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Biondi, Carrie-Ann
2024.
Principles and Praxis in Ancient Greek Philosophy.
Vol. 155,
Issue. ,
p.
295.
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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 January 2009
Extract
Individualists like to think of themselves as atoms, their trajectories causally dependent on collisions with other similar entities but their essence resolutely independent and autonomous. They are whole and entire in themselves: they are not elements or adjuncts of some greater whole. Collectivists take an opposite view. Their oddities and accidents may be individual and independent, their movements and machinations largely self-determined, but in their essence they are necessarily bound to others – for all are adjuncts and elements of a larger whole.
In this essay I discuss one version of the collectivist philosophy, a version which has (I suspect) been as popular and as widely supported as any philosophy of human nature. In Section I, the constituent ideas are expounded, largely by way of citation from Alexander Pope. In Section II, the anthropological aspect of Pope's philosophy is subjected to scrutiny; and in Section III, the axiological side of the theory is examined.
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References
1 I 259–68: I quote from the Twickenham edition, edited by Maynard, Mack: The Poems of Alexander Pope III i (London: Methuen, 1950).Google Scholar
2 ibid., I 237. Compare I 237–258: it is the “scale” (i.e. the scala naturae) at I 208, and the “chain of Love” at III 7–26.
3 ibid., III 21.
4 See Barnes, Jonathan, “Bits and Pieces”, ed. Barnes, J. and Mignucci, M., Matter and Metaphysics (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1988), pp. 223–94.Google Scholar
5 Essay, IV 49–50.
6 ibid., I 247–50.
7 ibid., I 32.
8 ibid., I 60. Some commentators stress the Essay's insistence on the presumptuousness and frailty of human reason, and make Pope into something of a skeptic (see esp. Mack, Maynard, Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 527–30).Google Scholar But despite the doleful and the scornful passages, Pope cannot be called a consistent skeptic. According to one critic, skepticism “is indeed trumpeted by Pope at the beginning of the second epistle but is merely disregarded elsewhere” (Nuttall, A. D., Pope's Essay on Man (London: Allen and Unwin, 1984), p. 50Google Scholar).
9 Essay, III Ill.
10 ibid., III 45–48.
11 The aphorism in quotation marks is repeated from ibid., I 145–6 – where, however, it is put in the mouth of an imagined anthropocentric objector to Pope. Yet there is no doubt that at IV 35–36, Pope is speaking in propria persona. For an attempt to explain the dislocation see Nuttall, pp. 145–46 (but note that elsewhere Nuttall is prepared to find “stark inconsistency” in Pope, p. 98).
12 Essay, IV 35–38.
13 ibid., I 288–94.
14 ibid., IV 113–16. The lines are obscure. At IV 115 the printed editions give “Or Change admits”: this is not easy to read (at least, my own ear finds it extraordinarily difficult to construe “Change” as the subject of “admits”), and it offers a puzzlingly weak thought (how is Change contrasted with Nature?). “The thought stammers woefully,” says Nuttall (p. 157). “Chance” is an obvious emendation: in fact Pope's earlier version had “Or Chance escape” at this place (see the apparatus to the Twickenham edition); and I suppose that “Change” is a printer's error. Even so, the quatrain remains hard. I paraphrase it as follows: “Any ill which befalls a part of the universe either (i) is in the end for the good of the whole (and hence not really an ill for the part), or else (ii) is the result either (a) of coincidence or (b) of an exception to the generally valid natural laws. In the case of (ii), ills will be rare and will not last for long; or rather, they were rare and short-lived until men, by their free action, made them common and persistent.” (The word “improv'd” either is ironical or else bears the now obsolete sense of “increased.”) – Note that the earlier version of the Essay had a distich in place of the quatrain:
15 Essay, IV 193–94.
16 ibid., II 2.
17 ibid., II 161.
18 ibid., III 83–84.
19 ibid., III 97–98.
20 ibid., IV 331–40.
21 ibid., III 311–18.
22 ibid., IV 361–62.
23 ibid., IV 363–70.
