![before Christians undertook an “imitation of Christ,” Socratics struggled to imitate Socrates; Cynics
aimed to live as austerely as the first Cynic, Diogenes; and Epicureans tried to emulate the life led by
their eponymous master, Epicurus.
The telling of tales about spiritual heroes thus played a formative role in the philosophic schools
of antiquity. The need for such narratives led to the crafting of idealized accounts that might enlighten
and edify. In such dramatic dialogues as the Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, Plato’s picture of Socrates
facing death is meant to stir the imagination and to fortify the resolve of a student setting out on the
uncertain path toward wisdom. As the classicist Arnaldo Momigliano has put it, Plato and his peers
“experimented in biography, and the experiments were directed towards capturing the potentialities
rather than the realities of individual lives … [Socrates] was not a dead man whose life could be
recounted. He was the guide to territories as yet unexplored.”
Following in Plato’s footsteps, and experimenting with some of the earliest known forms in the
West of biography and autobiography, a number of Hellenistic philosophers, including Seneca and
Plutarch, similarly supposed that a part of their job was to convey precepts by presenting, in writing,
an enchanting portrait of a preceptor: hence, Plutarch’s lives of the noble Greek and Roman
statesmen, and Seneca’s account of himself in his Moral Letters. To separate what is fact from what is
fiction in such portraits would be (to borrow a simile from Nietzsche) like rearranging Beethoven’s
Eroica symphony for an ensemble consisting of two flutes.
But if the quest for wisdom about the self begins with heroic anecdotes, it quickly evolves into a
search for abstract essences. For numerous Greek and Roman philosophers from Plato to Augustine,
one’s true self is immaterial, immortal, and unchanging. But that is not the end of the story, since
inquiry into the self eventually encounters, and is forced to acknowledge, the apparently infinite
labyrinth of inner experience. First in Augustine (A.D. 354–430) and then, even more strikingly, in
Montaigne (1532–1592), there emerges a new picture of the human being as a creature in flux, a pure
potentiality for being, uncertainly oriented toward what had previously been held to be the good, the
true, and the beautiful.
The transition from ancient to modern modes of living life philosophically was neither sudden nor
abrupt. Writing a generation after Montaigne, Descartes (1596–1650) could still imagine
commissioning a kind of mythic biography of himself, whereas, less than two hundred years later,
Rousseau (1712–1778) can only imagine composing an autobiography that is abjectly honest as well
as verifiably true in its most damning particulars. It should come as no surprise, then, that so many
modern philosophers, though still inspired by an older ideal of philosophy as a way of life, have
sought refuge, like Kant, in impersonal modes of theorizing and teaching.
This sort of academic philosophizing notoriously left Friedrich Nietzsche cold. “I for one prefer
reading Diogenes Laertius,” he wrote in 1874. “The only critique of a philosophy that is possible and
that proves something, namely trying to see whether one can live in accordance with it, has never
been taught at universities; all that has ever been taught is a critique of words by means of other
words.”
A century later, Michel Foucault (1926–1984) expressed a similar view. In the winter of 1984,
several months before his death, Foucault devoted his last series of lectures at the Collège de France
to the topic of parrhesia, or frank speech, in classical antiquity. Contemplating, as Nietzsche had a
century before, possible antecedents for his own peculiar approach to truthfulness, Foucault examined
the life of Socrates and—using evidence gathered by Diogenes Laertius—the far odder life of
Diogenes of Sinope (d. c. 320 B.C.), the archetypal Cynic, who was storied in antiquity for living in a
tub, carrying a lit lamp in broad daylight, and telling anybody who asked that “I am looking for a
man.”
Foucault of course knew that the lore surrounding a philosopher like Diogenes was no longer](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/41204-250416195156-d27ecc3b/85/Examined-Lives-From-Socrates-to-Nietzsche-3rd-Edition-James-Miller-13-320.jpg)
![taken seriously. But he, like Nietzsche, decried our modern “negligence” of what he called the
“problem” of the philosophical life. This problem, he speculated, had gone into eclipse for two
reasons: first, because religious institutions, above all Christian monasticism, had absorbed, or (in his
words) “confiscated,” the “theme of the practice of the true life.” And, second, “because the
relationship to truth can now be made valid and manifest only in the form of scientific knowledge.”
In passing, Foucault then suggested the potential fruitfulness of further research on this topic. “It
seems to me,” he remarked, “that it would be interesting to write a history starting from the problem
of the philosophical life, a problem … envisaged as a choice which can be detected both through the
events and decisions of a biography, and through [the elaboration of] the same problem in the interior
of a system [of thought], and the place which has been given in this system to the problem of the
philosophical life.”
* * *
Foucault was not the only twentieth-century figure who appreciated that philosophy could be a way of
life and not just a study of the most general features of the world and the categories in which we think.
For example, a conception of authenticity informed Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), just as a
horror of bad faith inspired Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1944). Toward the end of that work,
Sartre went even further, and imagined creating a comprehensive biographical and historical account
that might demonstrate how all the apparently haphazard particulars of a single human being’s life
came together to form a “totality”—a singular and unified character.
As a graduate student in the history of ideas, and as an activist in the sixties, I aspired to understand
and describe how the broader currents of social and political existence informed lived experience,
and hence to show how the political became personal, and vice versa. My interest in these themes was
doubtless shaped by my own religious upbringing in a Protestant community that claimed to prize
telling the truth about one’s deepest beliefs and inward convictions. Perhaps as a result, “authenticity”
for me has meant an ongoing examination of my core commitments that would inevitably entail
specific acts: “Here I stand. I can do no other.” Later, when I wrote an account of the American New
Left of the sixties, I focused in part on how other young radicals sought to achieve personal integrity
through political activism. And when I wrote about Michel Foucault, I produced a biographical and
historical account of his Nietzschean quest to “become what one is.”
Still, as Foucault himself reminds us, the theme of the philosophical life, despite its durability, has
been challenged since the Renaissance and Reformation by the practical achievements of modern
physics, chemistry, and biology, as well as by the rival claims of a growing array of religious and
spiritual traditions that, like Protestantism, stress self-examination. Hence the problem of the
philosophical life: Given the obvious pragmatic power of applied science, and the equally evident
power of faith-based communities to give meaning to life, why should we make a special effort to
elaborate “our own pondered thoughts,” in response to such large questions as “What can I know?
What ought I to do? What may I hope?”
The twelve biographical sketches of selected philosophers from Socrates to Nietzsche that follow
are meant to explore these issues by writing, as Foucault suggested, a “history starting from the
problem of the philosophical life.” Instead of recounting one life in detail, I recount a number of lives
in brief. Anecdotes and human incident flesh out the philosopher under discussion. Distinctive
theories are summarized concisely, even though their nuances and complexities often puzzle
philosophers to this day. And following the example of such ancient biographers as Plutarch in his
Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, I am highly selective, in an effort to epitomize the crux of a
character. My aim throughout is to convey the arc of a life rather than a digest of doctrines and moral](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/41204-250416195156-d27ecc3b/85/Examined-Lives-From-Socrates-to-Nietzsche-3rd-Edition-James-Miller-14-320.jpg)
![superhuman stamina—one of the few salient traits recorded in virtually every ancient story told about
him.
In these years, Athens was politically divided. On the one side stood proponents of extending
political rights and obligations to every citizen, no matter how poor. This party of avowed democrats
was headed by Pericles (c. 495–429), the city’s elected commander in chief, who was the unchallenged
leader of Athens in the 440s and 430s, and an orator who used his formidable gifts to frame a
rationale for the self-government of the city by its ordinary citizens. In response, some wealthier
Athenians fought, as the rich often do, to exercise unconstrained power; they denigrated the
intelligence of the Athenian common man, and in some cases they commended the authoritarian
institutions characteristic of other Greek city-states, such as Sparta.
Where Socrates stood in these epochal debates over democracy is not known—an odd fact, given
that Athens expected its citizens to participate actively in the political life of the polis. As a young
man, some say, he frequented the circles around Pericles, who was no friend of tyranny. There is
sketchy evidence that his wife, Xanthippe, whom he married around 420, may have been an aristocrat.
There are also stories, all of them unreliable, about a younger half brother who may have been one of
the archons, or rulers, of Athens in the period after the fall of the Thirty Tyrants in 403 B.C.
According to Diogenes Laertius, “he was so orderly in his way of life that on several occasions
when pestilence broke out in Athens [in 430, at the start of the Peloponnesian War] he was the only
man to escape infection”—an exaggeration, obviously, though a vast number of citizens did perish,
and it was the plague that cost Pericles his life. In any case, Socrates prided himself on living plainly
and “used to say that he most enjoyed the food which was least in need of condiment, and the drink
which made him feel the least hankering for some other drink; and that he was nearest to the gods
when he had the fewest wants.”
Sometime after assuming the duties of adult citizenship, Socrates began to behave strangely.
Ignoring custom, he refused to follow in his father’s footsteps as a stonemason. Instead of learning
how to earn a living by carving rock, Socrates became preoccupied with learning how to live the best
life conceivable. He expressed astonishment that “the sculptors of marble statues should take pains to
make the block of marble into a perfect likeness of man, and should take no pains about themselves
lest they turn out mere blocks, not men.”
