Classics in Contemporary Culture

Hyping Hypatia

Alejandro Amenabar's  film about Hypatia, Agora, is opening in the US -- if anyone notices a film about Late Antique Alexandria and its mix of religion and violence, the movie is certain to evoke Pavlovian culture-war reactions from all and sundry...In any case, here's an interview with the star, Rachel Weisz, stressing the theme of opposition to religious intolerance / fundamentalism, and noting (?!) that basically ancient science and acting are interchangeable -- neither one involves telescopes (I know: Totally unfair!):

"What's remarkable is that everything she was doing was imaginary because she was working in the time before the telescope. Everything she was figuring out, she was doing with her imagination. There was some math to back it up - but what she did was imagine things. Which is what I do for a living as well."

And here's a thoughtful essay by Nathan Schneider, generally against the portrayal offered, although appreciative of the lack of sex / the contrast with (e.g.) HBO's Rome series. In particular, some interesting final thoughts:

The best-developed character in Agora, held as a foil against the street riots, is the sky. Amenábar used a starscape calibrated to look exactly as it would have in antiquity, accounting for axial precession. Several times he juxtaposes the stars’ stillness, and the Earth’s roundness, with the chaos below. Like a good Platonist, Hypatia was obsessed with the stars, which Plato and Aristotle held to be demigods, eternal as the universe and its Prime Mover. Contemplating of their order and their perfection is where her philosophy lurked. Unfortunately, other Platonic legacies mar her contemplation in Agora: an obsession with the circle, which blinds her to the elliptical motion of the planets, together with sitting atop a society predicated on slavery and gross inequity.

The Christians turn out to be even worse astronomers, but they do get some things right. The Parabalani—a band of the patriarch’s bodyguards that Agora implicates in Hypatia’s murder—were actually a fellowship chosen from among the poor, principally to serve the poor. They tended to the sick and buried the dead, risking infection in the process. Between violent mob scenes, the movie does at least give a glimpse of what brought so many in the vast Alexandrian underclasses to wear the sign of the cross: bread, freedom, and the good news of the Beatitudes. Hypatia’s slave Davus is, to her, only a slave, albeit a clever one; among Christians, he learns that feeding the hungry is better than fattening the full.

In any case, it's clear that any discussion will be a fruitful venue for centuries of cultural anxieties and antagonisms to be aired willy nilly...

Bob Dylan, Amateur Classicist

Douglas Brinkley interviewed Dylan for the new issue of Rolling Stone, in the course of which the conversation turned to religion, morality, and the musician's early intellectual "influences" (as reported by Douglas LeBlanc of GetReligion.org):

After that evening’s show at the Heineken Music Hall — at around 11:30 p.m. — I interview Dylan again. Because it is Easter weekend, I decide to push him on the importance of Christian Scripture in his life. “Well, sure,” he says, “that and those other first books I read were biblical stuff. Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur. Those were the books that I remembered reading and finding religion in. Later on, I started reading over and over again Plutarch and his Roman Lives. And the writers Cicero, Tacitus and Marcus Aurelius. … I like the morality thing. People talk about it all the time. Some say you can’t legislate morality. Well, maybe not. But morality has gotten kind of a bad rap. In Roman thought, morality is broken down into basically four things. Wisdom, Justice, Moderation and Courage. All of these are the elements that would make up the depth of a person’s morality. And then that would dictate the types of behavior patterns you’d use to respond in any given situation. I don’t look at morality as a religious thing.”

Head in the Clouds

Another endorsement of Stoicism, in this obituary of Dr. Eilene Galloway, who was active in "space law and policy" ever since (in 1957) then-Senator Lyndon Johnson brought her on board to work on US space-preparedness...

She constantly affirmed the core principle of the 1967 U.N. Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies (the Outer Space Treaty), stated in Article II: “Celestial bodies are not subject to national appropriations by claims of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.”

...

Eilene was fearless. When she was six, her mother enrolled her in the Georgie Brown Dramatic School in Kansas City, Missouri, where she learned to be confident in front of audiences. She was one of a group of girls from the School who performed a patriotic song and dance for Theodore Roosevelt at the Muhlbach Hotel in Kansas City, when he was campaigning for the U.S. presidency in 1912. Throughout her life, she was not afraid to take on any task that came her way. She always found a way to turn crises and problems into opportunities. In times of stress, she turned to her favorite book, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, for guidance. [emphasis mine]

Furtive Philosophical Messages...

As a navy ship was dedicated in memory of the late James Stockdale, perhaps best known as Ross Perot's running-mate in 1992, Steve Chawkins' commemorative story (LATimes) especially focuses on his philosophical response to imprisonment by the North Vietnamese. 

