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by Corry Shores
[Search Blog Here. Index tabs are found at the bottom of the left column.]
[Victor Goldschmidt, entry directory]
[Goldschmidt, Le système stoïcien, entry directory]
[The following is summary. Bracketed commentary is my own, as is any boldface. Proofreading is incomplete, which means typos are present, especially in the quotations. So consult the original text. Also, I welcome corrections to my interpretations, because I am not good enough with French or Greek to make accurate translations of the texts.]
Summary of
Victor Goldschmidt
Le système stoïcien et l'idée de temps
Deuxième partie:
(2)
Aspects temporels de la morale stoïcienne
A
(2.1)
La Connaissance
Chapitre IV
(2.1.4)
L’interprétation des événements
II
(2.1.4.2)
Finalité et causalité
42.
(2.1.4.2.42)
La perfection instantanée
Brief summary:
(2.1.4.2.42.1) The Stoics favor a sort of cause that is involved in the construction of copies. They do not place the models of the copies as having a primary causal role however. The role of the models is to inspire the creation of techniques that will produce copies. (2.1.4.2.42.2) This “artisanal” cause is a corporeal that causes the incorporeal predicates. The incorporeals in Plato and Aristotle would serve as primary causes, being the forms that draw forward the motion of change. But for the Stoics, the incorporeals serve a secondary causal role in that it is the nature of the corporeal motion that determines what the incorporeal ends will be, and it is not the incorporeal ends that determine what the corporeal movements will be. (2.1.4.2.42.3) Primary Causality in Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics involves the establishment of a temporal distance that is also overcome by that very same primary causality that established the distance in the first place. For Plato, the Forms that serve as models for guiding how the demiurge will try to fashion the world are also the ends on the causal basis of which the demiurge sets upon fashioning the world in the first place. Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, in order to cause movement, needs there to be things before it that move toward it, but since it causes every moment of the movement, it closes that temporal gap through its final causality. For the Stoics, however, it is not that the final end causes the movement toward it, even though the end is expressed in each moment of movement, because the efficient causality of the movement is really what drives it in the direction of that end. This means that the incorporeal predicate that is expressed every present moment temporally coincides in the present with that future end state, even though the end state has not been actualized yet. (2.1.4.2.42.4) Motion for the Stoics is not determined by an end to which it must arrive at and thus the pre-existing temporal/spatial interval that it must come to occupy before doing so. Rather, the whole of all of its time and movement is built into or nested into the causal and other properties of its present nature.
[Stoic Artisanal Causality]
[Corporeal and Incorporeal Causality]
[Overcoming Incorporealized Temporality]
[Eternity in the Present]
Summary
2.1.4.2.42
La perfection instantanée
[Stoic Artisanal Causality]
(p.94: “42 La nouveauté de cette théorie stoïcienne …”)
[In sum: The Stoics favor a sort of cause that is involved in the construction of copies. They do not place the models of the copies as having a primary causal role however. The role of the models is to inspire the creation of techniques that will produce copies. ]
The novelty is the Stoic theory of causality (which regards it as primarily the motor, active, efficient causality of God; see section 2.1.4.2.40) is not that it affirms the cause to be primary to the effect, rather, its novelty is that if affirms the primacy of the motor cause. In Aristotle and above all in Plato, the partial success of the copies does not measure up to the excellence of the Form. However, the partial success of the copies is more a matter of the value of the artisan whose aim it was to imitate this excellence. For the next idea, we should examine the citation, Plato’s Philebus, 54b-c:
(54b) Protarchus
For Heaven’s sake, is this the kind of question you keep asking me, “Tell me, Protarchus, whether you think shipbuilding is for the sake of ships, or ships for the sake of shipbuilding,” and all that sort of thing?Socrates
Yes; that is just what I mean, Protarchus.Protarchus
Then why did you not answer it yourself, Socrates?Socrates
There is no reason why I should not; but I want you to take part in the discussion.Protarchus
Certainly.Socrates
I say that drugs and all sorts of instruments (54c) and materials are always employed for the sake of production or generation, but that every instance of generation is for the sake of some being or other, and generation in general is for the sake of being in general.(Plato 1925j, copied from Perseus)
(If I am not mistaken, Goldschmidt’s idea might be the following. In Plato we see that the models exist for the sake of the copies to be created, and so the existence of something, like a drug or a tool, is there for the creation of copies. For Stoics however, this is not the case. Instead, it is not the ideal models that exist so that the copies can be made, rather, the technical means that we invent and whose efficient causal powers can create copies is what exists for the sake of the copies. And these technical means themselves are incorporeals rather than models. So the causal primacy goes still to the efficient cause (here the techniques for making copies) all while still, like in Platonism, these causes benefit the intelligible models. They thus favor a sort of “artisanal” or constructive cause.)]