The ancient authorities do not agree on precisely why or when Socrates took up his strange new
calling. The association of the word philosophy with Socrates and his way of life was largely the
work of one man, Plato, who was the most famous of his followers. A conjunction of the Greek word
philo (“lover”) and sophos (“wisdom”), philosophos, or philosopher, as Plato defined the term,
described a man who yearned for wisdom, a seeker of truth—a man like Socrates, whom Plato
sharply distinguished from other sages, or Sophists. (According to Plato, who was not impartial,
Sophists were neither truly wise nor were they sincere seekers of truth—they were charlatans, skilled
mainly in devious forms of debate. Before Plato, by contrast, Sophists were widely admired as
experts and wise men—the legendary Attic lawgiver Solon was a Sophist, in this original honorific
sense, and so was Thales of Miletus, another one of the so-called Seven Sages.)
When Socrates was coming of age, Athens was teeming with teachers from throughout the Greek-
speaking world. The city’s most influential democratic leader, Pericles, championed the new learning
and is said to have consorted with some of the era’s most prominent professors of wisdom, including
Anaxagoras. A theorist of nature, Anaxagoras discoursed for a fee, specializing in presenting
theories about the organizing principles of the cosmos. He shocked some Athenians by his bold claim
that the sun was a large, incandescent stone. Other teachers, like the orator Gorgias (c. 485–380 B.C.),
made money by showing students how to shape the opinion of the citizenry through artful speech
when the demos met each month in the open-air assembly that was the hallmark of the Athenian](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/41204-250416195156-d27ecc3b/85/Examined-Lives-From-Socrates-to-Nietzsche-3rd-Edition-James-Miller-20-320.jpg)
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- 8. FOR RUTH
- 9. CONTENTS Cover Title Page Dedication INTRODUCTION SOCRATES PLATO DIOGENES ARISTOTLE SENECA AUGUSTINE MONTAIGNE DESCARTES ROUSSEAU KANT EMERSON NIETZSCHE EPILOGUE NOTES ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INDEX Also by James Miller Copyright
- 10. INTRODUCTION Of all those who start out on philosophy—not those who take it up for the sake of getting educated when they are young and then drop it, but those who linger in it for a longer time—most become quite queer, not to say completely vicious; while the ones who seem perfectly decent … become useless. —PLATO, Republic (487c–d)
- 11. Once upon a time, philosophers were figures of wonder. They were sometimes objects of derision and the butt of jokes, but they were more often a source of shared inspiration, offering, through words and deeds, models of wisdom, patterns of conduct, and, for those who took them seriously, examples to be emulated. Stories about the great philosophers long played a formative role in the culture of the West. For Roman writers such as Cicero, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius, one way to measure spiritual progress was to compare one’s conduct with that of Socrates, whom they all considered a paragon of perfect virtue. Sixteen hundred years later, John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) similarly learned classical Greek at a tender age in order to read the Socratic “Memorabilia” of Xenophon (fourth century B.C.) and selected Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, as retold by Diogenes Laertius, a Greek follower of Epicurus who is thought to have lived in the third century A.D. Apart from the absurdly young age at which Mill was forced to devour it, there was nothing unusual about his reading list. Until quite recently, those able to read the Greek and Roman classics were routinely nourished, not just by Xenophon and Plato but also by the moral essays of Seneca and Plutarch, which were filled with edifying stories about the benefits and consolations of philosophy. An educated person was likely to know something about Socrates, but also about the “Epicurean,” the “Stoic,” and the “Skeptic”—philosophical types still of interest to David Hume (1711–1776), who wrote about each one in his Essays, Moral and Political (1741–1742). For Hume, as for Diogenes Laertius, each philosophical type was expressed not only in a doctrine but also in a way of life—a pattern of conduct exemplified in the biographical details recounted by Diogenes Laertius about such figures as Epicurus, the founder of Epicureanism; Zeno, traditionally regarded as the first Stoic; and Pyrrho, who inaugurated one branch of ancient Skepticism. Besides Hume and Mill, both Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)—to take two equally modern examples—also studied The Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. Indeed, both Marx and Nietzsche, while still in their twenties, wrote scholarly treatises based, in part, on close study of just this work. Today, by contrast, most highly educated people, even professional philosophers, know nothing about either Diogenes Laertius or the vast majority of the ancient philosophers whose lives he recounted. In many schools in many countries, especially the United States, the classical curriculum has been largely abandoned. Modern textbooks generally scant the lives of philosophers, reinforcing the contemporary perception that philosophy is best understood as a purely technical discipline, revolving around specialized issues in semantics and logic. The typical modern philosopher—the Kant of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), say, or the John Rawls of A Theory of Justice (1971)—is largely identified with his books. It is generally assumed that “philosophy” refers to “the study of the most general and abstract features of the world and the categories with which we think: mind, matter, reason, proof, truth etc.,” to quote the definition offered
- 12. by the outstanding recent Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Moreover, in the modern university, where both Kant and Rawls practiced their calling, aspiring philosophers are routinely taught, among other things, that the truth of a proposition should be evaluated independently of anything we may know about the person holding that proposition. As the philosopher Seyla Benhabib puts it, “Philosophical theories make claims to truth that transcend historical and social context. From inside the discipline, the details of personal lives seem quite irrelevant to understanding or evaluating a thinker’s views.” Such a principled disregard of ad hominem evidence is a characteristically modern prejudice of professional philosophers. For most Greek and Roman thinkers from Plato to Augustine, theorizing was but one mode of living life philosophically. To Socrates and the countless classical philosophers who tried to follow in his footsteps, the primary point was not to ratify a certain set of propositions (even when the ability to define terms and analyze arguments was a constitutive component of a school’s teaching), but rather to explore “the kind of person, the sort of self” that one could elaborate as a result of taking the quest for wisdom seriously. For Greek and Roman philosophers, “philosophical discourse … originates in a choice of life and an existential option—not vice versa.” Or, as Socrates puts it in the pages of Xenophon’s Memorabilia, “If I don’t reveal my views in a formal account, I do so by my conduct. Don’t you think that actions are more reliable evidence than words?” In ancient Greece and Rome, it was widely assumed that the life of a philosopher would exemplify in practice a specific code of conduct and form of life. As a result, biographical details were routinely cited in appraisals of a philosophy’s value. That Socrates faced death with dignity, for example, was widely regarded as an argument in favor of his declared views on the conduct of life. But did Socrates really face death with dignity? How can we be confident that we know the truth about how Socrates actually behaved? Faced with such questions, the distrust of modern philosophers for ad hominem argument tends to be reinforced by a similarly modern skepticism about the kinds of stories traditionally told about philosophers. Consider the largest extant compilation of philosophical biographies, the anthology of Diogenes Laertius. This work starts with Thales of Miletus (c. 624–546 B.C.): “To him belongs the proverb ‘Know thyself,’ ” Diogenes Laertius writes with typically nonchalant imprecision, “which Antisthenes in his Successions of Philosophers attributes to Phemonoe, though admitting that it was appropriated by Chilon.” He describes Thales as the first absentminded professor: “It is said that once, when he was taken out of doors by an old woman in order that he might observe the stars, he fell into a ditch, and his cry for help drew from the old woman the retort, ‘How can you expect to know all about the heavens, Thales, when you cannot even see what is just before your feet?’ ” The work of Diogenes Laertius has long vexed modern scholars. His compilation represents an evidently indiscriminate collection of material from a wide array of sources. Despite its uneven quality, his collection of maxims, excerpts from poems, and extracts from theoretical treatises remains a primary source for what little we know today about the doctrines held by a great many ancient Greek philosophers, from Thales and Heraclitus (c. 540–480 B.C.) to Epicurus (341–270 B.C.). Diogenes’ anecdotes, on the other hand, have often been discounted, in part because he makes no effort to evaluate the quality of his sources, in part because his biographies are riddled with contradictions, and in part because some of the stories he recounts simply beggar belief. The stories preserved by Diogenes Laertius occupy a twilight zone between truth and fiction. From the start—in the Socratic dialogues of Plato—the life of the philosopher was turned into a kind of myth and treated as a species of poetry, entering into the collective imagination as a mnemonic condensation, in an exemplary narrative, of what a considered way of life might mean in practice. Joining a school of philosophy in antiquity often involved an effort, in the company of others, to follow in the footsteps of a consecrated predecessor, hallowed in a set of consecrated tales. Long
- 13. before Christians undertook an “imitation of Christ,” Socratics struggled to imitate Socrates; Cynics aimed to live as austerely as the first Cynic, Diogenes; and Epicureans tried to emulate the life led by their eponymous master, Epicurus. The telling of tales about spiritual heroes thus played a formative role in the philosophic schools of antiquity. The need for such narratives led to the crafting of idealized accounts that might enlighten and edify. In such dramatic dialogues as the Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, Plato’s picture of Socrates facing death is meant to stir the imagination and to fortify the resolve of a student setting out on the uncertain path toward wisdom. As the classicist Arnaldo Momigliano has put it, Plato and his peers “experimented in biography, and the experiments were directed towards capturing the potentialities rather than the realities of individual lives … [Socrates] was not a dead man whose life could be recounted. He was the guide to territories as yet unexplored.” Following in Plato’s footsteps, and experimenting with some of the earliest known forms in the West of biography and autobiography, a number of Hellenistic philosophers, including Seneca and Plutarch, similarly supposed that a part of their job was to convey precepts by presenting, in writing, an enchanting portrait of a preceptor: hence, Plutarch’s lives of the noble Greek and Roman statesmen, and Seneca’s account of himself in his Moral Letters. To separate what is fact from what is fiction in such portraits would be (to borrow a simile from Nietzsche) like rearranging Beethoven’s Eroica symphony for an ensemble consisting of two flutes. But if the quest for wisdom about the self begins with heroic anecdotes, it quickly evolves into a search for abstract essences. For numerous Greek and Roman philosophers from Plato to Augustine, one’s true self is immaterial, immortal, and unchanging. But that is not the end of the story, since inquiry into the self eventually encounters, and is forced to acknowledge, the apparently infinite labyrinth of inner experience. First in Augustine (A.D. 354–430) and then, even more strikingly, in Montaigne (1532–1592), there emerges a new picture of the human being as a creature in flux, a pure potentiality for being, uncertainly oriented toward what had previously been held to be the good, the true, and the beautiful. The transition from ancient to modern modes of living life philosophically was neither sudden nor abrupt. Writing a generation after Montaigne, Descartes (1596–1650) could still imagine commissioning a kind of mythic biography of himself, whereas, less than two hundred years later, Rousseau (1712–1778) can only imagine composing an autobiography that is abjectly honest as well as verifiably true in its most damning particulars. It should come as no surprise, then, that so many modern philosophers, though still inspired by an older ideal of philosophy as a way of life, have sought refuge, like Kant, in impersonal modes of theorizing and teaching. This sort of academic philosophizing notoriously left Friedrich Nietzsche cold. “I for one prefer reading Diogenes Laertius,” he wrote in 1874. “The only critique of a philosophy that is possible and that proves something, namely trying to see whether one can live in accordance with it, has never been taught at universities; all that has ever been taught is a critique of words by means of other words.” A century later, Michel Foucault (1926–1984) expressed a similar view. In the winter of 1984, several months before his death, Foucault devoted his last series of lectures at the Collège de France to the topic of parrhesia, or frank speech, in classical antiquity. Contemplating, as Nietzsche had a century before, possible antecedents for his own peculiar approach to truthfulness, Foucault examined the life of Socrates and—using evidence gathered by Diogenes Laertius—the far odder life of Diogenes of Sinope (d. c. 320 B.C.), the archetypal Cynic, who was storied in antiquity for living in a tub, carrying a lit lamp in broad daylight, and telling anybody who asked that “I am looking for a man.” Foucault of course knew that the lore surrounding a philosopher like Diogenes was no longer
