Faculties and evidence

Use in the book

B 32 gives one of the most explicit surviving accounts of how the listener should inquire. The imperative is comprehensive: observe by every available means, and understand each thing in the way in which it becomes clear. Sight is not to receive an automatic privilege over hearing; hearing is not to overwhelm the evidence associated with the tongue; no other bodily avenue to understanding is to be denied its appropriate trust. The body supplies differentiated access, not one undivided and infallible channel.

The passage is sometimes easy to misread as either wholesale confidence in sensation or a rejection of it in favour of pure thought. Neither follows from its wording. The warning in B 2 concerns restricted capacities and the inflated conclusions people draw from their encounters. B 32 answers with disciplined use of the faculties. B 172 then directs the hearer to see Love with mind rather than sit staring in amazement. Such intellectual attention does not have to contradict B 32: a power whose operations are evident through relations may require a mode of recognition different from looking at a visible object.

B 212 adds a vocabulary of witness. The sun's warmth and brightness, rain's dark chill, and earth's solidity are offered as evidence for a preceding account. Familiar experience serves an explanatory argument. In B 133 the standard highway of human persuasion, sight and touch, cannot bring the divine subject within reach. The limitation applies to that subject; the fragment does not invalidate the faculties in every inquiry.

The range of palamē helps maintain the connection between knowing and handling. The hearer grasps by faculties; Cypris shapes in palms. It would be excessive to deduce an entire theory from this lexical relation, but it shows why a translation that turns all bodily language into abstract “reason” would lose something important. Understanding is repeatedly instructed through limbs, inward parts, attention, and skilled practice.

Astonishment itself has different roles. B 172 warns against merely staring in amazement, while B 352 calls the emergence of varied mortal forms a wonder to behold. The difference is between amazement that leaves the hearer uncomprehending and a spectacle encountered through an explanatory account; wonder is not rejected wholesale.

Places to read

1. B 2.1–2Means of grasping are narrow and dispersed through limbs.
2. B 3.9–13Every faculty must receive trust according to its distinctive evidence.
3. B 17.21–262The listener is instructed to recognize Love with mind.
4. B 21.1–6Visible and felt phenomena are presented as witnesses to the argument.
5. B 133The divine subject is inaccessible by ordinary sight and touch.
6. B 35.16–17The diversity emerging through mixture is called a wonder to behold.

Translation in this edition

“Faculty” is an interpretive English rendering, not an abstract Greek noun identical in every use. The verse's tongue may evoke speech, taste, or evidence given through that organ; this edition's “plain evidence of the tongue” does not by itself settle the question. Its “channel for understanding” also retains the bodily image of poros.