Mauro Bonazzi
Ulysses’ journey and the ambitions of philosophy
Oratie Uitgesproken bij de aanvaarding van de leeropdracht ‘Antieke en Middeleeuwse Filosofie’ aan de Universiteit Utrecht op woensdag 4 december 2019.
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Mijnheer de Rector Magnificus, Collega’s en vrienden Beste studenten,
I Some years ago, in 1990, the European Space Agency, in collaboration with the NASA, launched a space probe into the heliosphere, as part of one of the most ambitious projects ever attempted – to explore the poles of the Sun, and discover the secrets of the star on which our life depends. The name of the mission, not surprisingly, was ‘Ulysses’, the Latin name of the Greek Odysseus. As we read on the ESA webpage1, it was an ‘unprecedented journey of discovery’, and Ulysses in our imaginaire is precisely the model of the man who wants to know, the mythical hero always ready to embark on ‘journeys of discovery’. The name of the protagonist of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, was David Bowman. Bowman: the man with the bow, that is – once again, and rather predictably – Ulysses. The list is long. Is anyone surprised by this association between Ulysses, journeys of discovery and knowledge? Well, probably not, except for one remarkable exception: Homer, the ‘author’ of the Odyssey, the poem dedicated to the adventures of Ulysses, and the inventor of his legend. Homer would have been surprised by this description, and reasonably so, for in the Odyssey Ulysses is a tired hero, whose only desire is to return home. When we first meet him in the fifth book of the poem – and it is his first substantial appearance on the stage of history and literature – he is standing on a rock in front of the sea, his face wet with tears, oppressed by the desire to return home, to see his wife, and a son that he barely knows. It is a torment that never ends, just as the waves of the sea never stop: ‘he was sitting by the shore as usual, / sobbing in grief and pain; his heart was breaking. In tears he stared across the fruitless sea’ (Odyssey 5.82-84; transl. Wilson). True, in some 1
https://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Ulysses_overview.
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moments his desire is less intense than in others – for instance, he could have avoided spending an entire year with the beautiful Circes, after defeating her. But if he did it, it was certainly not for philosophical reasons. Only in a few cases were Odysseus’s actions driven by a sort of intellectual curiosity. Desire to know is not a defining aspect of this character, and it does not play a strategic role in the plot of the Odyssey. The apparent tension between Homer’s Odysseus and our Ulysses is easy to explain. The model of our Ulysses, the archetype of the hero of knowledge, is not Homer. Our Ulysses comes from a completely different tradition, he is the invention of another poet, who did not even read Greek. Our Ulysses descends in a direct line from Dante Alighieri’s Divina comedia, and more precisely from the Inferno. We are at the bottom of Hell, where Ulysses is being eternally punished for his sins – he is burning for the treachery of the Trojan horse and for the sacrileges committed at Troy. But this is not what Dante is interested in – and this is actually very strange. Dante’s mission is to report to his readers sins and punishments in order to help them, us, to set their, our, lives on the right course. But all this fades away, in the presence of Ulysses, when Dante finally meets the Greek hero. Dante wants to know of his travels – or, better, of his journey, ‘the’ journey. There was a legend about Ulysses’ travels beyond the pillars of Hercules, at the Straits of Gibraltar, beyond the limits of the world set by God2. Dante’s ‘canto’ 26 will inform his readers of this story, of what happened after Ulysses crossed the columns and entered these uncharted waters, on an ‘unprecedented journey of knowledge’, until the final catastrophe struck him. It is a story of greatness – here as never before or afterwards, Ulysses is the hero of knowledge – and of misery – for his journey will tragically end in a shipwreck, just as a new land is emerging on the horizon. The theme of the canto is Ulysses’ desire for knowledge; and Dante’s desire to know. In Antiquity Ulysses’s journey was a return, a centripetal movement, often interpreted as the metaphysical return of the soul to the first 2 See M. Corti, Scritti su Cavalcanti e Dante. La felicità mentale – Percorsi dell’invenzione e altri saggi, Torino: Einaudi 2003, 256-267.
