Seeing with Different Eyes - Cosmology and Divination

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Chapter One
the divinity inside itself. The explanations for oracular trance are not as
close to hand, but would presumably rely on a similar line of reasoning.
This follows up on and deepens an observation made earlier. The Stoics
see the human soul as up to the task of understanding the world, here
reflected in a true continuity between divine reason and human reason.
VI. Concluding Thoughts
If we take a step back from the Stoic evidence for a moment and look at
the whole, we can, in my view, find some illumination as to why ancients
and moderns might view divination differently, based on certain premises
of ancient and modern physics. Most important here is a central idea of
ancient physics that is not mirrored in modern accounts: the idea of
intentionality. In my view, a focus on intentionality as an organizing
principle in the cosmos provides a way around the horns of Fritz Graf’s
dilemma that I mentioned at the beginning of this paper. It holds out a
detour around the problem of belief versus skepticism and instead gives us
breadth of view. I’ll explain.
Only a few ancient philosophers deviated from the idea of a purposive
cosmos. It was more often the case that the world unfolded as it did
according to some form of teleological drive. Its processes were not willynilly,
but were part of a larger plan. And more often than not, the ancients
were comfortable enough calling the architect of this plan the divine (with
all caveats in place against assimilating the various philosophical notions
of the divine with traditional Homeric theology). If this is a beginning
point of physics, then the study of the unfolding of physical processes will
be the reading of a purposiveness that is ultimately traceable, even if by a
long and circuitous route, to the divine. This starting point makes
divination look a lot less exotic and more a practice whose premises are
congruent with those of the empirical scientist: both place human beings in
the position of gathering information derived from a more or less remote
cause of causes. Neither Plato, Aristotle, nor of course the Stoics, would
have any objection.
The next step is, then, to think about the gap that separates the process
of reading signs in an intentional cosmos from reading signs in an
unintentional one. Contemporary theorists of signs have already pointed
the way. In his A Theory of Semiotics, Umberto Eco talks of a “lower
threshold” of semiotic activity that takes place around natural “things”
whose status as “signs” is liminal. 32 In his discussion, Eco makes reference
to physical stimuli, neurophysiological phenomena, and genetic coding as
signals that exist below the threshold of the sign. In referring in particular