By all accounts, he was brilliant. A Naval Academy graduate who studied philosophy at Stanford, he was an avid follower of the Stoics, ancient Greeks who taught that free will enables people to rise over the most adverse circumstances. It was an ethos that proved invaluable in prison, where his shoulders were wrenched from their sockets, his knee was broken twice, he was forced to wear leg irons for two years, and he was tortured at least 15 times.

Charlie Plumb, a former prisoner of war who helped organize the ceremony, said in an interview that Stockdale encouraged others by spreading the ideas of the philosopher Epictetus, secretly disseminating them on sheets of toilet paper in an ink he made from brick dust. Plumb said the effort helped men overcome their shame for buckling under torture.

Epicurus Beyond God and Evil

The "reception" of Epicurus in media this month presents a number of references to the supposed "Epicurean paradox" directed against the idea of divine providence.  In Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Part X), the thoughts are identified by Philo as Epicurean:  "Epicurus's old questions are yet unanswered.  Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?"  So now Dinesh D'Souza [Christianity Today]; the ever-amusing Vox Day [WorldNetDaily]*--both of whom argue against "Epicurus"; and a column by one Chris Jepson [Winter Park / Maitland (FL) Observer]--who cites Epicurus with approbation.

So what's the problem? The paradox is in fact very un-Epicurean. It is attributed to Epicurus by the Church Father Lactantius, which looks to me like the source of Hume's attribution and much of his phrasing:

...illud argumentum Epicuri.  'deus' inquit 'aut vult tollere mala et not potest, aut potest et non vult, aut neque vult neque potest, aut et vult et potest. si vult et non potest, inbecillus est, quod in deum non cadit; si potest et non vult, invidus, quod aeque alienum est a deo; si neque vult neque potest, et invidus et inbecillus est ideoque nec deus; si et vult et potest, quod solum deo convenit, unde ergo sunt mala aut cur illa non tollit?' (De Ira Dei 13.21)

But the Epicurean conception of the gods is precisely that they are perfect examples of freedom from disturbance--and paying close attention to the world to ensure its happiness would certainly count as a disturbance to be avoided rather than a sign of weakness or malignity.  And of course, Epicurus claimed to believe in the gods!  Hence, the assumptions of the "Epicurean paradox" do not fit Epicureanism.

Basically the same argument, however, appears in Sextus Empiricus, with no connection to Epicureanism:

...Either they both want to and can provide for all, or they want to but cannot, or they can but do not want to, or they neither want to nor can.  If they both wanted to and could, then they would provide for all; but they do not provide for all, for the reason I have just given; therefore it is not the case that they both want to and can provide for all.  If they want to but cannot, they are weaker than the cause in virtue of which they cannot provide for the things for which they do not provide; but it is contrary to the concept of god that a god should be weaker than anything.  If they can provide for all but do not want to, they will be thought to be malign.  If they neither want to nor can, they are both malign and weak--and only the impious would say this about the gods.  The gods, therefore, do not provide for the things in the universe. (Outlines of Skepticism 3.10-11)

And thus the train of thought comes off more as a Skeptical response to philosophies that espoused Providence, rather than an Epicurean one.  Presumably Epicurus was, for Lactantius or his source, a convenient tag for the label "atheist" and thus the attribution seemed (and still seems) plausible to many...

*Some irrelevant but also funny bits:  "It's worth noting, however, that Epicurus is not believed to have ever applied his paradox to the biblical God for the very good reason that he died in 270 B.C. ... This may explain why Epicurus formulated his paradox as a justification for a philosophy of indifferent stoicism, not as a logical argument against the existence of God." [emphasis mine]  Of course it is true that Lactantius, sort of as Vox Day may be thinking, does say that Epicurus used the argument to challenge the idea of Providence, not that of the existence itself of the gods...

Philosophical Satire

James Morrow's new satirical novel, The Philosopher's Apprentice, is reviewed in the Washington Post.  The protagonist, Mason Ambrose, is a doctoral student hired as "private ethics tutor" for a rich teenager...Inevitably (?), when philosophy actually comes into it, the reader's attention wanes:

But the spell of these early chapters is broken by a turgid course in ethics, from Aristotle to Stoicism to Epicureanism and beyond, forced upon Londa, and the reader. Somewhere in Ambrose's lesson on Sartrean existential freedom, rebellious readers may long for the "Philosophers' Drinking Song" belted out by the cast of Monty Python.

Or maybe this tells us more about the reviewer than the book!  In any case, the lessons are not in vain; well, not at first:

Londa, armed with the fierce sense of right and wrong instilled in her by Ambrose, founds a utopian community, Themisopolis (City of Justice), where she develops patents for advanced technologies that will aid humankind.