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principle3; in Dante the metaphysical circle is broken, the end and the beginning do not coincide anymore. Ulysses’ movement is centrifugal; he is attracted by the unknown4. There is something essential in this story, something of the utmost importance, as the fame it has enjoyed over the centuries confirms. What could that be? In order to understand it we need to better investigate the sources on which Dante drew when he created his character. Dante did not read Greek, and never read the Iliad or the Odyssey5. What are his sources of inspiration, then? To reconstruct what lies behind Dante’s Ulysses is the task of the historian, and it is more exciting than it is usually believed. For the sake of the present oratie, it will suffice to say that two major sources of inspiration can be identified. And it is extremely interesting that they both lead to Aristotle. The first is a very short testimony on Antiochus of Ascalon, a pretty obscure philosopher who lived in the first century BCE6. At best, outside the close circle of specialists, he is 3 See Plot. Enn. 1.6[1].8.6-26; on the Neoplatonist appropriation of Ulysses and more in general on the various intepretation of Ulysses in Antiquity see F. Buffière, Les mythes d’Homère et la pensée grecque, Paris: Les Belles Lettres 1956; W.B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme. A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero, Oxford: Blackwell, 1963; J. Pépin, The Platonic and Christian Ulysses, in D. O’Meara (ed.), Neoplatonism and Christian Thought, Albany: SUNY Press 1981, 3-18; R. Lamberton, Homer the Theologian. Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition, Berkeley/Los Angeles/ London: University of California Press, 1986; S. Montiglio, From Villain to Hero: Odysseus in Ancient Thought, Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press 2011. 4 W.B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme, 148; R. Imbach, Dante, la philosophie et les laïcs, Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires de Fribourg 1996, 244: ‘Dante est un émigrant qui ne désire plus le retour’. 5 After the Medieval centuries, the first reader of the Iliad will be Giovanni Boccaccio, in 1362, see A. Petrusi, Leonzio Pilato fra Petrarca e Boccaccio, Firenze: Olschki 1964. In general, on Ulysses in the Middle Ages, see the above quoted studies of R. Imbach and W.B. Stanford. On Dante’s Ulysses, together with B. Nardi, La tragedia di Ulisse, in Id., Dante e la cultura medievale, Bari: Laterza 1949, A. Pagliaro, Ulisse: ricerche semantiche sulla “Divina commedia”, Messina: D’Anna 1967 and M. Fubini, Ulisse, in Enciclopedia dantesca, Roma: Istituto della Encliclopedia italiana, vol. I, 1970. Very useful is also P. Boitani, Il grande racconto di Ulisse, Bologna: Il Mulino 2016. 6 I investigate the importance of this testimony in Antioco di Ascalona su Ulisse e il desiderio umano di conoscenza (a proposito di Cicerone, De finibus bonorum et malorum, V 48-50), in E. Cattanei – C. Natali (eds.), Studi sul medioplatonismo e il neoplatonismo, Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura 2019, 1-13; see also T. Bénatouïl, THEORIA
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sometimes remembered as one of Cicero’s teachers. And it is precisely Cicero who informs us of his interest in Ulysses in De finibus bonorum et malorum, a text that Dante had voraciously studied. He does so in a short but very important sentence. Cicero here is dealing with the opposition between different ways of life. What is the best kind of life, that which will make your existence happy? This was a central topic of debate among ancient philosophers. Supporting the Aristotelian ideal – in the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle had argued that the best life is the contemplative one, devoted to knowledge and wisdom, we will come back to that – Cicero celebrates the innate human craving for learning and knowledge; he calls it discendi cupiditas or ardor. As his exemplary lover of wisdom he presents none other than Ulysses: …Scientiam pollicetur, quam non erat mirum sapientiae cupido patria esse cariorem. ‘It is knowledge that the Sirens offer, and it was no marvel if a lover of wisdom held this dearer than his home (De finibus bonorum et malorum 5.49)’. If Ulysses did what he did, it is because of his desire for knowledge, which is an important part of our nature. It is a remarkable sentence, which introduces a completely new Ulysses. Until then, as far as we know, Ulysses had only been known and celebrated as the virtuous hero, as a model of endurance and an example of morality. Here, for the first time, Ulysses the moral sage is presented as the hero of knowledge, and transformed into a model for the contemplative life. Into an Aristotelian philosopher, in other words. The second major source of inspiration leads us to the intellectual crisis that upset the Christian world in the 13th century AD, a few decades et vie contemplative du stoïcisme au platonisme: Chrysippe, Panétius, Antiochus, Alcinoos, in M. Bonazzi – J. Opsomer (eds.) The Origins of the Platonic System. Platonisms of the Early Empire and their Philosophical Contexts, Louvain: Peeters 2009, pp. 3-31, S. Montiglio, From Villain to Hero, 134-142 and G. Tsouni, Antiochus on contemplation and the happy life, in D. Sedley (ed.), The Philosophy of Antiochus, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2012, 131-150.
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before Dante began his Comedy. Also in this case, Aristotle was at the center of the stage. For centuries Aristotle had been mainly read as a logician, on the assumption that this was the function of philosophy – to teach some rudiments of logic and prepare students for the study of serious disciplines such as medicine, law, and theology. Now, thanks to new translations and to the mediation of the Arabic commentators in Spain, most notably Averroes, all Aristotle’s treatises, and not only those on logic, came back into circulation again7. What these Aristotelian treatises were showing was that philosophy had much to say on the important issues which were supposed to be the domain of the serious disciplines, most notably theology. It was a cultural shock, and not only because Islamic philosophers, the most important Aristotelian commentators, were now passionately read in the intellectual heart of Christendom, the Parisian universities – the complex role played by the Islamic tradition in the definition of the European identity is an old issue, contrary to what is often repeated nowadays. In this case the problem was Aristotle himself, and his Nichomachean Ethics more in particular, which was now read and commented on by the magistri in the faculties of philosophy and theology. These commentaries are the second and most important source of inspiration for Dante. It is difficult to find a text expressing what philosophy is and what its ambitions are more clearly than the Nicomachean Ethics. It is not difficult to imagine that Aristotle’s views upset Dante’s contemporaries. If we want to decipher the secret of Ulysses, it is to this book that we need to move.
II The Nichomachean Ethics can be read as a detective story8. Something
7 See R. Imbach, Dante, la philosophie et les laïcs, and, more recently, the papers collected in A. De Libera (ed.), Dante et l’averroïsme, Paris: Collège de France/Les Belles Lettres 2019. L. Bianchi, Boezio di Dacia. Sull’eternità del mondo; sui sogni; sul sommo bene, Milano: La vita felice 2017, 203-208 rightly insists also on the role played by Albert the Great. 8 As brilliantly suggested by M. Pakaluk, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics: An introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005, 1.
