Looking for Theophrastus: Travels in Search of a Lost Philosopher

"It’s about another ancient Greek philosopher. The book is called Looking for Theophrastus and it’s by Laura Beatty. This was a tip-off from Sophie , the editor of Five Books , who’d read it and liked it. I don’t know if I would have come across it in my reading generally. Laura Beatty is principally a novelist, I think, she’s written two new novels, two biographies, and a travel book. The subtitle is ‘Travels in Search of a Lost Philosopher.’ Theophrastus was slightly younger than Aristotle and came to Plato’s Academy when Plato was quite an old man. Then, when Plato died, he traveled with Aristotle, and was involved in Aristotle’s non-philosophical projects looking very closely at the nature of the world: the biological world, the geological world and so on. Theophrastus is probably best known for a book called The Characters . It’s not really famous amongst philosophers, although he was a philosopher. The Characters consist of descriptions of types of people in terms of their psychological patterns of behavior and so on, which seem very modern. But what Laura Beatty has done is take the bare bones of his life—because not all that much is known about him—and made a literal journey through the places where Theophrastus lived and tried to understand more about him. She tries to find him. Some of that involves a recreation of what might have happened. It’s imaginative biography, in a sense, and it would have to be imaginative biography to get to a book that’s around 300 pages because there isn’t so much reliable evidence about Theophrastus. It’s fascinating because even though she never steps back and says, ‘this is what I’m doing,’ she’s scrutinizing everything in the style of Theophrastus. She’s trying to describe that particular way of looking at things, where you pay attention and discover things, she’s trying to show us that through her writing. When she arrives in Greece, for example, you get a very novelistic description of her own experience of what she sees. At first, I thought it was a bit overwritten, with this colorful description of the context. But then I realized what she’s doing is actually embodying that way of seeing the world, trying to be like Theophrastus and showing us the kind of close attention to detail that he had and that is the essence of his way of doing philosophy. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He’s actually a bit like a modern philosopher that I really admire, Peter Godfrey-Smith, an Australian who writes brilliantly about octopuses and other marine life. His book, called Other Minds , about octopuses, is exactly that kind of concentrated, receptive engagement with the biological world. Through his description, he reveals more than just something neutral. He achieves a different level of understanding through that receptive attitude of somebody who wants to know, the curious mind—which is the source of philosophy, people being curious about the nature of the world. In Aristotle and Theophrastus’s day, it wasn’t so demarcated as a subject. They were intellectuals trying to understand their world with the limited equipment that they had: not limited in terms of intellect, but limited in terms of scientific apparatus, and the existing framework. Peter Godfrey-Smith is doing something similar out there snorkeling, looking at cuttlefish and arthropods and crustaceans in the sea around Australia. These are supposedly primitive animals but aren’t, he’s paying attention to what their behavior actually is and through the description of the nature of their bodies and interactions with their environment Godfrey-Smith provides a very interesting take on the nature of other minds. An octopus mind can be very sophisticated. I think Theophrastus and Aristotle were forefathers of that way of thinking. This book is fun because Beatty in her own way is doing that as well in the descriptions of her travels. She has a receptive mind. I don’t know what Classicists will make of this book. Maybe they’ll think, ‘this is just speculation, and a bit spurious, and it may not have been like that at all.’ But the speculation is hung on a framework of historical evidence and of his of Aristotle’s writing. It’s not the definitive story of what happened with Theophrastus, and it doesn’t purport to be. You can’t miss that she’s hypothesizing, it’s almost like a daydream as you go where Theophrastus went. Was he looking at this? Was he doing that? It’s openly speculative. It’s not trying to say this is how it really was, but I don’t see how else you could get into his world."