Greek word formation, it appears, was not part of the lessons...

The Examined Life

Whose attention would not be arrested by the headline "Socratic dialogue with a woolly mammoth"?

In this review of a comic--er, graphic novel--entitled Blue Pills:  A Positive Love Story, Sam Leith (the Telegraph) describes how the main character's "mixture of lust, fear, tenderness and growing paternal feelings are delicately charted...[as well as]...negotiations with sexual intimacy."  Sadly, the book's appropriation of the classical tradition is not entirely happy--and I guess you have to read it to find out how this part is even supposed to make one iota of sense--:

Where it loses its way, slightly, is in a peculiar closing fantasia in which Peeters debates with himself about love are framed as a Socratic dialogue with an Epictetus-quoting woolly mammoth.

Gosh, I really need to post once in a while...

Greek Philosophy: Back to the Spoken Word

Sue Arnold (the Guardian) reviews an audiobook Introduction to Greek Philosophy:

What is life? How should we live it? And why are difficult books so much easier to digest on audio than in print? ...Even so, there were passages in the Griffith brothers' admirably digestible guide to the often wacky belief systems of some of those pre-Socratic thinkers, cynics, sceptics, Epicureans et al that I had to rewind a few times. There's Heraclitus, for instance, who advised that sexual pleasures should be confined to winter and believed that everything was composed of and reverted to fire. The eightfold division of the soul upheld by the Stoics also took a bit of unravelling, but it was worth it if only to appreciate that Stoicism originally meant a great deal more than grin and bear it. Having several readers brings the Platonic dialogues to life, and I defy anyone not to be moved by Socrates' cool, courageous speech to the Athenian jury which has just condemned him to death for impiety. We may have über-technology, the internet, DNA and The Moral Maze, but the ethical beliefs and clear-headedness of those legendary first thinktanks - Plato's Academy, Aristotle's Lyceum, Zeno's Stoa and the Garden of Epicurus - still have a lot to teach us.

There's also Aristotle:

The poet Thomas Gray said that reading Aristotle was "like eating dried hay". Certainly his writing isn't as lively as his tutor Plato's, and given the choice of a single philosopher for further study I'd probably have plumped for Pythagoras, whose precepts include the pithy "don't shake hands too eagerly", "always roll your bedclothes up" and "don't sit down on your bushel". Still, as the philosopher with the greatest and longest influence on western thought, he's worth more than a long second glance...

So, you know, go forth and "know thyself" - but not in excess!

Socrates: Where's That Fly-Swatter?

Reviewing The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint by Emily Wilson, Duncan Fallowell (Telegraph) complains of the author's flippancy and failure to take Socrates and his legacy seriously.

She has chosen to front her book with a fatuous remark of Macaulay's which he wrote in a private letter in 1835: "The more I read about Socrates, the less I wonder that they poisoned him."

In her introduction, Wilson comes up with this inanity: "I sometimes feel that Nietzsche was right when he blamed the decadent dying Socrates for the later decline of Western civilisation. We still live in the shadow of what Nietzsche called Socrates' 'naïve rationalism'. Perhaps Socrates has held sway over our culture for far too long."
...

So what are we dealing with here? It doesn't take long to realise that this is a kind of teaching aid, an introduction to the circumstances surrounding the death sentence, followed by a checklist of responses down the ages.

But where does this leave Socrates? Neutered for some universal classroom by authorial chastisement, he becomes just another brand with no intrinsic value. Does this matter? Yes, it most certainly does, because his real importance - why you should be reading the book at all - is never presented.

Fallowell goes on to offer his own view, including a nice suggestion that Socrates = Buddha + Falstaff + Oscar Wilde...

Ex Nihilo?

You wouldn't think Lucretius would be a good jumping-off point for Christian apologetics, but Mike Licona appeals here to the principle ex nihilo nihil fit, arguing that it bolsters Christianity rather than the reverse.  Hmm...now that I poke around a bit, it's actually quite popular...even for Wiccans...Ah, but here's Heidegger: 

Christian dogmatics denies the truth of the sentence Ex nihilo nihil fit and gives                   nothingness a changed meaning, in the sense of absolute absence of non-godly being.

Finally, "Much Ado about Nothingness":

In Hindu, Taoist, and Buddhist wisdom traditions, “emptiness” and “nothingness” carries quite a different significance.  The following may help. Christian theologians tend to view the universe as “Creatio ex nihilo” – created out of nothing.  This means that God did not make the universe out of some prior “stuff,” but whipped it up new, bringing existence out of the nothing.  Scientists would argue, “Nothing comes from nothing.”  A Buddhist would say, “Everything comes from nothing!”

[For Lucretius' own phraseology, see citations here.]