Justin Messmore, Review of Parmenides, Plato and Mortal Philosophy, Ancient Philosophy

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Parmenides, Plato and Mortal Philosophy. By Vishwa Adluri. New York: Continuum, 2011. Pp. xvii + 212. $120.00 (hardback), $39.95 (paperback). ISBN 978-1441166005. Justin Messmore

In Varieties of Religious Experience, William James notes the tragic misfit between the philosopher’s conceptual apparatus and the fullness of life itself: ‘Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late. No one knows this as well as the philosopher. He must fire his volley of new vocables out of his conceptual shotgun, for his profession condemns him to this industry, but he secretly knows the hollowness and irrelevancy. His formulas are like stereoscopic or kinetoscopic photographs seen outside the instrument; they lack the depth, the motion, the vitality’ (360). This is the plight of the philosopher: How could I possibly use language in order to give an account of that which eludes language? Vishwa Adluri’s Parmenides, Plato and Mortal Philosophy shows how Parmenides and Plato do precisely that. Both preserve the distinction between logos (reason, or language) and phusis (nature), and they help to show us our own unsuccessful attempts to escape tragic mortal finitude by fleeing into metaphysical accounts of being. Adluri offers a radical new interpretation of Parmenides’ poem. Traditionally, philosophical interpretation of Parmendies’ Peri Phuseōs has focused on the unnamed goddess’ discourse on true being, the Way of Truth. With this speech, as many scholars take it, Parmenides breaks from previous ‘mythical’ ways of persuasion. The goddess aims to convince the traveler with logic. This break separates the mytho-poetic storytelling that occupied previous thinkers and artists from philosophy proper. No longer would abstract thought need to be filtered through mythology. After Parmenides, it would be critical, rational, and logically rigorous. As the goddess tells the kouros, ‘judge by logos the strife-ridden refutation spoken by me’ (7.5-6), and we are to do the same. Traditional views of Parmenides’ poem, however, tend to ignore the literary aspects of the first section (the proem) and the second speech (the doxa, or Way of Mortals). Adluri’s insightful and provocative work aims to upset these traditional views and replace them with one that takes the whole poem into account. Adluri persuasively argues that the themes of journey and mortal temporality shape the poem, and that rather than being a philosophy of static being, it is a rich description of inescapably mortal finitude and our attempts to transcend that condition. The first chapter sets the stage for Adluri’s interpretation of the poem by arguing that mortal temporality has typically been excluded from philosophy and science, due to their failure to capture the existential and experiential aspects of Ancient Philosophy 34 (2014) ©Mathesis Publications

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time. Central to his account of mortal temporality is the Greek concept of phusis, or nature. The word contains a paradox: phusis refers to nature as both ‘essence’ and ‘way we encounter the universe primordially’ (58), i.e., as both being and becoming. An inability to grasp this paradox of time leads us to ‘Metaphysics, understood as an ontology, theology, and logic’, which ‘enables us to evade the monstrous duality of permanence and change in phusis’ (16). Metaphysics, to Adluri, is ‘a way of thinking that lays aside temporality in an attempt to evade mortality’ (17). The glaring problem with metaphysical logoi is that they cannot account for individuality or the singular mortal lifespan. (The closest it gets, as Adluri points out, is with proper names. Yet even proper names cannot pin down true individuality.) As he puts it, ‘Metaphysics is the prephilosophical condition whereby we employ logos to protect us against our own mortality’ (20). Adluri proposes that we overcome metaphysics with an account of singularity, i.e., the mortal lifespan stretched out between birth and death that makes each of us completely individual that does not evade finitude, and he finds the resources for just such an account in the early Greek twofold division of the soul into psukhē and thumos. Adluri’s philological analysis of thumos from Homer until Plato shows that human intellectual, volitional, and emotional activity were the work of thumos rather than psukhē. Thumos perishes at death (and, as the emotional center of the soul, feels dread at this possibility) while psukhē, insubstantial and inhuman, journeys to the underworld. For Adluri, thumos picks out the unique, singular, and mortal. With its temporal structure and desire for immortal preservation, thumos defines the journey of a mortal life. Central to Adluri’s study is the motif of journey in Parmenides’ poem and Plato’s dialogues (he provides an in-depth analysis of the Phaedrus). An account of the soul that recognizes thumos as the principle of both mortality and desire for immortality allows us to tell the story of the radical individual that ultimately cannot take shelter in metaphysical truths. The journey of life, as the book’s subtitle points out, is a ‘return from transcendence’. So how does this connect to Parmenides and Plato? Adluri makes his argument clear: ‘The journeys of Parmenides’ kouros and of Plato’s Socrates trace a common theme. Each begins with a concern for metaphysical permanence, then deconstructs metaphysical atemporality, and finally accepts the mortal condition’ (11). In chapter 2, Adluri begins his break from the traditional over-emphasis on the Way of Truth. His exegetical thesis is simple, yet strikingly original: ‘Parmenides’ poem consists of three sections, which form a coherent philosophical program’ (40, emphasis original). Where other scholars (notably Burkert 1969 and Kingsley 1995, 1999, 2003) have emphasized the proem’s initiatory language—a nice corrective to the usual exclusion—Adluri reminds us to consider the entire poem as a philosophical journey, with each section essential to understanding Parmenides’ view on finitude and transcendence. Adluri sets out his reading of the poem in the subsequent three chapters (Part II of the book). Adluri’s identification of thumos (the mortal soul) as the best candidate for a rich mortal philosophy both informs and is informed by his reading of the proem.