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is missing and everybody is looking for it; the detective investigates, collecting pieces of evidence and information; at the end he will finally reach a solution – an absolutely surprising solution, something no one would have ever expected. The object of the investigation, what everybody is looking for, is happiness – how to live a happy life. It is towards this goal of doing well, of living a happy and satisfying life, that all our action and choices are ultimately directed. That this is the most important issue for human beings, Aristotle remarks, is evident, and does not require any explanation. The problem is that it is far from clear what happiness is: ‘To say that the best thing is happiness is to say something that, plainly, everyone accepts. What one wants to know is that something be said more clearly about what happiness is’ 9. This is what needs to be discovered. Like a careful detective, the philosopher then begins his investigation by collecting all the relevant information, by taking into account the most important views on happiness. But the investigation ends in frustration. Not one of the solutions envisaged is convincing. The most widespread opinion in antiquity as much as today is that a happy life means a pleasant life: it is ‘la dolce vita’, to use a famous and almost untranslatable Italian expression that everyone understands. But this cannot be the case, Aristotle objects, for pleasure cannot be the final answer; the meaning and value of our life cannot be reduced merely to pleasant feelings, otherwise there would not be difference with the other animals. Pleasure is important, but we are also looking for something else, not only some happy moments, but a happy life, which is something different. Nor – and this is the second option Aristotle puts forward – can a life of political and civic involvement be the solution, because it depends on others and on external conditions – it is difficult to be a good politician, say, if you live under a tyranny – whereas happiness is something which must belong to us, and depends on us. It seems that the investigation is leading nowhere, until the philosopher has an intuition.
9 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1097b22-24; on Aristotle’s discussion of the genres of life see R. Joly, Le thème philosophique des genres de vie dans l’Antiquité classique, Bruxelles 1956 and S. Gastaldi, Bios hairetotatos. Generi di vita e felicità in Aristotele, Napoli: Bibliopolis 2003.
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In order to successfully define happiness, in order to understand what a happy life is, we first need to understand who we are. For a happy life is a life in which you realize your talent and your potential – your nature and function, in other words. This is what we need to know if we want to find an answer to our question. It is not a matter of specific individual talents, for Aristotle. What we are looking for is the ‘talent’ of the human race as a whole, it is what makes us what we, and we alone, are. ‘What special ‘talent’ set us apart from other animals’10, is distinctive of us? The answer is not difficult to find: what is distinctive of human beings, what is specifically ours and ours only is the possession of reason. The Greek word is logos: we become what we really are, that is human beings, when we use our logos correctly, that is in the most excellent way: when we think, when we speak, when we know. This is what makes of us what we are, humans – rational animals, logika zoa. Here, in the life involving reason, is the key to an happy life. What I have summarised so far is one of the most famous arguments, the so-called function argument11, of the Nicomachean Ethics, the object of many discussions among contemporary scholars no less than among the medieval magistri in Paris. It was for instance carefully commented on by Boethius of Dacia, whom Dante knew and read: ‘Parum enim est homini habere ea, quae per naturam habet homo. Natura enim valde imperfecte dimittit hominem, et videtur homo sine sapientia esse quasi brutum animal [...] In his enim tribus consistit vita beata, scilicet in operatione boni et cognitione veri et delectatione in utroque. Et hoc summum bonum est speciei humanae et quicumque est sine hoc, sciat se esse imperfectum individuum in specie sua, nec habet actiones humanas’12.
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M. Pakaluk, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, 77.
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Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1097b22-1098a20.
12 Quaestiones 5, 23, 70-74; 24, 79-84. See M. Corti, Scritti su Cavalcanti e Dante, 336-339.
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Dante has expressed the same idea in three famous verses: considerate la vostra semenza: fatti non foste a vivere come bruti ma per seguire virtute e conoscenza. (‘Consider your origin: you were not made to live as brutes, but to pursue virtue and knowledge’, If 26.118-120) What typically happens to famous quotations has also happened to these verses: they have become so famous, so proverbial, that no one seriously reflects on what they mean. In fact, these three verses faithfully repeat what Aristotle argues for over three pages. If you want to know what you have to do in your life, if you wish to give meaning to your life, you have to consider who you are, what your nature is: considerate la vostra semenza (‘consider your origin’). You are not animals, your life cannot be reduced to a life of pleasure, because this would mean that there is no difference between humans and animals; we are something else: fatti non foste a vivere come bruti (‘you were not mad to live as brutes’). We are rational animals, and it is in the use of our reason, logos, that the meaning of our life lies. This is why knowledge is so important. Ma per seguire virtute e conoscenza (‘but to pursue virtue and knowledge’). As you will surely know, the person who pronounces these verses in the Divina Commedia is Ulysses: these words mark the culmination of the small speech, the orazion picciola, he gives when he tries to convince his companions to follow him on the journey beyond the columns of Hercules. It is a topical moment, the precise moment in which, with this small vessel that dares the unthinkable, the myth of Ulysses as the hero of knowledge begins. After a long sojourn with Circe, Ulysses and his companions can finally return home; instead, they will decide to sail towards the unknown. To know, to understand, this is what gives importance and value to our life. It for this reason that we need to sail off on a journey of discovery, Ulysses tells his companions, framing the voyage as a pursuit of knowledge. The speech is so compelling that his companions enthusiastically agree to set off. Remarkably, it is an
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Aristotelian Ulysses who is speaking13.
