Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 308 - Dominic O'Meara on Michael Psellos.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Michael Cellos with Dominic O'Mara, who is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Freiburg in Switzerland. Hi, Dominic, thanks for coming back on the podcast. Hi, Peter. I'm going to start with a quote from Cellos, which is the following. I alone practice philosophy in unphilosophical times. What did he mean by that? And was what he was trying to convey a fair assessment of the context in which he was working? Yes, we need to talk a little bit about what he means by doing philosophy or being a philosopher, and also what he means by unphilosophical times. I think by unphilosophical times he means the circumstances in which he lives, which are unfavourable to philosophy. He obviously thinks that he lives in a society which, so to speak, does not leave much room for philosophy. But nevertheless, in these circumstances, he tries to practice philosophy. But what is this philosophy that he practices, and why are his times unphilosophical? He has a concept of philosophy which we need to think about a little bit, because it's not really ours. Philosophy for Cellos is a very wide-ranging concept. And my good friend John Duffy has identified it with polymatia, knowing many things. As if for Cellos to do philosophy, to be a philosopher, is to know many things. It seems to be the reverse of what Heraclitus says when he denounces somebody who knows many things but doesn't understand anything. But for Cellos, knowing many things seems to be characteristic of philosophy. And if you look at how he articulates philosophy, you see that it comprises a whole series of sciences. There's metaphysics, there's mathematics, there's physics, there's what we might call psychology, ethics, politics, and even goes into things like judicial science, legislation, and rhetoric. philosophy seems to be almost the same thing as knowing everything. And Cellos wrote for his imperial pupil a little handbook called De Omnifaria Doctrina, which sort of means all sorts of knowledge. And in this little handbook, he has little chapters on practically everything you need to know about metaphysical principles, Christian principles, soul, body, the world, earthquakes, hailstones and free will and evil and so on. So he has an extremely comprehensive concept of philosophy and it seems to be the equivalent almost of being interested in everything and trying as far as possible to know everything. So what this means that for him to philosophize is in fact to master all of the known sciences, the sciences he could discover in a period which did not at all conform to this ambition of his. Does that mean that the opposition that he detected amongst his contemporaries had the form of being encouraged not to know everything? In other words, there were only certain things you need to know, maybe only religious knowledge, for example? Yes, I think at least one element probably is an implicit struggle with certain monastic currents, in particular currents of monasticism, of monastic asceticism and spirituality, which sought to avoid, let's say, pagan knowledge or Greek science, and which felt that spirituality could be developed, should be developed in a kind of a renunciation on reason. And so perhaps his emphasis on the richness, the variety of knowledge stands in contrast to the, so to speak, reduction of human reading to almost nothing and reliance on spiritual emotion, shall we say, cultivated by certain monastic movements of his time. So the opponent's idea would be that ascetic practice would be enough, it would get you to heaven, so you don't need all of this learning of rhetoric, science, metaphysics, and so on. That's right. There's a kind of a quick road to heaven, and you don't need to go through philosophy. And you need to wall yourself up in a cell and not eat anything for weeks on end. So it's not that easy. Okay, yeah, maybe it hurts a little. But one very interesting example of this is the way he talks about his mother. He wrote a speech in praise of his mother after her death. It's a funeral oration in praise of his mother. And his mother was very religious, so religious that to all intents and purposes she tried to live like a nun, although she was not a nun in her house. And one of the results of her action was as a spiritual fanatic, I would say, almost, was to send her husband out of the house. And he had to become a monk in a monastery. Another thing she did was to practically starve herself. So a physical asceticism, so to speak, driven to really extremes. The way Psellus describes it, it sounds really pretty bad what she did to her body. But in his description of her spirituality, let's say of her mysticism, Psellus has his mother use Plutinian ideas. It's very amusing. So his mother begins to Plotonize, so to speak, when she talks about union with God, as if Psellus had to recuperate this ascetic extremism practiced by his mother by giving it a kind of a philosophical dimension to it. And that way of presenting his mother shows also his criticism of these extreme anti-intellectual tendencies of asceticism of his time. That mention of Plutinus brings me to another question, though, which is that when he says there's all this learning that we could acquire, we should be reading these books, we should be steeping ourselves in the knowledge of the ancients. You called it the knowledge of the Greeks just now. But of course, when you talk about the Greeks, what you, I suppose, mean is pagans, not people who write in Greek because that's his contemporaries too. And isn't there a problem there for him to square the paganism of most of the texts he's interested in with his own Christian belief and the Christian belief of his society? Yes, this is a very difficult problem, and it's hard to give a simple, quick answer to it. On the one hand, Psellus subscribes to Christian doctrine and to the authority of Christian revelation and subordinates all knowledge to this authority. On the other hand, his evident love of knowledge, of philosophy in this very broad sense, which means he is curious about everything that he can find relating to all branches of knowledge, leads him to the very rich field of pagan philosophy, in particular the pagan philosophy of late antiquity, which