cause and victor davis hanson and thucydides and forgiveness and sunflower and procatarctic and proegumenal

Every essay I write arises out of something. Unlike God, I don't create ex nihilo. Two things stimulated these several essays on "cause." First, I had a conversation with a friend yesterday on the word "forgiveness" after I had written three essays in which I argue that the meaning of the forgiveness, at least as Wiesenthal presented it, is quite difficult. She disagreed. So, we talked about it. This got me to think about easy and difficult words in general, but didn't take me into "cause's" neighborhood. Second, when relaxing, I happened to hear Victor Davis Hanson speak eloquently about his latest book on the Thucydides, the Peloponnesian War and the nature of warfare and power. Among other things, he said that Thucydides' major contribution was twofold: (1) to combine a series of seemingly random skirmishes over a 27-year period and call it "The Peloponnesian War" (after all, when do a bunch of seemingly unrelated "raids" or events become one big event?) and (2) to use the Greek word "prophasis," (which we translate "pretext"), differentiate it from the traditional word "aitia," translated "cause," and bring it into his analysis. By using "prophasis," Thucydides now had a powerful term at his disposal for understanding the nature of human ambition or motivation. Often when I combine two things in my mind I end up dreaming about them and coming up with weird mixtures (such as some helmeted person forgiving someone else in the Pelopponesian War), but this time I managed to combine the two ideas in a waking state, and I found a difficult word to study--"cause." Actually, I "backed into" cause in the following way.

Begining with Prophasis

I first decided to follow up Hanson's thought by looking up the usage of "prophasis" in ancient Greek literature. Since I keep the big Liddell-Scott Greek dictionary on my dining room table (what better food to eat?), I simply took it and read. The word is a noun and is derived from the verb "prophaino," which means to "show forth, manifest, appear" but the noun takes on a slightly different flavor. The principal appearance of "prophasis" seems to be in the historians and rhetoricians, and it may be translated "motive" or "alleged motive" or "plea" or "pretext" (i.e., that which shows forth or appears) Thucydides has a passage which is transliterated "the prophasis of the aitia," and which may be translated, "the plea in the case" or "the basis of the charge." Thus, we see that prophasis was a significant word in Greek, and was to be distinguished from the basic word for "cause," aitia.

I wondered whether prophasis made the perilous journey into English intact, and I was pleased to see that indeed it had. I should have suspected that medicine had taken it over, but since I had temporarily forgotten how linguistically imperialistic that profession is, I blissfully opened the OED only to discover that prophasis appeared as early as in a 1681 medical work to mean, clinging to the literal significance in the Greek, "the appearing or shewing of a thing." By 1693 prophasis meant "a fore-knowledge in Diseases." Thus, the subtle shift from a manifestation of something, derived from the literal meaning of the verb "prophaino," to the cause of something was taking place. Gone, of course, was any Thucydidean distinction between "aitia" and "prophasis." But we were now in the realm of cause, and prophasis could suggest what we might call an "antecedent" cause. Then, Robert Mayne's 1860 Expository Lexicon of the Terms..of Medical and General Science took me a step further when he defined prophasis as follows:

"an old term for the remote, or procatarctic cause of disease; but Lindenus seems to have taken if for the antecedent, or proximate cause, and the predisposition of the body to disease."

If you read this definition carefully, all of a sudden you not only have new words that you don't know (such as procatarctic), but you have the concept of cause being divided up into "remote" and "antecedent," which may also be called the "proximate" cause. Then you throw in a dash of "predisposition," bake for 30 minutes and serve warm. By the mid-19th century, then, I saw that the concept of cause, even in the medical world, had become rather complex. It seemed as though we had at least three things with respect to cause: (1) remote or procatarctic; (2) antecedent or proximate; and (3) predisposition.

Continuing the Journey

So, I continued my journey by grasping the most obvious straw: procatarctic. I checked it out in the Century, and it gave a quotation using procatarctical, which means the same as procatarctic (phew!), which made my mind spin. Here is the relevant part:

"for the physicians reduce almost all diseases to three causes: procatarctical, proegumenal, and synetical or containing."

I took a deep gulp and saw that I had to continue my journey.

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