- 14. taken seriously. But he, like Nietzsche, decried our modern “negligence” of what he called the “problem” of the philosophical life. This problem, he speculated, had gone into eclipse for two reasons: first, because religious institutions, above all Christian monasticism, had absorbed, or (in his words) “confiscated,” the “theme of the practice of the true life.” And, second, “because the relationship to truth can now be made valid and manifest only in the form of scientific knowledge.” In passing, Foucault then suggested the potential fruitfulness of further research on this topic. “It seems to me,” he remarked, “that it would be interesting to write a history starting from the problem of the philosophical life, a problem … envisaged as a choice which can be detected both through the events and decisions of a biography, and through [the elaboration of] the same problem in the interior of a system [of thought], and the place which has been given in this system to the problem of the philosophical life.” * * * Foucault was not the only twentieth-century figure who appreciated that philosophy could be a way of life and not just a study of the most general features of the world and the categories in which we think. For example, a conception of authenticity informed Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), just as a horror of bad faith inspired Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1944). Toward the end of that work, Sartre went even further, and imagined creating a comprehensive biographical and historical account that might demonstrate how all the apparently haphazard particulars of a single human being’s life came together to form a “totality”—a singular and unified character. As a graduate student in the history of ideas, and as an activist in the sixties, I aspired to understand and describe how the broader currents of social and political existence informed lived experience, and hence to show how the political became personal, and vice versa. My interest in these themes was doubtless shaped by my own religious upbringing in a Protestant community that claimed to prize telling the truth about one’s deepest beliefs and inward convictions. Perhaps as a result, “authenticity” for me has meant an ongoing examination of my core commitments that would inevitably entail specific acts: “Here I stand. I can do no other.” Later, when I wrote an account of the American New Left of the sixties, I focused in part on how other young radicals sought to achieve personal integrity through political activism. And when I wrote about Michel Foucault, I produced a biographical and historical account of his Nietzschean quest to “become what one is.” Still, as Foucault himself reminds us, the theme of the philosophical life, despite its durability, has been challenged since the Renaissance and Reformation by the practical achievements of modern physics, chemistry, and biology, as well as by the rival claims of a growing array of religious and spiritual traditions that, like Protestantism, stress self-examination. Hence the problem of the philosophical life: Given the obvious pragmatic power of applied science, and the equally evident power of faith-based communities to give meaning to life, why should we make a special effort to elaborate “our own pondered thoughts,” in response to such large questions as “What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?” The twelve biographical sketches of selected philosophers from Socrates to Nietzsche that follow are meant to explore these issues by writing, as Foucault suggested, a “history starting from the problem of the philosophical life.” Instead of recounting one life in detail, I recount a number of lives in brief. Anecdotes and human incident flesh out the philosopher under discussion. Distinctive theories are summarized concisely, even though their nuances and complexities often puzzle philosophers to this day. And following the example of such ancient biographers as Plutarch in his Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, I am highly selective, in an effort to epitomize the crux of a character. My aim throughout is to convey the arc of a life rather than a digest of doctrines and moral
- 15. maxims. Modern standards of evidence are acknowledged—I am a historian by training, and facts matter to me. But for the ancient philosophers especially, the myths must be acknowledged, too, for such legends long formed a constitutive part of the Western philosophical tradition. That the lives of many ancient philosophers have beggared belief is a cultural fact in its own right: it helps to explain the enduring fascination—and sometimes the resentment—aroused by spiritual athletes whose feats (like those of the early Christian saints) have so often seemed beyond the pale of possible experience. This history properly begins with Socrates and Plato, for it was Plato in his Socratic dialogues who first gave currency to the word philosophy. In the century after the death of Socrates, a distinct, identifiable group of “philosophers” flourished for the first time. Monuments to their memory— busts, statues—were erected in Athens and elsewhere in the Greek-speaking world. And in retrospect, ancient scholars extended the word philosopher to earlier Greek sages. Some now said that the first philosopher had been Pythagoras (c. 580–500 B.C.), on the Socratic grounds that he regarded no man as wise, but god alone. Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, went even further, applying the term to a broad range of pre-Socratic theorists, from Thales to Anaxagoras (c. 500–429 B.C.), on the Socratic grounds that these thinkers, filled with wonder as they were at the first principles behind all things, “philosophized in order to escape from ignorance.” How a history of the problem of the philosophical life is written depends in key part on what one takes to be the ambitions of this sometimes neglected tradition. For the purposes of this study, I generally picked figures who sought to follow in Socrates’ footsteps by struggling to measure up to his declared ambition “to live the life of a philosopher, to examine myself and others.” For Socrates, as for many (though not all) of those who tried to measure up to his example, this ambition has in some way revolved around an effort to answer to the gnomic injunction “Know thyself.” (Aristotle, for one, assumed that this injunction was a key motive for Socrates’ lifework.) Of course, what, precisely, the Delphic injunction means—and what it enjoins—is hardly self- evident, as we learn in Plato: “I am still unable,” confides Socrates in the Phaedrus, “to know myself; and it really seems to me ridiculous to look into other things before I have understood that.” Moreover, self-examination, even in antiquity, is only one strand in the story of philosophy. From the start—in Plato, and again in Augustine—the problem of the philosophical life evolves in a complicated relationship between what we today would call “science” and “religion”—between mathematical logic and mystical revelation in the case of Plato, between an open-ended quest for wisdom and the transmission of a small number of fixed dogmas in the case of Augustine. The series of biographies that follows is not comprehensive. It omits Epicurus and Zeno, Spinoza and Hume, and such twentieth-century philosophers as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Sartre, and Foucault. But I believe the twelve ancients and moderns I selected are broadly representative. While I include some figures rarely taken seriously by most contemporary philosophers—Diogenes, Montaigne, and Emerson, for example—I also include several canonic figures, notably Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant, whose life’s work helped lead philosophy away from its classical emphasis on exemplary conduct toward a stress on rigorous inquiry, and whose biographies therefore raise larger questions about the relation of philosophy as a way of life to the mainstream discipline of philosophy as it currently exists in academic institutions around the world. * * * When Emerson wrote a book of essays on Representative Men, he began by declaring it “natural to believe in great men”—yet nearly two hundred years later, such a belief hardly seems natural, and what makes a character “great” is far from self-evident. When Nietzsche a generation later imagined
- 16. approaching a philosophical life “to see whether one can live in accordance with it,” he presumably had in mind an exemplary—and mythic—character like Socrates. But it is the fate of a modern philosopher like Nietzsche to have left behind notebooks and letters, offering detailed evidence of a host of inconsistencies and singular foibles that make it absurd to ask seriously whether one could live in accordance with them. And it is one consequence of Nietzsche’s own criticism of Christian morality that anyone who takes it seriously finds it hard, if not impossible, to credit any one code of conduct as good for everyone, and therefore worth emulating. Of course, works of moral edification remain popular, certainly in the United States. Some spiritual and religious manuals promise a contemporary reader invaluable lessons in living well, but the essays that follow can make no such claim. Taken as a whole, these twelve biographical sketches raise many more questions than they can possibly answer: If, like Plato, we define philosophy as a quest for wisdom that may prove unending, then what is the search for wisdom really good for? What is the relation of reason to faith, of philosophy to religion, and how does the search for wisdom relate to the most exacting forms of rigorous inquiry and “science”? Is philosophy best pursued in private or in public? What are its implications, if any, for statecraft, for diplomacy, for the conduct of a citizen in a democratic society? Above all, what is the “self” that so many of these philosophers have sought to know, and how has our conception of the self changed in the course of history, in part as a result of how successive philosophers have embarked on their quests? Indeed, is self-knowledge even feasible—and, if so, to what degree? Despite years of painful self-examination, Nietzsche famously declared that “we are necessarily strangers to ourselves, we have to misunderstand ourselves.” If we seek, shall we find? * * * Here, then, are brief lives of a handful of philosophers, ancient and modern: Socrates and Plato, Diogenes and Aristotle, Seneca and Augustine, Montaigne and Descartes, Rousseau and Kant, Emerson and Nietzsche. They are all men, because philosophy before the twentieth century was overwhelmingly a vocation reserved for men: a large fact that has limited the kinds of lives— stubbornly independent, often unattached, sometimes solitary and sexless—that philosophers have tended to lead. Within these common limits, however, there has been considerable variation. Some philosophers were influential figures in their day, while others were marginal; some were revered, while others provoked scandal and public outrage. Despite such differences, each of these men prized the pursuit of wisdom. Each one struggled to live his life according to a deliberately chosen set of precepts and beliefs, discerned in part through a practice of self-examination, and expressed in both word and deed. The life of each one can therefore teach us something about the quest for self-knowledge and its limits. And as a whole, they can tell us a great deal about how the nature of philosophy—and the nature of philosophy as a way of life—has changed over time.
