Early Greek Philosophy
For humans, the art of living, or wisdom, is not something that comes
automatically, but instead is an object of intellectual judgement. For
most people throughout history, such judgements are not made in a
systematic fashion using one's own mind, but rather are left in the
hands of authority figures who bind others to them by framing their
instruction in terms of myths, presiding over ritual, and exercising
alleged oracular powers.
In the Greek world of the early 6
th century B.C., an
unusual set of social circumstances upset this age-old pattern. The
Greeks, who had not only settled Greece itself but were also colonizing
the west coast of Turkey (known in ancient times as Ionia), southern
Italy, and Sicily, had developed numerous decentralized political and
religious structures and in some areas a kind of free-wheeling frontier
culture that stripped priests and aristocrats of their intellectual
monopoly and opened up the quest for wisdom to all.
In an atmosphere where political and economic competition was
supplemented by intellectual competition, certain men came to be
celebrated for their practical intellectual innovations. One of these
was
Thales of the Ionian city of Miletus. Thales made
the daring suggestion that the world wasn't merely the plaything of
capricious gods, but rather had a regularity to it that renders it
predictable and that can be explained by the properties of a fundamental
substance, water, which supposedly composed all of matter. Thale's
prediction of a solar eclipse on May 28
th, 585 B.C. greatly
impressed other Greeks, enough so that others were willing to propagate
his teachings and even try to improve upon them.
While Thales' astronomical prowess may only have been a simple
deduction from patterns already known to the Egyptians and the
Babylonians, his speculative physics was something completely new. For
the first time, the world was being treated as a legitimate object of
independent study. Knowledge about the world, in other words, was
conforming to observation and not to arbitrary say-so in a way that had
never been attempted before.Others from Miletus followed Thales' example. His student
Anaximander
came up with the idea that matter as such didn't have determinate
properties such as the wetness of water, but rather that there were
powers in a dynamic tension with one another operating in conjunction
with matter to produce motion and differentiation of substances.
Anaximander's student
Anaximenes thought that changes
of density could account for observed differences between substances,
with air being the most fundamental kind of matter. For all the
differences among the Milesians in the specifics of their theories, they
were united in groping for an explanation of the universe that invited
students to rely upon observation and not imagination. This in itself
was one of the most profound revolutions in the history of thought.
While the Milesians were formulating their theories, a native of the
near-by island of Samos was sparking yet another intellectual
revolution.
Pythagoras emigrated to the city of Croton
in southern Italy in 530 B.C. and set up a quasi-religious cult based
on the notion that a rule of life could be derived from a systematic
understanding of the world. While having a god-like figure that
inspried his followers as an “:Apollo from the north” is not
particularly significant for the subsequent history of philosophy, what
is important is that Pythagoras had suggested a crucial link between the
nature of the world and the content of wisdom. Pythagoras came to be
known as a lover of wisdom, or a
philosophos, from which we get
our word “philosopher.” In this manner, the scientific enterprise of
the Milesians was expanded into the field of ethics.
Pythagoras was also innovative in terms of trying to reduce his
explanations of the world to high-level abstractions involving
mathematics and geometry. While the Milesians had stressed the
properties of matter as being the key to physical explanations, the
Pythagoreans insisted that the form that matter took was really the
crucial factor. The relationship of form to substance was to greatly
vex later Greek philosophers, but the two intellectual traditions
founded by Thales and Pythagoras were to define the subject matter of
philosophy and, in the crucial concepts of form and matter, provide the
starting point for further progress in the field.
