Philosophy in the Age of Distraction

I am struggling to define some relationships between Homer, Heraclitus and Protagoras based upon my limited knowledge of Greek poetry and philosophy. I suppose one might use the lengthy quality of Homeric epic poetry versus the short aphorisms of the latter two philosophers as a basis of comparison. I have also considered Heraclitus and Protagoras as thinkers working within different frameworks of "philosophy" as we might define the term today. Philosophy is in my opinion a formalistic inquiry into how the world exists and how reality is defined. This includes how humans might conduct themselves and also how they might construct a system of justice or define political life. We can see these lines of inquiry emerging in Protagoras and Heraclitis. As these kinds of philosophical considerations are embedded in Homer's oral epic poetry I feel that they are less systematically described.

Additionally, philosophizing in the time of the Presocratics appears to be open to debate, and debate does not seem to be part of the manner by which Homer constructs his narrative. Although the characters within the Iliad may debate each other, Homer's epic was not recited nor performed to elicit debate; in other words, I gather that Homer was not thinking about "philosophy as rhetoric" per se in his performances. He was not concerned with crafting an art of speech to defend one's rights and property like Protagoras who, according to Aristotle, even justified his right to take money to help people "better" themselves in the art of rhetoric.

Snell argues that the "Homer conceived of the thing which we call intellect in a different manner, and that in a sense the intellect existed for him, though not qua intellect." I am not quite sure what Snell means by intellect. Does Snell mean the construction of human subjectivity when he uses the term "intellect"? Another Snell question might be important here: "What did the Greeks at any given time know about themselves, and what did they not yet know?" Does Snell mean "self-consciousness", which could mean anything from having consciousness about one's world to theorizing about it? Aristotle writes about (and this is taken from a fragment in the Protagoras reading) how Protagoras struggled with geometry and mathematics as a legitimate subject of inquiry ("As Protagoras says of mathematics, the subject-matter is unknowable, and the terminology distasteful.") I cite this as an example of something that some "Greeks" did not yet know, or at least something that they could not agree on as an object of inquiry.

Finally, a comment on methodology: I can't even imagine how difficult it must be to construct a coherent philosophy of thinkers like Heraclitus and Protagoras from fragments of mostly secondhand sources.

Epic poetry

It has been quite a long time since I last read Homer, and this past week I had to mentally adjust to the non-direct, circular quality of the Iliad. I had to refamiliarize myself with verbal exchange that consisted of lengthy speeches issued from one character to the other. Because the characters do not respond to each other succinctly, one gets the feeling that they are lecturing to an invisible audience.

In short, I had to get used to reading epic poetry, which is an entirely different experience than one would have hearing it episodically and with variations of performance, as I would imagine to be the case of Homeric audiences. Havelock says, "Epic had been par excellence the vehicle of the preserved word through the Dark Age." (47) This idea of the "preserved word" is worthy of attention here, since it seems almost paradoxical to present a notion of "preserved word" vis-a-vis the stories in the Iliad. If Greek stories of gods and humans, warfare and ritual were passed orally (assuming this is preliterate Greece), they probably did not exist in the sense of "preserved", as a 1-1 copy of one story to the next, but as variations of each other. They were imitations, and one might consider Havelock's analysis of Plato, and the latter's problems with Homer, in light of this chain of imitation, of poor imitations.

This leads me to one of main question (posed by Havelock) in this week's reading: what exactly is Plato's problem with mimesis? According to the classicist, Plato applies the term to a variety of Homeric contexts. Is Plato's problem with mimesis a question of the act itself, coming from the poet, or mimesis in the context of epic poetry? I am inclined to think that Plato's issue with imitation lies in the genre, and most crucially, in the experience, of listening to and absorbing the messages of epic poetry over and over again. In Plato, this sort of "brainwashing" of the listeners and audiences of epic poetry is antithetical to the engagement of Socratic dialogue, and as a form of paideia, only a weak copy (as Dan mentioned) of existing, deeper bodies of knowledge. I.e., if you want to learn about making a boat, don't ask Homer to give you a lecture, ask the boatmaker or sailor.