“I have discovered the greatest majesty which the Greeks are and were. The Path from Thales to Socrates is something incredible.” – Friedrich Nietzsche[1]
By Ryan Smith
As the Pre-Socratics are the very first philosophers, a lot of people instinctively assume that they must also be primitive and crude in their thought. This is, however, far from the case: For more than two millennia, the Pre-Socratics have held unerring sway over philosophers and psychologists alike. Indeed, as the Nietzsche scholar Greg Whitlock would have it, the beauty of their theories, their simplicity and insight, is second to none.[2] But what interests us here is not just that these philosophers were bold and edgy thinkers in their own right: Equally interesting is the fact that each of the Pre-Socratic philosophers was a philosophical archetype of exceptional purity.
The idea of the Pre-Socratics as “philosophical archetypes” predates Jung. Schopenhauer was much taken in with the “republic of geniuses” that he found in the Pre-Socratic tradition, and according to Nietzsche, every thinker that succeeded the Pre-Socratics constitutes a non-pure type, a “mixed type,” as it were, that is thus less psychologically interesting than the archetypes that could be found in the Pre-Socratics.[3] According to Nietzsche, only the Pre-Socratics were philosophically pure types: They constituted a “dance of personalities” to which Nietzsche would dedicate the early part of his career. A pupil of Nietzsche’s, who once attended a private lecture of his, would later recall:
“Nietzsche gave a sort of introduction to philosophy. He let the so-called pre-[Socratic] philosophers pass before my inner eye in a series of fascinating personalities. … They moved along grandly and majestically, like a shining cloud.”[4]
The story of the modern-day thinkers who have been fascinated with Pre-Socratic personalities is in no way exhausted with Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. To Karl Popper, too, the thinking of the Pre-Socratics constituted no less than a beautiful tale and a “timeless truth.”[5] According to Popper, the Pre-Socratic contribution to the intellectual life of its day appears to have constituted no less than an “age of enlightenment” that took place some 2100 years before the actual Age of Enlightenment, as delineated by such luminous names as Spinoza, Voltaire, Kant, and Hume.[6]
The Impossible Quest
As mentioned above, Nietzsche repeatedly said that the Pre-Socratic philosophers were the only “pure types” that ever lived.[7] In Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, an unpublished book of his youth, he tried to convey to us his impression of their actual personalities.[8] But though he kept circling their mysteries, and revising his text, he eventually had to abandon the project as he found it too hard to give solid form to the liquid insights that had been gleaned by his intuition (and, we may say, such is often the plight of intuitive types).[9]
As a major thinker who struggled with the Pre-Socratics and lost, Nietzsche was among the first philosophers to wrestle with “The Impossible Quest”:[10] In his work he tried to portray the full psychological significance of the Pre-Socratics but evidently failed and knew it. Yet while Nietzsche may have been the first of the greats to fail The Impossible Quest, he would by no means be the last.
Freud and Jung, too, were attracted to the riches of Pre-Socratic thought, with Jung being irresistibly drawn to the doctrine of unity of opposites that is found in Heraclitus.[11] And the aging Freud, for his part, was positively enchanted to discover those same histrionic elements in Empedocles that he had found so seducing in Jung and Wilhelm Fleiss earlier in his life.[12]
For both Freud and Jung, the fascination with the Pre-Socratics was so strong that it was not enough for them to express it in writing; the attraction had to make itself felt in their personal lives as well: For Freud, his private art collection included a renaissance depiction of Empedocles,[13] while Jung, for his part, went so far as to paraphrase Heraclitus on the stone monument that he carved for himself at his Bollingen retreat.[14] Even Jung’s assistant Marie-Louise von Franz would often return to the Pre-Socratics in work publications in order to explain certain psychologico-philosophical tendencies by way of archetypes.[15]
With regards to Jung’s fascination with the Pre-Socratics, some even go so far as to say that Jung derived his typology from their teachings, in so far as Thinking is Fire (Heraclitus), Feeling is Water (Thales), Sensation is Earth (Xenophanes), and Intuition is Air (Anaximander). Likewise, they take the principle from Heraclitus’s teachings that pushing in one direction will produce a hidden counter-orientation in the opposite direction. The parallel to Jungian typology is that if a person is marked by a strong orientation towards Extroverted Intuition, then that orientation will at the same time produce a hidden counter-orientation towards Introverted Sensation.[16] That is indeed how Jungian typology works, but to credit Heraclitus and his contemporaries with having said as much is perhaps an overstatement. Be that as it may, however, it is nevertheless undeniable that the inspiration for Jung’s typology was to some extent derived from the thought of the Pre-Socratics.[17]
On the topic of Pre-Socratic philosophy in modern times, we also find Heidegger’s botch-job attempt to handle the Pre-Socratics; an overflowing monstrosity of verbosity which we will not go into here. Suffice to say that, to Jung, Heidegger’s thought was “unutterably trashy and banal.”[18] While Karl Popper – a man who was no friend of Jung’s – would admonish people to stay away from Heidegger by way of the following plea: “I appeal to the philosophers of all countries to unite and never again mention Heidegger or talk to another philosopher who defends Heidegger. This man was a devil.”[19]
So Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Freud, Jung, Popper, Heidegger, and von Franz would all adulate the Pre-Socratics to various degrees and keep circling their personalities throughout their lives. But they all failed. That makes the Pre-Socratics a perennial quest. The quest that they set before us remains unsolved, and the ultimate book on the Pre-Socratics still remains to be written.
