Why would a world of divine beings, as crowded as the one of ancient Greek polytheism, need daimones too to be part of it? Implicitly (and plausibly) assuming that things are for a reason, Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge addresses the question by investigating, in her latest magnificent book, how the Greeks of the archaic and classical periods conceived daimones. What are daimones ‘for’? What do they ‘do’? Pirenne-Delforge observes that in all cases, in the texts she examines (which range from Homer’s poems to inscriptions on vases, monuments, as well as on some lamellae from Dodona), daimones have something to do with the causal power of the gods to act in our world:
The term [daimōn] does not point…to a distinct and well-circumscribed category of divine entities, but it identifies a particular quality of divine beings, namely their capacity to intervene among men, around and within human beings. (2025: 101, my translation)
More specifically, according to Pirenne-Delforge, mention of daimones in the texts she considers serves to indicate divine intervention in human affairs, when human understanding remains partial, in relation to what causes what’s happening.
At the heart of the uses of [the term] daimōn is the expression of a divine power in action among men who suffer its effects, while not being able to identify it and therefore name it (2025: 37, my translation)
Pirenne-Delforge cogently argues (against a well-established alternative in the scholarship) that whatever the authors call daimon should not be reified as an entity falling under its own ontological category, nor should it be laden with intrinsic positive or negative value (there aren’t good daimones or bad ones as such). Pirenne-Delforge shows that term as such has a neutral valence; its etymology indicates that a daimōn is a ‘distributor’: it distributes the will of the gods on earth, among the mortals, and in so doing it, the daimōn distributes some goods and some evils, but without becoming itself the cause of them as a doer of good- or bad (see e.g. pp. 159-162 and 284-5).
If this is the function for which daimones are included in the panoply of divine beings of ancient Greek polytheism, what does this tell us about the Greek conception of the cosmos and of the divine, and our relation to them? And how does the conception that Pirenne-Delforge masterfully extrapolates from non-philosophical texts, relate to what we learn from philosophical texts of the same period? I will here briefly discuss such matters to show how valuable Pirenne-Delforge’s book is, for anyone interested in ancient Greek thought, whether from the perspective of literature, religion, or philosophy. I read her book from a philosophical perspective.
On my reading, Pirenne-Delforge shows that appeal to daimones reveals the ways that, during the archaic and classical periods, the Greeks were discovering gaps in the causal structure of the cosmos and in their understanding of it. What are such gaps? Pirenne-Delforge talks of a principle of uncertainty or indeterminacy, which is key to her overall argument and needs to be explicated.
Faced with the complexity of the world and the divine interventions within it, the humans depicted in the poets’ verses resort to the notion of daimōn to talk about the action of the gods, its impact on their existence and the difficulty of identifying its origin. The [use of the] term daimōn] is based a principle of uncertainty or indeterminacy which is at the heart of the polytheistic system, and particularly in the representation given by poets. (2025: 146 and relevant footnote, my emphasis)
Indeterminacy makes a system unpredictable, where uncertainty reigns; however, indeterminacy is not the same as unpredictability: the former is an ontological issue, the latter an epistemic one; predictability concerns the status of our knowledge/understanding of the world, while indeterminacy concerns the state of the world itself. So Pirenne-Delforge’s claim needs to be disambiguated.
Notwithstanding various passages in the book where she seems to have both indeterminacy and unpredictability in mind (see, e.g., pp. 102, 189, 284), it is ultimately clear that for her the issue is epistemic. According to Pirenne-Delforge, for the authors she examines there exist gaps in our understanding of events in the world, as caused by the gods, due to the limits of our human abilities. I would add that the philosophers of the time also identified some causal gaps in reality as such, where the issue is ontological (e.g. paradigmatically a gap between Plato’s world of transcendent Forms and the sensible world, and yet the former is assumed to make a causal difference to the latter).
The fact that the Greeks in general did identify such (epistemic and ontological) gaps is interesting because it allows us to infer some of the fundamental philosophical assumptions they made: (i) that the cosmos is governed by causal relations, which, then as now, are understood as the ‘cement of the universe’ (see E. J. Mackie, 1980), and (ii) that the cosmos is in principle intelligible to us.
Even the non-philosophers Pirenne-Delforge examines seem, in her reconstruction of their ideas, to hold these two assumptions, because for them everything is caused by a god; but there are many gods who might cause an event, and we are not able to know which god it is (although this fact is in principle knowable), because of our human epistemic limitations. Because we do not know which god it is, a daimōn is invoked. Pirenne-Delforge explains:
When the term [daimōn] is placed in the mouth of a human protagonist [attempting to explain a phenomenon in the world], it translates the existence of a range of possibilities inherent in the plurality of Greek polytheism and it expresses the difficulty, even the impossibility, of deciding. (2025: 102, my translation)
The impossibility for us to know which god it is that causes a certain event, leaves us in ignorance of the causal source, even if we can assume there is one and it is a god:
[…] daimōn is above all the lexical mark of a supra-human action in the process of being accomplished, leaving those it affects in ignorance of its source. Only one certainty then imposes itself: a divine power is at work. (2025: 189, my translation)
Appeal to a daimōn seems, put in these terms, a declaration of epistemic humility. An important point to emphasize is that the mention of a daimōn ‘at work’ in the texts Pirenne-Delforge examines only points to an unsolved problem – ignorance of a causal source; it does not provide a solution. Philosophers of this period, sharing the same general assumptions about the natural world (that is held together by causal relations, and that it is intelligible to us), did not choose epistemic humility or seek supernatural solutions. Rather, they postulated that there existed causal powers which held the world together, and that knowledge of these powers provided insight into their workings in the world.