III When we come back to the Nicomachean Ethics, we notice that we are still in the first of ten books. The journey is long, time is short, and many questions are still there, awaiting to be answered. Starting from the most important one. Do we really believe that happiness is so strictly interwoven with knowledge and understanding? Why is knowledge so important? One obvious answer is that we need to know, in order to live well, to choose well in our practical life – in short, reason is of the utmost importance for rationally organising our life in our daily choices. It seems that this is also Aristotle’s solution, as he goes on in his investigation, book after book. The conclusion, however, takes a completely different direction. There is no place for practical, daily concerns in the best life. The best life is a life devoted to pure knowledge – the contemplative life, Aristotle says, theoretikos bios – and it is the best life because it will make us immortal: ‘We must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, immortalize (ἀθανατίζειν), and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us […]. It would be strange, then, if he were to choose not the life of himself but that of something else. And what we said before will apply now; that which is proper to each thing is by nature best and most pleasant for each thing; for man, therefore, the life according to intellect is best and pleasantest, since intellect more than anything else is man. This life therefore is also the happiest (Nicomachean Ethics 10.7, 1177b18-1178a8; transl. Barnes et alii)’.
13 The importance of this desire to learn and to know also played a strategic role in his most philosophical text, the Convivio (1.1), which begins with a famous Aristotelian quotation form the Metaphysics (980a21): «all men naturally desire to know».
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This conclusion is so puzzling and shocking that some scholars have even gone so far as to deny its authenticity, as if it were impossible for Aristotle to advance similar ideas14. Others have tried to excuse these pages as the youthful error of an Aristotle who was still under Plato’s spell. True: these pages are clearly reminiscent of Plato15, but in them there is nothing surprising. They perfectly describe what Greek philosophy was (at least according to Plato and Aristotle), and what its ambitions are. The key word is the verb athanatizein, a hapax in the Aristotelian corpus, and a verb almost impossible to translate. What does it mean precisely to ‘immortalize’? The stem of the verb provides a clue as to its meaning. Athanatizein is linked to athanatos, the adjective traditionally used to refer to the gods – they are the athanatoi, literally the immortals, those who never die. Aristotle is thus exhorting us to recover our divine nature, to be like god. And god, for Aristotle, is essentially an intellect, a thinking mind: divine excellence is determined by its rational and intellectual excellence, which we can emulate. When we use our intellect, we can therefore assimilate ourselves to the divine, or, even better, we can become god (athanatizein < athanatos), because we have something in us, our intellect, which is divine. This assimilation is thus understood quite literally: to contemplate is ‘to think of God’s thought’16. Contemplation is nothing less than the possibility of understanding reality as God understands it: it is the full and instantaneous understanding of the essential features of things and their interrelations within the overall structure of reality. It is to ‘command a clear view’ of everything, to paraphrase Wittgenstein17. 14 See for instance M. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986, 373-377. 15 So, rightly, D. Sedley, The Ideal of Godlikeness, in G. Fine (ed.), Plato 2: Ethics, Politics, Religion and the Soul, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1999, 324-328, who underlines the parallel with Timaeus 90a-c. On Plato’s and Aristotle’s ideal of contemplative life, see now A. Nightingale, Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy. Theoria in its Cultural Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004. 16
Sedley, Ideal of Godlikeness, 328.
17 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations I 122, quoted by A. Kenny, Aristole on the Perfect Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1992, 104.
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And it is to gain some sort of immortality. As it appears to philosophers, the world is a wonderful spectacle (spectacle in Greek is theoria, which gives us the adjective theoretikos, contemplative), a spectacle in which there is no more place for death. This is also implied in the meaning of athanatizein. Of course, Aristotle is not alluding to or promising some generic possibility of indefinitely extending our lives. That is not the point. Like us, Aristotle is well aware that sooner or later we are going to die. This is a fact, not a problem. The problem is what is apparently implied by this fact: the fact that we are going to die risks erasing the value of our lives18. We did not exist before, we exist, we will no longer exist. What value does something have, if it is destined to fade away? This question always obsessed the Greeks, from the very beginnings, from Homer’s famous and bleak identification of humans and leaves in the Iliad. ‘As the generation of leaves, so is that of mankind … one generation grows, while the other dies (6.145-149)’ explains Glaucus to Diomedes. Nothing has value in this world of transformation and death. The philosopher’s answer, in stark contrast to this pessimism, is that everything in this wonderful world has its place and value, because it contributes to the overall plan. For this reason, because it helps us understand the role and meaning of our existence, knowledge is the key to human happiness. Ephemeral creatures, humans believe to be living in a disorderly and meaningless world, in which everything is doomed to ‘go into the dark’19 and end in nothingness. Thanks to their intelligence they can rise above, go beyond the chaotic surface of things and discover the rational and beautiful order that holds reality together, and in which everything – including ourselves, each of us – has its own place. In this sense philosophy is the activity that can remedy to our mortality and make us like gods; it enables humans to acquire in themselves ‘immortality in the fullest measure that human nature admits’ (Timaeus 90c), as Plato writes: 18 For an analysis of the problem I refer to M. Bonazzi, Creature di un solo giorno. I greci e il mistero dell’esistenza, Torino: Einaudi 2020. 19
T.S. Eliot, East Cocker, III 1.
