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Phos, Our Other Greek Name

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Abstract

It is perhaps time to revivify our other name in Greek: phos. For although the Greeks named us anthrôpos, they also called us phos. And the Greeks used the word phos because we are like light. Indeed, our way of being light-like is illuminating, which illuminates being and the truth of being, so that it can be thought and said, imagined, and sensed—especially insofar as we are this illumination. Thus, it is time to reclaim phos as our name and so rethink what it means to illuminate, whether we light up everything that is (and is not), as well as ourselves, or not.

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Notes

  1. Euripides 1994, 386–401; also, φωτῶν, man (429), φάος, light (425, 608), φῶς, light (1084).

  2. Sophocles 1990, 891–910; also, φῶτα, man (106); φάος, light (101, 600), φῶς, light (944). See also, Aeschylus 1973, 499; Sophocles 1990, 107.

  3. Although the issue of poetry vs. prose exceeds the scope of the present work, we recall Plutarch’s assessment: Parmenides borrows ‘from poetry its weight and meter like a chariot in order to avoid the pedestrian character of prose’ (Laks and Most 2016, 89). Or, as Proclus insists ‘in his poetry, Parmenides himself [scil. like Plato], though obliged by his poetic genre to make use of metaphorical terms, figures and tropes, nevertheless gives a friendly welcome to the unadorned, dry, and pure style of the announcement…his discourse seems to be more prosaic than poetic’ (Laks and Most 2016, 91–93). And Parmenides’ pun puns—as we shall see—regardless of the difference between poetry and prose. Also, although the pun on φώς/φῶς is mentioned by nearly every commentary on Parmenides (ancient or contemporary), none—at least to my knowledge—sets out to think the implications of thinking us as illumination.

  4. Indeed, εἰδότα φῶτα, the ‘man of understanding,’ knowledge, wisdom, is the antithesis of βροτοὶ εἰδότες οὐδέν (Parmenides, Diels and Kranz 1960; Laks and Most 2016 4, 5), ‘mortals with no understanding,’ lacking knowledge, and without wisdom, who uncritically accept ‘the reality of sensible objects’ (Coxon 2009, 271–2; see Plato, Phaedo, 64e, 65d; Tarán 1965, 12).

  5. Roskam, Commentary, 150. As Plutarch notes ‘Indeed I imagine that the ancients called man phôs because from our kinship with one another a strong love is implanted in each of us of being known and of knowing’ (Roskam, Commentary, 150). As Jones writes in 1925: ‘the speculations of etymologists are rarely free from conjecture’; so ‘after careful consideration,’ Clarendon Press insists upon ‘essential alterations of the text’ and the erasure of Liddell and Scott’s 1883 (false) etymology of φώς (supposedly rooted in ΦΥ, φύω, φύσας, nature and natural, created and procreating; or in ΦΛΩ, φημί, the speaking one or the one to whom speech and voice has been given)—for this had ‘little solid construction,’ and its removal ‘brought about the clearance of much rubbish’ (Liddell et al. 1940, x; Curtius 1869, 278; Schneider 1828, 1044). Furthermore, if all myth is a myth of origin, and if etymology is the myth of linguistic origin, it is then perhaps no surprise that the German philologists of the nineteenth century perpetuate the Aryan myth of Germany’s rootedness in Greece (as well as mythic anti-Semitism and racial superiority)—and even more originally, in languages such as Sanskrit (Eliade 1992, 4; Poliakov 1974, 178–9).

  6. As the Liddell et al. (1940) notes for ‘light,’ Homer ‘uses [a declination of] φάος and φόως, never φῶς; of the oblique cases he uses only dat. sing. φάει and acc. pl. φάεα; dat. pl.’ Indeed, ‘the terms are distinct and are declined differently’ (Cosgrove 2011, 29n4), even if Homer sometimes uses φῶς (in its proper declination of φώς) to signify ‘human’ but also uses ἄνθρώπος (e.g. Homer 1920, 5.442; 1922, 4.565, 8.29).

