Although I will focus on philosophical writing, I begin with Euripides’ Antiope because this play raises all three challenges and reminds us of the intellectual connections between authors that modern academe too often keeps apart. Only fragments of Antiope survive, but they record an interesting disagreement between two brothers. Zethus accuses Amphion of betraying his ‘‘noble nature [gennaian phusin]’ by taking on a ‘‘womanish shape’’ and refusing to ‘‘offer vigorous counsel’’ (fr. 185 TGF). He charges, ‘‘Any man well-equipped for life who neglects the affairs of his house and runs after the pleasures of music and dance will be useless (argos) to his house and the city and a nobody to his friends. One’s nature [phusis] is ruined when one gives way to sweet pleasure’’ (fr. 187 TGF). Zethus also singles out for scorn the pleasures of intellectual inquiry, and he beseeches Amphion to reject ‘‘these refined subtleties’’ and ‘‘idle babbling’’ that threaten his house and weaken his city (frr. 188 and 219 TGF).
But Amphion can offer three distinct replies. First, he can defend his quiet pursuit of pleasure. This involves two distinct moves. Amphion first has to defend the pursuit of pleasure in general. He argues that uncertainties governing other pursuits make it a reasonable option (cf. Horace, Odes 1.11): ‘‘Such is the life of struggling mortals: not always fortunate or unfortunate; sometimes successful and sometimes not. Since we are faced with uncertain blessedness, why should we not live as pleasantly as we can and avoid pain?’’ (fr. 196 TGF). Amphion’s second move is to insist that the best route to pleasure leads not through politics but through quiet withdrawal. He says, ‘‘He who busies himself in many things [prassei polla] that he might avoid is a fool, when he might live pleasantly as an unbusied man [apragmona]’ (fr. 193 TGF). The two steps of this argument are related. In a life of public engagement, one struggles against rivals to secure honor, prosperity, and security for oneself and one's friends. But the goals of such competition are subject to fortune. Amphion argues that it is more sensible to pursue a goal that one can achieve reliably and that one can achieve one’s goal reliably if one pursues pleasure in a quiet life.
Amphion can also defend the life of quiet withdrawal by defending more particularly the intellectual inquiries that Zethus scorns. Another fragment that might belong to Antiope suggests how he could do this. This complicated fragment contrasts the life spent studying nature with sordid business: ‘‘Blessed is he who gives his attention to research, desiring neither the misery of his fellow citizens nor unjust actions, but contemplating the ageless order of immortal nature - how it is constituted, and whence, and why. Concern for shameful deeds never sits near such things’’ (fr. 910 TGF).4 Again, Amphion draws attention to the competition that political life involves. Such competition involves wishing ill to one’s rivals and temptations to do wrong to promote one’s own projects. So even when things work out fortunately, politics is a disagreeable way of procuring what one wants. Quiet study, by contrast, is entirely free of such nastiness. It is not a disagreeable way of procuring what one wants; it is something that one wants. Quiet study simply makes one blessed because it is, if not valuable for its own sake, at least intrinsically pleasant. (If it is intrinsically pleasant, it brings about pleasure all by itself, and pleasure, according to Amphion, is valuable for its own sake.)
Third, and perhaps most surprisingly, Amphion can argue that his detached life makes him a more effective citizen. Again, his argument has more than one part. His general claim is that wise advice takes precedence over manly vigor: ‘‘With a man’s sound advice a city and a house thrive, and there is, in addition, great strength for war. For one bit of wise counsel conquers many hands, and ignorance is the greatest evil with the mob’’ (fr. 200 TGF). Then Amphion suggests that he will be a more effective source of wise advice: ‘‘I hope I shall have a sense of proportion [aidos] and say something wise, and so make no disturbance which harms the city’’ (fr. 202 TGF). It is not difficult to imagine that Amphion rests this hope on his quiet way of life. As we have seen, he expects that busily engaged citizens will show ‘‘concern for shameful deeds.’’ So that kind of life threatens a ‘‘sense of proportion.’’ Presumably, then, if Amphion thinks that he will have a ‘‘sense ofproportion'' and so be able to give wise advice, it is because his quiet life enables him to protect his balanced sense of right and wrong. So understood, Amphion connects the quiet life and wise citizenship.
