's ethics and politics.

For all its universality, Aquinas's theory of legal justice nonetheless holds an important place for politics ordinarily understood, and for participation and practices guided in some respects by civil law and issuing in new ordinances deemed useful for the community. If law and virtue are so closely intertwined in Aquinas's politics of the common good, we might then wonder whether he is not uncomfortably close in theory to the “clear and present danger” posed in practice by the Vice and Virtue Ministry mentioned in Chapter 1.

For most contemporary political theory, the preeminent or focal meaning of justice is on the macro level: its primary subject is the political community and its regime or basic structure. Justice is above all, in Rawls's famous phrase, “the first virtue of social institutions” (Rawls 1971, 3; 1999, 3), and as such he later specifies it as “free-standing” and “political, not metaphysical” (Rawls 1985, 1993). In recent years, scholars have challenged this reigning paradigm from various vantage points, arguing for a renewed appreciation of the links among political science, ethics, and philosophic anthropology, and hence for the importance to political theory of also investigating personal virtue (cf. inter alia Bartlett 1994; Berkowitz 1999; Budziszewski 1988; Collins 2004; Galston 1991, 2002; Macedo 1990; Manent 1998; Sandel 1998). Aristotle's works have appropriately loomed large in the revival of the political study of personal virtue, while by comparison the contribution of Thomas Aquinas has been largely overlooked. Susan Collins has recently observed that justice itself has been given short shrift among the virtues, even in neo-Aristotelian scholarship (Collins 2004, 53; cf. O'Connor 1988, 417).

This chapter seeks to continue the reconsideration in political theory of justice as a personal virtue, focusing on Aquinas's dialectical account of justice as a preeminent ethical virtue and a character trait of persons who care about and work for the well-being of their political communities.

In his preface to Dependent Rational Animals, Alasdair MacIntyre quotes a prayer composed by Thomas Aquinas “in which he asks God to grant that he may happily share with those in need what he has, while humbly asking for what he needs from those who have.” It is a prayer of a magnanimous person in humility, highlighting the two qualities that when fused together seem to distinguish, morally and politically, the Christian world from the classical world. Yet, as Aquinas himself notes elsewhere, it is far from clear how humility can be compatible with magnanimity, a virtue conducing to outstanding statesmanship: “humility is apparently opposed to the virtue of magnanimity, which aims at great things, whereas humility shuns them” (ST II–II 161, 1, obj. 3). Even if humility is vindicated as an ethical excellence, can it be politically salutary? Should politics, understood as humans' own government, be suffused with pride in human virtue, or should it be humbled by the realization of human dependence on God and interdependence with others?

In this chapter I revisit the theories of magnanimity advanced by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, endeavoring especially to develop a more detailed analysis and comparison of Aquinas's Commentary on the “NE” and the relevant texts of the ST than those offered by other recent commentators. In particular, I consider Aquinas's discussions in the ST of two of what MacIntyre (1999) terms “virtues of acknowledged dependence”: gratitude and humility.

Aristotelianism and Political-Philosophic Foundations, Old and New

In this chapter I begin to investigate Aquinas's social and civic foundations, probing their philosophic origins in Aristotle's texts. As several statements in On Kingship and especially in the ST make clear, Aquinas understands politics to be rooted in our common human nature, which in turn encompasses an inherent rational inclination toward participation in the common good of a just and beneficial social order. It is easy to see in this position shades of Aristotle's position in the Politics, “that the city belongs among the things that exist by nature, and that man is by nature a political animal” (Pol. I.2, 1253a2–4). To probe more deeply the meaning and resonance of this Aristotelian foundation for Aquinas's theories of virtue, law, and the common good, we need to return to the relevant passages of Aquinas's Commentary on the “Politics” of Aristotle, too often neglected in studies of Aquinas's thought. There we learn how Aquinas interprets the anthropological and ethical arguments with which the Politics commences and that appear to ground Aquinas's theory of political life and the common good. For Aquinas, I will argue, political community is natural to human beings in a real yet relative and qualified way. The analogy Aquinas draws between this social and civic naturalness, and the naturalness to human beings of moral virtue, is critical for apprehending the purposes as well as the problematic of politics as Aquinas sees them.