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‘But if someone has committed himself entirely to learning and to true wisdom, and it is these among the things at his disposal that he has most practised, he must necessarily have immortal and divine wisdom, provided that he gets a grasp on truth. And so far as it is possible for human nature to have a share in immortality, he will not in any degree lack this. And because he always takes care of that which is divine, and has the daimon that lives with him well-ordered, he will be supremely happy’ (εὐδαίμων; Plato, Timaeus 90a-b). It is a knowledge that transforms. Contemplation is, first and foremost, the capacity to discern the rational order of reality – because there is a rational order; and in so doing, by understanding this order and becoming one with it, the self transforms from a state of chaos, internal discord and division into a divinely unified and stable rational agent. Acquisition of knowledge is thus not merely instrumental for rationally organising one’s life towards happiness and well-being, but it is something that quite literally brings human beings closer to a divine state, to god-likeness20. If death was a threat because it was making our lives valueless, it is no longer a threat. Happiness consists precisely in this, in the victory over the insignificance of things. Albert Einstein once remarked that ‘the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility’. To grasp this comprehensibility is the ambition of Greek philosophy, and it is what makes us divine and immortal – that is, happy, as only God is. ‘If, then, God is always in that good state […] this compels our wonder; and if in a better this compels it yet more. And God is in a better state. And life also belongs to God, for the actuality of thought is life (ἡ γὰρ νοῦ ἐνέργεια ζωή), and God is that actuality; and God’s essential actuality is life most good and eternal (Metaphysics 1072b25-30); ‘The activity of God, which surpasses all others in blessedness, must be contemplative; and of human activities, therefore, that which is most 20 See P. Remes, Plotinus on the Self. The philosophy of the ‘We’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2009, 125 and 155.
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akin to this must be most of the nature of happiness (Nicomachean Ethics 1178b21-24)’. While it is expressed so boldly and so clearly by Aristotle and Plato, this claim is not exclusively Aristotelian or Platonic. It is widely shared by the majority of Greek philosophers, and not by them alone. Is there any need to recall the name of the great Dutch philosopher Spinoza and the famous amor dei intellectualis at the end of his Ethica? Admittedly, Spinoza was not very well versed in the writings of Greek philosophers; he was aware of their ideas, though, thanks to the mediation of Jewish and Islamic philosophers, most notably Maimonides and Averroes21. Averroes and all the other Aristotelian commentators also spread these ideas in the Christian Latin world, in Paris and elsewhere. In Florence, for instance: interestingly enough, also Dante shared similar views. The happiness of the blessed is nothing but the possibility of contemplating God and, by contemplating him, of understanding all reality in its glory. Bliss, in Dante’s paradise, is this capacity to contemplate God and the world with God’s eyes. It is difficult to find a more effective description of what contemplation is (and why it is so important) than in the final canti of Dante’s poem: ‘Nel suo profondo vidi che s’interna, / legato con amore in un volume, / ciò che per l’universo si squaderna’ (Pd 33.8486: ‘In its profundity I saw ingathered and bound by love into one single volume what, in the universe, seems separate, scattered’). Just as in Aristotle, Dante’s journey culminates in a transformation of the self, and in the perpetual fulfilment of desire: ma già volgeva il mio disio e ’l velle, sì come rota ch’igualmente è mossa, l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle (‘But my desire and will were moved already like a wheel revolving uniformly by the Love that moves the son and the other stars’; Pd 33.143-145) 21 See for instance S. Nadler, Spinoza’s Heresy. Immortality and the Jewish Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2004.
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God’s description as a mover and lover; the dependence of movement on the desire to know; identification with God as the goal of the journey and the supreme experience of bliss. All these ideas can be easily traced back to Aristotle (and Plato). It is a powerful description of the contemplative ideal in a different context. It is the achievement of happiness, an inexpressible bliss. From Aristotle to Dante and beyond this is what makes philosophy so great. But can philosophy really mean that much? It is time to come back to Ulysses.