42. La nouveauté de cette théorie stoïcienne n’est pas d’affirmer, en général, que la cause vaut mieux que l’effet5 ; c’est de l’affirmer, de la cause motrice. Chez Aristote et, sur tout, chez Platon, la demi-réussite des copies ne mesurait pas l’excellence de la Forme. Mais elle mesurait très exactement la valeur de l’artisan chargé d’imiter cette excellence. Le modèle n’est pas en vue de la copie, l’existence n’est pas en vue de la genèse6 ; mais les techniques qui s’inspirent du modèle ont uniquement pour fin ces copies : guérir tel malade, construire telle maison7. Le stoïcisme accepte cette dépréciation de l’effet par rapport à la cause. Mais il l’opère, non plus, comme le platonisme, au profit d’un modèle intelligible, mais en faveur précisément de la cause « artisanale », de la causa quae facit8.
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5. Sén., Ep., 65, 14 : « Multum enim interest inter opus et causam operis » ; Plat., Phil ., 27 a : Ἆρ᾽ οὖν ἡγεῖται μὲν τὸ ποιοῦν ἀεὶ κατὰ φύσιν, τὸ δὲ ποιούμενον ἐπακολουθεῖ γιγνόμενον ἐκείνῳ;
6. Plat., Phil., 54 b-c.
7. Arist., Eth. Nic., I, 5 (7), 1097a 18-22 ; Métaph., A, I, 981 a 16-24.
8. P. 92, n. 5.
[Corporeal and Incorporeal Causality]
(p.95: “ On comprend par là que …”)
[In sum: The artisanal cause is a corporeal that causes the incorporeal predicates. The incorporeals in Plato and Aristotle would serve as primary causes, being the forms that draw forward the motion of change. But for the Stoics, the incorporeals serve a secondary causal role in that it is the nature of the corporeal motion that determines what the incorporeal ends will be, and it is not that the incorporeal ends determine what the corporeal movements will be.]
We should understand this artisanal cause in the context of the way the Stoics understand causality in terms of corporeality and incorporeality. For the Stoics, every cause is a body that causes some incorporeal effect to another body (see for exampleBréhier’s La théorie des incorporels dans l'ancien stoïcisme, section 1.2.4.) Here incorporeality is a sort of imperfection and affirmed quasi-existence. And in a way it inverts Platonism, because here the effect, which is incorporeal, plays the role that is equivalent to the deficient and impermanent sensibles, that are the imperfect effects of the incorporeal Ideas. This refers us to the distinction between perfect and principle causes and axillary and proximate causes. Perfect and principle causes include corporeal individuals, while axillary and proximate causes include incorporeal events, which, in preceding the activity of the agent, are proximate and antecedent causes whose results, insofar as they can be said to have any, are not bodies but accidents and predicates. (I probably have that wrong; please check the text. I cannot find yet a translation of the Stobaeus text. But this could be very important. The Posidonius passages may be the source of Deleuze’s notion of the quasi-cause of the incorporeals. The idea here for Goldschmidt just might be the following, but probably not. Bodies cause to other bodies predicates, which are like the extra-present events, but not activities, that tie together different present moments. But predicates cannot cause bodies. This is what Posidonius is saying. Rather, they can only cause accidents/attributes and predicates. Now, the predicates are incorporeal, but the accidents are not so obviously such. So let us consider an example from Bréhier’s La théorie des incorporels dans l'ancien stoïcisme section 2.1.12. The tree greens. Here the predicate is to green or something like, to become and/or maintain as green. It would seem then that the greenness of the corporeal tree would be its accident, but I am not sure. So here is perhaps the idea. The greening predicate/event of the tree cannot cause anything to change in the corporeal mixture directly, like