In part 2 of this essay, then, I do not kid myself that I have solved The Impossible Quest. Far from penetrating that deep and ancient mystery, I merely aim to equip the reader with a lively aperitif to their amazing story, so that he may one day take up their mantle for himself in his striving to complete The Impossible Quest.
***
Image of Xenophanes in the article commissioned from artist Francesca Elettra.
REFERENCES
Bennet: Meetings with Jung Daimon 1985
Jung: Nietzsche’s Zarathustra Princeton University Press 1988
Malcolm: In the Freud Archives Random House 1983
Nietzsche: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks Regnery Publishing 1996
Nietzsche: The Pre-Platonic Philosophers University of Illinois Press 2006
Popper: The World of Parmenides Routledge 2001
Von Franz & Hillman: Lectures on Jung’s Typology Spring Publications 1971
NOTES
[1] Nietzsche: The Pre-Platonic Philosophers p. xxvi
[2] Whitlock, in Nietzsche: The Pre-Platonic Philosophers p. 167
[3] Nietzsche: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks p. 34
Actually, according to Nietzsche, Socrates is the last philosophical “pure type” as “Socrates, the denier of all physics.” For this reason Nietzsche refers to the Pre-Socratics as the Pre-Platonics, but we take the meaning to be essentially the same. See Whitlock, in Nietzsche: The Pre-Platonic Philosophers pp. 167-168, 258
[4] Ludwig von Scheffler, quoted in Nietzsche: The Pre-Platonic Philosophers p. xli
‘Pre-Platonic’ has here been replaced with ‘Pre-Socratic’ by our hand.
[5] Popper: The World of Parmenides p. 8, p. 82. Popper is speaking “in character” here in an exposition of Parmenides’ timeless truth, but Popper’s own fascination with the Pre-Socratics is evident enough, as chronicled through his interest, stretching at least from his ‘Back to the Pre-Socratics’ lecture (first given in 1958) and on to the very end of his life in 1994. See also Arne F. Petersen, in Popper: The World of Parmenides p. xiii, and Yue-Ching Ho: ‘At 90, and Still Dynamic: Revisiting Sir Karl Popper and Attending His Birthday Party,’ in Intellectus 23 (Jul-Sep 1992)
[6] Popper: The World of Parmenides p. 37 ff.
[7] Nietzsche: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks p. 35
[8] Nietzsche: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. As well as the lecture series that has posthumously been published as Nietzsche: The Pre-Platonic Philosophers.
[9] Nietzsche: The Pre-Platonic Philosophers p. xxvi
[10] See also Whitlock, in Nietzsche: The Pre-Platonic Philosophers p. 153 ff. for a discussion of some of the other thinkers who wrestled with the Pre-Socratics before Nietzsche.
[11] Jung: Psychological Types §708, cf. James L. Jarrett, in Jung: Nietzsche’s Zarathustra vol. I p. 562n4
[12] Freud: Analysis Terminable and Interminable §6, cf. Leonard Shengold, quoted in Malcolm: In the Freud Archives p. 84
[13] Freud Museum London: Artifact FM 5101
[14] Heraclitus: DK B52
[15] Von Franz, in von Franz & Hillman: Lectures on Jung’s Typology p. 34
[16] Jung: Psychological Types §708
[17] Bennet: Meetings with Jung p. 27
[18] Jung: Personal letter to Arnold Künzli, dated 28. February, 1943
[19] Karl Popper, as quoted in Yue-Ching Ho: ‘At 90, and Still Dynamic: Revisiting Sir Karl Popper and Attending His Birthday Party,’ in Intellectus 23 (Jul-Sep 1992)