  7. Freud illustrates this by ‘a brilliant joke of Heine’s, who makes one of his characters, Hirsch-Hyacinth, the poor lottery-agent, boast that the great Baron Rothschild had treated him quite as his equal, quite “famillionairely”’ (Freud 1925, 9); although it could equally have been illustrated by the classic, Traduttore—Traditore! (33); Holmes’ ‘Put not your trust in money, but your money in trust’ (33n1); Schleiermacher’s Eifersucht ist eine Leidenschaft, die mit Eifer sucht, was Leiden schaft’ (35). Double-entendres, Doppelsinn mit Zweideutigkeit, abound—just one of Freud’s many sexist examples: ‘A doctor, as he came away from a lady’s bedside, said to her husband with a shake of his head: ‘I do not like her looks’. ‘I’ve not liked her looks for a long time’, the husband hastened to agree’ (38). And Henny Youngman’s, ‘Take my wife…Please!’, may have its ancestry in jokes such as: ‘Two Jews meet in the neighbourhood of the bath-house. ‘Have you taken a bath?’ asks one. ‘What?’ asked the other in return, ‘is there one missing?’ (50)—for both exploit ‘the two-fold use’ of the word ‘take’ (50). And thanks to Helen Lambert for reminding me of this one: ‘The past, the present and the future walk into a bar. It was tense.’ For more Ancient Greek jokes, see Thierfelder, 1968.

  8. Freud 1925, 10–11, 103. For Freud, what is hidden or concealed is unconscious desires, such as rebellion against authority, freedom and liberation (sexual and repressed, or not), transgression and violence, approval or condemnation, hatred or fear (recognition and repetition of ‘true’ or believed xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, etc.), jealousy or lust, or the desire to be seen and recognized as desired, and the joke satisfies this desire (while serving a social-political function, such as bonding or group formation, inclusion/exclusion)—for it gives us the opportunity to experience that which we might not have experienced without it, simultaneously silencing critics and prolonging pleasure. Thus, for Freud, laughter is economic: the joke allows (through the joke-work—analogous to the dream-work—such as association, substitution, condensation, displacement, indirect representation, revision, reduction, comparison which resolves difference into sameness, or moves from ‘absence’ to presence) the explosive expenditure of latent-desire, that is, the free-discharge of inhibited (repressed, suppressed, censored, unconscious) affect or ideation, and a revivification of childhood happiness, when ‘humor was not needed to make us feel happy in life’ (Freud 1925, 191, 269).

  9. Parmenides, Diels and Kranz 1960; Laks and Most 2016, 9.1, 144.4, 144.15. Similarly, Heraclitus puns on the homophany of ΒΙΟΣ: ‘the bow (βιός) is called life (βίος), but its work is death’ (Heraclitus, Diels and Kranz 1960, 48). It would be easy enough to multiply the examples: ‘Your dinner,’ said the host to the guest; ‘no, you are dinner,’ replied the cannibal. The phonetic alphabet inaugurated a whole new area for punning. Romeo makes a homographic pun: ‘Give me a torch; I’m not for this ambling. Being but heavy, I will bear the light’ (Shakespeare 1623, Act I, Scene 4).

  10. Vernant argues that Greek has two senses of φῶς: ‘light of life’ and ‘light of day’ (2007, 1157n2; see, Plato 1922b, 45b–c). Additionally, light and darkness and fire and night are often associated in the Pre-Socratics (Empedocles, Diels and Kranz 1960, 210, 217; Pythagoras, Diels and Kranz 1960, 359; Heraclitus, Diels and Kranz 1960, 16). As Kahn writes ‘the conception of the psyche in terms of light was probably anticipated in the riddle about the man who lights a lamp (phaos, light) for himself in the night. But the lamp there was a nocturnal substitute for the truer life of the psyche…The radiance of the sunlit sky thus stands traditionally for life; it is the innovation of Heraclitus to identify this physically with the finest state of the psyche’ (Kahn 1979, 247). Similarly, light signifies vision, wisdom, even life itself: ‘As the living man kindles a new light for himself when he is “quenched in his vision” (XC, D26), so the psyche of a dead man replaces the light of life by another form of perception’ (Kahn 1979, 257). Heraclitus, Diels and Kranz 1960, 26: ‘A man strikes a light for himself in the night, when his sight is quenched. Living, he touches the dead in his sleep; waking, he touches the sleeper’ (Kahn 1979, 71). And ‘the character of a man is thus identified with the corresponding element…light for the wisest and best’ (Kahn 1979, 261; see, Heraclitus, Diels and Kranz 1960, 118).

