Plato and “Hippocrates” on Nature and Power: Reading Phaedrus 269d–272b in the Light of the Hippocratic Treatise On Ancient Medicine
Résumé
The purpose of this paper is not to reopen the controversial “Hippocratic question”. The intellectual affinity between a sequence of the Phaedrus in which Hippocrates is named and On Ancient Medicine does not need to entail that Plato means this particular treatise to have been written by Hippocrates himself. Plato may very well regard as Hippocratic a certain number of treatises belonging to a school of medicine, as we also do, and name only the founder while using the description of the art of medicine found in such books. Once this difficulty is set aside, we may investigate a field of research that has only been waiting too long since it was opened by Taylor and Souilhé, namely the precise study of the importance of the Hippocratic corpus in the formation of Plato’s fundamental concepts, in particular his concept of dynamis, of physis and of eidos. In endeavouring such an intellectual archaeology of Platonic concepts and methods, it is not necessary to reduce Plato’s invention to a simple reuse of medical concepts and methods. The interesting part is to identify the doctrines and texts that Plato engages with, reuses into new constructions of his own. In the present case, I believe that Plato shares some aims with the author of On Ancient Medicine, while differing on some essential points of method. The treatise On Ancient Medicine is well known for its challenge to a conception of an “enquiry into nature”, shared by some presocratic philosophers and by some physicians, according to which the essence of all things would be explained genetically by the history of their constitution from primary elements (Heinemann 2010). Plato is also known to have taken up such a critique of the “enquiry into nature” in the Phaedo (Macé 2006: 88–95). Now in the Phaedrus, Plato follows the project of the author of On Ancient Medicine to promote an interactionist approach to nature: to know the nature of something is to know how it can act upon another and be acted upon. In the first two sections of this paper, I will show how Plato prepares the introduction of this interactionist method not by criticising a genetic approach to nature, but by evoking a more popular vision associated with the study of “things above (meteōra)” (first section) and the knowledge of the universe (second section). The third section examines the important question of passive power: the complete formula of a power to act upon and be acted upon is found in Plato only and not in the Hippocratic treatise, which insists on active power. I will look at the Hippocratic text to show that passive power is implicit in it, but only understood through the conception of a balance of active powers. Plato turns this into an explicit concept of passive power, a key element of his own doctrine of nature. The fourth section deals with the fact that both Plato and the author of On Ancient Medicine develop a method of the division of natures based on a theory of nature as power. However, this convergence opens up a new divergence. I will try to show that the author of On Ancient Medicine used a scale of powers and strength to divide natures – there are as many natures to be distinguished as there are levels of power to act and be acted upon, – and that Plato reverses this model, by using the division of natures to determine different powers to act and be acted upon. We will see that this development is precisely conditioned by the emergence of the explicit concept of passive power previously examined. challenges,
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