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In the first line, we find that the kouros is carried by mares ‘as far as thumos might reach’ (1.1). This is important because thumos is essentially mortal and so cannot reach immortality without offense to Dikē, or justice. For Adluri, it does not much matter where the kouros is journeying. What is significant for the poem is simply that the kouros is journeying. The theme of journey unifies the three parts of the poem (typically divided into the Proem, the Way of Truth, and the Doxa or Way of Mortals). Adluri notes that ‘[w]hen it comes to spatial descriptions, Parmenides is vague and elusive’ (50), but Parmenides is incredibly specific when describing the rapid activity and directionality of the kouros. This hints, at the very least, that we should pay attention to the journey itself (rather than the landmarks) as a clue to interpreting the poem. The originality of Adluri’s position lies in its middle way, so to speak, between reading the poem as merely literary and reducing it to an oddly framed treatise on being. This portion of his argument, I suspect, will be most engaging for those interested in early Greek thought. As Adluri makes clear in his explication, the literary aspects of the poem are philosophical. Most basically, the poem is a whole, consistent philosophical text. From this perspective, Adluri criticizes both the allegorical and merely-literary readings of the proem (presented by Kahn and Taran, respectively) for failing to see how the ordering of the journey (as a journey toward immortality, with a brief sojourn there, and an inevitable return) frames the philosophical issues within. Interestingly, the technological imagery of the proem (which Kingsley 2003 also acknowledges) can be read in relation to thumos and journey. If thumos is essentially mortal, and the kouros is journeying to an immortal realm, then how can the journey continue? Technology allows for the suspension of temporality (such as, for example, Circe’s pharmakon for Odysseus). ‘In Parmenides’ poem, thumos is able to harness technology both as a vehicle to approach the immortals as well as a medium of metaphysics’ (61). The kouros passes through the gates of Night and Day, which are guarded by Justice (Dikē), and is met by the goddess. She warmly welcomes the kouros and says that ‘no evil fate (moira kakē)’ sent him (Fr. 1.26). If you are looking for a detailed treatment of the Way of Truth, then you may be disappointed by Adluri’s brief discussion. I think that this is a fair counterbalance to the usual emphasis on the goddess’ speech on being, however. In chapter 4, Adluri analyzes this speech, and he claims that the theme of mortal temporality allows us to read the speech as a crossing between the worlds of phusis and of logos. Dikē, standing guard at the gate between day and night, allows the mortal kouros to enter the realm of logos. Other readers have argued that the goddess exists in Hades (see P. Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom, Inverness: The Golden Sufi Center and W. Burkert ‘Das Proömium des Parmenides und die Katabasis des Pythagoras’ Phronesis [1969] 14: 1-30), but Adluri convincingly argues that interpreting her world as logos (rather than some specific location— and remember, Parmenides gives short shrift to spatial details) allows us to notice the asymmetry of the encounter between mortals and immortals. In her speech, the goddess claims to speak on truth (alētheia) and opinion (doxa), yet she is