  11. Roskom, Commentary, 155n234. For a discussion of the continuation of this tradition throughout Gnosticism and Manichaeism (and its influence on Christianity), see Wetter 1915Untersuchung, 1–7, 98–146. For Heidegger’s loyalty to this tradition, see the ‘phenomenology’ of Dasein in Being and Time as the one who show itself and shows that things themselves are showing themselves, bringing φαινομένων to light, φαίνω, and placing in the light, making visible and manifest self-showing, self-manifesting phenomena (Heidegger 1975, vol. 2, 28)—but while Heidegger thinks us as φῶς (light, lux, lumen, Lichtung), and thinks light as medium (the sun, enabling and empowering third thing between the eye and/or mind and world, the condition of the possibility, yoke or ground, the opening or giving of thinking the being of beings; Heidegger 1975, vol. 34, 55), the task is to think φώς as us.

  12. See Vlastos (1946, 74) and Kahn (1979, 214n288).

  13. Another possible etymology traces φώς back to both φῶς (light) and ‘φῶ = λέγω; Et. Gud. s.v. φώς (p. 560 Sturzius): ὀξυτόνως ὁ ἀνὴρ, παρὰ τὸ φῶ τὸ λέγω, μόνος γὰρ ὁ ἄνθρωπος λογικὸς, ὡς ὁ Θεολόγος· φὼς γὰρ τὸν ἄνθρωπον ὀνομάζει, διὰ τὴν τοῦ ἐν ἡμῖν λόγου δύναμιν; cf. also Eustathius, Ad Hom. Il. I, 623,4; II, 697,11–12 Van der Valk; Epimerismi Homerici φ 16, p. 724 Dyck’ (Roskam, Commentary, 150n222). For Plato on ‘the whole,’ see for example, Lysis, 214b.

  14. See, Tarán (1965, 192). For Heidegger, coming to light (and so seen with the eye or mind/soul) is only possible because ‘the essence of truth and of being is ἀλήθεια’ (Heidegger 1975, vol. 54, 218), the unconcealing, the opening. In other words, there must be something to be seen, out in the open, unconcealed, in order for us to see it—for the opening is what allows being to come to presence as beings. Thus, we illuminate what is present and/or absent qua present and absent and/or present qua absent—for like hints, absences only remain absences insofar as we do not translate them into the language and logic of presence, of seeing and thinking only that which presents (or represents) itself to sight and thought (Heidegger 1975, vol. 10, 188). And ‘the belonging-together of being and unity, of ἐόν and ἓν, already shows itself to thought in the great beginning of Western philosophy,’ that is, in the originally Greek thinking of being qua ‘self-revealing presencing’ and unity qua the ‘gathering-revealing character of λόγος’ (Heidegger 1975, vol. 9, 459). In this way, being always only has one (primary, essential, fundamental) meaning—although its sense varies: for Parmenides, being has the sense of unity; for Plato, being is participation; and for Aristotle, being means presence. Of course, according to Heidegger, this tradition continues: Kant too thinks the ground of being and unity in (the Grundsatz of the synthetic unity of) transcendental apperception, which thereby (always already pre-) grounds the unity of diverse judgments, and is the possibility of any understanding whatsoever (even with regard to its logical employment), as well as the connection of representations between subject and object, and in the object itself ‘irrespective of the state of the subject’ (KrV, B134n, B142). In this way, Kant transfers (and relocates) unity to the I-subject: transcendental philosophy regrounds ontology (and the modes of being—not the what, but the how—that is, necessary/actual-contingent, possible/potential-impossible, and problematic) in transcendental logic, which is itself grounded in the unity of transcendental apperception (Heidegger 1975, vol. 9, 462). Then, being is not a ‘real (ontic) predicate, but a transcendental (ontological) predicate,’ that is, the positing of the modalities of a thing (Ob-jekt, Gegen-stand) as an object of experience (matter and form in accordance with the pure forms of intuition, space, and time) and knowledge (in accordance with the categories), are grounded in the unity of apperception, so that unity (the posited relations of agreement-with, coherence-with, connection-with) comes to presence as possible (in relation to the representation of a thing) or actual (in relation to the thing itself) on the ground (about which Kant only provides an indication, Hinweis) of the (regulative principle of the) ‘problematic’ (Heidegger 1975, vol. 9, 467, 472; Kant, KU, 5:402, §76). For Heidegger, however—‘listening to the speaking of language can, with the necessary precautions and with due regard for the context of the speaking, give us hints [Winke] to what is to be thought’—it is possible to hear how Kant’s understanding of being as positedness is a somehow motivated determination of being as presence and an interpretation of the Es gibt of presencing (Heidegger 1975, vol. 9, 476, 479). On Heidegger’s Destruktion of metaphysics and raising of the Seinsfrage (conditioned by the Judenfrage), see notes such as: ‘The question of the role of world-Judaism [Weltjudentum] is not a racial [rassisch] question, but a metaphysical [metaphysische] one, a question that concerns the kind of human-existence which in an utterly unrestrained way can undertake, as a world-historical “task,” the uprooting of all beings from being’ (Heidegger 1975, vol. 96, 243, 46; Heidegger 1975, vol. 97).

