Listening to the Logos: Speech and the Coming of Wisdom in Ancient Greece

Epilogue

Epilogue I commenced this inquiry seeking, in the Greek wisdom literature of the archaic and classical periods, coherent accounts of how founders of the Western intellectual tradition conceived wisdom, understood its means of acquisition and expression, and viewed the role of logos (broadly conceived) in these processes. I was particularly concerned to discover not merely how these thinkers described the idea of wisdom but also the content of the wisdom they believed themselves to have sought and acquired. Granting for the sake of discussion that these wisdom-seekers actually arrived at legitimate insights about the natural world and human experience, what did they understand? Turning from the nature and contents of Greek wisdom to its connections with logos— proportion, speech, reasoning, rational principle, discussion and debate, argument , logical inquiry—I sought to illuminate how these activities are involved in the acquisition of the highest forms of human wisdom, and how wisdom manifests itself in speech. My aim in these closing pages is to distill from the foregoing discussions of these matters the principal conclusions and insights to which they point. I have argued here for no overarching thesis, but my examination of these texts and their contexts yields a number of important ideas. Connections between sophia and logos presage relations between philosophy and rhetoric that emerged during the fifth and fourth centuries; these relations persist into our own time. The language arts that came to be identified with speculative inquiry (philosophy) and with political deliberation and practical decision (rhetoric) arose from the same set of cultural beliefs and practices. The distinctions between them appear most conspicuously in Plato and Aristotle . Their proper concerns, boundaries, and commonalities are considered by Western thinkers ranging from Cicero and Augustine to Vico, Erasmus, and George Campbell. Twentieth-century scholars in both philosophical and rhetorical studies have sought to clarify the issues and themes that link and divide the two fields. Yet, for all this, in the beginning there was no difference between philosophy and rhetoric; later theorists gave them names “to express appearances,” as Lao Tzu might put it. Logos was the path to sophia, and sophia 216 LISTENING TO THE LOGOS expressed itself as logos. After Plato, the relationship between two distinct disciplines has been a common and important theme in scholarly inquiry. We can identify no single, comprehensive conception of wisdom in the reports of early Greek speculative thought. Yet, for all the multiplicity of views, there are points of coherence among the discontinuities and contradictions. We find from the outset a distinction between divine and human wisdom— between “perfect wisdom” and that which “befits our human estate,” fraught as it is with imperfection and uncertainty. In both cases wisdom permits its possessor to foretell the future. The poets held that only the gods are capable of “true wisdom,” for only they can know why world events happen as they do, and only they can foresee the destinies of these events and the fates of human beings. Yet, to the extent that humans are capable of apprehending the divine mind, we are capable of divining what lies ahead. Insofar as we can read omens and understand the gods’ characters as revealed in myth, we can envision, however imperfectly, what the gods have ordained. With the Presocratics the same impulse is at work. However much thinkers such as Anaximander, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Leucippus may have differed in their conceptions of the world’s origins, the nature of matter, and the sources of motion and change, they are united in their conviction that the universe is directed by an indwelling rational principle— Justice, Logos, Reciprocity, Harmony, Mind, Thought. It is precisely the idea that the universe is rational, that it exhibits order and is law-governed, that permits reasoned explanation of natural events and reasoned prediction about their outcomes. The same conclusion holds if, as with Aristotle, the highest wisdom is apprehending the “final causes” or “first principles” that direct the cosmic processes of creation and destruction, and knowing the particulars that follow logically from these principles. Speculative or theoretical wisdom enables its possessor to foresee the careers of natural events because they are bound by the laws of causation. One motif running through Greek wisdom-literature, then, is that sophia entails the power of foresight, the capacity for predicting the future. Whether this power comes through grasping the mind(s) of (the) god(s) or through understanding the logos of nature, one aspiration of the speculative thinker is to...