Southern Thought and Other Essays on the Mediterranean

7. Europe and Southern Thought

c h a p t e r 7 Europe and Southern Thought Greece, the Sea, and Philosophy It is not by chance that philosophy was born on the sea, when the word ‘‘being’’ came into existence, floating between being and nothingness; when ‘‘becoming’’ became a word charged with a cognitive sense, calling into question truths that had been so strong as to never have been doubted or discussed. Knowledge escaped its oracular and sacred form and became a matter of opinion, debatable, the opportunity for a challenge, rhetoric, the capacity to persuade and argue: It moved from the temple to the market. As a result, humanity no longer awaits the verdict of the oracles: It becomes instead the one we find in Plato’s dia-logoi, where Socrates’ final answer is just a secondary detail, and the great protagonists are the continuous search for knowledge, the questioning, the meeting, and the discursive agon. In the background this society of men freed from other duties; friendship and dialectic competition; and discussions late into the night, until one is overcome by weariness. The logoi are challenged and questioned , and the game shuts down only temporarily, before starting all over again, incessantly, like the sea’s undertow. It is difficult to imagine philosophy without these a priori geographic conditions: without the pervasiveness of the Greek sea and the sweetness of the nights, the pleasure of a 107 108 Other Essays on the Mediterranean prolonged discussion, the masculine friendships, and the competitions. It is easy to observe, and people have repeatedly done so, that the free exercise of the mind presupposes the slavery and exclusion of women: This is clearly an observation that needs no rebuttals. However, it is almost too easy to object that, while the history of humankind is full of male freedoms predicated on the enslavement and exclusion of women, only the Greek one gave birth to philosophy. What is extraordinary about philosophy is not the solution given to its issues by the single philosopher, but the essence of its interplay, the cultivation of controversy and discussion, something that goes on, and lasts longer than any theoretical closure to the interplay by this or that philosophical school. The temptation and hope of any philosopher is to bring closure to this interplay; but in this pursuit, the philosopher himself is played because his answer, far from ending the interplay, reopens and revives it through the formulation of the argument for subsequent discussions. It is surprising that today the structure and history of this interplay have been simplified and reduced to a single scheme and purpose—technology: Philosophy has been reduced to science, and the latter to technology. So the logos has been reduced to a single use, and the will to power has been unstitched from that complex interplay as the only and most authentic vocation of the logos: As a result, a determinism worthy of better origins has completely been traced back to a primordial DNA. It is as if modernity and unbridled technology were the necessary destiny of Greece, as if, in subsequent eras, leaps and intervals, external developments and grafts to that primordial root had not contributed to give modernity its contemporary shape. I believe that, as long as the Mediterranean was the gravitational center of civilization, the sea allowed navigation between lands: Being, just like a ship, set sail but landed again in the bay of Essence. The emphasis on becoming and the tipping over of the Greek balance happens later, with the full advent of modernity and the passage to the oceanic dimension, when the sea is no longer kept in check by land, but becomes ocean, sea without limits. To suggest that Greece exhausted its usefulness by giving birth to unbridled technology (as if the myths of Dedalus and Prometheus had never existed) is to diminish its contributions, to use up the complex weave of its possibilities to follow the journey of a single thread. Although this is not the right place to discuss this issue, I wish to say that Greece is also polytheism and tragedy, the borderland that has constantly questioned itself about the plural statute of truths, their contradictions, and the suffering caused by this plurality. Europe and Southern Thought 109 Philosophy is the peaceful and discursive ritualization of that contrast, the move that attempts to avoid its cruel statute, a sweetening of the tragic clash over the nature...