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incapable of evaluating these from anywhere but her position of atemporal logic. Thus, she completely excludes temporality and reaches the conclusion that being does not come into being, perish, or move. The true being that she presents seems foreign to our mortal experience because ‘[o]nly in metaphysical logoi can thinking and being be the same. In the case of mortals, who live in phusis and also have access to logos, thinking and being correspond in logos, but they are asymmetrical in mortal existence’ (77). Adluri’s point is that our tragic mortal condition leads us to seek shelter in metaphysical logoi, and this may explain the neat attractiveness of the goddess’ argument, but to accept this completely would be to deny our essential temporality, our home in phusis. The goddess’ discourse on the Way of Truth is a beautiful denial of our human finitude, and our romance with her speech (at the risk of abandoning our very nature) is also the tale of Parmenides scholarship until now. Adluri reminds us that the goddess does not stop after the Way of Truth. The journey of the kouros is a round-trip. ‘Scholars have previously read the contradiction of the goddess’ two speeches as denying phenomenal reality (something unthinkable to a pre-Socratic), but I argue that it is meant to draw limits to the logos she unfolds in her ontological demonstration’ (7). I have long puzzled over the goddess’ speech on mortal opinions. Are we meant to examine our opinions in the light of her logoi and thus correct our ignorant thoughts? Or is this an uncritical tossing together of names and concepts (the same way that mortals establish their knowing)? She famously tells the kouros to listen to the ‘deceitful ordering’ of her words (8.52). Yet she also says that she is teaching the kouros ‘so that never any knowing of mortals might outstrip you’ (8.61). Rather than trying to explain away the questions arising from the Way of Mortals, Adluri wisely points out that this confusion is part of the philosophical point: ‘[A]ccording to the contrasting temporalities that inform her logical being and the mortal being of our phusis, juxtaposition of these two realms necessarily generates an aporia, one that reflects the aporia of time discussed in Chapter 1’ (80). The interpretation of the poem as journey means that the third speech ‘returns the kouros to the mortal doxa that discloses our mortal cosmos of becoming as such: changeable, and knowable with some probability but not with certainty, and never unequivocally’ (87). Justice is the separation of mortals and immortals, and so the disembodied logos of the goddess is unfit for the kouros. He returns from logos to the mortal cosmos. In Part III of the book, Adluri defends a new interpretation of Plato’s Phaedrus. Adluri claims that the Phaedrus has striking and intentional similarities to Parmenides’ poem. An obvious congruence is the motif of a chariot journey. Both texts deal with the issue of how mortals try to access immortality, and in considering the Phaedrus, Adluri points out the obvious but often overlooked fact: Socrates, the mortal, is soon to be put to death. On this reading, the Platonic dialogue repeats the theme of journey that we find in Parmenides’ poem. The soul escapes from mortality into a metaphysical logos (the realm of the goddess, or the realm of the Forms in Socrates’ palinode), encounters unchanging being,