IV The parallels between Dante and Aristotle must not conceal a major difference. True, in the Divina Commedia the goal is the same as in the Nichomachean Ethics – to see and understand the world as God does. Also for Dante in the Paradise, happiness is nothing but the possibilty of contemplating God and, by contemplating him, of understanding reality in all its glory. But in the Divina Commedia it is Dante, not Ulysses (or even Aristotle), who succeeds. It is the theologian, so to say, who succeeds, not the philosopher. Dante’s Ulysses, the philosopher, the hero of knowledge, fails, his journey ends in a shipwreck, just in front of a mountain. Ulysses cannot know that that mountain is the Mountain of Purgatory, the place of salvation, on which Dante will soon land. Dante reaches his destination, whereas Ulysses fails. The reason is simple. Dante is not travelling alone: his journey was made possible not so much by his intellectual merits (‘altezza d’ingegno’, ‘high intellect’, as he says to another friend punished in Hell, Cavalcante Cavalcanti, If 10.59) as by divine favour. Knowledge without faith and grace means nothing, is nothing. Ironically, but it is a bitter irony, Ulysses the Greek hero of knowledge does not understand – he is blind. Philosophy remains the highest expression of human intelligence, and the desire to know our most distinctive and noble characteristic. This is what Ulysses stands for. But this wisdom is nothing without divine support. What is condemned – this is the decisive point – is not the desire to know, 16
but the claim that one is able to attain knowledge by trusting only in one’s own intellectual strength. This desire, without divine help, is not salvation but damnation, and the journey towards knowledge and wisdom turns out to be sheer folly: ‘il folle volo (the mad, wild, flight; If 26.141)’. This is the story of Ulysses and of Aristotle. Aristotle too appears in the Divina Commedia. To be sure, he is in the limbo, which is a better place than Ulysses’s wasteland; but it is still far from Purgatory and Paradise – far from salvation, knowledge and happiness (which are one and the same thing, as should be clear by now). The punishment to which Aristotle is eternally condemned is a fruitless longing to know, a desire – the desire to know and to understand – which is impossible to fulfill, because it is not assisted by faith and grace. With Ulysses’ shipwreck it is thus all ancient, human wisdom – wisdom which is all too human – that falls into the abyss. It is more than likely that behind Ulysses’ story some episodes from Dante’s life are concealed. Like many others, Dante was influenced by the new Aristotle of the so-called ‘radical Aristotelians’, and in his youth he had probably shared their conviction that it is possible to reach knowledge and happiness also in this life, through the efforts of our intelligence22. Ulysses’ canto is therefore his recantation, and his tragedy is also Dante’s atonement for his most dramatic sin, the belief that philosophy can save us. Ulysses dies for Dante’s sins23. But these biographical details are not something we can discuss here. What is relevant, now, are the questions that Ulysses’ story raises. What is the moral of Ulysses’ tale for us, today? We probably live in a world to which Dante’s theological concerns are quite foreign. But his question remains relevant: can philosophy, as a rational enterprise, really amount to that much? And is there a final meaning to reality that our reason can unveil? These same questions continue to resonate even today and are even becoming more and more alarming, as another philosopher had 22 See M. Corti, Scritti su Cavalcanti e Dante, 336; on Dante’s identification with Ulysses see J.M. Lotman, Il viaggio di Ulisse nella «Divina Commedia» di Dante, in Id., Testo e contesto. Semiotica dell’arte e della cultura, Bari: Laterza 1980. 23 T. Barolini, The Unidivine Comedy. Detheologizing Dante, Princeton: Princeton Universiy Press 1992, 58.
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well realized, a philosopher who also liked travels – imaginary not less than real ones.
V Today, Friedrich Nietzsche is a philosopher more popular than Aristotle or Dante. Interestingly, Nietzsche too reflected and wrote on journeys and folly. The conclusion he reached, however, was different from that of his predecessors. In spite of their divergences, Aristotle and Dante shared the belief that the journey has a destination – their disagreement was on how to reach it. What if there were no destination, and our journey were an eternal sailing, or better an eternal plunging into a universe which has now lost all its reference points? This is the question raised by the madman in one of Nietzsche’s most famous parables, that on the death of God: ‘“Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him–you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead (The Gay Science, § 125; transl. Kaufmann)’. Nietzsche’s infinite universe is completely different from Dante and Aristotle’s closed world; it is actually very similar to our own conceptions. And in this new conception of the world the problem is that of the boundary between good and evil. This is what the men of Nietzsche’s parable don’t understand when they meet the madman, 18
but will soon come to realize. In a world ruled by God, the problem of good and evil does not even arise – they clearly depend on God’s will. And now? Where are good and evil in this infinite, godless, world? The navigation becomes impervious. Impervious as it may be, however, the journey proceeds along old routes. Sure, the new context helps make the problem easier to see. But it was already there, even though few noticed it. It was already present in Ulysses’ adventures and from Ulysses it is not difficult to go back up to the original models, Aristotle and Plato. There is a small detail which often goes unnoticed in the story of Dante’s Ulysses. In the ‘orazion picciola’ he exhorts his companions to ‘seguire virtute e conoscenza’. This is the climax of the speech, as we have already remarked, and a clear sign of the Aristotelian influence. Indeed, the distinction between between ethical virtues (‘virtute’) dealing with our moral behaviours (justice, generosity, courage and so on), and theoretical virtues, linked to knowledge (‘conoscenza’), plays a decisive role in Aristotelian ethics. The most distinctive feature of the philosopher, as we have seen, is the desire to know; no less important, however, is her or his moral and practical commitment. Modern scholars and ancient and medieval commentators never tire of emphasizing this point. This moral commitment, though, does not really emerge when we read the first part of Ulysses’ speech to Dante and Virgil, where he explains the reasons for his choice: né dolcezza di figlio, né la pieta del vecchio padre, né ’l debito amore lo qual dovea Penelopè far lieta, vincer potero dentro a me l’ardore ch’i’ ebbi di divenir del mondo esperto e de li vizi umani e del valore (‘Nor reverence for my aged father, nor the due love which would have made Penelope glad, could conquer me in the longing that I had to gain experience of the world, and of the human vice and worth’; If 26.94-99). In order to satisfy his thirst for knowledge, Ulysses did not care about 19
anyone. It is hard to define this behaviour as morally irreproachable. It could not have been otherwise, though: surprising as it is, the desire for knowledge is hardly compatible with ethical and practical responsibilities. There were no alternatives; Ulysses had to choose and he chose. It is not the problem of Ulysses alone. Most importantly, the same tension is at the heart of the Aristotelian text. Before I was alluding to the many interpretative problems raised by the Nicomachean Ethics. Basically, all these problems can be reduced to one major difficulty. The emphasis on the contemplative ideal is not easy to reconcile with the practical dimension of human life. Indeed, it is not reconcilable with it at all, despite the many attempts made by modern scholars and ancient commentators. It is only when we are contemplating, not when we are acting in accordance with moral virtue, that we come to resemble God. For it would be demeaning to God for us to think of him as needing moral virtues like courage or temperance24. God’s activity is the best and it coincides with contemplation. Therefore there is no place for any practical or moral commitment in contemplation25. This outcome, with the opposition between the desire to know and moral, practical, commitment, is problematic, to say the least. As Mario Vegetti has it, ‘the philosophical, contemplative, life involves an extraordinary fullness, thanks to its contiguity with the divine; but it also involves some deprivation … a sort of amputation of humanity’26. Again, we are not dealing with Aristotle alone, because the same tension was already present in Plato, in the central section of his most important dialogue, the Republic. I am of course referring to the myth of the cave: why should the ‘natural’ philosopher, the philosopher who managed to get out of the darkness and is now free to roam the bright world of divine Truth, return to the cave to take care of others, who in return will kill
24 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1178a7-23. 25 D. Sedley, Ideal of likeness, 324; Id., Becoming Godlike, in C. Bobonich (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2017, 322-328. ‘Theoretical wisdom is, in short, essentially amoral’: A Nightingale, Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy, 222. 26 M. Vegetti, L’etica degli antichi, Roma-Bari: Laterza 1989, 209.