The Eleatic Challenge
Parmenides of Elea (another Greek colony in southern Italy) initiated the next great transformation of philosophy around the end of the 6
th century B.C. Having received instruction in the Milesian-oriented theories of
Xenophanes and in the Pythagorean system from
Ameinias,
Parmenides realized that the Pythagorean numerical and geometric
abstractions of form which seemed to be so fundamental to our capacity
to know the world were in conflict with the theories of change and
motion featured in the Milesian theories. Thus, the problem of
understanding the nature of truth was added to physics and ethics as a
branch of philosohpy.The specific problem that Parmenides raised was this: if to know
something is to mentally grasp its identity, then one can't claim to
know a thing whose identity was always changing. Yet, we constantly
observe things that do chage and form Milesian-like opinions that things
change according to regular patterns. Yet, a pattern of changing
identities is not an identity, so how can change be knowable? As
Parmenides put it in his poem
The Way of Truth:
“Come now, I shall speak, and you must hear and receive my
word. These are the only roads of inquiry that exist for the thinking
mind: that ‘IT IS’, and that ‘IT CANNOT NOT BE’ is the path of
Persuasion, for Truth attends it. Another road, that ‘IT IS NOT’, and
that ‘IT MUST BE NON-EXISTENT’ is a road that I declare to be totally
indiscernable. For you could neither know what is non-existent, for that
is unattainable, nor could you describe it. For it is the same thing
which is for thinking and for being.”
According to this view, the IT IS must be unchanging over time in
order to be comprehensible, for any stability of comprehension implies a
stability of being over time—a stability that is sorely lacking in any
perception of change. All motion, all transformations, all acts of
creation must by this argument be a mere illusion. The actual nature of
reality, Parmenides concluded, must take the form of a single
unchangeable, indvisible, featureless sphere.Parmenides' student
Zeno developed a number of
striking paradoxes in support of the Eleatic theory. Some of the more
noteworthy ones include the problem that unlimited divisibility implies
an infinite number of parts which cannot have a definite magnitude, that
the existence of more than one thing would imply an infinite number of
things in order to fill the universe, and that motion of an object
implies rest at each moment of time if the object is to take up a space
equal to itself.If it be objected that we can directly observe that the Eleatic
description of the universe is false, then the problem is to revise our
understanding of the nature of the world in order to make knowledge
possible. Merely observing the changing identity of things is nt
enough; philosophy of the 5
th century B.C. needed a theory of
causality to account for man's ability to know specific patterns of
change and to resolve the puzzles posed by Parmenides and Zeno.
Post-Eleatic Responses
The Eleatics marked a crucial divide in the history of philosophy,
with the post-Eleatic philosophers being obliged to come up with precise
world-views that formed the basis of comprehensive philosophical
systems. The problem of causality and accounting for change and
knowledge became a pressing issue for the successors of the Milesians
and the Pythagoreans.The first answer to the Eleatics was offered by a contemporary of Parmenides,
Heraclitus.
Like Parmenides, Heraclitus had also received instruction at the hands
of Xenophanes, but there the similarity ended. Heraclitus basically took
the systems of Anaximander and Anaximenes and added a crucially
important element: he argued that there was a cosmic fire pervading the
universe that was intelligently directing all change. As he put it:
“The cosmic order, which is the same for all, no god nor man
has made it, but it has always existed, does exist, and will exist;
ever-living fire, being kindled in measures and being quenched in
measures.”
This fire was similar to Anaximenes' air, or
pneuma, in some
respects, but is a separate kind of element from the matter it is
directing and not the sole kind of matter as was typical of earlier
Milesian theories. Later, followers of Heraclitus substituted air for
fire in his system, but in Heraclitus we can see the beginnings of the
basic pneumatic response to the Eleatics. In brief, the Pneumatic
world-view is that causality is strictly determinate, associated with an
intelligent substance found throughout the universe. Forms are
therefore a product of consciousness, being imposed on matter by an
omnipresent, intelligent kind of matter. Our comprehension of the world
is basically a recognition of this cosmic ordering principle inherent in
the
pneuma and not of the specific identities of particular
things as such. The most famous saying attributed to Heraclitus is that
“everything flows,” which seems to flatly contradict the conditions of
knowledge that Parmenides insisted on.The second answer to the Eleatics was made in the early 5
th century B.C. by
Anaxagoras.
Unlike the pneumatic claim that an intelligent substance permeated the
universe, Anaxagoras instead argued that the cosmic mind, or
nous,
that ordered the universe was immaterial. This mind transcended the
material world, but directed everything within it. As Anaxagoras
explained his Noetic system:
“Other things share in a portion of all things, but Mind is
boundless and rules itself, and is mingled with no other thing, but
remains apart by itself. For if it were not apart but had been mised
with any other thing, it would have shared in everything if it had been
mixed with anything. For, as I have said above, there is a portion of
everything in everything. And if other things had been mixed with Mind,
they would have prevented it from exercising the rule which it does when
apart by itself. For Mind is the slenderest and purest of all things.
