PURITY OF THOUGHT: DUALISM AND DIVINIZATION IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY Patrick Lee Miller ‘A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy. Chapel Hill 2005 ‘Approved by Reader: Ram NetaUMI Number: 3170504 Copyright 2005 by Miiller, Patrick Lee All rights reserved. INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and. photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. UMI UMI Microform 3170504 Copyright 2005 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48108-1346© 2005 Patrick Lee Miller ALL RIGHTS RESERVEDABSTRACT PATRICK LEE MILLER: Purity of Thought: Dualism and Divinization in Greek Philosophy (Under the direction of C. D. C. Reeve) Despite their disagreements, many ancient Greek philosophers agree that thought is divine. To Aristotle, indeed, God just is a kind of thought—the kind that actively thinks itself (Metaph, 12.9). In the conclusion of Nicomachean Ethics (10.6-8), Aristotle enjoins us to live a life of pure thought (nous), since such a life is divine in comparison with a merely ‘human one. Although this injunction has embarrassed some commentators, who see it as inconsistent with his naturalistic anthropocentrism, this dissertation concludes that it represents the very heart of his philosophy. Aristotle, itis argued, inherited a program of purification and divinization from Plato. This program has three main tenets: (i) God is pure thought; (ii) the human is a hybrid of divine thought and mortal nature; the goal of philosophy is to purify thought of its mortal entanglements, and thus to divinize the philosopher. Plato, in tum, appropriates this program , from the Pythagoreans, but synthesizes it with four contributions from other Presocratics: (i) the purity of thought exalted by Anaxagoras; (ii) the self-intellection of the divine articulated by Parmenides; (ii) the divinity of thought proposed by Xenophanes and Heraclitus; and (iv) the correspondence between cosmos and soul introduced by the Milesians.Beginning with these Milesians, then, this dissertation tells a history of Greck philosophy from Thales to Aristotle, tracing the origins, development, and refinement of its persistent program of purification and divinization. Special attention is paid to Plato and Aristotle, focusing on the following topics: the importance of contemplation in their ethics; the role of images—especially the metaphors of light and vision—in their epistemologies; and finally, the picture of selfhood that emerges from their psychologies. According to this, picture, we are distinct from our humanity. The pure thought we really are, claim Plato and Aristotle, must be separated from our bodies, and from the imagination, emotion, and appetite these bodies produce. Until death, philosophy is the means of this separation. In compensation for this painful process, though, Plato and Aristotle promise us the consolation of divinity.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Although this dissertation was written in less than a year, it was the fruit of more than a decade of training, I would thus like to take this opportunity to recognize those teachers whose instruction helped me most with this project, even if, as in some cases, it happened many years ago. To the lectures and writings of both Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre I owe my historical approach to the problems of philosophy, as well as my fascination with two problems in particular: selfhood and rationality. To Kenneth Reckford, I owe many things. Of most relevance here is the understanding he gave me of the intellectual history of fifth- century Athens, and especially of Aristophanes’ condensation of this history in Clouds. To the supervision of Philip Stadter and William Race I owe my standards of scholarship. Needless to say, any points at which I fall short of these standards are my own fault, not theirs Halfway through the writing of this dissertation, I luckily met James Lesher, who agreed to become a reader. Without his skepticism about my divinization thesis and my ‘mystical’ reading of the Presocratics, I would have been far more complacent in the development and defense of each. His comments were valuable models of generous criticism. ‘My friends, Jeffrey Kearney and Christopher Childers, were no less exacting critics of my style. The exposition of these ideas would have been far less clear were it not for theirgracious help. A special acknowledgement is due to someone else who edited the entire work, but did much else besides. I am speaking of my director, David Reeve, whom I am also fortunate to count among my best friends. Without him—both as a guide and as a model of philosophical precision and depth—this work would not have been possible. Two others were indispensable, Paul Brinich’s patient attention kept me from becoming distracted by other projects, as I would inevitably have done without him. He also helped me probe my own investment in the ideas presented here, making this dissertation far more than a professional obligation, as philosophy ought always to be. Sarah Miller, my wife, also helped me to see the power these ideas have exercised over me unwittingly for many years. I could never have conceived this topic without her help, and without her wise advice along the way I could never have brought it to its present form.To My ParentsDN éxi mécov xdSagors Rexréovr ofre yg xai % Suoiwois tin gavegts xai % taurérns tin Seip. Plotinus viiiTABLE OF CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION... 2. PRESOCRATICS. 2.1. Monists: Thales to Anaxagoras... 19 2.1.1. Cosmos and Soul: the Milesians.... 9 2.1.2. The Divinity of Thought: Xenophanes and Heraclitus.....25 2.1.3. The Thought of Thought: Parmenides. . 2.1.4, The Purity of Thought: Anaxagoras... 2.2. Monism to Dualism: Teleology and Theodicy.. 2.3. Dualists: the Pythagoreans... 2.3.1. The Purification of Thought... 2.3.2. Transmigration and Divinization... 3. PLATO..... 3.1. Socrates the Pythagorean... 3.2. Plato’s Dualistic Synthesis... 3.3, Plato’s Pure Thought... 3.4, Plato’s Ambivalent Body... sees TIS 3.5. Plato’s Divine Light... 120 3.6. Dialectic and Divinizatios 127 3.7. The Divided Soul.. sll 3.8, Plato’s Divine Thought 1524. ARISTOTL 162 4.1, Dualism Refashioned... 162 4.2. Aristotle’s Divine Light 169 4.3. Aristotle’s Pure Thought. 4.4, Aristotle's Divine Thought 4.5. Aristotle’s Inhuman Thought.......... 5. CONCLUSION. WORKS CITED. 12531. INTRODUCTION Imagining the whole cosmos as a plant, Plotinus insisted that “the individual soul in its lowest part would be like maggots in a rotting part of the plant because that is what the ensouled body is.”' This startling contempt both for the body and the so-called lower parts of the soul is not unique to ancient philosophy. In the modem period, Kant testified to its powerful legacy by calling sexual desire “nothing more than appetite,” adding that “there lies in this inclination a degradation of man.” Accordingly, he wrote, “all strict moralists, and those who wish to be taken for saints, have sought to repress and dispense with it.”* But sexual desire was not alone the target of Kant’s contempt. If action is to be moral, all appetites and passions must be disregarded, if not dispensed with, as merely human nature, “The ground of obligation,” he believed, “must not be sought in the nature of man or in the circumstances in which he is placed but a priori solely in the concepts of pure reason.” The * Plotinus, Enn, 4.3.4; trans. O'Brien 1964:131. (All abbreviations for classical works are those of Alexander 2004.) Kant, Lectures on Ethics; trans. Peter Heath, in Heath and J. B, Schneewind 1997:15S. Cited in Reeve 2005:6-7. Ibid. “Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysies of Morals 389; trans. Beck 1990:5.