an efficient cause can have direct action. But it can lead the tree’s present states by affirming a future that it is on the road toward. The tree is not yet entirely green, but it expresses the predicate “greening”. That predicate gives to the tree an advance of where it can be headed, that is to say, it gives is a bit more of its accidents even before they are fully actualized. It can bend the present by giving it a taste of the future. Then we might say that the corporeal mixture is of such a distribution that it is not yet a little more green, but the incorporeal predicate has endowed it with a little bit of the irreality of the future. (See Goldschmidt section 1.1.3.16.5 for this temporal co-contamination of realities.) The motor cause acts in an interval marked by two incorporeal terms; in Plato and Aristotle, the movement is an imperfect becoming, suspended between two perfections: the model from which it comes and the end to which it tends. (This idea is also important, but I will probably get it wrong. In Plato for instance, some sensible thing will change from one form to another, let us say, wood to fire. The movement between is what is imperfect. For the Stoics, the movement also happens between incorporeals. But here, the corporeal motion was moving on its own, and the incorporeal beginning and ending points (maybe, being woody and being fiery) are simply what results as the predicates that will be attained only through that corporeal movement.)]
On comprend par là que « pour lès Stoïciens, toute cause est un corps qui, sur un antre corps, cause quelque effet incorporel »1. Cette thèse a pu paraître bizarre et même choquante ; mais l’incorporalité, c’est-à-dire l’imperfection et la quasi-existence affirmées, ici, de l’effet, correspondent, dans le platonisme, à la déficience et au devenir des sensibles. A cela se rattache la distinction entre les « causes parfait es et principales » et les « causes auxiliaires et prochaines »2 ; les premières comprenant les individus corporels, les secondes, les événements incorporels, lesquels, précédant l’activité de l’agent, sont « causes prochaines et antécédentes » et, s’ils en résultent, des effets, c’est- à-dire, « non pas un corps, mais un accident et un attribut »3. La cause motrice agit dans un intervalle marqué par deux termes incorporels ; chez Platon et chez Aristote, le mouvement est un devenir imparfait, suspendu entre deux perfections : le modèle d’où il vient et la fin où il tend.
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1. Sext., math., IX, 211 (S.V.F., II, 341).
2. Le schéma logique de cette opposition pouvait être fournie par la distinction, courante chez Platon et chez Aristote, entre la cause et l’instrument de la cause (αἴτιον δι᾽ ὅ- αἴτιον οὗ οὐκ ἄνευ). C’est à cette distinction fondamentale que se ramène, en définitive, le pluralisme des causes stoïciennes, critiqué par Alexandre d’Aphrodise (cf. p. 35, n. 5). En théorie générale, il suffisait de distinguer la causa efficiens et la causa superueniens (Sén., Ep., 65, 14), de dire, avec Chrysippe : « Causarum aliae sunt perfectae et principales, aliae adiuuantes et proximae » (ap. Cic., de fato, XVIII, 41) ; mais les sciences, surtout la médecine et la jurisprudence, étaient obligées d’analyser de plus près la série de ces « causes auxiliaires et prochaines » précédant (« antecedentibus », loc. cit.) la cause parfaite ; même celle-ci pouvait comporter des subdivisions (Cic., Top., XV, 59, i. f.). – La distinction fondamentale recouvre, du point de vue ontologique, l’opposition entre les êtres et les événements et, du point de vue moral, celle entre τὰ ἐφ᾽ ἡμίν et τὰ οὐκ ἐφ᾽ἡμῑν, la cause parfaite produisant infailliblement l’effet qui dépend d’elle (cf. Cic., Top., XV, 58: « Causarum genera duo sunt, unum quod ui sua id quod sub ea subiectum est certo efficit, ut ignis accendit. »)