Mind is the ruling force in all things that have life whether greater or
smaller.”
A Noetic system also demands some mechanism by which the immaterial
mind orders matter. Anaxagoras attempted to solve this problem by
describing the universe as a mixture of different kinds of infinitely
divisbile components, with the cosmic mind regulating the distribution
of each component over space. Local concentrations of a given kind of
component would give rise to a macroscopic thing with properties similar
to that of its preponderant component (a doctrine called the
homoeomerous theory of matter).The third answer to the Eleatics came later in the 5
th century B.C. by
Leucippus and
Democritus.
These philosophers realized that the Eleatic dilemma of identity and
change could be resolved without invoking a cosmic intelligence of any
kind, whether material or immaterial. In their theory, the universe
consisted of unchanging indivisble particles, the
atomoi or atoms, moving within an empty void.Since the identiy of the microscopic atoms is unchanging and the
interactions between atoms is in accord with definite causal laws, it is
possible to reduce macroscopic identities to a combination of fixed
microscopic identities and fixed causal relationships among these atomic
identities. In effect, each atom is like an Eleatic universe as far as
the conservation of its identity over time is concerned, but the
Atomists expanded their notion of identity to include causal
interactions among fixed identities which can lead to changing
interrelationships between the atoms.
Further Developments in Noetic Philosophy: the Socratics
Greek philosophy in the mid to late 5
th century B.C.
underwent rapid development, as an informal educational system grew up
around private tutors known as sophists. These sophists continued and
amplified the Eleatic tradition of challenging conventional ideas and
common sense at every turn, forcing the various post-Eleatic schools of
thought to greatly refine their teachings.A student of Anaxagoras,
Archelaus, transmitted the Noetic system to Athens, where it was taught to
Socrates.
Socrates shifted the focus of Noetic thought to ethics, suggesting that
humans too were regulated by the cosmic mind and only human ignorance
stood in the way of adherence to the proper art of living. In contrast
to the amoral tendencies of the sophists, Socrates gained great fame
portraying virtue as a given for the knowledgable wise man, and vice as a
product of ignorance. Socrates was too famous for his own good, as his
incessant moralizing (often coupled with a disdain for social
convention), association with disreputable politicians, and
condescending attitude towards the more tradition-minded masses made him
an easy target for popular scorn. Convicted of atheism and corruption
of the youth, Socrates was sentenced to death and, by willingly drinking
a cup of hemlock, became the most famous philosophical martyr of all
times.
Plato, one the aristocratic students of Socrates,
built on Socratic teachings as well as his subsequent studies of
Pythagoreanism and his personal experiences as a courtier in Sicily.
Amending the Anaxagorean model of form-matter relationships, Plato
argued that there had to be a separate world of forms that provided the
templates from which the cosmic mind (characterized as a
demiurge
or craftsman) ordered the world of matter. Since the demiurge couldn't
make perfect copies of the original forms from base matter, Plato took
the radical step of suggesting that our insight into ideal forms
provides more certain knowledge than empirical observations of material
objects. Plato, perhaps inspired by Pythagorean cults, also developed
the view that the state ought to take the central role in promoting
wisdom, using rigid social stratification, indoctrination, and coercion
to closely govern every aspect of a citizen's life.
A student of Plato's,
Aristotle, ultimately came to
reject the Platonic emphasis on the imperfections of matter and the
perfection of an other-worldly realm. Instead of displacing forms off in
their own separate world, Aristotle saw forms as being embodied in
material objects via some external agency. While there is still an
immaterial cosmic intelligence that is the “unmoved mover” of the entire
universe (and also 55 immaterial celestial intelligences to account for
specific planetary motions), material objects can act as secondary
movers of other things, implanting forms into them. By observing such
objects, one can discern via empirical observation the forms that govern
motion and development as well as the imperfections of matter.
Generally speaking, Aristotle required fewer transcendent props to
explain how the world works.