  15. On the one hand, absence can be thought as a lack, στέρησις, deficiency, deprivation, derived from presence as ‘a manner of presencing’ (Heidegger, 1975, vol. 14, 18): for example, Aristotle thinks that which is not present, presence, or presencing—not simply as the negation of being, non-presence, non-being (what Plato thinks as not just δόξα or ψευδής, but τὸ μὴ ὄν; Plato, Sophist, 258e3), which has been thought from the Medieval nihil out of which being comes to presence, ex nihilo omne ens qua ens fit, through Hegel’s concept of das Nichts as the same, das Selbe, as being, to the Sartrean néant as being’s real and concrete other—but rather, as privation of οὐσία, that is, ἀπουσίᾳ, and all the other ways of speaking non-being are all various senses of absence. On the other hand, as Heidegger argues: non-being is a way of being, a way of being absent—for being means presence, and non-being means being present as non-present. Thus, ‘if we say of a human being: “I miss him very much, he is not there,” I precisely do not say that he is not present, but assert a completely determinate way of his being-there for me…characterized through absence, through not-being how they actually could or should be’ (Heidegger 1975, vol. 18, 311). This is how Heidegger can think that which manifests itself as ‘what is essentially never manifest’ (Heidegger 1975, vol. 2, 41).

  16. Following this tradition, what is illuminated is something such as Aristotelian substance qua actuality, what is actually at work in actual works, οὐσία as the one sense of being thanks to which being is spoken, πρὸς ἕν, in many ways as opposed to the potentiality of the potential; Cartesian res cogitans as opposed to res extensa; Kantian transcendental subjectivity as opposed to things-in-themselves; Hegelian absolute spirit as opposed to the particularity of the particular; Heideggerian being as the coming-to-presence of being and beings and of (the event of the opening up of) their ontological difference—and so, of what is present in illumination, of what shows itself, the φαινόμενον, the self-showing that comes to light, to us, and is placed in our light.

