What is Philosophy? Diogenes Laërtius’ Answer

Everyone has a philosophy, whether they know it or not. As Dr Kmita points out 'No life can be fully human without it.' It is part of our nature.

From The European Conservative

 By Robert Lazu Kmita, PhD

Whilst the term ‘philosophy’ is Greek in origin, the practice it denotes is as old as mankind. No life can be fully human without it.

If we wish to understand what philosophy is, we must investigate the world in which this word was born, namely ancient Greece. Beyond the philological and etymological approaches, which, while valuable, have their limitations, we must find out how classical authors understood the notion of ‘philosophy.’ Alongside the great speculative thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus, from whom we have substantial collections of texts, there is an author who discussed in detail the origins of ‘love-of-wisdom’: Diogenes Laërtius. In the most famous collection regarding ancient philosophers and their doctrines, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (Vitae philosophorum), he dedicates the first pages to a detailed analysis of the origins of philosophy.

Unfortunately, due to the harsh criticism brought against him by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Hermann Usener (1834-1905), Laërtius has often been ignored or treated with some reserve. The accusation made by these two was that of plagiarism. Specifically, he was alleged to have copied entire sections from the writings of Diocles of Magnesia, Apollonides of Nicaea, or Favorinus. Considering how accounts about the ancient Greek philosophers were circulated and borrowed, such criticisms are unjustified. Ancient authors did not live in a world marked by the modern ethical principle of the ‘rights of the author.’ What was important for them, as seen from their writings, was the completeness of the information transmitted, collected haphazardly from sources either mentioned or left obscure. They were driven by the desire to record everything that had been said about the ancient lovers-of-wisdom, without concerning themselves with consistency, contradictions among different sources, or the authorship of these accounts.

Diogenes Laërtius most likely lived sometime in the 2nd-3rd centuries AD. He conveys several important ideas that we constantly encounter when studying the nature of philosophy in the context of sources preserved from ancient authors. But I want to emphasize a fact that can be proven with the help of texts: that there was a unity to the understanding enjoyed by thinkers from that tradition—a tradition which gave us Pythagoras, Parmenides, Empedocles, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Proclus. They knew what philosophy is, and even though there are differences in nuances or emphases, the core of this contemplative art of the intellect is the same for all of them.

Greek or barbarian?

Diogenes Laërtius begins the discussion on the origins of philosophy quite abruptly: are they Greek or ‘barbarian’? The question is perfectly legitimate because, as he tells us, “there are some who say that the study of philosophy had its beginning among the barbarians.” Those who could be cited to support the ‘barbarian’ origins of philosophy include Aristotle, with his treatise On Magic, and Sotion with his Successions of Philosophers. Another author who had discussed the oriental origins of philosophy—five centuries before Laërtius—was Hecataeus of Abdera (c.360 BC-c.290 BC). The discussion has never ceased to fascinate historians who, as often happens, have tried—from the ancients to Theodor Hopfner, Aram Frenkian, and Daniel Constantin—to demonstrate the indemonstrable. The only certainty is the Greek origin of the term in question, and not the discipline to which it refers.

There were, therefore, authors who claimed that philosophy began among the barbarian peoples. The complete list mentioned by Laërtius is as follows: the Persians, Babylonians and Assyrians, Indians, Celts and Gauls, Phoenicians, Libyans, Egyptians, and Thracians. Their contributions are mentioned succinctly and accurately, although sometimes they are firmly criticized. Here is a relevant example:

Those who attribute its invention to barbarians bring forward Orpheus the Thracian, calling him a philosopher of whose antiquity there can be no doubt. Now, considering the sort of things he said about the gods, I hardly know whether he ought to be called a philosopher; for what are we to make of one who does not scruple to charge the gods with all human suffering, and even the foul crimes wrought by the tongue amongst a few of mankind?