Further Developments in Pneumatic Philosophy: the Stoics
Another major step in the development in Greek philosophy took place at the beginning of the 3
rd
century B.C. While Plato and Aristotle left established schools to
carry on their teachings, the non-Noetic traditions underwent a
resurgence at this time, a period known as the Hellenistic era. The
Eleatic and Sophist tradition of disputatious criticism was carried on
by the Skeptics, while Atomism, as we shall see below, was being
transformed by Epicurus. Pneumatic teachings also underwent a revival,
beginning with
Zeno of Citium, a city in Cyprus. Zeno taught at the painted colonnade, or
stoa poikile in Athens, hence the name “Stoic” for his school. Zeno and his successors, notably
Cleanthes and
Chrysippus,
combined the physical teachings of Heraclitus with a severe version of
Socratic ethics (associated with a group known as the “Cynics”).
Stoicism later became very influential among the upper classes of Rome,
especially under the influence of
Epictetus and the Emperor
Marcus Aurelius.
The Stoic system puts a strong emphasis on working out the logical
implications of a universe ordered by the pneuma, exploring the pneuma's
role as a manifestion of rational intelligence, as a unifying principle
of nature, and even as a supreme divinity. Ethics was portrayed as
conformnity with this cosmic natural reason, understood by humans as
virtues that serve as a detailed script for how one should behave. This
duty to live in accordance with natural dictates transcended all other
values, including one's own survival and happiness.
This conception of nature was not without its ambiguities, however.
Stoicism is perfectionist in its treatment of the virtues—the virtuous
life being an all-or-nothing proposition—thus requiring that one supress
all passions that stand in the way of virtue, confronting one with a
fundamental conflict between reason and desire. Moreover, there is a
tension in Stoic ethics between the organic unity of nature provided by
the pneuma, which prompts one to subordinate private interests to the
common good of society; and the rationality of the pneuma, which prompts
one to think and act independently of social conventions and
constraints.
Notwithstanding the practical difficulties posed by Stoic ethics,
Stoicism came to define a kind of logical culmination of the pneumatic
(and even in some respects the noetic) view that causality in nature
requires an external intelligence, imposing strict moral duties on the
wise man that are known through reason. Where the Skeptics doubted the
ability of rational mind even to know anything, the Stoics tended
towards the opposite extreme of elevating reason to being the master of
everything. It is amid these sharply contrasting views about the nature
of reason that fluorished in the Hellenistic age that Epicureanism was
born.
Further Developments in Atomistic Philosophy: Epicurus
The
history and
beliefs
of Epicurus and his school are recounted elsewhere on this webstite,
but the story of how Greek philosophy developed up through the
Hellenistic age provides crucial insights into development of
Epicureanism.Epicurean physics was rooted in the atomistic tradition, with one
significant innovation by Epicurus. Epicurus realized that the
deterministic character of Democritus's system was fatal to the notion
of a freedom of choice that is inherent in any sensible conception of
ethics, and that it was also problematic for explaining how
inhomogeneities arise in nature. Epicurus therefore introduced the
notion of the atomic swerve, where the path of an atom is no longer
simply a function of the other atoms it interacts with, but also subject
to some random variation. This leads to a strikingly modern conception
of physics, where the traditional atomistic conception of particles
with fixed identities and variable interrelationships is supplemented by
what modern scientists would classify as a quantum indeterminacy.Given the Skeptic assault on reason, Epicurus's reaction was to
formulate canonics as a separate branch of his philosophy, a kind of
epistemology that highlights an unconditional acceptance of sensations
and thus firmly anchors human knowledge in reality. While other schools
stressed subjects like classification and deductive logic, Epicurus
realized that the mechanics of reasoning were less important to the
philosophical enterprise than comprehending the link between nature and
human understanding. Canonics thus became an essential preliminary to
the modified atomistic physics.
The capstone of the Epicurean system was its ethics. Certain
Sophists from Libya, known as the Cyrenaics, had taken the controversial
position that pleasure was the ultimate purpose of life. The various
advocates of rational virtues, including Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and
the Stoics had all denounced pleasure-seeking as a threat to virtuous
conduct and something fit only for animals, though some like Aristotle
and the Stoics were careful to portray the virtuous wise man as being
happy in some sense. One of Epicurus's greatest achievements was to
refute the false dichotomies of reason versus passion and of virtue
versus pleasure-seeking, affirming instead that reason and virtue are
highly instrumental to the pleasurable life.