In the power-ful cosmologies of early and classical Greek philosophy, things happen because there are certain powers in the cosmos that are disposed to exercise themselves in a certain way, necessarily, when the appropriate circumstances arise. Powers are essentially defined by their exercise, i.e., by the type of change they or their bearer bring about; this is important to understand a contrast I want to draw here between power-ful cosmologies and a power-ful polytheistic world. Although, strictly speaking, Plato and Aristotle postdate the period considered by Pirenne-Delforge, I quote here their definition of causal powers, assuming that it reflects also what their philosophical predecessors thought.[1]
Plato’s and Aristotle’s definitions show the essential connection between a power and what it does – its effect in the world. (It is important to emphasize that ancient conceptions of cause and causal powers to which such definitions apply are much broader than those we have today. In particular, the diversity of entities considered as causes or powers in ancient ontologies extends to the physical, abstract, and transcendent realms.) Plato writes that,
In the case of a power, I refer only what it is set over and what it does, and by reference to these I call each the power it is: What is set over the same things and does the same I call the same power, what is set over something different and does something different I call a different one. (Republic, 477d1–5)
Aristotle on his part holds that,
All potentialities that conform to the same type are starting points of some kind, and are called potentialities in reference to one primary kind, which is a starting point of change in another thing or in the thing itself qua other. (Metaphysics, 1046a9–10)
When causal powers are exercised, they change the causal configuration of the world (e.g., the exercise of magnetism attracts nearby metal and displaces its position in space, thus changing the causal environment around it). Thus, a world of powers is a causal structure; this structure is the world.
A world built out of causal powers is not indeterministic or unpredictable, because the exercise of powers is governed by what is called ‘conditional necessity’: a power is essentially defined by the kind of change it or its bearer produces under appropriate circumstances. There is a one-to-one correspondence between a kind of power and a kind of change. (Thus, for example, magnetism manifests itself by attracting metal; not, for example, by making metal dissolve in water or break into pieces.) The appropriate circumstances mentioned in the definition of a power are the conditions under which it manifests itself (e.g., proximity between a magnet and metal in the case of magnetism). When these conditions are met, the powers necessarily manifest themselves. This type of necessity is called ‘conditional’ because it is not absolute but depends on the occurrence of the relevant circumstances. However, if these circumstances occur, the power cannot fail to be activated: their realization requires the activation of the power.
Therefore, in a power-ful cosmology, things happen because there are certain powers in the cosmos that are disposed to manifest themselves in a certain way, necessarily, when the appropriate circumstances arise. Thus, knowing the effect enables us to know the cause; there is no motivation for an epistemic humility of the sort that a polytheistic world of divine powers, according to Pirenne-Delforge, requires and expresses by invoking daimones.
Pirenne-Delforge does not merely give us a well-researched and well-argued answer to the question of why the Greek authors she considers mention daimones in their narratives of particular events in the world. Some god is surely the cause, but which one, men cannot understand. In a sense, as I read Pirenne-Delforge, she holds that it is their commitment to polytheism that puts men in this condition. One may speculate here about the role that polytheism might have played in relation to the development of ancient Greek philosophy and science. Pirenne-Delforge does not express herself on this point and emphasizes multiple times that her domain of inquiry does not include ancient philosophical texts (one might ask: is the boundary so neat between philosophy and non-philosophy at that time, as Pirenne-Delforge takes it to be?).
I come now, briefly, to the second very interesting view Pirenne-Delforge puts forward in the second part of the book (the last three chapters), concerning cults and ritual practices. When the Greeks do want either to attract the benevolence of a god or express gratitude for something good received from the gods, they revert to naming the relevant god directly (as succinctly explained p. 216) and not just a generic daimōn. Pirenne-Delforge makes a cogent case that this is the case, by examining literary texts, accounts of ritual practices, and material evidence (such as, e.g., inscriptions). In such cases there is no epistemic humility displayed, it seems; there is knowledge of which god is to be ‘spoken’ to.[2] It would be fascinating to speculate on how epistemic confidence in this context relate to epistemic humility in other contexts according to Pirenne-Delforge. Space limitations however do not allow me to say more on this, or to cover many other aspects of Pirenne-Delforge’s book; what I selectively cover here is what I expect a philosophically minded reader would most appreciate.
It is clear that with her excellent book Pirenne-Delforge has given much food for thought to anybody interested in the world of the ancient Greeks and in all its expressions: literature, art, religion, philosophy, etc. This is a book that will inspire, I believe, a flurry of follow-up conversations.
Notes
[1] I have argued elsewhere, in multiple publications, that for nearly all the cosmologists or philosophers of the first millennium of Western philosophy, the world was made up of causal powers.
[2] Or, at the very least, it is believed that the named god is the appropriate divine interlocutor.