Wonder and the Discovery of Being: Homeric Myth and the Natural Genera of Early Greek Philosophy

Myth and philosophy are two different ways of knowing the same world. (1) Claude Levi-Strauss observed that human beings have always thought equally well; always changing is what humans think with. (2) Homer knew the category of being, but he thought being in mythological terms expressed through universal images (Vico's imaginative genera). (3) Classical Greek philosophers (namely, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle) thought being through universal ideas (abstract genera). (4) The shift, in Levi-Strauss's terms, is from thinking with images to thinking with ideas. That shift begins to take place in early Greek philosophy as the transformation of the mythological way of knowing the world, characteristic of Homer, into an incipiently philosophical way of knowing the world through natural genera in which the realm of nature is distinguished from the realm of the divine. These natural genera are no longer mythological but also not yet abstract; rather, they are on the way from one to the other, a third and transitional way to think being. In this article, I shall consider the transition from imaginative to natural genera in the thought of Thales and Xenophanes and how that transition is understood by Plato and Aristotle as they make their own move to rational genera. While analyzing the transition from imaginative to natural and then, finally, to rational genera, I shall note the fate of wonder along the way. There is a sense in which all this paper aims to accomplish is to elaborate a few distinctions made by Aristotle in Metaphysics 1. (5) Before I turn to Aristotle's text, it is necessary that I make clear how I read Aristotle's account of his predecessors (and contemporaries). My own position is that Aristotle reads a text respecting not only its announced intentions, but also its implicit meaning. Aristotle wants to know not only what a text says it does, but also what it actually does. Another way of putting this is that Aristotle reads a text in terms of what it must mean if what it says is to obtain as an adequate explanatory account. My reading stands in sharp contrast to that of Cherniss: Aristotle's belief that all previous theories were stammering attempts to express his own aids him in interpreting those theories out of all resemblance to their original form. He is openly frank about his method of setting down the 'inner meaning' of Presocratic doctrines even when such a procedure necessitates the 'articulation' of of which the original author was and in a system exactly contrary to that which the original text sets (6) I agree with Cherniss that Aristotle adumbrates implications of which the original author was unaware or, perhaps more accurately, of which the original author may have been unaware. I disagree with the second half of his conclusion, namely, that Aristotle's interpretation results in a system exactly contrary to that which the original text sets forth. Cherniss holds that Aristotle deliberately manipulated the arguments of other thinkers in order to create interlocutors in the artificial debates which he sets up to lead 'inevitably' to his own solutions. (7) I do not assert that Aristotle is always correct in his reading of his predecessors, rather only that his motive is different to that enunciated by Cherniss and which serves as the driving motif for his book, Aristotle's Criticism of Presocratic Philosophy. On my account, in his dialectical engagement with other thinkers, Aristotle seeks to analyze the metaphysical and logical mechanics of their arguments and, indeed, to discover the necessary of those arguments. In Metaphysics 1, Aristotle distinguishes three stages of philosophy: that of mythology, (8) that of early philosophy, (9) and that of philosophy proper. (10) Those first two stages are philosophy in a qualified sense, but he counts them as philosophy in a way that he does not esteem his contemporaries, the dialecticians and sophists. …