Maddie Wahrman

4/8/07
RE176
Aletheia and Doxa
Detienne begins chapter 6, “A Choice Between Aletheia and Apate,” by
discussing Simonides of Ceos. Simonides was the first poet to compose poems for a fee.
This forced his contemporaries to recognize poetry as a commercial art, and as a result,
they treated him as a greedy man, and less as a religious figure who spoke the truth of the
gods. Simonides recognized that, “Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that
speaks.” Since painting was known as an art of trickery, whose purpose was to make
things look deceptively real, Simonides must have been alluding that his own poetry was
also a form of trickery. He is said to have remarked, “Speech is the image of reality.”
Art became increasingly a work of the artist, and less a religious sign. Artists
inscribed their name at the base of their statues, and the artist’s discovery of himself
became associated with the invention of an image. In declaring himself a master of Apate
(deception), he rejected the religious aspect of a poet – Aletheia, and embraced Doxa.
Memory became less sacred, and merely an instrument to help one learn a profession, and
eventually the alphabet was invented, and writing became a way to make works public,
and not just for political reasons. Aletheia lost much of its value once it was no longer the
supreme point of poets.
Doxa was to replace Aletheia in many ways. It was also a difficult concept to
define, with many interpretations. It was subject to persuasion, kairos, instability, and
“turns and twists that prove false and true.” Simonides secularizes poetry by declaring
dokein is more important than Aletheia. Simonides is seen as prefiguring the Sophist.
Sophists felt thought was ruled by the “principle of contradiction,” and the aim of
Sophistry is persuasion and trickery – the domination of man through the power of
ambiguity.
Where the Sophists had a radically different philosophy aiming to influence
others, there were still religious sects aspiring to an internal transformation, adopting
techniques that prolonged earlier religious thought. In the Pythagorean Petron of
Himerus, Plutarch associates the act of memory and Aletheia in a religious context.
Memory becomes a religious power which marks the end of a cycle of reincarnation
once truth is discovered. It also constitutes, “the discipline of salvation that results in
victory over death and time and makes it possible to acquire the most complete kind of
knowledge.” However, the Aletheia of the philosophicoreligious groups differs from the
past Aletheia of poets, diviners, and Kings of justice in its dissociation from Peitho,
persuasion. For philosophicoreligious sects the Immutable, Being, Memory, and
Aletheia were opposed to Fluidity, Non-being, Oblivion, and Lethe.
The meaning of memory and the meaning of Aletheia change. Memory becomes
a means of transcending time and separating the soul from the body, while Aletheia
becomes a “religious prefiguration of Being, or even of the One,” in it’s opposition to
anything fluid or changing.
The concept of “Masters of Truth” further changed as well. A master of truth in
philosophicoreligious groups was more aware of the difference between his own kind:
one who knew, and recognized the Aletheia, and men who knew nothing. Parmenides
had a very interesting stance. He initially characterizes himself as a Master of Truth, by
playing out the beginning as Hesiod and Epimenides did. The Goddess chooses to speak
to him the truth, but then Parmenides associates Aletheia with Being. Being is the central
concept to Parmenides. He attempts to separate Being from words, “Being is, non-Being
is not.” It is singular, Permanent, Intemporal, and One. Parmenides’ most radical
oppositions are between Being and non-Being, and no longer between Aletheia and
Apate.
Through Aletheia, we can gauge the gap between thought that obeys a logic of
ambiguity and thought that obeys a logic of contradiction.