It was believed that the truth had been "given" in the master's texts, and that all that had to be done was to bring it to light and explicate it. Plotinus, for example, writes: "These statements arc not new; they do not belong to the present time, but were made long ago, although not explicitly, and what we have said in this discussion has been an interpretation of them, relying on Plato's own writings for evidence that these views arc ancient. " 10 Here we encounter another aspect of the conception of truth implied by "exegetical"
philosophy. Each philosophical or religious school or group believed itself to be in possession of a traditional truth, communicated from the beginning by the divinity to a few wise men. Each therefore laid claim to being the legitimate depositary of the truth.
From this perspective, the conflict between pagans and Christians, from the second century AD on, is highly instructive. As both pagans and Christians recognized affinities between their respective doctrines, they accused each other of theft. Some claimed Plato plagiarized Moses, while others affirmed the contrary; the result was a series of chronological arguments destined to prove which of the two was historically prior. For Clement of Alexandria, the theft dated back even before the creation of humanity. It had been some wicked angel who, having discovered some traces of the divine truth, revealed philosophy to the wise of this world. 1 1
Pagans and Christians explained in the same way the differences which, despite certain analogies, persisted between their doctrines. They were the result of misunderstandings and mistranslations - in other words, bad exegesis
- of stolen texts. For Celsus, the Christian conception of humility was nothing but a poor interpretation of a passage in Plato's Laws;12 the idea of the kingdom of God only a misreading of a passage in Plato's text on the king of all things, ll and the notion of the resurrection only a misunderstanding of the idea of transmigration. On the Christian side, Justin asserted that some of Plato's statements showed that he had misunderstood the text of Moses.1�
In this intellectual atmosphere, error was the result of bad exegesis, mistranslation, and faulty understanding. Nowadays, however, historians seem to consider all exegetical thought as the result of mistakes or misunderstandings. We can briefly enumerate the forms these alleged mistakes and deformations are thought to assume: in the first place, the excgctes make arbitrary systematizations. For instance, they take out of context passages originally widely separated from each other, nml nn11lyze thl'rn in 11 pUl'ely formal way, in order t o reduce t he texts to hl' cxpl11inl'll to 11 hoil \' 111' rnhl'rl'nt
Philosophy, Exegesis, and Crtalivt Mistakes 75
doctrine. In this way, for instance, a four- or five-tiered hierarchy of being was extracted from various dialogues of Plato.
Nor is this the most serious abuse. Whether consciously or not, systematization amalgamates the most disparate notions, which had originated in different or even contradictory doctrines. Thus we find the commentators on Aristotle using Stoic and Platonic ideas in their exegesis of Aristotelian texts.
It is fairly frequent, especially in the case of translated texts, to find commentators trying to explain notions which simply do not exist in the original. In Psalm 1 1 3: 1 6, for example, we read: "The heaven is the heaven of the Lord. " Augustine, however, started out from the Greek translation of the Bible, and understood: "The heaven of heavens is of [i.e. belongs to] the Lord." Augustine is thus led to imagine a cosmological reality, which he identifies with the intelligible world, which he then goes on to try and locate with relation to the "heaven" mentioned in the first verse of Genesis. From the point of view of the actual text of the Bible, this whole construction is based on thin air.
Cases of misunderstanding arc not always this extreme. Nevertheless, it frequently occurs that exegeses construct entire edifices of interpretation on the basis of a banal or misunderstood phrase. The whole of Neoplatonic exegesis of the Parmenides seems to be an example of such a phenomenon.
The modern historian may be somewhat disconcerted on coming across such modes of thought, so far removed from his usual manner of reasoning.
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.