3. Posidonius (cf. p. 44, n. 1).
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[Overcoming Incorporealized Temporality]
(p.95: “ Or ces deux perfections coïncident …”)
[In sum: Primary Causality in Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics involves the establishment of a temporal distance that is also overcome by that very same primary causality that established the distance in the first place. For Plato, the Forms that serve as models also serve as the guides to how the demiurge will try to fashion the world, with the Forms also being the Ends to which that fashioning process is tending. Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, in order to cause movement, needs there to be things before it that move toward it, but since it causes every moment of the movement, it closes that temporal gap through its final causality. For the Stoics, however, it is not that the final end causes the movement toward it, even though the end is expressed in each moment of movement, because the efficient causality of the movement drives it in the direction of that end. This means that the incorporeal predicate that is expressed every present moment temporally coincides in the present with that future end state, even though the end state has not been actualized yet.]
These two perfections [maybe, the final and formal cause for Plato and Aristotle and the current and future incorporeal predicates for the Stoics] coincide in the order of the real [for all three philosophies]. The Platonic Form is not an example for itself but only for a demiurge, whose task it is to imitate it; the Unmoved Mover [of Aristotle] is only a form and end for the beings that move; all distance is abolished in their eternal present. For an inverse reason, all distance is abolished in the temporal present in Stoicism: the two terms that could mark it are incorporeal, which the incorporeal agent realizes at each instant of the movement. [This is very tricky, yet also very important. It is not clear to me what the two perfections are in all these cases. We said previously that for Plato and Aristotle, the first perfection is the model from which something (maybe a movement or a thing produced by a causal movement) comes and the second perfection is the end to which it tends. Now, for Plato and Aristotle, it would seem that the model and end are the same. We want do bake a cake, so the cake is the end or purpose we are aiming to attain, but it is also the model that guides us to use cake-appropriate ingredients and baking techniques. It is a little less clear right now with the demiurge and unmoved mover examples. The idea might be we establish a temporal difference involved in the actualizing movement to an end, while at the same time eliminating that temporal distance. So let us take the first case. Suppose there were just Platonic Forms. Why would they even be there in the first place? It would seem that were they to have a purpose, it would be to guide the changes in the world. But that requires temporalized changes in the world, like wood to fire. Now, we have wood that will in the future become fire, but that means it futurity has entered into the present moment as a causal factor. In that sense the temporal distance is both structured and overcome by the same causal factor. In the case of the Unmoved Mover, as far as I recall, it is like the final cause that drives all things toward it. But it only is a mover insofar as it is moving things. And things could only move toward it if they preceded it in time and carried themselves toward it through time’s passage. That means that here again we see that the final end establishes a structure of temporal distance while at the same time overcoming it, but being a causal factor at each moment of that duration. Now we move to the Stoics. Here again all temporal distance is abolished in the present. Goldschmidt says that here there are two incorporeal terms that mark the temporal present, and the corporeal agent realizes those marks at each instant of its movement. But what again are the incorporeal marks? My best current guess is the following. At each moment of the movement (let us say of a qualitative change like wood to fire), there is both the current predicate that is expressed, let us say here that it is the wood being very hot but not yet fire, and the predicate corresponding to where it is going, the fire it is bound to become on account of the current causal factors that will lead to it being fire.)]
Or ces deux perfections coïncident dans l’ordre du réel ; la Forme platonicienne n’est pas exemplaire pour elle-même, mais seulement pour un démiurge, chargé de l’imiter ; le Moteur Immobile n’est forme et n’est fin que pour les êtres eu mouvement ; toute distance est abolie dans leur présent éternel. Pour une raison inverse, toute distance est abolie dans le présent temporel du stoïcisme : les deux termes qui pourraient la marquer étant des incorporels que l’agent corporel réalise à chaque instant de son mouvement.