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him? (any reference to Socrates is obviously intentional)27. The difficulty becomes even more pressing in Nietzsche’s new universe. Today, an heir to Aristotle’s philosopher and to Dante’s theologian is the scientist, as was once observed by Anthony Kenny (and as was implied by my examples at the beginning of this oratie). ‘Modern commentators, Kenny writes, when they strive to understand Aristotle’s text, have in mind not a monk or a theologian, but a philosophical or a scientific researcher’; ‘the modern equivalent of the question to which Aristotle addressed himself is the problem of the role of science in society. […] The Aristotelian question “what is the correct attitude for the contemplative vis-à-vis the other moral virtues?” has as its modern equivalent “What are the limits of the autonomy of science?”’ 28 . Driven by the same desire, the scientist is the new traveler, who sails the seas of the unknown in search of knowledge. And that this travel is now proceeding triumphantly, no one will dare deny. From nuclear fusion to genetic editing or cloning, we are unveiling the mysteries of the universe with a power we did not believe we possessed. We are fulfilling our thirst for knowledge – that desire which for Dante’s Aristotle was doomed to remain impossible to fulfill. In the world in which there is no longer any foundation for good and evil, the desire of the philosopher and the scientist is free to pursue its object, knowledge, without hesitation. Why should ethical concerns hinder this search for the truth? It is the same problem as Ulysses faced, but there are no longer any columns to show us where to go and where not to go. Why should we stop, why should we return into the cave?
27 See Plato, Republic 514a-517d with L. Strauss, The City and Man, Chicago: Chicago University Press 1978, 124 and D. Roochnik, Beautiful City. The Dialectical Character of Plato’s ‘Republic’, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 2003, 74-77. 28 A. Kenny, Aristole on the Perfect Life, 107-108.
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VI It is time for me to stop, though, to wrap this oratie up, and it is no coincidence that I wish to do so with a question. There is a recurring myth in the European and Western tradition, the celebration of Ancient Greece as an Apollinean world, marmoreal and serene – ‘le miracle grec’, as is often said, echoing Ernest Renan29. As it happens, it is all a myth. The Greeks are like us, facing similar problems and obstacles, trying to make sense of their existence as we do with ours. It would be naive to expect them to provide insights or precepts which will lead us to a successful life. If they are still important, or even necessary, it is not so much for the answers they offers us but because they help us understand our problems. The ambitions of the Greek philosophers I have been trying to reconstruct may not seem so appealing today. But that is not the point. We are rational animals and we are political, that is social and moral, animals, Aristotle and the Greeks used to say. It looks like a trivial statement. The goal of this oratie was to show that unfortunately things are much more complicated. Are we willing to give up knowledge if it proves to be incompatible with our moral concerns? By showing us how important and controversial the desire to know is, ancient philosophers contribute to a better understanding of who we are, because this desire is an essential part of us – and they provide a magnificent framework to discuss and investigate our complexity. As Berard Williams has remarked, when they speak, the Greeks ‘do not merely tell us about temselves. They tell us about us. […] They can tell us not just who we are, but who we are not: they can denounce the falsity or the partiality or the limitations of our images of ourselves’30. 29 E. Renan, Prière sur l’Acropole, in Id., Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse, Paris: Nelson & Calman-Lévy 1883, 60. These remarks on the Neoclassicist interpretation of the Ancient world does not automatically imply an adhesion to Nietzsche’s Dionysiac interpretation; for a first introduction to the problem see for instance D.T.F. Held, Conflict and Repose: Dialectics of the Greek Ideal in Nietzsche and Winckelmann, in P. Bischop (ed.), Nietzsche and Antiquity. His Reaction and Reponse to the Classical Tradition, Rochester, NY: Camden House 2004, 411-424. 30 B. Williams, Shame and Necessity, Berkely: University of California Press 1993, 20.
