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Know Thyself: Plato and Aristotle on Awareness
- Leuven University Press
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know thyself: plato and aristotle on awareness Frans de Haas* The most valid and surest starting point for the dialogues of Plato, and, practically for the whole of philosophical consideration, is, in our opinion, the discerning of our own being.¹ With this statement Proclus opens the introduction to his commentary on the First Alcibiades. This statement seems appropriate at the celebration of the 50th jubilee of the De Wulf Mansion Centre for the Study of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy. In this Centre the study of Proclus is currently flourishing as never before. Indeed, ‘the whole of philosophical consideration’ has found such an attractive place in Leuven, and not least ‘the discerning of our own being’, in major publications on consciousness and changing selves. Therefore it is a pleasure to congratulate the present inhabitants of the Centre on the 50th anniversary of their institute. 1. introduction Discerning one’s own being is no easy matter. It is even more difficult to achieve what Proclus promises us a few pages further on: ‘the clear and unadulterated knowledge of ourselves determined in scientific terms and securely established by causal reasoning’.² For him, Plato led the way to knowledge of one’s own being, and thereby to knowledge of one’s own cause and origin, as a constitutive characteristic of philosophy — indeed as a constitutive characteristic of mankind as a whole.¹ Procl. in Alc. 1. *Thanks are due to the participants of the Leuven conference for their critical remarks to a remote ancestor of this paper, in particular to Victor Caston. I am grateful to Pavel Gregorić who kindly made his book available to me and saved me from a number of infelicities , as well as to Annick Stevens for providing me with a copy of her text in the final stages of my writing. It should be noticed here that they both did so in the inspiring surroundings of Delphi. 3-5: Τῶν Πλατωνικῶν διαλόγων καὶ πάσης, ὡς εἰπεῖν, τῆς φιλοσόφου θεωρίαςἀρχὴνκυριωτάτηνκαὶβεβαιοτάτηνεἶναινομίζομεντὴντῆςἑαυτῶνοὐσίαςδιάγνωσιν. Transl. O’Neill (1971).² Procl. in Alc. 4.19-5.1: ὭστεκαὶφιλοσοφίαςἁπάσηςκαὶτῆςτοῦΠλάτωνοςπραγματείας ταύτην ἂν ἀρχὴν κυριωτάτην νομίζοιμεν, ὅπερ εἴπομεν, τὴν ἡμῶν αὐτῶν καθαρὰν καὶ ἀκίβδηλον εἴδησιν ἐν ὅροις ἐπιστημονικοῖς περιγεγραμμένην καὶ τοῖς τῆς αἰτίας λογισμοῖς βεβαίως καταδεθεῖσαν. Transl. O’Neill (1971). frans de haas In this paper I would like to explore part of Aristotle’s contribution towards such ‘clear and unadulterated knowledge of ourselves’. The Proclean expression ‘knowledge of ourselves’ (ἐπιστήμη ἡμῶν αὐτῶν) suggests that there is a type of ‘knowledge’ which has ‘ourselves’ as its object. In his discussion Proclus draws heavily on the Platonic antecedents of this expression in the First Alcibiades and Charmides where problems are raised about the exact nature and object of this type of ‘knowledge’. It is well-known that in da iii 2 Aristotle may be seen as taking up the challenge of the Charmides: ‘What we need, my friend, is some great man to give an adequate interpretation of this point in every detail’ (169a1–3), i.e., whether it is possible for something to possess a δύναμις in relation to itself. His discussion of perceptual awareness in da iii 2 echoes the wording and argument of the Charmides, as we shall see. This passage, together with relevant sections from De somno and De insomniis, has received much attention in the modern debate on consciousness.³ Since Plato tends to discuss awareness as a function of the rational part of the soul, Aristotle is perceived as criticizing Plato when he locates perceptual awareness in the perceptual capacity of the soul. However, in da iii 2 Aristotle merely wants to provide an account of perceptual awareness in all animals,⁴ not merely humans, so that rationality cannot come into play in da iii 2. Perceptual awareness, then, is explained in terms of the perceptual capacity of the soul, and commentators usually point to the common sense as the appropriate locus of awareness even though the common sense is not mentioned in da iii 2. Gregorić has suggested that Aristotle may be refraining from mentioning the common sense because he wants to criticize Plato in Plato’s terms.⁵ We shall see, however, that the premises of Aristotle’s argument and its position in da iii 2 already entail so much of Aristotle’s own psychological theory that this suggestion does not carry conviction. The absence of the common sense here will have to find another explanation. It is unfortunate that recent discussions elaborate on perceptual awareness, and tend to postpone discussion of Aristotle’s statements concerning awareness of thinking. After all, the Charmides focused on knowledge of knowledge, and mentions perception only as part of Socrates’ strategy against it, as we shall see. For Plato, instances of the pattern ‘x of x’ as in...