As he says in book 9 of the Meditations: "You have the power to strip off many superfluous things that are obstacles to you and that depend entirely
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upon your value-judgments; you will open up for yourself a vast space by embracing the whole universe in your thoughts, by considering unending eternity." 28 In book 7, he admonishes himself as follows: Watch and see the courses of the stars as if you were running alongside them, and continually dwell in your mind upon the changes of the elements into one another; for these imaginations wash away the foulness of life on the earth. When you are reasoning about mankind, look upon earthly things below as if from some vantage point above them.29
We shall return later to the final phrase. Elsewhere, Marcus describes the way in which the soul plunges itself into the totality of space and the infinity of time: "it traverses the whole Universe and the surrounding void, and surveys its shape, reaches out into the boundless extent of time, embracing and pondering the periodic rebirth of the all." 30 The goal of physics as a spiritual exercise was to relocate human existence within the infinity of time and space, and the perspective of the great laws of nature. This is what Marcus means by the all-embracing metamorphosis he mentions,31 but he also has in mind the correspondence of all things, and the mutual implication of each thing in everything else.
Here, I believe, we have the reason why Goethe, in the passage quoted above, considered true poetry as an exercise consisting in spiritually elevating oneself high above the earth. For Goethe, poetry in the truest sense is a kind of physics, in the sense we have defined above: it is a spiritual exercise, which consists in looking down at things from above, from the point of view of the nature or the all, and the great laws of nature. By "laws of nature" we are to understand not only the all-embracing metamorphosis and unity of all things, but also the two universal principles Goethe refers to as "polarity" and
"increase," and which he loved to observe bo1 h in nature and in individual human life.32 We can detect the inspiration of 1 heHe idens not only in Goethe's youthful poetic cycle "God and the Wor l ll , 11 h111 11hm in lhc more modcsl 1111d
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unassuming poems of the older Goethe. Like the physics of antiquity, poetry thus conceived is intended to bring about in its readers or listeners greatness of soul and inner peace.
We now move on to another aspect of this spiritual exercise. The view from above can also be directed pitilessly upon mankind's weaknesses and shortcomings. All the philosophical schools dealt with this theme at length, but, as we shall see, it was treated with particular relish by the Cynic tradition. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, we find a Nee-Pythagorean version of the theme: "It is a delight to travel along the starry firmament and, leaving the earth and its dull regions behind, to ride on the clouds, to stand upon stout Atlas' shoulders and see, far below, men wandering aimlessly, devoid of reason, anxious and in fear of the hereafter, thus to exhort them and unroll the book of fate!" 33 We encounter an Epicurean version of it at the beginning of book 2 of Lucretius' On the Nawre of Things: "nothing is more delightful than to possess well-fortified sanctuaries serene, built up by the teachings of the wise, whence you may look down from on high upon others and behold them all astray, wandering abroad and seeking the paths of life." 34
The theme takes on a Stoic coloration in Seneca's Natural QJlestions.35 Here the soul of the philosopher, looking down from the heights of the heavens, becomes aware of the puniness of the earth, and the ridiculousness of the wars fought by human armies - which resemble swarms of ants - over minuscule stretches of territory. In Marcus Aurelius, the theme appears in a particularly realistic form: "look upon earthly things below as if from some place above them - herds, armies, farms, weddings, divorces, births, deaths, the noise of law courts, lonely places, various foreign nations, festivals, mournings, market places: a mixture of everything and an order composed of contraries." 36
Elsewhere, Marcus enjoins us to: " 'Look from above' at the spectacle of myriad herds, myriad rites, and manifold journeyings in storm and calm; diversities of creatures who are being born, coming together, passing away." 37
The view from above thus leads us to consider the whole of human reality, in all its social, geographical, and emotional aspects, as an anonymous, swarming mass, and it teaches us to relocate human existence within the immeasurable dimensions of the cosmos. Everything that does not depend on us, which the Stoics called indifferent (indiflerentia) - such as health, fame, wealth, and even death - is reduced to its true dimensions when considered from the point of view of the nature of the all.
When the view from above takes on this specific form of observing human beings on earth, it seems more than ever to belong to the Cynic tradition. We find it being used with particular effectiveness by Lucian, a contemporary of Marcus Aurelius who was strongly influenced by Cynic doctrines. In Lucian's dialogue entitled lcaromenippus, or the Sky-man, the Cynic Menippus confides to a friend thnt he was so disillusioned by the contradictory teachings of the philusuplll'n• l"onct•rning tht• ultimate principles and the universe that he
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Themes
resolved to fly up heaven to see for himself how things were.38 He fitted himself out with a pair of wings - on the left side a vulture's wing and on the right side that of an eagle - and soared upwards towards the moon. Once there, he reported, "I rested myself, looking down on the earth from on high and like Homer's Zeus, now observing the land of the horse-loving Thracians, now the land of the Mysians, and presently, if I liked, Greece, Persia and India; and from all this I got my fill of kaleidoscopic pleasure." 39 Once his eyes had become accustomed to the tiny dimensions of human beings, however, Menippus began to observe mankind. He could see "not only the nations and cities but the people themselves as clear as could be, the traders, the soldiers, the farmers, the litigants, the women, the animals, and, in a word, all the life that the good green earth supports." "° Not only could Menippus see what people were doing in the open air, but also what they were about inside their own homes, when they thought no one was observing them. 41
After Menippus has recited a long list of the crimes and adulteries he had seen committed inside people's homes, he sums up his overall impression: what he saw was a cacophonous, ridiculous hodge-podge of a play. What he found most ridiculous of all were those people who fought over the borders of their cities and private land-holdings, since the earth itself appeared to him so absurdly tiny and insignificant. Rich people, says Menippus, are proud of completely unimportant things. Their domains arc no bigger than one of Epicurus' atoms, and the sight of man's cities reminded him of an anthill, with all its inhabitants scurrying about aimlessly.
Once he leaves the moon, Menippus travels among the stars until he arrives at the dwelling-place of Zeus. There, he has a good laugh over the ridiculously contradictory nature of the prayers mankind address to Zeus.