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It is no small thing, after all. It is a big challenge. In the background of my speech today, the real protagonist of the journey is what the Greeks call logos, reason. What is at stake is the most important notion in our tradition, the very cornerstone of our identity. Is not rationality is not the hallmark of the European and Western tradition? It is an idea which we inherited directly from Ancient philosophy, even if we often tend to forget it31. And it is thanks to these philosophers that we can begin to understand how complex this claim is and how controversial the use we make of it. Without celebrating or condemning anything, but only trying to understand. This is the task, and the passion, of the historian. And in order to pursue it successfully, we need to be creative. These disciplines are made of trees and woods. They cannot survive if they are not specialistic, but neither will they survive if they are only specialistic. Without hours spent on the meagre testimonies on Antiochus, or on the commentaries to Aristotle and Plato, in a joint effort with other colleagues, all these interconnections would have eluded us. The study of antiquity, the Altertumswissenschaften as they are often called, is based on a rigorous tradition which has been the model for many other disciplines over the last two centuries. This scientific rigour must be maintained at all cost. But it must not become an excuse for isolation. The study of Classics, most notably of ancient philosophy, has the potential to branch out in many directions, and it can only profit by dialogue with other disciplines. I don’t see any other way of confirming the importance of the ancient world in the changing world in which we live: Meanwhile Greece goes on travelling, always travelling This is a verse by the modern Greek poet Georgios Seferis32, and the best description of what Greece is and can mean to us. 31 As I argue in M. Bonazzi, Eredità greche, «Il Mulino» 63 (2014), pp. 701-707. 32 G. Seferis, In the manner of G.S., see Id., Collected Poems, transl. E. Keeley and P. Sherrad, London: Anvil Press Poetry 1995.
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*** Ik ben geen Ulysses, maar ik reis ook. En ik had het geluk om in Utrecht een ideale haven te vinden. Ter afsluiting van mijn oratie wil ik graag enkele woorden van dank spreken: – aan het College van Bestuur, het bestuur van de Faculteit Geesteswetenschappen en het Departement Wijsbegeerte en Religiewetenschap voor mijn benoeming en het daarmee in mij gestelde vertrouwen, hier in het uiterste deel van wat ooit het glorieuze Romeinse Rijk was; – aan mijn collega’s en medewerkers bij het Departement Wijsbegeerte en Religiewetenschap, aan mijn studenten maar ook aan collega’s uit andere afdelingen, voor de hartelijkheid waarmee zij me welkom hebben geheten. Vanaf het allereerste begin heb ik me op deze universiteit thuis gevoeld, en de collegialiteit en het enthousiasme die ik dagelijks ervaar, geven me goede moed voor de taken die in de volgende jaren op ons gaan afkomen. Wij leven in een tijd van uitdagingen, niet allemaal plezierig, en het is belangrijk om te weten dat wij een echte gemeenschap zijn, voorbereid op de confrontatie. Al na ruim één jaar zijn er zo veel mensen voor mij belangrijk geworden dat ik ze niet meer allemaal kan opnoemen. Utrecht is een van de belangrijkste en meest gerenommeerde instellingen voor oude en middeleeuwse filosofie, zoals ik al snel ontdekte toen ik voor het eerst met mijn onderzoek begon, vele jaren geleden in Milaan onder toezicht van Fernanda Decleva Caizzi en Pierluigi Donini. Het is een grote verantwoordelijkheid en een nog grotere eer om deel uit te maken van deze traditie hier in Utrecht; en het is ook een plezier om met alle leden van onze groep te werken. Most importantly, I am not travelling alone. I would like to conclude my inaugural lecture with some special thanks. First, to my father Oscar and my mother Maria Letizia (and, of course, also Anna Maria). I am more than willing to acknowledge that, for a parent, to hear that their son has decided to undertake the study of classics and philosophy is not the most exciting prospect. But here we are, and would have been impossible without your support. Finally, a special thanks goes to that noisy and 24
sunny piece of Italy that is making the journey so passionating. Marta, Caterina, and Annachiara, thanks. Ulysses cannot even imagine what he lost, when he decided to travel alone. Ik heb gezegd.
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Curriculum vitae Mauro Bonazzi (born in 1973 in Milan, Italy) studied Classics at the University of Milan, where he also earned his PhD (2002), became Assistant Professor (2006) and Associate Professor in History of Ancient Philosophy (2017). He taught as invited professor in the universities of Bordeaux, Lille, Clermont-Ferrand and the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. Since March 2018 he is Professor of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy at Utrecht University. His publications include À la recherche des Idées: platonisme et philosophie hellénistique d’Antiochus à Plotin (Vrin, Paris 2015); Atene, la città inquieta (Einaudi, Turin 2016); Processo a Socrate (Laterza, Rome 2018); Creature di un sol giorno. I Greci e il mistero dell’esistenza (Einaudi, Turin 2020). His forthcoming book The Sophists will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. He collaborates with the Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera.
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Copyright: Mauro Bonazzi, 2020 Vormgeving: Communicatie & Marketing, faculteit Geesteswetenschappen, Universiteit Utrecht Afbeelding titelpagina: Odysseus en de sirenen, anoniem, naar Abraham van Diepenbeeck, 1622 - 1725 Š Rijksmuseum Amsterdam Portretfoto: Ed van Rijswijk 27