Tissue of the World
The Nature of Ancient Sympathy
Tissue of the World
The Nature of Ancient Sympathy
A multidisciplinary account showing how ancient notions of sympathy changed ways of thinking about interconnectedness.
When we hear the word sympathy today, we tend to imagine the emotional bond between people. But for centuries, sympathy just as commonly brought to mind interdependencies between plants, rocks, and celestial bodies. It explained why magnets attract iron, how the stars influence human destiny, and why one trembles when one is afraid. It implicated human beings in a complex network of loves (sympathies) and hates (antipathies). The ancient notion of sympathy led to ways of thinking about community even beyond the boundaries of the human that continue to influence how we think about life, society, and Nature today.
This book offers the first comprehensive account of ancient sympathy, spanning the fifth century BCE to the third century CE. Tracing connections across works of philosophy, natural history, cosmology, medicine, and literature, Brooke Holmes argues that how people thought about sympathetic communities played a crucial role in shaping the idea of Nature as a webbed, well-ordered whole in the Hellenistic and Roman Imperial Mediterranean. From the scale of the organism to that of the cosmos, this book interrogates the ancient history of a protoecological, antimechanistic conception of Nature, proposing the richly textured thought-world of sympathy as a resource for rethinking and reimagining human and nonhuman communities, the stories we tell about the classical world, and the political and theoretical stakes of vital materialisms.
416 pages | 6 x 9
History: History of Ideas
Literature and Literary Criticism: Classical Languages
Philosophy: History and Classic Works
Table of Contents
Preface
Abbreviations
Note to Readers
Introduction
The Nature of Affective Life and Affective Community in Fourth-Century BCE Greece
Life, Community, and Nature: The Perceptual–Conceptual Field of Sympathy
The Enchantment of Sympathy, We Moderns, and Bioclassicism
The Problem of Premodern Sympathy
I. Sympathy in the Living Being: Affective Relation and Affective Community
Chapter 1. Life as Affective Community in the Hippocratics, Plato, and Aristotle
Life, Together
The Physical Body and Affective Community in the Hippocratic Corpus
Making Sense of Affect at the Border of Body and Soul: The Hippocratics and Plato
Embodied Life in Aristotle and the Rise of Psychosomatic Sympathy
Chapter 2. The Sympathetic Community of the Body and the Soul in the Stoics and the Epicureans
Vessel and Weave
The Soul Is a Body: The Hellenistic Argument from Psychosomatic Sympathy
Lucretius on the Common Life of the Body and the Soul
Stoic Sympathy and the Complex Unity of Animal Life
Chapter 3. Galen on Hippocratic Sympathy and the Nature of Nature
Believing in Magnets
Translocal Sympathy: Finding the Hippocratic Body, Losing the Platonic Soul
The Teleological Program of “Hippocratic” Sympathy
The Nature of Oecological Attraction
II. Sympathy Between Natural Bodies: Oecology, Contagion, Antipathy
Chapter 4. Aristotle’s Oecology and the Archive of Natural Facts
Mother’s Milk, and Mine
Peripatetic Habitat
Making an Archive
Aristotle on Mothers, Nutriment, and Nature Itself
Aristotle’s Household
Chapter 5. Sympathy as a Physical Problem: Contagious Affect, Kinship, and Human Nature
The Pain of Others
The Physical Problem of Sympathy as Contagious Mimesis
Common Nature and Expansive Kinship
Shared Suffering in Hellenistic Historiography
Stoic Cosmopolitanism
Chapter 6. Sympathy, Antipathy, and the Knowledge of Nature in Pliny and Bolus
Contesting Hellenism
Pliny on Sympathy and Antipathy: Natural Oecology to Cultural Anthropology
Ancient Magic and the Making of the Magi
Bolus of Mendes on Sympathy and Antipathy
The Nature of Expertise in Sympathy and Antipathy
III. Sympathy, Nature, and Cosmological Experimentation
Chapter 7. Cosmozoology, Oecology, and Back: Plato, Peripatetics, Stoics
The Breath of Cosmic Life
Plato’s Cosmological Turn
Nature and the Whole in Aristotle
Peripatetic Sympathy Between Heaven and Earth: Theophrastus to Alexander
Stoic Cosmozoology and Cosmic Sympathy
Chapter 8. Seeing Cosmic Sympathy in the Stoics and the Nature of Cosmic Life
The Tides
The Facets of Cosmic Sympathy
Spectacle and Sign
Cosmological Experimentation in Cicero’s On Divination and On Fate
Cicero’s Roman Nature
Chapter 9. Astrological Sympathy and Cosmological Experimentation
Ptolemy’s Stars
Late Babylonian Celestial Science and the Rise of the Chaldeans
Making Astrological Sympathy
Philo’s Sympathetic Cosmos
Sympathy, Antipathy, and Egyptian Cosmo-Anthropological Authority
IV. Sympathy at the Edge
Chapter 10. Plotinus on Cosmic Life and the Nature of Sympathy
Plotinus’s World
From the Affected Part to the Cosmic Whole
Parts and Wholes: In and Out of the Sympathetic Cosmos
The Affective Life of the Trace
Nature and the Sympathetic Unity of Cosmic Life
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index