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[Eternity in the Present]
(p.95-96: “ La perfection instantanée du mouvement abolit …”)
[In sum: Motion for the Stoics is not determined by an end to which it must arrive at and thus the pre-existing temporal/spatial interval that it must come to occupy before doing so. Rather, the whole of all of its time and movement is built into or nested into the causal and other properties of its present nature.]
So, the instantaneous perfection of movement abolishes the distance between intention and its eventual end, between cause and effect. But the constant coincidence of these two combined terms does not dissolve in an infinitesimal instant. [Here the idea might be that were you to remove the interval between present state and end state, that would not make them coincide so much that they become indistinguishable. Rather, each instant expresses the temporal whole and thus always the difference between before and after, even when no such beginning and endpoints are discernible. Put another way, were present and future made indiscernible, that does not eliminate their difference, because even an instant of present motion has packed into it the temporal difference of all time. Or maybe instead the idea is that even though both the end and the present coincide, that does not make the motion stop.] The present of movement is not distant in relation to itself [it does not include parts that are temporally distinct, maybe], but rather it is an extended present [it is one solid present moment of movement, maybe, that is indivisible in a Bergsonian sense]. So if it has no distance to reduce, the movement still occupies an “interval” and possess an extension (διάστημα). [I am not following, but the idea might be, suppose we take an indivisible instant. It does not extend durationally. But it has implied in it an extent of time that is in fact the whole of time. That is likely wrong, so please help me if you can.] But this interval is not marked, in advance, by two immobile terms; rather it is marked, at each point along its course, by the movement itself. [That is to say, maybe, that it is not defined by an end to which it aims and a model by which it is guided to attain it. Making the cake is not defined by the cake that will result nor the recipe that guides the baking procedures. The present moment of time is defined simply by the motion itself in all that it expresses in its directionality. There are efficient causal factor that have brought this current phase of the worlds development into its current state, and it is headed in a certain direction, but its motion is not dictated by that end it is moving toward; rather, the efficient causal nature of its movement dictates the end it will eventually attain.] In other words, the movement does not fill the interval; rather, the movement determines the interval. [So consider the Platonic and Aristotelian sorts of pictures above. We have a final end, but that end state is a cause of motion toward it. This creates an interval of time preceding it, that then secondarily the motion toward it will fill. Here however, the interval through which the motion passes is not created beforehand for the motion to cross. Rather, the nature of the motion itself determines that interval that it will by efficient causal necessity pass through.] In the same way that the body, in the void, occupies and divides up places, so too does the act, in the infinite aiôn, determine by its own extension, the presents. [We refer to section 1.1.3.16, and see especially section 1.1.3.16.3. Here we saw that a month was defined by the action of the moon going around the earth. And in section 1.1.3.16.5 we saw that for such an extended act to transpire, incorporeal time needs to accompany it and thus co-contaminate the reality and the irreality of present and non-present time. So the act involves the incorporeal future, which determines the length of the present. For example, the moon’s current circular motion around the earth has a present of one month long, because its current movement is contaminated with the incorporeal future of its movement. But by extension, the movement of the moon is part of a larger movement of a greater duration, and so on to the whole of time. Thus the present is contaminated with the whole of aiôn time.] The present measures the totality of movement. But this totality of movement in the present is not, like in Aristotle, composed of partial and imperfect movements where only the last of which can sum up and complete the entirety. Rather, the whole of time is given each instant; its completion would rather be like the Aristotelian act, which, however, is neither movement nor is in time, because it is perfect each moment of its duration. [So the idea here seems to be that each moment of time for the Stoics has built into it the providential whole, such that it is not occupying a pre-established temporal distance between it and the end, but rather, the movement has nested within it that very interval that must unfold given the nature of its current motion.]
