21 Plato, Phaedrus, 270a-c.
22 Lucretius, On the Nature rif Thi11gs, 2, 1044.
23 Ibid, 2, 72-7.
24 Ibid, 2, 7+-S.
25 [The French Romantic poet Andre Chenier, born 1762 in Constantinople, was guillotined during the French Revolution on July 25, 1 794. - Trans.]
26 Andre Chenier, "Hermes," in A. Chenier, <Euvres completes, Paris 1966, p. 392.
27 Philo Judaeus, On the Special la111s, 2, 44. Cf ibid, 3, 1 .
28 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 9, 32.
29 Ibid, 7, 47 -8.
30 Ibid, 1 1 , I 2.
3 1 /,uf. I'll .. 2. 1 7.
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Themes
32 Cf. C.F. von Weizsiicker, "Einige Begriffe aus Goethes Naturwissenschaft," in Goethes Werke, HA, vol. 13, p. 548.
33 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1 5, 147 ff.
34 Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, 2, 7 ff.
35 Seneca, Natural fbestions, Preface, 7-1 1 .
36 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 7, 48.
37 Ibid, 9, 30.
38 Lucian, lcaromenippus, vol. 2, pp. 268 ff. Harmon.
39 Ibid, 1 1 , p. 287.
40 Ibid, 1 2, p. 289.
41 This is also the theme of Lesage's eighteenth-century novel, u diable boiteux
["The Limping Devil " - Trans.]. The idea of a trip to the moon or to the stars was the inspiration for many a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century novel; an example would be Voltaire's Micromegas.
42 Lucian, Charon sive contemplantes, vol. 2, pp. 397ff. Harmon.
43 Lucian himself describes the Cynic in this way. Cf. Dialogues of the Dead, 10, 2.
44 Cf. E. Norden, "Beitriige zur Gcschichte der gricchischen Philosophic,"
Jahrbiicher jiir dassische Philologie, supplementary vol. 1 9, Leipzig 1 893; Epictetus, Discourses, 3, 22, 24.
45 Lucian, Quomodo historia conscribenda sit, ch. 49.
46 Ernest Renan, <Euvres completes, vol. 2, Paris, 1 948, p. 1 037.
47 Charles Baudelaire, "Elevation."
1 0
The Sage and the World
1 Definition of the Problem
No one has described the relationship between the ancient sage and the world around him better than Bernard Groethuysen:
The sage's consciousness of the world is something peculiar to him alone. Only the sage never ceases to have the whole constantly present to his mind. He never forgets the world, but thinks and acts with a view to the cosmos. . . . The sage is a part of the world; he is cosmic. He does not let himself be distracted from the world, or detached from the cosmic totality . . . . The figure of the sage forms, as it were, an indissoluble unity with man's representation of the world.1
This is particularly true of the Stoic sage, whose fundamental attitude consisted in a joyful "Yes!" accorded at each instant to the movement of the world, directed as it is by universal reason. We recall Marcus Aurelius'
well-known prayer to the universe: "All that is in tune with you, 0 universe, is in tune with me." 2 Perhaps less well known is the aesthetic theory Marcus developed from the same point of view:
If a person has experience and a deeper insight into the processes of the universe, there will be hardly any phenomenon accompanying these processes that does not appear to him, at lea'>t in some of its aspects, as pleasant. And he will look upon the actual gaping jaws of wild beasts with no less pleasure than upon all the imitations of them that sculptors and painters off er us . . . . and there are many such things, which do not appeal to everyone; only to that person who has truly familiarized himself with nature and her wurkintCI'· 1
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Themes
We recall, moreover, that the Stoic sage, like Seneca, was conscious of being a part of the world, and plunged himself into the totality of the cosmos: Ioli se inserens mundo.4
The same could be said of the Epicurean sage, even though the physics he professed considered the world to be the result of chance, excluding all divine intervention. Nevertheless, this conception of the world suited the Epicurean perfectly: it brought with it pure pleasure and peace of mind, freed him from unreasonable fear of the gods, and made him consider each instant as a kind of unexpected miracle. As Hoffmann pointed out,5 it is precisely because the Epicurean considered existence to be the result of pure chance that he greeted each moment with immense gratitude, like a kind of divine miracle. The sage's pleasure came from contemplating the world in peace and serenity; and in this he resembled the gods, who took no part in the management of the world, lest their eternal repose be disturbed. Describing the sage's contemplation, analogous to that of the gods, Lucretius exclaimed: the terrors of the mind fly away, the walls of the world part asunder, I see things moving on through all the void . : . At these things, as it were, some godlike pleasure and a thrill of awe seizes on me, to think that thus
. . . nature is made so clear and manifest, laid bare to sight on every side.6
This cosmic dimension is thus essential to the figure of the antique sage.
Here the reader may object: it could well be that ancient wisdom - whether Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, or Epicurean - was intimately linked with a relationship to the world; but isn't this ancient vision of the world out of date?
The quantitative universe of modern science is totally unrepresentable, and within it the individual feels isolated and lost. Today, nature is nothing more for us than man's "environment"; she has become a purely human problem, a problem of industrial hygiene. The idea of universal reason no longer makes much sense.
All this is quite true. But can the experience of modern man be reduced to the purely technico-scientific? Does not modern man, too, have his own experience of the world qua world? Finally, might not this experience be able to open up for him a path toward wisdom?
2 The World of Science and the World of Everyday Perception It would be stating the obvious to affirm that the world which we perceive in our everyday experience is radically different from the unrepresentable world constructed by the scientist. The world of science docs indeed, by mennK of its multiple tcchnic11I npplicnl ions, r11d ic111ly 1 rnm1form 1mme 11s11ectK of our
The Sage and the World
253
daily life. Yet it is essential to realize that our way of perceiving the world in everyday life is not radically affected by scientific concepti9ns. For all of us
- even for the astronomer, when he goes home at night - the sun rises and sets, and the earth is immobile.
Following Husserl, Merleau-Ponty developed some noteworthy reflections on this opposition between the world of science and the world of perception:
The entire world of science is constructed on the basis of the world as we experience it [sur le monde vecu], and if we want rigorously to think through science itself, in order precisely to appreciate its range and its meaning, we must first of all reawaken this experience of the world, of which science is the secondary expression.7
For lived, existential experience, the earth is nothing other than the immobile ground8 in relation to which I move, the fundamental referent of my existence. It is this earth, immobile in relation to our experienced movements, that even the astronaut uses as a reference point, including when, from the depths of space, the earth appears to him like a little blue ball. The analyses of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty thus let us see that the Copernican revolution, of which so much is made in philosophy handbooks, upset only the theoretical discourse of the learned about the world, but did not at all change the habitual, day-to-day perception we have of the world.