- 17. SOCRATES
- 18. Socrates in profile, a graphite drawing, c. 1820, by the British poet, printmaker, and mystagogue William Blake (1757–1827). “I was Socrates,” Blake remarked near the end of his life. “I must have had conversations with him. So I had with Jesus Christ. I have an obscure recollection of having been with both of them.” (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, USA/The Bridgeman Art Library International)
- 19. In the middle of the fifth century B.C., the city-state of Athens was at the zenith of its power and influence. After leading an alliance of Greek city-states to victory over the Persian Empire in battles at Marathon (490 B.C.), Salamis (480), and Plataea (479), the city consolidated a democratic regime. It peacefully extended political power to all citizens—native-born male residents—and created a model of the enlightened rule of law. At the same time, it established a far-flung hegemony over a variety of maritime colonies and vassal Greek city-states. Prospering from the trade and tribute provided by its empire, the city amassed the eastern Mediterranean’s most feared military machine, a lavishly equipped navy, backed up by cavalry and infantry. The de facto leader of the Greek-speaking world, Athens led the Hellenes in education as well, attracting teachers from throughout the region. Its people “believed themselves to be a priestly nation to whom, at a time of universal famine, Apollo had entrusted the mission of taking vows on behalf of all the Greeks and barbarians,” wrote Jacob Burckhardt, the great Swiss historian. “Attica was traditionally credited with the inventions of civilization to an extent positively insulting to all other nations and the rest of the Greeks. According to this tradition, it was the Athenians who first taught the human race how to sow crops and use spring water; not only were they first to grow olives and figs, but they invented law and justice.” And they in fact invented “philosophy.” Socrates, the first man to be renowned as a philosopher, was born in Athens around 469 B.C. Although he grew up in a golden age in a great city, the ancient sources agree that there was nothing glittering about his pedigree or upbringing. He was the son of Sophroniscus, a stonemason, and of Phaenarete, a midwife. A citizen of Athens by birth, he belonged to the district of Alopece. The externals of his life were nondescript—his family, they say, was neither rich nor poor. But his inner experience was extraordinary. Socrates heard a voice inaudible to anyone else. In some situations, the voice ordered him to halt what he was doing and to change his course of conduct. According to Plato, our primary source for almost everything we think we know about the first philosopher, Socrates considered the voice to be uniquely his own, as if it were directed to him alone from a supernatural sort of tutelary spirit. A source of wonder and disquiet, the voice set Socrates apart. From the time he was a child, he felt isolated and different—an individual in a collective that prized its sense of community, vividly expressed in its web of customary rituals and traditional religious beliefs, and crowned by a set of political institutions that embodied the novel ideal of democracy, a new form of collective self-rule. Every Athenian citizen was expected to fight for the fatherland. The waging of war was an almost constant concern in these years, as Athens struggled to maintain its regional supremacy over its only real rival in the Greek world, the fortified land power of Sparta. Though never rich, Socrates had sufficient wealth to outfit himself with armor and serve as a foot soldier, or hoplite, in the city’s citizen army. In 432, Socrates participated in the siege of Potidaea, where he demonstrated an almost
- 20. superhuman stamina—one of the few salient traits recorded in virtually every ancient story told about him. In these years, Athens was politically divided. On the one side stood proponents of extending political rights and obligations to every citizen, no matter how poor. This party of avowed democrats was headed by Pericles (c. 495–429), the city’s elected commander in chief, who was the unchallenged leader of Athens in the 440s and 430s, and an orator who used his formidable gifts to frame a rationale for the self-government of the city by its ordinary citizens. In response, some wealthier Athenians fought, as the rich often do, to exercise unconstrained power; they denigrated the intelligence of the Athenian common man, and in some cases they commended the authoritarian institutions characteristic of other Greek city-states, such as Sparta. Where Socrates stood in these epochal debates over democracy is not known—an odd fact, given that Athens expected its citizens to participate actively in the political life of the polis. As a young man, some say, he frequented the circles around Pericles, who was no friend of tyranny. There is sketchy evidence that his wife, Xanthippe, whom he married around 420, may have been an aristocrat. There are also stories, all of them unreliable, about a younger half brother who may have been one of the archons, or rulers, of Athens in the period after the fall of the Thirty Tyrants in 403 B.C. According to Diogenes Laertius, “he was so orderly in his way of life that on several occasions when pestilence broke out in Athens [in 430, at the start of the Peloponnesian War] he was the only man to escape infection”—an exaggeration, obviously, though a vast number of citizens did perish, and it was the plague that cost Pericles his life. In any case, Socrates prided himself on living plainly and “used to say that he most enjoyed the food which was least in need of condiment, and the drink which made him feel the least hankering for some other drink; and that he was nearest to the gods when he had the fewest wants.” Sometime after assuming the duties of adult citizenship, Socrates began to behave strangely. Ignoring custom, he refused to follow in his father’s footsteps as a stonemason. Instead of learning how to earn a living by carving rock, Socrates became preoccupied with learning how to live the best life conceivable. He expressed astonishment that “the sculptors of marble statues should take pains to make the block of marble into a perfect likeness of man, and should take no pains about themselves lest they turn out mere blocks, not men.” The ancient authorities do not agree on precisely why or when Socrates took up his strange new calling. The association of the word philosophy with Socrates and his way of life was largely the work of one man, Plato, who was the most famous of his followers. A conjunction of the Greek word philo (“lover”) and sophos (“wisdom”), philosophos, or philosopher, as Plato defined the term, described a man who yearned for wisdom, a seeker of truth—a man like Socrates, whom Plato sharply distinguished from other sages, or Sophists. (According to Plato, who was not impartial, Sophists were neither truly wise nor were they sincere seekers of truth—they were charlatans, skilled mainly in devious forms of debate. Before Plato, by contrast, Sophists were widely admired as experts and wise men—the legendary Attic lawgiver Solon was a Sophist, in this original honorific sense, and so was Thales of Miletus, another one of the so-called Seven Sages.) When Socrates was coming of age, Athens was teeming with teachers from throughout the Greek- speaking world. The city’s most influential democratic leader, Pericles, championed the new learning and is said to have consorted with some of the era’s most prominent professors of wisdom, including Anaxagoras. A theorist of nature, Anaxagoras discoursed for a fee, specializing in presenting theories about the organizing principles of the cosmos. He shocked some Athenians by his bold claim that the sun was a large, incandescent stone. Other teachers, like the orator Gorgias (c. 485–380 B.C.), made money by showing students how to shape the opinion of the citizenry through artful speech when the demos met each month in the open-air assembly that was the hallmark of the Athenian
- 21. democracy. According to Plato, it was Socrates’ dissatisfaction with teachers like Anaxagoras and Gorgias that led him to go his own way and to raise questions independently about the best way to live. But Aristotle claimed that Socrates was primarily inspired by the motto inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, “Know thyself.” Perhaps the most famous of the maxims associated with the temple at Delphi (“Nothing too much” is another), the injunction to “Know thyself” first appears in Greek literature in the fifth century, most notably in Aeschylus’s play Prometheus Bound. In defiance of the wishes of Zeus, Prometheus has stolen fire from the gods and given it to mankind; though he is punished for this presumptuous act, Prometheus remains stubbornly defiant, which provokes the god of the sea, Oceanus, to admonish him to “know yourself, and make compliant your youthful ways”—by obeying the will of Zeus. In other words, know your limits. Whatever motivated Socrates—and however he may have interpreted the Delphic maxim to “Know thyself”—he evidently began to elaborate in practice a new mode of inquiry. It was remarkable for its public, and implicitly egalitarian, style. Spurning the more formal settings preferred by other professors of wisdom, who generally held court in households wealthy enough to host a lecture, Socrates strolled through the city. He visited the marketplace when it was crowded with shoppers, talking with anyone who was interested, young or old, rich or poor. When bystanders gathered, they were invited to join in the ongoing argument he was holding, with himself and with others, over the best conceivable way to live. At some point after Socrates had embarked on this eccentric new career, Chaerephon, a friend since youth and a loyal supporter of the democracy, journeyed to the Temple of Apollo, where cities as well as individuals throughout this period frequently went to receive divine guidance on rules of purity and questions of religious observance, and sometimes about law. At Delphi, according to Plato, Chaerephon consulted (as one normally did) the Pythia, the priestess through whom the god Apollo spoke. There were two ways to consult the Delphic oracle. A written response required the sacrifice of an animal. But a simple yes or no cost nothing. Whether the answer was yes or no was determined by lot: it depended on whether the Pythia randomly plucked from an urn a bean that was white or one that was black. Since Chaerephon was probably too poor to offer an animal for sacrifice, it is likely that he popped a simple question, and that the Pythia plucked a bean to produce a response. Was anyone wiser than Socrates? No. According to Plato in his Apology, Socrates reacted to news of this oracle as any pious Greek would. The god never lied. But Socrates did not regard himself as wise. So what could the oracle mean? From this point forward, the life of Socrates became a consecrated quest—an epic inquiry, meant to unriddle a message from a god. His search for wisdom became an obsession. According to Plato, he ceased “to engage in public affairs to any extent”—a noteworthy decision, given the prevailing belief, most memorably expressed by Pericles, that abstention from public affairs rendered a citizen “useless.” The longer that Socrates struggled to know himself, the more puzzled he became. What, for example, was the meaning of his inner voice? Was there any rhyme or reason behind the audible interdictions he experienced as irresistible? Did Socrates in fact embody a good way of life? And, if so, how could he possibly have acquired the ability to be so good? Whether or not his way of life was useful to the city—and on this point his friends and enemies disagreed—Socrates was storied for the abstracted states that overtook him. “He sometimes stops and