This passage is highly significant for understanding the author’s perspective. The basis of the criticism directed against the famous Orpheus is theological in nature. It is similar to the objections raised by philosophers such as Xenophanes of Colophon (c.570-c.478 BC), Socrates (c.470-399 BC), Plato (c.427-348 BC), and even Aristotle (384-322 BC) against the popular depiction of Greek deities. Likewise, the early Christian authors from the intellectual elite raised increasingly sharp objections against the Greek and Roman pantheon. Laërtius aligns with those who have serious reservations about how authors like Homer and Orpheus describe the gods. This is why he cannot consider the latter a philosopher. I emphasize that we are dealing with a theological reason, which already tells us something very important about the nature of philosophy and those who practice it, as understood by Laërtius.

The Egyptians and ‘the others’

The most extensive presentation of the ‘philosophical’ vision of an ancient ‘barbarian’ people is that dedicated to the Egyptians:

The philosophy of the Egyptians is described as follows so far as relates to the gods and to justice. They say that matter was the first principle, next the four elements were derived from matter, and thus living things of every species were produced. The sun and the moon are gods bearing the names of Osiris and Isis respectively; they make use of the beetle, the dragon, the hawk, and other creatures as symbols of divinity, according to Manetho in his Epitome of Physical Doctrines, and Hecataeus in the first book of his work On the Egyptian Philosophy. They also set up statues and temples to these sacred animals because they do not know the true form of the deity. They hold that the universe is created and perishable, and that it is spherical in shape. They say that the stars consist of fire, and that, according as the fire in them is mixed, so events happen upon earth; that the moon is eclipsed when it falls into the earth’s shadow; that the soul survives death and passes into other bodies; that rain is caused by change in the atmosphere; of all other phenomena they give physical explanations, as related by Hecataeus and Aristagoras. They also laid down laws on the subject of justice, which they ascribed to Hermes; and they deified those animals which are serviceable to man. They also claimed to have invented geometry, astronomy, and arithmetic.

In the case of the Egyptians, Laërtius is much more lenient: he does not bring any pronounced criticism, aside from the theological remark that “they do not know the true form of the deity.” This is most likely due to the prestige their culture held among Greek philosophers. It is said that the most significant of them—Thales, Pythagoras, Socrates, etc.—visited ancient Egypt. The famous story of Atlantis, as told by Plato in the dialogues Timaeus and Critias, is also attributed to Egyptian priests from Sais who recounted it to the wise Solon (c.630-c.560 BC).

Shorter than the presentation dedicated to the Egyptians, the other sections review the religious representatives of the respective cultures: the Indian gymnosophists (i.e., yogis), the Celtic druids, the Gallic druids, the Thracian priest Zalmoxis, the Zoroastrian magi, the shaman Orpheus, and the legendary Atlas and Hephaestus (the equivalent of the Egyptian god Ptah). Going through all these brief encyclopedic descriptions, I noticed a common feature among them. Without exception, each of those proposed as the founders of philosophy are foremost religious figures in their cultures. Descartes, Hume, Bacon, Kant, or Husserl would be shocked to see this indestructible relationship between ancient religions and philosophy.

Philosophy as religion, religion as philosophy

In the Dictionnaire des Religions, whose first edition was published by the French publisher Plon in Paris in 1990, Ioan Petru Culianu unequivocally stated that “in the Platonic tradition, philosophy is a religion and religion a philosophy.” After more than 30 years of research, I have come to the conclusion that this statement is applicable to all of Greek philosophy. Ancient speculative thought cannot be separated from the specific horizon of the religions professed by its main representatives. In this sense, Diogenes Laërtius is just another author for whom philosophy and religious practices—whether ritualistic, shamanic, magical, or theurgic—are inseparable. No matter how foreign such a perspective may seem to us today, without adopting it, understanding the nature of philosophy as presented in Vitae philosophorum is impossible. We are not dealing with a mere hypothetical opinion, but with an axiom necessary for any investigation into the origins and nature of philosophy.

