On 24 Oct 2000, at 17:47, Sharon-zisser Shirle wrote:

> Wrong, Professor Prescott: it was Parmenides, Heraclitus, Philolaus of
> Croton, and other Pythagoreans who got there before Plato did, at the
> most archaic roots of the thinking of desire and being, which resonate 
> musically and passionately in the texts of the sixteenth-century
> English humanists.

Not wrong, I'm happy to say.

1.  (a) Heraclitus was not a Pythagorean and fr. 40 (_Heraclitus: 
Fragments_ ed. T. M. Robinson (1996)) makes disparaging 
reference to Pythagoras.  (b) If Parmenides was a Pythagorean in 
his early years, which is merely a supposition based on the report 
that Ameinias converted him to "the quiet life," he broke ranks in his 
mature philosophy.  (c) Philolaus was a Pythagorean, but hardly 
archaic since he was born about the middle of the fifth century 
BCE.  We cannot, unfortunately, learn anything about him since the 
fragments attributed to him are almost certainly a postAristotelian 
forgery based on Artistotle's own accounts of the Pythagorean 
system.  (d)  I don't know what other Pythagoreans you have in 
mind, but probably the postZeno ones.  Where do you find desire in 
them?  

2.  You certainly don't find desire in the sense you mean it in the 
extant fragments of Heraclitus.  The only occurrence of the word or 
any cognates is Fr. 85, which runs

thumwi makhesthai khalepon; ho gar an thelhi, psukhhs wneitai.

"It is difficult to fight with passion (= one's heart), for whatever it 
wishes it buys at the expense of the soul."    

The noun "thumos" originally meant the seat of our intellectual and 
emotive selves, and was located in the diaphragm.  As the 'heart/ 
spirit,' it can be simultaneously driven by anger and appetite.  
When, Heraclitus means, we give in to anger or bodily appetite, we 
pay a price: the weakening of the soul, which leave us even less 
able to resist the next assault.  Fr. 110 then goes quite nicely with fr. 
85:

anthrwpois gignesthai hokosa thelousin ouk ameinon.

"It is not better for people to have all they want."

This is probably an attack on the so-called Delian Inscription: "The 
fairest is what is most just, the best of all is health;/But the sweetest 
thing of all is to obtain what one loves."  A prose version of the 
second line is attributed to Thales: "The sweetest thing is to obtain 
what one desires (epithymeis)."  What most people find the sweetest 
thing of all is, as Heraclitus says in fr. 29, "to glut themselves like 
cattle."  Heraclitus doesn't deny that the satisfaction of appetite is a 
pleasure, but it's a pleasure that comes at a high price.  Every 
surrender to the drives of thumos progressively debilitates the soul.  

3.  Parmenides will answer your claim even less.  Neither the word 
"desire" or any cognate is to be found in his fragments. Fr. 13 
(_Parmenides of Elea: Fragments_, ed. David Gallop (1984)) does 
say that

prwtiston men Erwta thewn mhtisato pantwn ...

"She devised Love first of all the gods ..."

The "she" is probably the goddess of fr. 12 who preside over birth 
and sexual union (12.3-6).  Gallop suggests that the mention of Love 
as her first creation may indicate that Parmenides fashioned a 
theogony in the manner of Hesiod.  

> How could Plato speak of the links between the erotic
> and the erotematic (on which see his wonderful *Seminar VIII: Le
> Transfert*) to which one might, in a Renaissance spirit, add what
> Puttenham calls the sym-metric or harmonmic  if it were not for the
> dialogue with Simm-ias, a disciple of Philoalus? One of the most
> important, pre-Socratic parts of the classical legacy of the humanists is
> beging repressed too in current Renaissance studies -- along with almost 
> everything else partaking of truth, the real, the symbolic (loci of the
> passionate and sensual)

1.  I have no idea what the first sentence above means, but what 
evidence can you cite that Simmias was a disciple of Philolaus?  
You certainly can't find it in Plato, because the name "Philolaus" is 
not in the Platonic corpus.  Nor can I find any connection between 
the two other than the city Thebes.  In Phaedo 61E Cebes, not 
Simmias, says "kai Philolaou hkousa, 'ote par' 'hmin dihitato" ("I 
heard Philolaus when he was living with us").  Simmias was from 
Thebes, of course, but we don't have any source--unless you can 
pull one from your magic hat--that states he either heard or studied 
under Philolaus.

2.  I very much doubt the Renaissance humanists knew much of the 
PreSocrates from the actual fragments.  If they got their knowledge 
from Diogenes Laertius and bits of Aristotle or Plato, they couldn't 
have developed a very accurate picture.  But whatever the scope of 
their knowledge, I do not even remotely believe in an academic 
conspiracy to suppress the humanist's knowledge of PreSocratic 
philosophy.  What, once again, is the evidence?  Or is this another 
nonconceptual scheme?

  

   
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Steven J. Willett
University of Shizuoka, Hamamatsu Campus
2-3 Nunohashi 3-chome, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan 432-8012
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