- 22. stands wherever he happens to be,” reports a friend in Plato’s Symposium. Later in the same dialogue, Plato depicts another friend recalling an even more striking episode that occurred when both men served together on the campaign to Potidaea: One time at dawn he began to think something over and stood in the same spot considering it, and when he found no solution, he didn’t leave but stood there inquiring. It got to be midday, and people became aware of it, wondering at it among themselves, saying Socrates had stood there since dawn thinking about something. Finally some of the Ionians, when evening came, after they’d eaten—it was then summer—carried their bedding out to sleep in the cool air and to watch to see if he’d also stand there all night. He stood until dawn came and the sun rose; then he offered a prayer to the sun, and left. Famously aloof, Socrates could also be, in Plato’s metaphor, a “gadfly”—a chronic source of irritation. Serenely self-assured, perhaps because he was blessed by a divine sense of mission, he was also ostentatiously self-doubting, professing repeatedly his own lack of wisdom. To critics, his avowed humility seemed obnoxious, even disingenuous: Was not Socrates like those Athenian aristocrats who struck a Spartan pose of austere self-restraint, in order to show their superiority to the ordinary run of vulgar men? This was perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Socrates’ character. The more strenuously he tried to prove the god right, by exposing the ignorance of supposed experts while protesting his own lack of knowledge, the more admirable he seemed to followers like Chaerephon, who worshipped him as if he were the wisest man alive. Abjuring the material trappings of his class, he became notorious for his disdain of worldly goods. “Often when he looked at the multitude of wares exposed for sale, he would say to himself, ‘How many things I can do without!’ ” He took care to exercise regularly, but his appearance was shabby. He expressed no interest in seeing the world at large, leaving the city only to fulfill his military obligations. He learned what he could by questioning the beliefs held by other residents of Athens, scrutinizing their beliefs rather than pondering the heavens or poring over books: “They relate that Euripides gave him the treatise of Heraclitus and asked his opinion upon it, and that his reply was ‘The part I understand is excellent, and so too is, I dare say, the part I do not understand; but it needs a Delian diver to get to the bottom of it.’ ” Still hoping to learn how to live the best life conceivable, Socrates, according to Plato, began to query anyone with a reputation in any field for knowledge. Craftsmen knew a thing or two about their crafts and were even able to train their children to follow in their footsteps. But most craftsmen had nothing coherent to say about justice, piety, or courage—the kinds of virtues that Socrates, like most Athenians, supposed were crucial to living a good life. As Socrates kept searching, a conviction took shape: craftsmen had no more wisdom than Socrates himself, and neither did poets, politicians, orators, or the other famous teachers he queried. In fact, all these people seemed even more ignorant than Socrates. Unlike him, most of them were complacent, not disquieted; vainglorious, not humble; and arrogantly unaware, unless irritated by the gadfly, of just how limited their knowledge really was. A primary obstacle to true wisdom was false confidence. And so Socrates now set out to destroy such confidence, not by writing books (he evidently wrote nothing) and not by establishing a formal school (for he did no such thing), but rather through his unrelenting interrogation of himself and others, no matter their rank or status. Such behavior did not make Socrates popular. “Frequently owing to his vehemence in argument, men set upon him with their fists and tore his hair out;… for the most part he was despised and laughed at, yet bore all this abuse patiently.” At the same time, his fearless habit of cross-examining powerful men in public won him a growing circle of followers—and helped turn him into one of the most recognizable figures in the Athens of
- 23. his day. In busts erected shortly after his death—Socrates was the first Greek sage to be so honored— he appears as a balding older man with a big belly, bug eyes, and thick, protuberant lips. According to Plato, his friends compared him with Silenus—an ugly and aging satyr traditionally associated with uncanny wisdom. Centuries later, retailing the lore surrounding the physical ugliness of the philosopher, Nietzsche gleefully recounted how the physiognomist Zopyrus was said to have sized him up: “A foreigner who knew about faces once passed through Athens and told Socrates to his face that he was a monstrum … And Socrates merely answered, ‘You know me, sir!’ ” Anecdotes like this began to circulate about Socrates, and Diogenes Laertius recounts a number of emblematic episodes, for example: One day a young man came to Socrates with an apology, saying, “ ‘I am a poor man and have nothing else to give, but offer you myself,’ and he answered, ‘Nay, do you not see that you are offering me the greatest gift of all?’ ” Socrates was walking on a narrow street in central Athens when he first met Xenophon, who would become, along with Plato, his most influential follower. Barring the way with his walking stick, Socrates asked the young man “where every kind of food was sold. Upon receiving a reply, he put another question, ‘And where do men become good and honorable?’ Xenophon was dumbfounded. ‘Then follow me,’ said Socrates, ‘and learn.’ ” There is an even more revealing story in an essay by Plutarch (c. A.D. 46–119): Aristippus, when he met Ischomachus at Olympia, asked him by what manner of conversation Socrates succeeded in so affecting the young men. And when Aristippus had gleaned a few odd seeds and samples of Socrates’ talk, he was so moved that he suffered a physical collapse and became quite pale and thin. Finally he sailed for Athens and slaked his burning thirst with draughts from the fountain-head, and engaged in a study of the man and his words and his philosophy, of which the end and aim was to come to recognize one’s vices and so rid oneself of them. By 423, Socrates was sufficiently renowned to be caricatured by one of the most celebrated playwrights in Athens, Aristophanes, in his comedy The Clouds. With poetic license, the playwright condensed the features of a variety of contemporary professors of wisdom into the character he called Socrates. Though Socrates in fact organized no school, Aristophanes portrayed him as the guru in charge of a cloistered think tank. In the play, a dishonest farmer named Strepsiades sends his son Phidippides to learn from “the high priest of subtlest poppycock,” hoping that he will acquire enough rhetorical tricks to help the father evade his creditors. When the son emerges from the care of Socrates and turns his gift for gab against his father, Strepsiades burns down the school. Onstage, Socrates first appears in a basket, gazing skyward, and treating his earthbound interlocutors as an Olympian god might treat a manifestly lower form of life—with sovereign disdain. He is a purveyor of holy secrets, hair-splitting arguments, and a peculiar sort of contemplative introspection that does not, on the face of it, promise practical results. Modesty is not one of his salient traits, and he comports himself strangely: “You strut around like a grand gander, roll your eyes, go barefoot, endure all, and hold such high opinions.” He peppers his pupils with pointed questions, meant to probe and test their personal character. When his school goes up in smoke, it seems like rough justice for a prattler and a parasite. In 423, when The Clouds was first produced, Athens and its allies were entering the eighth year of the Peloponnesian War (431–404) with Sparta and its allies. That year, Socrates apparently saw action again as a foot soldier, this time in an expedition to Delium, where the Athenian army suffered a signal defeat. Socrates is said to have acted with exemplary courage in the retreat, helping to keep the enemy’s cavalry at bay. The defeat at Delium, coming on the heels of the plague that had devastated the city in the first years of the war, broke Athenian morale. Doubts about the city’s military strategy and tactics boiled
- 24. over in the assemblies of the people (which were regularly scheduled public meetings led by elected generals and dominated by popular orators of variable talent and uncertain integrity). Though Plato says that Socrates disclaimed any ability to teach, just as he evidently refused to accept fees from prospective students, wealthy young men flocked to his side. They offered him friendship and patronage, hoping that he, like other prominent teachers, might help them win public influence and exercise political power. With their support, he was free to pursue his calling without material concerns. A cross section of the Athenian elite, his best-known companions fell into different political camps. Among his disciples were Nicias and Laches, generals loyal to the democracy, but also Charmides and Critias, pro-Spartan oligarchs. But the most famous disciple of all was Alcibiades—a man too cunning to be categorized politically. The ancient authorities stress Alcibiades’ sheer beauty as a young man. He was descended from a family sufficiently rich to equip a trireme, a warship powered by a team of rowers and the mainstay of the city’s imperial fleet. After the death of his father, it is said that Pericles himself became one of his guardians. “Soon a large number of high-born men began to gather around him and follow him around.” A career in politics beckoned: he was, after all, the kind of aristocrat tailor-made for the role of a democratic leader (or demagogue)—dashing and handsome, clever, and quick on his feet. Socrates knew Alcibiades from at least the time of their campaign together at Potidaea, when Alcibiades would have been eighteen years old and Socrates about forty. By the standards of the day, this made the boy a normal object of the older man’s erotic interest. (There is no Greek or Latin word that corresponds to the modern term homosexuality, and erotic relations were judged according to the age, social status, gender, and active or passive role of the participants.) According to Plutarch (who credits the account of Plato), “The fact that Socrates was in love with him strongly suggests that the boy was endowed with a natural aptitude for virtue.” The philosopher now faced a daunting, and perhaps impossible, challenge: to convert his most prominent potential disciple from his lust for power to a love of wisdom. His ally in this venture proved to be Alcibiades’ desire for Socrates. To the astonishment of others, the beautiful boy couldn’t get enough of the ugly old man. Yet when Socrates did sleep with him, Alcibiades was disappointed by his master’s superhuman self-restraint: “When I arose after having slept with Socrates, it was nothing more than if I’d slept with my father or an elder brother.” This passage from the Symposium remains the classic image of Platonic love, a form of unsatisfied carnal desire that Socrates characteristically tried to harness and redirect toward spiritual objects, according to Plato and several other contemporary sources. How Socrates set about trying to effect this transformation is the subject of the Alcibiades, a Socratic dialogue by an unknown ancient author that was included in the Platonic corpus and was widely read as an introduction to Platonic thought until the nineteenth century. Like most of the other extant Socratic dialogues by Plato, the Alcibiades consists mainly of a series of short questions and answers that begins when Socrates raises a doubt—in this case, about the ability of the younger man to realize his naked ambition: “You want your reputation and your influence to saturate all mankind.” Socrates in the dialogue proceeds to question Alcibiades about the specific know-how that might enable him to realize his stated goal. Is he really sure that he is “better” than other men? How does he understand his superiority? Does he behave more justly than others? Is he wiser? As their conversation proceeds, the cocky young man becomes more and more confused: “I must be in some absolutely bizarre condition! When you ask me questions, first I think one thing, and then I think something else.” If Alcibiades is this confused, how can he presume to have his influence “saturate all mankind”?
