E. R. Dodds
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 130th anniversary of the birth of Eric Robertson Dodds (26 July 1893–8 April 1979), better known as E. R. Dodds, who was born in Banbridge, County Down, Ireland, on this date in 1893.
There is a sense of “philosophy of history” quite distinct from that of a scholarly discipline, and that is how philosophy has entered into the lives of individuals, who have attempted to employ philosophical concepts and analyses in order to better understand their world, and to better make their way in the world. I think that scholarly philosophies of history do sometimes take this form, perhaps some scholarly works genuinely aspire to this social function, and certainly there are individuals who have read Herder and Hegel and Spengler and have sometimes tried to use their ideas to make sense of their own times, and thus to make sense of their own lives.
That both mystical philosophy of mystical religion dominated the intellectual milieu of late antiquity tells us something about the beliefs and attitudes of men of this time, and the helps that they believed themselves to need in order to make their way in the world. The discussion of philosophy and religion in Dodds’ Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety is in this spirit:
“Within our period only Plotinus and Porphyry are known to have practised mysticism in the strictest sense. But mystical experience admits of degrees, and Plotinian mysticism is not an isolated phenomenon. The tendency towards introvertive mystical theory is strongly marked in the philosophy of the second century, and in Numenius at least it is expressed in a manner suggestive of actual experience. We saw also that something resembling extrovertive mysticism appeared in a Gnostic and in a Hermetic text. And if we accept as ‘mystical’ in the wide sense any attempt to build a psychological bridge between man and Deity, then mysticism may be said to be endemic in nearly all the religious thought of the period, growing in strength from Marcus Aurelius to Plotinus and from Justin to Origen. Nor need that surprise us. As Festugiere has rightly said, ‘misery and mysticism are related facts.’ From a world so impoverished intellectually, so insecure materially, so filled with fear and hatred as the world of the third century, any path that promised escape must have attracted serious minds. Many besides Plotinus must have given a new meaning to the words of Agamemnon in Homer, ‘Let us flee to our own country.’ That advice might stand as a motto for the whole period. The entire culture, pagan as well as Christian, was moving into a phase in which religion was to be coextensive with life, and the quest for God was to cast its shadow over all other human activities.”
If misery and mysticism are related facts, the recurring periods of mysticism can be taken as an index of historical misery, though we probably need to make a distinction between material immiseration and spiritual immiseration, with the latter being especially reflected in late antiquity, which, materially, was probably in advance of much of the ancient world. This picture of late antiquity as being consumed with mysticism (betraying an inner spiritual misery), at the expense of the actual world, is already familiar to us from Gilbert Murray, who gave us the idea of a failure of nerve during this period. Dodds, on Murray’s recommendation, succeeded Murray as Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford.
Perhaps Dodds’ most influential study was The Greeks and the Irrational. When I first encountered this book I found this passage, which piqued my interest:
“If we may judge by the furniture of their tombs, the inhabitants of the Aegean region had felt since Neolithic times that man’s need for food, drink, and clothing, and his desire for service and entertainment, did not cease with death. I say advisedly ‘felt,’ rather than ‘believed’; for such acts as feeding the dead look like a direct response to emotional drives, not necessarily mediated by any theory. Man, I take it, feeds his dead for the same sort of reason as a little girl feeds her doll; and like the little girl, he abstains from killing his phantasy by applying reality-standards. When the archaic Greek poured liquids down a feeding-tube into the livid jaws of a mouldering corpse, all we can say is that he abstained, for good reasons, from knowing what he was doing; or, to put it more abstractly, that he ignored the distinction between corpse and ghost — he treated them as ‘consubstantial’.”
It had been the tradition in the humanities to present the Greeks and ancient Greek society as a paradigm of rationality, so that examining mortuary rituals such as described above called that image into question. Much of The Greeks and the Irrational covers similar ground as Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, though in a larger historical context. In Dodds we see dreams, magic, and the occult being handed down, always in the changing form, to eventually inform the spirit of late antiquity:
“…even in the generation after Iamblichus theurgy was not yet fully accepted in the Neoplatonic school. Eunapius in an instructive passage shows us Eusebius of Myndus, a pupil of Iamblichus’ pupil Aedesius, maintaining in his lectures that magic was an affair of ‘crazed persons who make a perverted study of certain powers derived from matter,’ and warning the future emperor Julian against ‘that stagy miracle-worker’ the theurgist Maximus… To which the prince replied: ‘You can stick to your books: I know now where to go’ — and betook himself to Maximus. Shortly afterwards we find the young Julian asking his friend Priscus to get him a good copy of Iamblichus’ commentary on his namesake (Julianus the theurgist); for, says he, ‘I am greedy for Iamblichus in philosophy and my namesake in theosophy, and think nothing of the rest in comparison’.”
If classical antiquity experienced a failure of nerve, as postulated by Murray, in which men each retreat into their own inner life, then when they are engaged in this retreat they could draw upon the resources of the classical past, from the great Attic dramatists through Platonism, eventually being transformed into a mystical outlook on life. This mystical outlook may be taken as a non-philosophy of history, and so a kind of flip side of the conception of practical philosophy of history sketched above: a denial of time and history in favor of eternity; ceasing to attempt to make sense of one’s time and one’s place in the world in order to instead meditate upon eternity and one’s place in eternity. I have called the philosophies of Karl Löwith, Simone Weil, Descartes, and Jacob Burckhardt non-philosophies of history. The mystic’s evasion of history is also, in this sense, a non-philosophy of history.
Further Resources
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