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Letter to the Foundation, June 2010
While staying in the small town of Freiberg, a rather rough section of Kant’s Prolegomena drove me to the streets one evening in search of coffee.
Aristotle and Homer Freiberg, Germany
I quickly became lost in the unfamiliar town and eventually found myself on the grounds of Freiberg’s university. Two statues at the entrance of the university building housing the departments of philosophy and theology caught my eye.
On the right was Aristotle, on the left Homer. Greek inscriptions were placed below each, which I copied down. Later that evening, having found coffee and my way back to the hotel, I was curious to see what advice these two thinkers offered. With the help of my dictionary, I translated the inscriptions that I had found. What was written below Aristotle was the first sentence of his Metaphysics: “All human beings by nature stretch themselves out toward knowing.”
The other was from Homer’s Iliad: “Always be best and be distinguished from others.” The Greek verb ἀριστεύειν, literally “to best,” can mean to be best both simply and with respect to bravery. What is it that the founders of the university hoped the philosopher and the poet would tell the students of humanities?
Homer’s advice is offered by a parent to a youth. The hunger for distinction is a passion that can carry the young very far and that parents may wish to direct. Homer’s advice has been placed in the context of Aristotle’s observation that humans reach to towards knowing. Yet to reach beyond is to reach somewhere, and some places are higher than others. Hence, those who begin to seek distinction by knowing are driven to another kind of searching after higher things. Taken in the context of Aristotle’s observation of a natural end, Homer’s exhortation points beyond itself: away from distinction for the sake of distinction towards knowing for knowing.