- 25. “Don’t you realize that the errors in our conduct are caused by this kind of ignorance, of thinking that we know when we don’t know?” When Alcibiades resists the implications of this line of reasoning, Socrates asks him to “trust in me, and in the Delphic inscription ‘know thyself.’ ” Still suspicious, Alcibiades asks Socrates what, precisely, he must know about himself. “The command that we should know ourselves means that we should know our souls.” What follows is so abstract and woodenly didactic that most modern scholars doubt that Plato himself could have written it (never mind whether Socrates could have ever really said any such thing). The crux of the philosopher’s quest, according to this text, is to attain true knowledge of psyche, a Greek word usually translated into English as “soul” (and also a Greek root of the English word psychology). In Homer, psyche is what leaves the body on death—perhaps it is breath, perhaps life itself. In the Alcibiades, Socrates goes farther, asserting that psyche is immaterial and immortal— and that the soul of a man is like a god within. What Alcibiades needs to prosper is what Socrates already exemplifies: because he has come to know his true soul, he is now able to lead a life of perfect justice, moderation, and reasoned inquiry. Toward the close of the Alcibiades, Socrates vows to his prize pupil that “I will never forsake you now, never”—but then adds, ominously, “unless the Athenian people make you corrupt and ugly.” And the last lines of the dialogue foreshadow the real fates of Alcibiades and of his teacher: “I should like to believe that you will persevere, but I’m afraid—not because I distrust your nature, but because I know how powerful the city is—I’m afraid it might get the better of both me and you.” As Plutarch tells the rest of the story, Socrates at first shamed Alcibiades into compliance. “ ‘He crouched down in fear, like a defeated cock, with wing aslant,’ and he believed that Socrates’ mission really was a way of carrying out the gods’ wishes by looking after young men and keeping them free from corruption. He began to despise himself and admire Socrates; he began to value Socrates’ kindness and feel humble because of his goodness.” Infatuated with philosophy, he became “cruel and intractable to the rest of his lovers,” including Anytus, the son of Anthemion (who many years later would charge Socrates with impiety and corrupting the youth). The battle for Alcibiades’ soul now began in earnest. In Plutarch’s account in his Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, Socrates bravely persevered “against all the odds and despite the number and importance of his rivals.” But as time passed, Alcibiades wavered in his devotion to philosophy. Sometimes, he would give Socrates the slip, acting “like a runaway slave,” in order to slake his thirst for pleasure. Yet “time and again,” according to Plutarch, “Socrates took him back in a state of complete promiscuity and presumptuousness, and by force of argument would pull him together and teach him humility and restraint, by showing him how great his flaws were and how far he was from virtue.” But Socrates was finally no match for the prospect of glory held out to Alcibiades by his political consultants: “it was by pandering to his ambitious longing for recognition that his corrupters set him prematurely on the road to high endeavor.” And in Plutarch’s cautionary version of the story, Alcibiades, by breaking free of Socrates and his influence, becomes the perfect antiphilosopher—a paragon of unprincipled viciousness: cruel, deceitful, prepared to say whatever he thinks his audience wants to hear and to feign whatever character he reckons will win popular approval. “He could change more abruptly than a chameleon.” With a student like this, it is no wonder that Plato sometimes depicts Socrates expressing skepticism about his ability to teach anybody anything. And although the accounts in both Plato and Plutarch put the blame for the vices of Alcibiades squarely on the institutions of the Athenian democracy and on the young man’s unruly will to power, one has to wonder about the judgment of Socrates, who first courted, and then failed to convert, an apparently promising pupil to the quest for true wisdom. In the years that followed, Alcibiades entered politics with a vengeance. Exploiting his extensive
- 26. Discovering Diverse Content Through Random Scribd Documents
- 27. Glacier d'Argentière: les Droites, les Courtes. Durant la montée du Glacier du Chardonnet jusqu'au Col, on a le loisir d'examiner la très curieuse face méridionale de l'Aiguille: celle- ci est toute hérissée de petites pyramides rocheuses superposées en gradins. Du côté d'Argentière, la crête rocheuse descend en pente rapide vers le Nord-Ouest, tombant en précipices sur la langue terminale du Glacier d'Argentière où se pressent les formes blanches qui dans l'air transparent du matin semblaient des êtres figés dans une interminable prière.
- 28. Et dans la douceur apaisante du bel après-midi d'automne, j'ai descendu à regret les marches de cristal, seuls vestiges intacts de la grande cathédrale gothique effondrée. Sous le soleil, les pierres croulaient dans les profondeurs sonores, les séracs s'éboulaient par intervalle en de sourds craquements, les cascades bondissaient dans la plaine en grondant, tandis qu'on entendait l'imperceptible et continuel crépitement des gouttes d'eau tombant dans les anfractuosités de la glace. Le Couvercle et l'Aiguille de Talèfre.
- 29. Par le sentier qui serpente sur la crête de la moraine, à travers l'herbe rousse parsemée de rochers, j'ai regagné Lognan déserté par les troupeaux. Les pâturages rocheux étaient vides et silencieux; les mélèzes des prés-bois portaient des aiguilles d'or; entre leurs racines les ruisselets chantaient; les mouches bourdonnaient joyeusement. Les airelles portaient des feuilles pourpres comme les pampres leurs sœurs, car l'airelle est la vigne de la montagne. C'était le moment de la vendange: une nuée de vendangeurs ailés s'était abattue sur les buissons, on les entendait piailler et se disputer sous les branches, qui descendent en terrasses successives jusqu'au glacier que l'on aperçoit très bas en-dessous de l'encorbellement. Le bruit de mes pas dérangeait les vendangeurs de leur agréable besogne; les merles s'envolaient effarouchés et plongeaient vers la glace bleue en criant; de toutes parts flottait l'odeur de sapins et de fruits mûrs. Toute la montagne vivait joyeuse sous les derniers rayons du soleil couchant, tandis que déjà la brume montant de l'Arve envahissait la vallée. S'il faut qu'après la mort, nos âmes changent d'enveloppe, je forme le souhait, divinité bienfaisante, de devenir l'un des merles du bois de Lognan. La nuit venue, je volerai jusque dans la plaine, et perché sur quelque pommier non loin d'un palace dans la nuit claire et sereine, j'écouterai les airs de danse. Le jour j'élirai domicile dans quelque buisson à l'abri d'un rocher non loin du sentier, et si quelque touriste élégant s'égare près de ma demeure, inquiet, soufflant et peinant, je lui sifflerai, moqueur, les airs de danse que j'aurai appris sous la lune blafarde. Mais je n'aurai plus peur de l'alpiniste, du bruit de ses souliers ferrés, ni du son du piolet frappant le granit. Caché sous les feuilles, je le regarderai de mon petit œil noir très vif; invisible sous les brindilles, j'accompagnerai ses pas jusqu'à la limite supérieure des prés-bois, me souvenant que dans une autre existence, j'étais monté moi aussi dans la grande nef, silencieuse, qui dort sous la lune, entre les piliers à demi écroulés, que l'homme a baptisés la Verte, les Courtes, les Droites, le Triolet, le Dolent, Argentière et Chardonnet.