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and returns from transcendence to mortal temporality. According to Adluri, the mythos of the soul’s journey and the critique of writing in the Phaedrus illustrate the deep similarity with Parmenides’ poem: ‘The philosophical problem that these two thinkers wrestle with is: how do we speak/write about the finite, fragile, irreplaceable, incarnate fate of specific mortals, when language is, in some sense, outside of time?’ (94). Adluri is critical of Jacques Derrida’s famous essay on the Phaedrus, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’. Derrida, it seems, fails to recognize the theme of Socrates’ mortal individuality, and so he emphasizes the idea of writing as pharmakon, ambiguously cure and poison. Writing is a cure for Plato, since he can attempt to preserve the being of Socrates; but it is also poison, because—as the dialogue makes clear—writing is a form of forgetfulness. Socrates on paper supplants the living man. Adluri argues that Derrida’s analysis is misguided, though. If the Phaedrus is dealing with the philosophical problem of mortal individuality and the quest for immortality, then ‘language, both in its written and spoken forms, is itself brought to trial’ (123, emphasis original). Logos in either form, written or spoken, is unable to save Socrates or any other mortal from temporal finitude. The book concludes with a brief critical discussion of Martin Heidegger’s history of being and Western metaphysics. Heidegger claims that there have been five ‘epochs’ of being, beginning with the Presocratic understanding (which he locates in Parmenides’ poem) and ending in our current late-modern epoch (ushered in by Nietzsche). Heidegger aims to overcome the nihilistic metaphysics of the late-modern epoch by returning to the early Greek understanding of being. According to Heidegger, we have failed to understand the difference between being and beings (or entities), and this error keeps us stuck in our metaphysical epoch. (Our current epoch is nihilistically bent on efficiency and technologization because, following Nietzsche [at least, according to Heidegger], we understand beings as merely forces to be optimized.) Adluri thinks that Heidegger fails to initiate this break with metaphysics, since Heidegger’s proposal that we understand the being of beings seems to be a surrender to ‘metaphysics qua theology’ (132). Instead of following Heidegger, Adluri proposes that we overcome metaphysics through a full understanding of mortal singularity and our flirtation with metaphysical logoi. On Adluri’s reading of Heidegger, the mortal individual is subsumed to an analysis of the history of being. A proper understanding of singularity is articulated by both Plato and Parmenides. Thus, Adluri boldly claims that ‘Plato is heedful to Parmenides in this recovery and retention and recapitulation of the singular and mortal’, and so there is ‘the necessity of returning to Parmenides via Plato rather than Heidegger’ at the end of metaphysics (131). This book is highly original, and it will contribute to our understanding of the Presocratics, Plato, and even Nietzsche and Heidegger. Scholars of ancient Greek language and philosophy will find the detailed appendix (with Adluri’s translation of Peri Phuseōs) useful, along with the comprehensive and careful text-critical approach to the whole poem that Adluri takes throughout this work. I find that Adluri’s criticism of Peter Kingsley’s reading of the poem is unjustified. Accord-

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ing to Adluri, Kingsley reads Peri Phuseōs as the description of a mystical experience. He rather pointedly says that ‘what transpires between the kouros and the goddess is not characteristic of a mystical experience’ (50). I think this claim is tenuous. Kingsley argues that the practice of incubation (or silence, meditation, and lucid dreaming in secluded caves) led Parmenides to his insights into reality, and no incubation is complete without a return to the mortal world to share wisdom gained. It seems to me that Adluri and Kingsley, in light of the journey motif, share more in common than Adluri is keen to admit. When we read the poem as a whole (as Adluri suggests), then it does not seem far-fetched to say that it could be a description of a mystical experience. Furthermore, Adluri’s claim that Plato aims to emphasize the mortal singularity of Socrates over the transcendent Forms is contentious, to say the least. While reading this book, I found myself asking: For whom is this work written? Students and scholars of ancient Greek philosophy might balk at Adluri’s appropriation of Parmenides and Plato for the task of redefining temporality and overcoming metaphysics. Adluri’s Heideggerese is occasionally thick and may put off some readers. Also, those well-versed in Nietzsche and Heidegger might find Adluri’s proposal for the overcoming of metaphysics through Plato and Parmenides unnecessary. Many might think that Heidegger’s later philosophy already accomplished the task of overcoming metaphysics. Despite my concerns, Adluri successfully shows the relevance of ancient Greek philosophy to contemporary philosophical (and theological) concerns like temporality, individuality, nihilism, and metaphysics. Those working in ancient philosophy, Continental philosophy, contemporary theology, and even literary studies would do well to engage with Adluri’s book. It is a refreshing take on doing philosophy in a personal and relevant way.

Department of Philosophy University of New Mexico Albuquerque NM 87131

Socrates’ Daimonic Art: Love for Wisdom in Four Platonic Dialogues. By Elizabeth S. Belfiore. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. xvii + 304. $99.00 (hardback). ISBN 9781107007581. Benjamin Harriman

Consider the following fragment from Aeschines’ Alcibiades (10 C, Dittmar): ‘I had no knowledge I could teach the man to benefit him, but I thought that by associating with him I could improve him through my love.’ In her intriguing monograph, Professor Belfiore takes up how ἔρως relates to philosophy for Ancient Philosophy 34 (2014) ©Mathesis Publications