Philosophy as a way of life

He is, however, forced to admit one fact: very often, mistakes and misunderstandings have brought about important evolutions in the history of philosophy. In particular, they have caused new ideas to appear. The most interesting example of this seems to me to be the appearance of the distinction between "being" as an infinitive and "being" as a participle, 15 which, as I have shown elsewhere, 16 was thought up by Porphyry in order to solve a problem posed by a passage in Plato. In the Parmenides, 17 Plato had asked: "If the One is, is it possible that it should not participate in being [ousia]?" For the Neoplatonist Porphyry, the One in question here is the second One. If this second One participates in ousia, he reasons, we must assume that ousia is prior to the second One. Now, the only thing prior to the second One is the first One, and this latter is not in any sense ousia. Thus, Porphyry concludes that, in this passage, the word ousia designates the first One in an enigmatic, symbolical way. The first One is not ousia in the sense of "substance"; rather, it \s being (elre) in the sense of a pure, transcendent act, prior to being as a substantial object (etanl). L 'etant, then, is the first substance and the first determination of l 'etre.

The history of the notion of being is, moreover, marked by a whole series of such creative mistakes. If we consider the series formed by ousia in Plato,

,,,,,;,, in Ari11tot le, rm.fill in the Stoics, rmsit1 in the Neoplatonists, and subs1at11ia

,

ur m1•111111 in the church F11thcrs 11nd the Scholastics, we shall find that the

76

Method

idea of ousia or essence is amongst the most confused and confusing of notions. I have tried to show elsewhere18 that the distinction, established by Boethius, between esse and quod est19 did not originally have the meaning that the Middle Ages was later to attribute to it.

It is clear that historians of philosophy must use the greatest caution in applying the idea of "system" for the comprehension of the philosophical works of antiquity and the Middle Ages. It is not the case that every properly philosophical endeavor is "systematic" in the Kantian or Hegelian sense. For two thousand years, philosophical thought utilized a methodology which condemned it to accept incoherences and far-fetched associations, precisely to the extent that it wanted to be systematic. But to study the actual progress of exegetical thought is to begin to realize that thought can function rationally in many different ways, which are not necessarily the same as those of mathematical logic or Hegelian dialectic.

Philosophers of the modem era, from the seventeenth to the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, refused the argument from authority and abandoned the exegetical mode of thinking. They began to consider that the truth was not a ready-made given, but was rather the result of a process of elaboration, carried out by a reason grounded in itself. After an initial period of optimism, however, in which people believed it was possible for thought to postulate itself in an absolute way, philosophy began to become more and more aware, from the nineteenth century on, of its historical and especially linguistic conditioning.