  17. Of course, for the Greeks, ‘being’ fundamentally means presence’ (Heidegger 1975, vol. 40, 46), which is why Plato’s ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας (Rep, 509b8) should not be understood as the good ‘beyond being’ but rather as the good ‘beyond presence,’ or the non-present or absent good (which nevertheless participates in, or is implied by, beings qua coming-to-presence and going-out-into-absence). Indeed, if there is no essential difference between the senses of being (accidental-necessary, true-false, potential-actual, categorical; or essence-existence, subject-predicate, noun-verb, identity-difference, words-deeds, thoughts-things), it is because they all relate, πρὸς ἕν, to the fundamental meaning of being: presence. The essence of a being is present; a being exists as present; the predicate is present in the subject, or the subject comes to presence insofar as it has the predicate (insofar as both subject and predicate are—so being is irreducible to one or the other); a being is present as itself or another, presents or represents itself to itself as it is or not, etc. Both the transitive and the intransitive uses of being mean presence: I am present here; I am present somewhere. Both mean: there exists a being that is present here or there, now or then. But while the transitive use makes presence explicit (just as, for Husserl, consciousness is always consciousness of something, an intentional object), the intransitive only implies presence. Thus, for the Greeks, being is spoken in many ways; but ‘the ancient interpretation of the being of beings [determines] the meaning of being as παρουσία or οὐσία, which ontologically and temporally means “presence”’ (Heidegger 1975, vol. 2, 25).

  18. Plato (1922a, 142c) (Cornford 1939, translation). Indeed, ‘in Greek the word “is” (the “copula”) can be omitted, as here’ (Cornford 1939, 136n1). Heraclitus (Diels and Kranz 1960, 62) also uses this: ‘immortals are mortal, mortals immortal, living the others’ death, dead in the others’ life’ (Kahn 1979, 71, my emphasis). That is, ἀθάνατοι θνητοί, θνητοὶ ἀθάνατοι, ζῶντες τὸν ἐκείνων θάνατον, and τὸν δὲ ἐκείνων βίον τεθνεῶτες. But being is not there, not present in the text, although neither is it simply absent—rather, it is implied, and the text should read ‘immortals mortal, mortals immortal, living the others’ death, dead in the others’ life.’ Indeed, ‘this is in point of form Heraclitus’ masterpiece, the most perfectly symmetrical of all the fragments. The first two clauses of two words each (with copula unexpressed [or more precisely, implied—a masterpiece of implication!] in Greek) are mirror images, identical but for the word order: a-b-b-a’ (Kahn 1979, 216).

  19. Other examples, in Greek: ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων (Heraclitus, Diels and Kranz 1960, B119) and ‘a passage from Plato, Laws X (901c8-d2), where a single occurrence of einai provides the verb for three clauses’ (Kahn 2003, XIIn11). In fact, ‘being’ is the most frequently implied verb: for example, Ἐγὼ φωνὴ (John 1:23), ‘I [am a] voice’—but other verbs, such as ‘living,’ may also be implied (Matthew 11:12) (Wallace 1996, 38, 81n26). In Russian, for example: Я человек больной...Я злой человек (Dostoyevsky 1864, 1); not, ‘I am a sick man . . . I am a wicked man’ (Dostoyevsky 1993, 1); but rather, ‘I sick man…I wicked man.’ See also, Mayakovsky’s Хорошо (1955, VIII, 322), which Jakobson (1985, 39) translates as ‘both life is good and it is good to live’—but being is only implied, and the text [и жизнь хороша, и жить хорошо] literally reads ‘both life good, and to live good.’ For Wittgenstein’s comments on implied being in Russian, see Wittgenstein (1958, §20).

  20. For Heraclitus, this means not presence, or presence-absence but proximity, ἀγχιϐασίην (Diels and Kranz 1960, 122). For Heidegger, this means ‘hints only remain hints, if thought stands by them, and does not translate them into announcements. Hints are only hints as long as thought follows their implications, insofar as it considers them’ (Heidegger 1975, vol. 10, 188). For Levinas, this means the refusal to ‘explicate these implications’ (Levinas 1978, 101). For Wordsworth, poetically, this means resisting ‘our meddling intellect,’ which ‘mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things,’ and so suspending how ‘We murder to dissect’ (Wordsworth 1919, 54).

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Haas, A. Phos, Our Other Greek Name. SOPHIA 60, 157–171 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-020-00787-4

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