- 30. Séracs au Glacier d'Argentière.
- 31. Le Montenvers et l'Aiguille du Dru.
- 32. La Mer de glace.
- 33. CHAPITRE V Au cirque des géants Ce nain de pierre pétulant et ridicule semblait nous dire: «Moi aussi je suis méchant, venez-voir!» Guido Rey. Compagnon fidèle de mes belles ascensions, O ami infortuné, comment ai-je pu venir sans vous jusqu'à cette «cité des songes» que nous avions rêvé de visiter ensemble? Lorsqu'en septembre 1906, un camarade commun, vous apportait, au pied des Aiguilles d'Arves où vous guettait la mort, l'expression de mes regrets et de ma rage d'être retenu loin de vous, votre cœur d'alpiniste avait trouvé pour moi une parole de consolation: «Tu lui diras que l'été prochain nous ferons les Aiguilles de Chamonix.» Hélas! votre promesse, vous l'avez emportée avec vous au fond de la crevasse où vous êtes tombé à bout de corde!
- 34. Traversée de la Mer de glace. Sans vous, mais votre souvenir en moi, j'ai gagné l'immense Glacier du Géant où de toutes parts se dressent les fières obélisques, les hauts bastions, les crêtes hérissées de hallebardes que vous aimiez escalader. Le chemin de fer du Montenvers m'avait remorqué le long des contreforts du Planaz, dans le souterrain du Grépon, puis sur les flancs du socle qui porte les Charmoz, et par le grand viaduc qui tourne au-dessus du Glacier des Bois, j'avais abordé la terrasse du Montenvers. En contemplant l'insigne panorama je comprenais pourquoi le contempteur du Mont-Blanc, Chateaubriand lui-même n'avait pu rester insensible à sa vue: «Qu'on se représente une vallée, dit-il, dont le fond est entièrement couvert par un fleuve. Les montagnes qui forment cette vallée laissent pendre au-dessus de ce fleuve une masse de rochers, les Aiguilles du Dru, du Bochard, des Charmoz. Dans l'enfoncement,
- 35. la vallée et le fleuve se divisent en deux branches, dont l'une va aboutir à une haute montagne, le Col du Géant, et l'autre aux rochers des Jorasses. Au bout opposé de cette vallée se trouve une pente qui regarde la vallée de Chamonix. Cette pente, presque verticale est occupée par la portion de la Mer de glace, qu'on appelle le Glacier des Bois. Supposez donc un rude hiver survenu; le fleuve qui remplit la vallée, ses inflexions et ses pentes, a été glacé jusqu'au fond de son lit; les sommets des monts voisins se sont chargés de neige partout où les flancs du granit ont été assez horizontaux, pour retenir les eaux congelées: voilà la Mer de glace et son site...»
- 36. Traversée de la Mer de glace. Le grand écrivain n'avait eu des yeux que pour les glaciers, seuls à la mode à son époque. Aujourd'hui, les visiteurs partagent leur admiration entre le fleuve glacé et les aiguilles qui dressent leurs impressionnants escarpements autour de Montenvers. Le simple touriste peut sans peine accéder jusqu'au pied de ces cimes ardues. Du Montenvers, en effet, part un sentier charmant qui conduit à Pierre Pointue, en suivant le sommet verdoyant de la
- 37. falaise qui domine la vallée de Chamonix. C'est le sentier du plan des Aiguilles. Il va, pittoresque, au bord de cette grandiose terrasse où viennent aboutir les glaciers des Charmoz, de la Blaitière et du Plan; un léger détour permet de passer au bord du lac du Plan, limpide miroir oublié par je ne sais quelle nymphe sur les hauteurs où dorment les Glaciers des Pèlerins de la Blaitière et des Nantillons. La gloire du Montenvers est sans contredit l'Aiguille du Dru, magnifique obélisque qui sur la rive opposée dresse ses pics vertigineux à 2000 mètres au-dessus du glacier. Étrange par la pureté de ses lignes, elle surprend également par la couleur changeante de ses roches; son nom «semble celui d'un nain difforme et méchant». Il n'est jusqu'au nom du glacier, qui dort à ses pieds, qui n'étonne à son tour par sa bizarre consonance: La Charpoua; c'est là que l'on va passer la nuit avant l'escalade du Dru. La Mer de glace, le Montenvers et les Aiguilles de Chamonix, vus depuis le chapeau.
- 38. Au bas de l'escarpement, le plus grand des Alpes, le Glacier du Géant déroule paisible son fleuve de glace. Celui-ci, en effet, coule majestueux et solennel entre les hautes digues que forment le Dru et l'Aiguille du Moine à l'Est et les assises des Charmoz à l'Ouest. Au départ de Montenvers, on remonte d'abord sa rive gauche par un sentier suspendu aux flancs de grandes dalles rocheuses munies de mains courantes. Puis en un point appelé l'Angle, un couloir de terre descend rapidement jusqu'au glacier. Dans cette partie qui est plane, la glace est unie et monotone. On remonte le glacier sans aucune peine dans la direction de l'Aiguille du Géant qui s'avance comme un éperon rocheux au milieu du courant. A sa surface courent des ruisseaux rapides, qui ont creusé dans la glace des cavités auxquelles on a donné le nom de «moulins». Dent et Cirque du Géant. Au delà des Moulins, les hautes parois qui enserrent le cours inférieur du glacier s'écartent. A gauche, dans la direction de l'Est, s'ouvre un magnifique cirque: c'est le Glacier de Talèfre.
- 39. Il fut jadis un des glaciers les plus explorés du massif. Avant que fut née l'idée de parcourir la montagne pour elle-même, les crystalliers allaient chercher les gemmes au pied des Droites et des Courtes qui forment le fond du glacier. Le milieu en est marqué par un îlot rocheux coté 2787 mètres d'altitude que l'on appelle Jardin de Talèfre. Chaque année, le mois d'août le voit se revêtir d'une riche parure composée des plus belles fleurs de l'Alpe; ainsi le rocher solitaire et perdu dans le désert immense et désolé devient durant quelques semaines la plus gracieuse des oasis, c'est un rappel de vie dans l'éternelle désolation. Les Séracs de la Mer de glace. A l'Est, l'Aiguille de Talèfre avance un long promontoire rocheux jusqu'au milieu de la vaste échancrure. Elle sépare le Glacier de Talèfre, de celui de Leschaux plus sauvage encore. La formidable paroi des Grandes Jorasses encercle de noir cet austère glacier; à l'Est, une mince bande de neige coupe la falaise verticalement et l'on aperçoit au sommet une brèche perdue dans l'azur: elle porte le
- 40. nom poétique de Col des Hirondelles. Sir Leslie Stephen raconte dans «l'Alpine Journal» les circonstances qui ont entouré son baptême: «En commençant à escalader les pentes de neige, nous observâmes un peu au-dessous de nous de mystérieux objets symétriquement arrangés en cercle sur la glace. C'était une vingtaine de points noirs parfaitement immobiles. En approchant, nous découvrîmes leur nature, non sans une certaine tristesse, je l'avoue. Les vingt objets étaient des corps, pas des corps humains, ce qui à un certain point de vue eût été moins étonnant... Les pauvres petits cadavres étaient les restes mortels d'hirondelles... Les oiseaux s'étaient peut-être rassemblés pour se tenir chaud, ou ils avaient été subitement stupéfiés par les tourbillons... Ils étaient unis dans la mort et paraissaient, je le confesse, étrangement pathétiques au milieu de la solitude des neiges.»
- 41. L'Aiguille du Dru. En amont de l'échancrure de Talèfre s'ouvre, en un prodigieux amphithéâtre, la cuvette glaciaire du Géant.
- 42. Escalade de l'Aiguille du Géant.
- 43. A l'Aiguille du Géant. Si le Glacier d'Argentière a pu être comparé à une cathédrale gothique on peut comparer le Glacier du Géant à un temple rond antique. Lorsque Vipsanius Agrippa construisait à Rome, au centre du champ de Mars, son célèbre Panthéon, il devait avoir je ne sais quelle divination du cirque des Géants. Le plan d'ensemble comporte les mêmes dispositions et la même orientation. Une façade au Nord avec un formidable portique, dont subsistent les deux colonnes latérales, l'Aiguille du Plan à l'Ouest et l'Aiguille du Géant à l'Est;
- 44. d'interminables gradins éboulés appelés séracs du Géant marquent encore la place de l'escalier de marbre. On le gravit par la droite à travers un dédale des blocs de glace, qui forme la plus belle chute de séracs de l'Europe. L'escalier franchi, on débouche dans le temple. Ses murailles sont revêtues de plaques de glace, comme les murs du Panthéon étaient plaqués de marbre. Dans l'épaisseur des parois, comme dans le temple romain, des ædicules, des absidioles, portant le nom des Aiguilles qui les dominent.