La perfection instantanée du mouvement abolit la dis- | tance entre l’intention et son but, entre la cause et son effet1. Mais la coïncidence où il amène sans cesse (πάλιν καὶ πάλιν)2 ces deux termes, ne se dissout nullement dans un instant infinitésimal. Le présent du mouvement n’est pas distant par rapport à lui-même, mais c’est bien un présent étendu. S’il n’a plus de distance à réduire, le mouvement occupe cependant un « intervalle », il possède une extension (διάστημα). Mais cet intervalle n’est pas marqué, préalablement, par deux termes immobiles, il l’est, à chaque point du parcours, par le mouvement même. Autrement dit, le mouvement ne comble pas l’intervalle, il le détermine. De même que le corps, dans le vide, occupe et découpe des lieux, de même l’acte, dans l’aiôn infini, détermine, par sa propre étendue, des présents3. Le présent mesure la totalité du mouvement. Mais cette totalité n’est pas, comme chez Aristote, composée de mouvements partiels et imparfaits dont, seul, le dernier pourrait faire la somme et les achever en un tout4. Elle est donnée à chaque instant ; son achèvement serait plutôt celui de l’acte aristotélicien, lequel, cependant, n’est « ni mouvement ni dans le temps », parce qu’il est « parfait à chaque moment de sa durée »5.
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1. La cause véritable quifait rouler le cylindre, n’est pas l’impulsion que je lui donne et qui lui demeure extérieure (« extrinsecus », Cic., de fato, XVIII, 42, XIX, 43; « non quia tu id iam feceris », Aulu- Gelle, VII, II, 11), mais sa propre nature (« suapte natura », de fato, XVIII, 42, i. f. ; « sed quoniam ita sese modus eius et formae uolubilitas habet », Aulu-Gelle, loc. cit. ; sur l’origine pytagoricienne de cette métaphore, voir A. Delatte, Et. sur la littér. pythag., Paris, 1915, p. 65). Dans la vie morale, ces causes externes fournissent l’occasion de nos intentions, lesquelles ont leur cause véritable dans la nature de l’agent moral ; « de même », continue Aulu-Gelle, « sic ordo et ratio et necessitas fati genera ipsa et principia causarum mouet, impetus uero consiliorum mentiumque nostrarum actionesque ipsas uoluntas cuiusque propria et animorum ingenia moderantur ». Le lion, l’hydre, le sanglier sont les occasions (περιστάσεις) « fort utiles pour révéler et pour exercer Héraclès » (εὔχρηστα ἦν πρὸς τὸ δεῖξαι καὶ γυμνάσαι τὸν Ἡρακλέα, Epict., Diss., I, VI, 34, 36). – Quant au résultat, d’autre part, nous verrons qu’il n’intervient jamais pour mesurer la valeur de l’acte moral. Notons, pour l’instant, que déjà dans la définition du mouvement physique, le résultat paraît comme quelque chose, non pas que le mouvement poursuit, mais simplement qui le suit (Simplicius, cf. p. 63, n. 3).
2. Simplicius (p. 63, n. 3) ; Plotin, III, VII, 8, 40-41 (dans la critique de la dé finition stoïcienne du temps ; mais Plotin finit par ramener l’expression à son sens aristotélicien de nombre, ou d’identité spécifique [Phys., IV, 12, 220b 12-14], 1. 42-43).
3 Cf. § 16.
4. Cf. les textes cités à la p. 94, n. 4.
5. Eth. Nic., X, 4 (3), 1174 b 8; a 14. C’est ce qu’Aristote appelle l’instant (τὸ γὰρ ἐν τῷ νῦν ὅλον τι, b 9) ; on a déjà noté que cet instant plein, intemporel, mais où trouve à se loger un acte dont on peut dire : καθ᾽ ὁντινοῦν χρόνον τελεία εἶναι (a 14), est différent de l’instant envisagé dans la Physique (cf. p. 52.)
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From:
Goldschmidt, Victor. 1953. Le système stoïcien et l'idée de temps. Paris: Vrin.
Otherwise:
Plato. 1925j. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 9. English translation by Harold Fowler. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University. London: William Heinemann.
Text copied from:
http://data.perseus.org/texts/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0059.tlg010.perseus-eng1
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