can nourish his curiosity and which brings him all sorts of interesting materials. This can get him into trouble because this is of course a pagan material which is sometimes in contradiction with Christian revelation. And Psellus is walking a kind of a tight rope because on the one hand he tries to defend himself against the charge of heresy, in fact, or of being interested in unholy, dangerous things by the claim that wisdom involves knowing everything, being interested in everything, and it is his duty to the extent that he wishes to cultivate wisdom to be interested also in non-Christian things, to find out about all of these things. On the other hand, he has to make sure that he points out where in fact this pagan wisdom stands in conflict with Christianity, and then he just says this is absurd or this is nonsense or this is rubbish and this is in contradiction with Christian authority. So he gives us all of this knowledge and then he could say at the end, no, this is all nonsense. He comes in at the end and so it's not that he suppresses it as it's going on, he actually tells you everything it says, and then he tells you the bits that you should reject at the end. Exactly. And this is a curious exercise, but it's a kind of, I think, a attempt to compromise between subscribing to the authority of Christian revelation on the one hand and allowing himself to explore the riches of wisdom on the other. He also says, and this is a traditional idea that he picks up from the Church Fathers, that is that you can sometimes use philosophical arguments and ideas as a weapon against heresy. So not only is it curiosity in itself that motivates them, but possibly also the idea that sometimes these things can be useful even to Christian theologians. I think one thing that's striking about Selos in particular is that we're quite familiar in a way by now at this point in this series with the phenomenon of members of the Abrahamic faiths using pagan material, Aristotle, Plotinus, for their own even theological purposes. You can think about thinkers in the Islamic world, thinkers in Latin Christendom. But what's unusual about Selos, I think, is that he actually goes for some of the pagan texts that are most pagan and most strikingly difficult to reconcile with Christianity. In particular, I'm thinking of Proclus and the Chaldean Oracles. And although, for example, Proclus was influential in Latin and Arabic, he was influential in this very stripped-down form where you don't get lots of references to the pagan gods anymore. Instead, you get references to abstract principles like the one or the limit or soul. Can you try to explain how that could be, that Selos would deliberately go for the material that's most difficult? Well, the thing I'm trying to say is that I don't think we have a coherent, consistent, defensible position in Selos. He is somewhere in between, so to speak, and it's quite dangerous. Because he does, he's very enthusiastic, he actually loves philosophy, I think, seriously. And he's full of admiration for Plato and he thinks philosophy can solve all problems. Very, very ambitious. And this love of philosophy extends to and includes especially the philosophy of Proclus, and that includes the Chaldean Oracles. And so he goes into all of the stuff which is dangerous and totally useless, you might say, to a Christian theologians. But Selos persists, and I think that's one of the interesting things about him. He's living in a tension, in a sort of contradiction all the time. And I think this tension is not resolved, really. Another thing that's unusual about Selos is that he's almost two authors, because there's the deeply philosophical side we've been talking about. And then there's also Selos the historian, the author of the Chronographia, which is a work that's really been of more interest to historians than historians of philosophy, because it details the lives and achievements of a series of Byzantine emperors. So do you think that nonetheless, this is a text that philosophers or historians of philosophy should take seriously? Is there any philosophy in it, so to speak? I think the Chronographia is not just history. It's used by historians as a source of historical information. It's information about Selos' time, about the emperors of his time, and it's a really interesting, so to speak, chronicle of his times. All the more interesting in the sense that he is often at the heart of the events, and he knows often the people he's talking about. So it's an eyewitness account of Byzantine history at the time, imperial history. But historians have also recognized that it's not just history. It's something more than that. And in my view, Selos on the one hand is telling a story about the use of political power and implicitly criticizing the way political power has been exercised by a series of Byzantine emperors. And this means bringing out, in fact, how political power should be exercised. On the other hand, I think he's also talking about himself and putting himself into this picture and showing his role in this series of events and how he, as a philosopher, is an actor in these political events. Having in a way his ambition to unite philosophy and politics. And is the ideal reader that he's envisioning also a politically engaged person who's supposed to maybe take a lesson from the way that Selos acted or maybe take a negative lesson from the less attractive figures he represents? I think that's a good question as to what readers he has in mind. But I think reading it, you would see implicitly that these emperors all exemplify different moral failings, which are also political failings. Reasons why they fail, why they bring catastrophe to the Byzantine emperor. And they show that the Shoahop Selos tried to engage in the political machine, so to speak, right at the heart of it, in the court. And the sorts of things that made things go wrong where his action could no longer be exercised. We were talking at the beginning of the interview about occasions, circumstances which were unphilosophical. And circumstances keep changing and in some circumstances a philosopher can act. In some circumstances he can't. In fact, it becomes impossible. And this happened to Selos. He had to retire from the court and go to a monastery, hide in a monastery, so to speak, where he became Michael Selos. Because