ヘイマルメネー : いにしへの野中の清水ぬるけれどもとの心を知る人ぞ汲む

Abstract

The paper contains a preliminary study to my research of Plotininian thought on Evil, Fate and Providence, and treats, first, of the history and meaning of the word Heimarmene, and then the different opinions embraced on Fate by Epicureans, Stoics, Alexander of Aphrodisias and Astrologers. That the word Heimarmene should have been used, especially in a philosophical sense, by Heraclitus and Democritus, I hesitate to acknowledge, though on the other hand I cannot deny it positively. However it may be, the word came to be used widely already in the fifth and fourth centuries B. C. among common people in Ionia and Attica alike. And Anaxagoras, we are told, asserted its meaninglessness. I have explained the possible and really meant meanings of the word both from the results of the linguistic analysis and particularly from the various uses of ancient philosophers and writers; here I owe much to Gundel, but I could not follow him in several points. In his third epistle Epicurus distinguished between necessity and Heimarmene : the former is the cause of only a part of things, while the latter, whose existence he denied, is to be the queen of all things. Who gave her, then, this absolute power? It is Stoics, I am inclined to answer, in spite of Usener, Hicks and others, who think here of Democritus and Leucippus rather than Stoics. About Stoic fatalism or determinism I have discussed the following points : (1) What is meant by Heimarmene, (2) How they argued in favour of her existence, (3) The doctrine of Confatalia, (4) The distinction drawn by Cleanthes and Chrysippus between necessity and Heimarmene. In the interpretation of these problems I am rather in sympathy with Leibniz, who seems to have profited by Lipsius. Unlike Megarian Diodorus or Spinoza both Cleanthes and Chrysippus did not consider future events necessary, though all future events, like all past ones, should occur by Heimarmene. We may interpret therefore their Heimarmene as a sort of certainty, a certainty by which every proposition, even about future events, must be either true or false, but this certainty is not the same as necessity. Alexander of Aphrodisias identified Heimarmene with nature on the authority, perhaps, of the only one passage of Aristotle's Physics; the thought may be interesting, but it violates the actual denotation and connotation of the word Heimarmene. Astrology seems to have been transmitted to Greece already in the fourth or third century B. C.. In Plotinus's time it flourished in many places and, as he himself says, was believed in by a great many people. And Nemesius tells us of wise men of Egypt who believed in it. Plotinus's criticism of it, therefore, was not directed, as Boll and Harder suppose, to one author only, such as Posidonius or Ptolemy.