- 45. La Mer de glace et le Mont-Blanc. De même aussi que le Panthéon était consacré à tous les dieux, le Glacier du Géant est consacré à toutes les divinités de la montagne. Elles entourent le vaste amphithéâtre. A l'Est, qui est la gauche en entrant, ce sont les Périades, le Mont-Mallet, l'Aiguille du Géant et les Aiguilles Marbrées; au Sud, se dresse la Vierge, puis on découvre successivement le Flambeau et la Tour Ronde; à l'Ouest, le Mont- Maudit, le Mont-Blanc de Tacul, et l'Aiguille du Midi. Enfin vers le Nord, un peu plus loin, pressées les unes contre les autres les divinités de second ordre, moins parfaites que les Dieux, mais plus vénérées et redoutées. Ce sont: le Grépon, les Grands Charmoz, la République; elles sont précédées dans le tour d'horizon par les pointes Saumon, l'Aiguille de la Baitière, l'Aiguille Dufour et l'Aiguille du Plan. Dans le fond de l'amphithéâtre autour duquel siègent les géants, la divinité suprême, toujours présente, bien que parfois invisible, immuable et mystérieuse: le dôme du Mont-Blanc, aux lignes pures comme aux premiers jours du monde, aveuglant avec sa neige sans tache, car à mesure que le glacier monte vers le ciel il
- 46. se débarrasse de tout ce qui pourrait le ternir afin de n'être plus autour du Dieu, que splendeur, pureté, ineffable beauté. Le Mont-Blanc et l'Aiguille de Blaitière, vus des Grands Charmoz. Durant de longues heures, le pèlerin gravit l'escalier triomphal fait de murs de glace successifs. Puis il gravit par une pente facile un large vallonnement glacé, qui aboutit au Col du Géant. Au delà du col, la paroi plonge presque verticalement jusqu'à Courmayeur à plus de 2 kilomètres en dessous, dans la haute vallée de la Doire: c'est l'Italie. Nulle situation n'est comparable à celle du Col du Géant. Théodore Camus déclare: «Bien qu'on en ait dit des merveilles j'ai trouvé la réalité encore plus merveilleuse... C'est une véritable vue de haut sommet, mise à la portée de tous, et qu'on peut admirer largement à son aise, dans les gloires du soleil qui se couche, ou du soleil qui se lève, ou dans les blancheurs lumineuses de la lune.» Un excellent refuge édifié par le Club Alpin Italien dès 1876, offre un agréable
- 47. séjour dans ce nid d'aigle situé à 3323 mètres d'altitude: il porte le nom de Rifugio Albergo Torino. Escalade de l'Aiguille du Géant.
- 48. Saxifrages. Quelques heures suffisent pour descendre du Col du Géant à Courmayeur. On suit d'abord une crête facile, dominant des à pics, puis des éboulis granitiques. Un passage de rochers escarpés lui succède, enfin un sentier muletier, qui s'améliore à mesure que l'on descend, mène au Pavillon du Mont-Frety. On atteint ensuite une superbe forêt de mélèzes et l'on arrive à Entrèves, d'où une route de chars commode conduit au Chamonix italien.
- 49. Au Grépon.
- 50. Requin et Grépon, vus de la Bédière. Le panorama du Col du Géant compte parmi les plus réputés: de gauche à droite, la vue s'étend sur les Alpes Pennines, le Mont-Rose, le Grand Combier, le Cervin, le Massif du Grand Paradis, la Grivola, la Grande Casse, l'Argentera, les Alpes-Maritimes, les Écrins et toutes les Alpes Dauphinoises. Tout près, formant un impressionnant premier plan, on distingue les Aiguilles Noire et Blanche de Peteret et le versant Est du Mont-Blanc qui s'élève encore à 1440 mètres au- dessus du col. A gauche du col, se dresse la flèche sans rivale que les Français appellent Aiguille du Géant et les Italiens Dente del Gigante!
- 51. Le Mont-Blanc et la Pointe Sella. Elle demeura longtemps inaccessible. Autour d'elle succombaient successivement toutes les aiguilles. Les Grandes Jorasses étaient domptées dès 1865, le Mont-Mallet était gravi en 1871, l'Aiguille de Rochefort en 1873, le Flambeau et l'Aiguille de Saussure en 1876. Seule, grâce à ses parois abruptes, l'Aiguille du Géant déjouait toutes les tentatives. C'est en vain, que les meilleurs alpinistes lui donnaient assaut: elle défiait leurs efforts. Mummery vient, en 1880, escorté de son célèbre guide Alexandre Burgner, et celui devant qui avait cédé le Grépon dut s'avouer vaincu devant la grande plaque lisse qui défend le sommet de l'Aiguille. En se retirant de la lutte inégale, le grand alpiniste déclara que l'ascension était impossible par les seuls moyens humains. Cet aveu d'impuissance était en même temps un conseil. Dès 1882, les frères Sella s'installent dans la cabane du Géant: ils vont attaquer l'Aiguille au burin et au marteau; ils entaillent la roche, y scellent des crampons de fer et finissent par enserrer l'obélisque dans un réseau de cordes par
- 52. lesquelles à la force des bras, ils se hissent jusqu'au sommet. Désormais, l'Aiguille enchaînée sera maintes fois gravie. Lever de soleil dans les séracs du Géant.
- 53. Refuge Torino.
- 54. La Dent du Géant, vue de l'épaule du Requin.
- 55. Les Grandes Jorasses et le Glacier de Leschaux, vus du Sentier du Couvercle. Elle est si tentante cette pointe d'or qui se détache dans le ciel rose du couchant: si lointaine, si aérienne, qu'elle paraît irréelle. Et puis elle ne comporte pas de bien grandes fatigues: elle n'exige qu'une tête exempte de vertige et de bons bras. Ceux que la nature a ainsi doués, peuvent en six heures accomplir à l'aller et au retour cette escalade inouïe.
- 56. Vous aurez le temps de paresser quelque peu dans le bon lit du refuge Torino, car il ne faut pas partir de grand matin. Laissez au chaud soleil d'Italie le soin de dégeler les cordes que le Club Alpin Italien a placées sur la face Ouest. En pleine saison, il vous suffira de partir à 6 heures. C'est l'heure propice. Le soleil n'a point encore amolli la neige et vous gagnerez rapidement et sans peine le plateau supérieur du Col du Géant qui se redresse près des Aiguilles Marbrées. Depuis cet endroit, l'ascension se fait en deux temps et beaucoup de mouvements. Les gestes les plus compliqués sont réservés au second temps: pour les faciliter, il est bon de s'encorder avec de très longs intervalles. Durant le premier temps, les efforts tendent à atteindre une sorte d'épaule, située à l'Est de l'Aiguille. L'escalade des premières assises est agréable; partout le rocher est excellent.
- 57. Requin vu du sentier du Couvercle.
- 58. Au sommet de l'Aiguille de Rochefort. Une fissure dans les rochers, inclinée mais assez large, s'offrira bientôt à vous; elle est idéale par sa commodité et ses dimensions: le corps entier y tient à l'aise; jamais vous n'avez rencontré fissure aussi praticable. Cependant bientôt, elle se rétrécit: qu'importe, elle reste assez large pour contenir votre jambe droite: c'est amplement suffisant pour un alpiniste; tant pis pour la jambe gauche, elle battra le vide de l'autre côté de la lame de rocher. Mais cela se complique, voici que la jambe droite enfle, elle ne tient plus dans la fissure: c'est peut-être la fissure qui se rétrécit? Contentez-vous dès lors, de laisser votre coude dans la fente et continuez hardiment. Encore quelques mètres et vous vous apercevez que votre coude est trop gros: jamais vous n'auriez cru avoir d'aussi gros bras, ni d'aussi grosses mains. Et alors, vous vous agrippez à une corde qui est là, comme un serpent dormant sur le rocher, le long de la rainure; laissez cependant quelques doigts dans les lèvres de la roche car il ne faut jamais se fier complètement aux cordes, et puis, que diable, le rocher est plus solide que le chanvre.
- 59. Mont-Blanc du Tacul et la Vierge près du Col du Géant. Et c'est ainsi que vous atteignez «la salle à manger», petit névé suspendu dans le vide au pied de l'Aiguille. La partie facile de l'ascension est terminée, les difficultés commencent; laissez sacs et piolets, mais ne laissez pas l'espérance, ni le courage, il vous en faudra beaucoup pour ce qui reste à faire. Que faut-il dire de cette gymnastique? Une petite corniche à gauche permet de gagner la face Nord-Ouest de l'Aiguille et l'on se
- 60. trouve au pied d'un mur. Heureusement, les câbles se succèdent à peu près sans interruption. Les bras font tout; les jambes se contentent de battre la mesure dans le vide. On parvient ainsi à une grande dalle triangulaire au pied de laquelle s'arrêta Mummery: c'est la plaque Burgener. Imaginez une énorme paroi lisse et sans aspérité, inclinée de 75°, entourée de trois côtés par le vide et vous aurez une faible idée de cette plaque, car il manquera encore l'image du vide très présent en cet endroit. Bien bas, le Glacier du Géant brille au soleil. Au-dessus de la tête le mur perpendiculaire continue sans trêve. L'arête gauche vous servira à franchir la première partie de la difficulté. Puis une marche de flanc dans une fissure, en équilibre contre le rocher fait un divertissement assez peu agréable. Bientôt la rude gymnastique recommence le long de la verticale. Quelques cheminées mettent encore à dure épreuve vos nerfs et votre tête, et vous vous trouvez subitement sur le premier sommet qui penche d'inquiétante façon sur le versant italien. Pourquoi cette aiguille persiste-t-elle à vouloir regarder ainsi je ne sais quel objet en retrait sur les rives de la Doire? Le sommet de l'Aiguille comprend deux pointes: la pointe Sella et la pointe Graham. Elles sont reliées par une petite muraille étroite et croulante, bordée de chaque côté par 600 mètres d'à pics. Au delà du petit mur, il n'y a plus grand'chose: le vide tout simplement. Cependant, c'est quelque chose que le vide lorsqu'il atteint de semblables dimensions.
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