Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

Diocles of Carystus on the method of dietetics 83nature of things that many things look like, or are taken as, principles. 21However, that would be a remarkable statement which would have nojustification in the context. Yet if we connect the use of the word phusishere with that in section 7 above, a more comprehensible view emerges:phusis again refers to the nature of the substance in question, for examplethe foodstuff, and means ‘according to their nature’, ‘in virtueof their nature’. In section 7 the ‘whole nature’ was said to be the causeof the effect the foodstuff normally produces; thus it is relatively easy tounderstand the statement that in virtue of their nature these foodstuffs andtheir producing such-and-such an effect are like principles. For the purposeof clarity, let me paraphrase what I think Diocles’ line of thought in thiswhole fragment amounts to. A foodstuff has its effect due not to one of itsparticular qualities but to its nature as a whole; as soon as we descend to alevel that is lower (e.g. more elemental) than this ‘whole nature’, for instanceby considering the constituents or qualities of the foodstuff in isolation, welose the ‘wholeness’, the total sum of these constituents or qualities and thestructure or proportion according to which they are interrelated – whereasthis very nature was said to be responsible for the effect in question. Tobe sure, we might be able to explain why honey is sweet (which is, after21 Jaeger: ‘von Natur’; Torraca: ‘secondo natura’. Kullmann takes as belonging to :‘Viele Gegebenheiten gleichen in gewisser Weise bestimmten naturgemäßen Prinzipien, so daß siekeine Darlegung über die Ursache zulassen’ (1974, 351) and he comments on p. 352: ‘Es kommtDiokles gerade darauf an, daß diese Prinzipien naturgemäß und nicht künstlich sind, um die Fragenach abstrakten Letztursachen ein für allemal auszuschließen.’ But this is difficult to accept becauseof the word order. Smith’s translation (‘many things are in some fashion like first principles in nature’)is not explicit on this point, like Frede’s paraphrase: ‘He also maintained that we should treat manyfacts of nature as primitive, rather than try to explain them in terms of some questionable theorywhich would serve no further purpose’ (‘Introduction’, 1985, xxii). Bertier’s paraphrase goes too farbeyond what is in the text: ‘Apport insignifiant des théories explicatives, dans la mesure où les réalitéscontiennent en elles-mêmes le reflet de leurs principes, et où lathéorie n’est qu’une répétition dela description du fait’ (1972, 32). H. Gottschalk (private correspondence) understands the wholesentence as follows: ‘(a) archai, because they are archai, cannot be explained or demonstrated, and(b) any train of reasoning, even if it does not start from the most universal and ultimate archai, muststart from something accepted as true for the purpose of that argument, a quasi-arche not subjectedto further analysis or demonstration’, and he takes the words as expressing that ‘Ourusing such propositions [e.g. honey is laxative] as archai is arbitrary, yet it is in the nature of thingsthat we reason in this way’, but he admits that ‘Diocles has not expressed himself very clearly, perhapsbecause he was trying to fit an Aristotelian idea into a context determined by older ways of thinking.’[After the original publication of this paper, I became aware of the paraphrase of fr. 176 by A. L.Peck in his 1928 Cambridge PhD thesis ‘Pseudo-Hippocrates Philosophus; or the development ofphilosophical and other theories as illustrated by the Hippocratic writings, with special reference toDe victu and De prisca medicina’, pp. 116–17, of which the following parts are worth quoting: ‘andthat many of the substances we have bear a considerable resemblance in their nature to some of thefirst principles, so that there is no place left for an account of the cause (of their effects) . . . whenthey think that they have given a satisfactory account of the cause by getting hold of something thatis not known nor generally agreed upon nor even plausible’; in a footnote to the words ‘so that thereis no place left’, Peck adds: ‘Because it is not possible to trace out a cause further back than a firstprinciple.’ Peck further agrees that Hippocrates’ On Regimen ‘comes under Diocles’ condemnation’.]