it was just impossible, too dangerous for him to stay in the court. But he came back later on when he could, out of the monastery, back into the court in Constantinople to try to act further as a philosopher at the heart of political power in the Byzantine empire. So he was thinking about Plato's injunction for the philosopher to go back into the cave and try to bring wisdom to the people. Certainly. Yes, he quotes Plato on the subject. And he says in antiquity philosophers did engage themselves in politics, Plato, but also Pythagoras, also Aristotle, but that this link between philosophy and politics has been broken. And he obviously thinks that this is something that should be reinstated, that the philosopher should involve himself in practical life, and in his case in political life, to the extent possible. So you came on the podcast before, actually, to talk about late ancient political philosophy. And you were just referring now to Plato, Pythagoras, really ancient philosophers. But on the other hand, you've told us that Selos was very interested in late antique figures like Prophos. What are the themes and ideas of late antique political philosophy that Selos can and does draw on in order to develop his own political views? Yes. For some preparatory remarks, Selos has a neo-platonic view of human nature. He thinks that human nature is made up essentially of the soul, which can exist independently of the body, and that this soul then comes in contact with the body, in relation with the body, and lives in this relationship. And corresponding to this distinction between the human as soul in itself or the human as soul in body, he uses the distinction, an old distinction, between the theoretical life and the practical life. So the theoretical life is the life of soul in itself, and practical life is the life of soul with respect to the body. And corresponding to these distinctions, the distinction between theoretical philosophy and practical philosophy, practical philosophy itself is made up of ethics, politics. And Selos talks about politics in a way which I think is influenced by people like Proclos, by philosophers of late antiquity, who describe political science in terms of two sciences, legislation and jurisdiction. And these are parts of practical philosophy or political philosophy which Selos thinks are largely neglected or have practically disappeared at his time, and that there has to be some work on bringing legislation and jurisdiction on a theoretical level into order and this is the job of the practical philosopher or the political philosopher. What's the difference between those two parts? Presumably legislation is the making of laws, is jurisdiction the enforcing of laws? That's right. So there's a kind of subordination. There is on the one hand a formulation of laws, and these laws should be developed for the good of the community. And then jurisdiction sees that people are punished to transgress these laws, or let's say jurisdiction guards these laws from violation. So it's a sort of secondary science subordinated to legislation. And legislation itself is supposed to be an expression of the knowledge required for knowing how humans can live well, that is happily in their incorporated state as part of a community. I think these ideas that we find in Selos are ready to be found in Proclus. And Selos was able to use Proclus in order to formulate what it is that the philosopher, to the extent that he is political or practical, should know in order to contribute in terms of knowledge to the political process. And is that really what makes the good politician a good politician, just knowledge, there's nothing else you need? It's a very kind of platonic or maybe even Socratic idea of what makes a good ruler a good ruler. In Selos it's a little tough because he's living in a political system which is monarchical. It's based on the structure of monarchical power. It's not like you can apply to become the Byzantine emperor. You can't. Here's my CV. That's right. I've got lots of Plato. It's already determined in terms of who has power by things like blood and things like murder and power and money and so on. Nothing to do with knowledge. So the criteria for the acquiring of power are quite different from those that Plato would specify, in other words, the criterion of knowledge. So given the fact that you're living in this system where knowledge doesn't count at all but power does or money or blood, the philosopher can intervene as an advisor. He can advise the emperor in terms of political policy. And this is precisely the role that Selos gave himself. He was the philosopher with the knowledge who could advise the emperor in his policies and the chronography in fact as chapters giving advice on how to rule to the emperor. That's how Selos saw his action as a philosopher in the court. It's interesting isn't it because I think there's a tendency to assume that what philosophers really want to be doing is what they call contemplation, shutting themselves away and thinking about God or metaphysics or the soul. And obviously Selos did quite a lot of that. He was forced into it in a way, the life of contemplation. But I think it's interesting that he seems to have chosen a politically engaged life when he could. Does he have a worked out theory about why that's the right choice? Can he give us a philosophical account of why the engaged political life or maybe the life that involves both political engagement and contemplation is to be preferred to the life that involves only contemplation? Yes. Here again, as I was speaking about the tituar on which Selos found himself with respect to the relation between Christian revelation and pagan learning, he's also on a tituar with respect to the relation between contemplative and practical life. He fully subscribes to the priority, the superior value of the contemplative life, of the life of pure knowledge without any action practice. But on the other hand, he insists very much that he'd rather be involved in the practical life. And this has to do with his concept of being in the middle. He's, so to speak, in the middle between soul and body in his life. He's a kind of intermediary. And he thinks his role is to mediate, so to speak, between contemplative and practical life. He's not totally divorced from contemplative life and he admires