Returning to Laërtius’s exposition, we find that its main purpose is to justify the Greek origins of philosophy. I must emphasize that this is not an archaic form of “nationalism.” An invention of the modern world, nationalism was non-existent in the context of ancient European or Eastern cultures. What he was defending was the prestige of the primacy of origins, which becomes very clear from the fragment in which he tries to demonstrate the Greek origins of philosophy:

These authors forget that the achievements which they attribute to the barbarians belong to the Greeks, with whom not merely philosophy but the human race itself began. For instance, Musaeus is claimed by Athens, Linus by Thebes. It is said that the former, the son of Eumolpus, was the first to compose a genealogy of the gods and to construct a sphere, and that he maintained that all things proceed from unity and are resolved again into unity. He died at Phalerum, and this is his epitaph: ‘Musaeus, to his sire Eumolpus dear, In Phalerean soil lies buried here; and the Eumolpidae at Athens get their name from the father of Musaeus.’ Linus again was (so it is said) the son of Hermes and the Muse Urania. He composed a poem describing the creation of the world, the courses of the sun and moon, and the growth of animals and plants. His poem begins with the line: “Time was when all things grew up at once”; and this idea was borrowed by Anaxagoras when he declared that all things were originally together until Mind came and set them in order. Linus died in Euboea, slain by the arrow of Apollo, and this is his epitaph: “Here Theban Linus, whom Urania bore, the fair-crowned Muse, sleeps on a foreign shore.” And thus it was from the Greeks that philosophy took its rise: its very name refuses to be translated into foreign speech.

A careful reading of the above fragment reveals three arguments in favor of the Greek origins of philosophy. First, the mythological argument invokes the origins of humanity: the Greeks not only are the initiators of the ‘love of wisdom’ but of all humanity. Basically, Adam and Eve were Greeks. From the premise that the Greeks were the originators of humanity, the second argument follows: as if they were witnesses of creation, they knew both the genealogy of the gods and how the entire cosmos came into being. Finally, the third argument, unrelated to the first two, is philological: the term ‘philosophy’ is not only Greek but also lacks an equivalent in the languages of the peoples whose philosophers have been presented.

While unquestionably favorable to the thesis of Greek origins of philosophy, Diogenes Laërtius provides us with many details about other cultures and how their most significant representatives followed the paths of ‘love of wisdom.’ Rich in exotic details, his analysis contains ideas worth noting for any thorough discussion on the nature of ancient philosophy.

Lessons from Vitae philosophorum

We accept the Greek origin of the term ‘philosophy.’ Even though modern authors, such as the Egyptologist Daniel Constantin, have attempted to demonstrate the non-Greek origins of the terms ‘philosophy’ and ‘philosopher,’ their hypotheses have not withstood rigorous philological analysis. However, while the Greek origin of the term ‘philosophy’ can be readily acknowledged without major issues, the same cannot be said about the phenomenon it denotes.

Implicitly demonstrated by Laërtius through his exposition of peoples and their religious representatives who practiced the discipline in question, we can deduce that we are dealing with an art that developed concurrently in different contexts by all the ancients. Wisdom had disciples everywhere. Yet, the Greeks merit recognition for immortalizing it with a name and systematically cultivating it over millennia until the Christian era, when philosophy gained a more substantial profile through thinkers like Augustine, John of Damascus, Scotus Eriugena, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, and John of the Cross.

Of course, some will speak—without the risk of error—of the ‘baptism’ of philosophy. At the same time, serious efforts must be made, akin to the endeavors of brilliant scholars such as Jean Pepin, Francis MacDonald Cornford, Endre von Ivánka, Pierre Boyancé, and others like them, to understand how this discipline as ancient as human history was assimilated within the new religious context after the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

I want to be clear: through all the statements above, as well as those made in other articles, I do not necessarily intend to reopen the discussion from the first half of the 20th century about ‘Christian philosophy.’ What I affirm is much more categorical: if for ancient Greece, philosophy was inextricably linked to religion, for us it can only be Christian. With the incarnation of the divine Logos, Jesus Christ—the second Person of the Holy Trinity—the ontological mutation influencing the entire cosmos presupposes inevitable intellectual-speculative, ritualistic, and ascetic rigor that must be assumed by any authentic lover of wisdom.

Pictured: A 17th century engraving of Diogenes Laërtius