24 On this see, e.g., Nuttall, pp. 46–47.
25 See, e.g., Mack, p. 541–42. Pope himself refers to seven translations in a letter of November 1743, in which he politely declines Christopher Smart's offer to translate the whole of the Essay into Latin (see Sherburn, G. (ed), The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, vol. IV (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), pp. 483–84).Google Scholar
26 See the essays on optimism in Kant's gesammelte Schriften, vol. XVII (Berlin, 1926), pp. 229–39.Google Scholar
27 See Lettres Philosophiques, ed. Naves, R. (Paris, 1956), pp. 256–57.Google Scholar But Voltaire's reaction was mixed: see Knapp, R. G., The Fortunes of Pope's Essay on Man in 18th Century France, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 82 (Geneva, 1971).Google Scholar
28 See, e.g., Mack, pp. 542–43.
29 For some sane comments on this problem see Nuttall, pp. 48–52. In the surviving MS drafts, Pope refers explicitly to four ancient authors: Cicero (the Somnium Scipionis), Manilius, Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics), and Oppian. But notes of this sort are very rare in the manuscripts, and they cannot be thought to provide a full catalogue even of expressly recognized sources. Modern philosophers may well think of Leibniz as a possible source. So did Pope's contemporaries, to whom he replied: “I never in my life read a Line of Leibnitz” (letter to Warburton, 2 Feb 1738/9, in Sherburn, p. 164).
30 “Pope wished his poem to be read, at least to some degree, as a modern De Rerum Natura” (Mack, p. 525, with references to Lucretian echoes).
31 Meditations, II iv, ix; IX xxii 2.
32 ibid., VI xlii 4.
33 ibid., VI xxxiii, VIII xxxiv.
34 ibid., II i 4.
35 ibid., II iii 2; VI xliv 6; liv.
36 ibid., X vi.
37 For a pertinent account of Marcus's ethical thought and its relation to ‘classical’ Stoicism, see Rist, John, “Are You a Stoic? The Case of Marcus Aurelius,” ed. Meyer, B. F. and Sanders, E. P., Jewish and Christian Self-Definition, vol. III (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982). The best study of Marcus is nowGoogle ScholarRutherford, RichardThe Meditations of Marcus Aurelius: A Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).Google Scholar
38 I take the symbols “<<” and “U” from Simons, Peter, Parts – A Study in Ontology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 160.Google Scholar Everything I say about mereology was inspired by – and much was filched from – this immensely exciting book.
39 Symposium, 189c–192a.
40 Politics, 1253a 19–25.
41 See Simons, pp. 10–11, 107–8.
42 Simons suggests that (1) there are distinct generic notions of parthood, formally analogous to one another but not falling under a single overarching concept, and also that (2) distinct restrictions upon these generic notions produce specifically different concepts of parthood: see pp. 104, 106, 128, and esp. 231–37.
43 The symbol “<” designates parthood in the broad sense – the sense in which everything is a part (an ‘improper part’) of itself. In the text I use “part” in the normal English sense, the sense for which mereologists often use the term “proper part.”
44 Simons, p. 160.
45 The “principal thesis” of Simons's book is that classical mereologies do not give an adequate account of the common part-whole relationship (or relationships): see p.5. He notes that “it is a central thesis of classical extensional mereologies that any two individuals possess a sum. Since individuals may be disjoint, spatio-temporally widely separated, and of quite different kinds, this assumption is very implausible” (p. 14). For an historical explanation of the prevalence of such implausible theories, see pp. 104–5.
46 Meditations, VI xxxviii. See also Hume's remarks in the Treatise at I iv 6 [p. 257, ed. Selby-Bigge], which Simons uses for the epigraph of Part III of his book (p. 253).
47 Compare Simons, p. 10 n. 2.
48 On groups see ibid., pp. 145–47. Note that groups are not sets or classes in the technical sense; for their identity is not determined by their membership. The Arsenal football team and the England football team might consist of exactly the same players – but even so, they would be different teams. The England cricket XI has won precisely one of its last twenty-two matches; but no set of eleven players can claim this grisly record.
49 Here and later I introduce sporting illustrations, the details of which will not be equally familiar to all readers. Team sports provide the best illustrations of what I want to say, and any choice of sport will leave some reader disgruntled. In fact, the sporting details never matter, and the gist will be always be plain.
50 Here I follow (with minor modifications) the development in Simons, pp. 327–30.
51 Aristotle's celebrated argument at Pol. 1252b28–1253a18 fails to prove that we are essentially or naturally political animals; for nothing in it legitimates the introduction of the crucial political notion of ‘ruling and being ruled.’ But the argument does indicate that, and how, we are essentially social animals. Here, and elsewhere in the Politics, Aristotle shows himself curiously insensitive to the distinction between State and society.
52 Politics, 1337a 27–31.
53 ibid., 1260b13–17.
54 e.g., Laws 923a.
55 e.g., Charmides 156e; Laws 903b.
56 See Jonathan Barnes, “Aristotle and Political Liberty,” forthcoming in the Proceedings of the XIth Symposium Aristotelicum.
57 See the Life of Pope in Johnson, Samuel, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, ed. Millar, J. H. (London, 1896), vol. III, pp. 137–38.Google Scholar
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