It is perhaps surprising to see someone hold that one can mind one’s own business and engage in politics. But if being unbusied { apragmosune) is generally opposed to being nasty and meddlesome {polupragmosune), and if there is no word for the condition of engaging in others’ business without nasty meddling, then one might want to characterize the middle ground as a way of being unbusied or minding one’s own business. That appears to be how Amphion sees himself. He does not entirely abandon politics, but nonetheless withdraws from the hustle and bustle of political competition in favor of research and pleasure. All told, then, he prefers the {relatively) quiet life for pleasure, intellectual inquiry, and wiser politics.5
It is not clear how Amphion would fit these aims together and balance his pursuit of pleasure, research, and the good of the city, nor is it clear how much political action or what kind of political action he would allow himself as one who minds his own business. Perhaps his position would display more obvious coherence if we had the rest of Euripides’ play. Perhaps not: he is a character in a drama and not a theorist striving for consistency.
In any case, later philosophers who were eager to justify withdrawal from ordinary politics typically separated these aims. They independently prioritized just one of the three aims to argue that it would be better to live a quiet than a political life. The significance of their arguments lies not just in their ramifications for ancient ethical theory and its account of how a person should live. The philosophers who argue for withdrawal also challenge the dominant ideology about politics in different ways, and they all suggest an alternative conception of politics.
To offer a first approximation of how they do this, I need to tease out some of the dominant ideology’s implicit commitments. The ideology explicitly holds that human excellence requires political action. If the ideology assumes, with Aristotle and many Greeks, that human excellence is the fulfillment of human nature, then it is committed to the idea that human beings are naturally political animals {see also Depew, this volume, chapter 26). But two other commitments offer a more relevant explanation of the dominant ideology. First, according to the dominant ideology, the good of a human’s life is {at least primarily) not private and exclusive to him but shared or common; it is {at least primarily) located not in some state of himself but in activities that necessarily involve others. Second, the dominant ideology identifies these activities that necessarily involve others and {at least partly) constitute the good of a human life as the traditional activities of the active citizen. These two commitments explain why the dominant ideology holds that excellence and achieving the good so obviously require political engagement.
The three philosophical defenses of withdrawal challenge different features of the ideology and suggest different alternatives. The first, developed by Plato and Aristotle on behalf of philosophical contemplation, accepts both of the dominant ideology’s implicit commitments but argues that some exceptional human beings do better by trying to transcend human nature and ordinary political activity. Like Amphion, they favor quiet study. Perhaps unlike Amphion, they think that only an exceptional few should favor quiet study, and they favor quiet study for its own sake, as the best activity a human can perform, and not for the sake of pleasure, although it is extremely pleasant. To the extent that Plato and Aristotle, and especially some heirs of their argument, suggest a community of like-minded people who avoid traditional political activity, they also introduce an alternative vision of a political community, and one that does not require face-to-face interaction.
The second defense of withdrawal, developed by Epicurus on behalf of pleasure, rejects the dominant ideology’s first implicit commitment by arguing that the good for human beings is private - each person’s good is his own pleasure and not a shared activity - and concludes that humans best realize their good outside traditional political activity. By turning their backs on the hazards of competition and embracing pleasure, including a defense of some intellectual inquiry, the Epicureans follow Amphion closely, although their concomitant embrace of a separatist community of Epicureans might well differ from his, which is uncertain.
The third defense of withdrawal, developed by Socrates and some of his followers on behalf of reforming politics, accepts that the human good lies in shared activity but rejects the second implicit commitment of the dominant ideology by radically transforming the picture of what that activity should be. On this approach, politics should not be the traditional competitive endeavor but a quiet, shared education in what is good. Perhaps this develops Amphion’s proposal to offer wise counsel from a quiet life. At the least, Socrates and his followers develop Amphion’s curious combination of withdrawal and engagement, and they offer various ways of developing this combination as a new kind of politics.
World History
