Philosophy as a way of life

Our Western thought has been nourished in this way and still lives off a relatively limited number of formulae and metaphors borrowed from the various traditions of which it is the result. For example, there are maxims that encourage a certain inner attitude such as "Know thyself'; those which have long guided our view of nature: "Nature makes no leaps," "Nature delights in diversity." There are metaphors such as "The force of truth," "The world as a book" (which is perhaps extended in the conception of the genetic code as a text). There are biblical formulae such as "I am who I am," which have profoundly marked the idea of God. The point I strongly wish to emphasize here is the following: these prefabricated models, of which I have just given some examples, were known during the Renaissance and in the modern world in the very form that they had in the Hellenistic and Roman tradition, and they were originally understood during the Renaissance and in the modern world with the very meaning these models of thought had during the Greco-Roman period, especially at the end of antiquity. So these models continue to explain many aspects of our contemporary thought and even the very significance, sometimes unexpected, that we find in antiquity. For example, the classical prejudice, which has done so much damage to the study of late Greek and Latin literatures, is an invention of the Greco-Roman period, which created the model of a canon of classical authors as a reaction against mannerism and the baroque, which, at that time, were called

"Asianism." But if the classical prejudice already existed during the Hellenistic and especially imperial eras, this is precisely because the distance we feel with respect to classical Greece also appeared at that time. It is precisely this Hellenistic spirit, this distance, in some ways modern, through which, for example, the traditional myths become the objects of scholarship or of philosophical and moral interpretations. It is through Hellenistic and Roman thought, particularly that of late antiquity, that the Renaissance was to perceive Greek tradition. This fact was to be of decisive importance for the birth of modern European thought and art. In another respect contemporary hermeneutic theories that, proclaiming the autonomy of the written text, have constructed a veritable tower of Babel of interpretations where all meanings become possible, come straight out of the practices of ancient exegesis, about which I spoke earlier. Another example: for our late colleague Roland Barthes,

"many features of our literature, of our teaching, of our institutions of language . . . would be elucidated and understood differently if we fully knew

. . . the rhetorical code that gave its language to our culture." This is completely true, and we could add that this knowledge would perhaps enable us to be conscious of the fact that in their methods and modes of expression our human sciences often operate in a way completely analogous to the mmlcl11 of ancient rhetoric.

Our hi111ory of Hellenistic and Roman thought should therefore not only 111111 l �·:t.c t he movcrm:nt of 1 houl(hl in philosophical works, but it should also

68

Method

be a historical topics that will study the evolution of the meaning of the topoi, the models of which we have spoken, and the role they have played in the formation of Western thought. This historical topics should work hard at discerning the original meanings of the formulae and models and the different significances that successive reinterpretations have given them.

At first, this historical topics will take for its object of study those works that were founding models and the literary genres that they created. Euclid's Elements, for example, served as a model for Proclus's Elements of Theology but also for Spinoza's Ethics. Plato's Timaeus, itself inspired by pre-Socratic cosmic poems, served as a model for Lucretius' De rerum natura, and the eighteenth century, in tum, was to dream of a new cosmic poem that would exhibit the latest discoveries of science. Augustine's Confessions, as it was misinterpreted, moreover, inspired an enormous literature up to Rousseau and the romantics.