it and has practiced it himself to some extent. But he thinks that his place in this life, so to speak, is to mediate and to make the junction between theory and practice, between contemplation and political action. He is also very interesting in terms of this insistence on the middle between extremes, and in this case, the middle between soul just in itself and a soul which is completely plunged into bodily concerns. He wants neither, but he thinks a successful life in this life, in this incorporated life, is a life in the middle, so to speak, where soul is not a slave of bodily desires, but controls these desires. But on the other hand, soul does take care of its corporeal condition. It does not abandon them and try to live, so to speak, by itself in another world. And he thinks that that would be the right choice for any embodied soul. It's not just a matter of taste that he likes to be engaged in politics. He thinks that every philosopher should, or even maybe would, as a true philosopher, would always get engaged in politics. I think he does, yes. He thinks the philosopher will have this concern to communicate. Sellars communicates in various ways. He's a teacher. He teaches in the court in Constantinople and he's a very active teacher, very interested in teaching his pupils. And when he talks about his mother's extreme example, he says that he can't meet up to her high standards of spirituality. He is deficient with respect to these high standards. And he says it is his lot, it is his duty. In fact, God has told him, the emperor has told him, his students tell him that he should teach, that he should communicate knowledge. So he sees himself as a philosopher charged with the mission of communicating knowledge to others. And this can be the knowledge that he communicates to his students, philosophical knowledge in general or perhaps more specifically, political knowledge that he can convey to the emperor. He is, as a philosopher, engaged at these various levels in this middle position between being totally enslaved to the body and totally ignorant on the one hand, on the other hand, being totally abstracted from the world and wrapped up just in some sort of transcendent existence. Does he give us a more fleshed out picture of what the best ruler will do or at least what characteristics the best ruler would have to have? For example, does he think that the best ruler would be an image of God and relate to the community the way that God relates to the universe or anything like that? I don't think so. It's a little difficult because the Conographia is not an entirely coherent piece. Most of it is very interesting in the sense that it does not conform to the normal pattern of what is called the mirror of princes or the firstenspiegel. And it's only at the end for the last emperor that Selass practices this literary genre of the mirror of princes. And this literary genre of the mirror of princes makes the emperor into the image of God. You're referring to this idea. And that as God rules the world, so the emperor should rule his people. And therefore the emperor will exercise philanthropy, love of man, just as God loves man. So these clichés of rhetoric which come from late antiquity in which the picture of the ruler as an image of God is repeated again and again. This is taken up again by Selass when he's referring to the emperor who reigned when he was finishing his book or coming to the end of his writing. But the earlier parts and the greater part of the Chronographia is not like that at all because the emperor has come across as a pretty terrible crowd. They seem to exemplify almost all of the vices one could think of and some of them are really bad. So we're very far from here pandering to emperors. We're far from the mirror of princes. We have a kind of a critique of the various vices including ignorance manifested by the different emperors and the catastrophic results of these vices on the population. The impoverishment of the empire, the misery of the population, the danger that this put the empire in with respect to its enemies. The vices you might say of the emperors have brought to catastrophic consequences in terms of material goods for the people in whose name, for whose goods these emperors are supposed to be ruining. Does Selass give us any idea why God saw fit to put this sequence of jerks on the Byzantine throne? I mean, it seems rather unkind. Is it a way of punishing? I think a lot of Byzantine intellectuals and theologians read the history of difficulties faced by the empire, the Arab invasions, plague, earthquakes, you name it. They would often say, well, this is because of sin, because of sin rampaging through the community and we're being justly punished. That doesn't really sound like it would be Selass' thought. No, I don't think that's his thought. For instance, when Procopius is denouncing the tyranny of Justinian, he says this is God's revenge and other people blame all the catastrophes that can happen to the empire in terms of God's revenge. The collapse of Hagia Sophia of the dome is blamed on the viciousness, the vice of the people of Constantinople. For example, I don't think this is Selass' line at all. He doesn't like divine intervention in the order of nature. He thinks that nature, this is also quite impressive, he thinks that nature has its own rationality. God is the cause of this rationality. But things happen in a certain order and you could describe this, if you like, as fate or as providence. Maybe all the things that we go through and all of the terrible things that we happen to have to undergo, again these chiroi, these occasions, are figuring this larger picture of fate. The fact that there are all sorts of miserable emperors or vicious emperors of various kinds, it's never quite the same situation, perhaps is part of a larger pattern of fate in which we can try to intervene to some extent, but of course we cannot control ourselves. I think he sees things more in that way than in terms of some sort of divine interventionism, so to speak, which he wishes to limit as much as possible. Okay, well thanks very much, Dominic, for coming on to talk about Michael Tsavas. Very welcome. And please join me next time when you'll have another occasion to learn more about Byzantine philosophy here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.