144 struggling with the worldMuch in the history of Greek thought contradicted the assumptions of
this agenda, both before and aft er the time of Plato and Aristotle: the
metaphysics of becoming inaugurated by Heraclitus; the proto- scientifi c
speculations of Anaximander about the turning of everything into
everything else; the explanation, in the naturalism of Democritus, of
distinctions in the macroscopic world as transient expressions of a
ceaseless reordering of the fundamental constituents of matter; and the
view in Plotinus of visible natural kinds as the momentary last stops in
a series of continuous emanations from the one, undivided, and ulti-
mate reality. Nevertheless, the idea of a permanent repertory of natural
kinds, developed by Plato and by Aristotle in such diff erent ways, was
to have a decisive eff ect on the main line of thinking in the theologies
and philosophies of the Semitic religions of transcendence (whether on
an Aquinas, a Maimonides, or an Averroes) and, more generally, on the
role that speculative thought played in the development of the orienta-
tion to life that I call the struggle with the world.
If the thinkers of these religions had not taken such an ontological
agenda from the ancient Greeks, they might have received it from some-
one else. It is an endeavor pursued many times, with in de pen dent
origins but similar motives and strategies, in the world history of phi-
losophy, no less systematically, for example, in the Vaisesika school of
classical Indian thought and in the related logic of Navya- Niyaya than
in the metaphysics of Aristotle.
Th e project of classical ontology imposed a two- sided insult on the
vision of world, self, and salvation that was central to the Near Eastern
mono the isms and that survived, reshaped, in the secular projects of
po liti cal and personal liberation.
One side of the insult was the impossibility of making sense, within
the limits of this way of thinking, of the primacy of the personal over the
impersonal: a primacy of both reality and value. For the mode of thought
that is informed by the project of classical ontology, everything that has
to do with the personal— the merely personal, one is always tempted to
say in this tradition— falls under a cloud of suspicion. Th e experience of
personality and of interpersonal encounter poses an at least potential
threat to the recognition of what is deemed to be most real and most
valuable: the impersonal structure of a world that is composed of a
closed set of types of being or of natural kinds. Even when the personal