With a number of profound insights about human psychology, Epicurus
set aside the naive hedonism of the Cyrenaics and instead undertook a
serious examination of what attitudes and patterns of behavior were
necessary for optimizing the pursuit of happiness. Using this approach,
Epicurus demonstrated that the virtues, understood as broadly-defined
constraints on conduct rather than as a script for living the good life,
were actually instrumental to optimizing one's pursuit of happiness.
Pleasure is indeed the highest good for humans, but the fullest possible
appreciation of pleasure creates a need for the prudent management of
the flow of pleasures over time and for a mental grasp of the art of
living. In short, our best hope for happiness is for reason and pleasure
to work together.Epicurus's empiricism, atomistic materialism, and rational hedonism
thus emerged as a powerful counterpoint to the demoralizing retreat from
philosophy preached by the Skeptics, and to the philosophical
deification of the cosmos and self-abnegation preached by the Stoics.
The Legacy of Classical Greek Philosophy
The Hellenistic age was the high point of Greek philosophy. Like the
followers of Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics and the Epicureans were
organized into formal educational institutions in Athens, perpetuating
their teachings long after the founders had died. However, the social
conditions that had promoted the fluorishing of intellectual competition
were gradually eroded in the following centuries, as political and
later religious centralization under the Hellenistic monarchs and later
under Roman rule increasingly marginalized philosophical activity. Both
Epicureans and Stoics had their moments of relative popularity when
they were introduced into the Latin-speaking world, but for the most
part it was a religious reaction against philosophy that ultimately came
to prevail in the Roman Empire. Only one significant new philosophical
school, the Neoplatonists (the most famous member being
Plotinus)
emerged during this period, but even this movement reflected the
broader trend towards supernaturalism and the restoration of
authoritarianism. Eventually, even the four schools in Athens were shut
down in the 6
th century A.D.
The truly astonishing aspect of this decline, however, was that
ancient Greek philosophy did not disappear altogether during the Dark
Ages, but instead arose Phoenix-like to become the essential substrate
of secular thought in the modern world. Ironically, the religious
opponents of philosophy conserved some of it and even embedded the old
philosophies into their theologies. In Europe, Aristotle became
enormously influential as the progenitor of the Scholastic philosophers,
followed by the rediscovery of the other surviving works of ancient
Greek philosophy during the 15
th and 16
th
centuries A.D. Thus, the bold speculations of Thales and Pythagoras,
the struggle to put knowledge on a systematic basis began by Parmenides,
and the still familiar outlines of the systems developed by the various
Socratic and Hellenistic schools, continue to shape our thinking today.
Σπάνιο εύρημα Γραμμικής Β γραφής στο Αρχαιολογικό Μουσείο Ηρακλείου, σε ειδώλιο ταύρου πάνω σε χρυσό συλλαβογραμμάτων ύψους 1,4 χιλ.Φανταστείτε έναν χρυσό δίσκο μεγέθους φακής όπου επάνω κάποιος έχει
χαράξει τη λέξη «σεβαστή». Για τον 21ο αιώνα, και την τεχνολογία που
διαθέτουμε σήμερα, τέτοιες «μικροχαράξεις» δεν αποτελούν αντικείμενο
ιδιαίτερου θαυμασμού. Οταν, όμως, πρόκειται για τον 14ο αιώνα π.Χ. και
για Γραμμική Β γραφή, όλα αλλάζουν. Η σπουδαία αυτή ανακάλυψη μάς
έρχεται από την Κρήτη και αφορά ένα μοναδικό Μυκηναϊκό ειδώλιο του 14ου
αι. π.Χ., στο οποίο έχουν χαραχθεί με μικροτεχνολογία τέσσερα σύμβολα
της Γραμμικής Β, κάτι που συναντάται για πρώτη φορά στον κόσμο, όπως μας
ενημέρωσε δίνοντάς μας όλα τα απαραίτητα στοιχεία ο δρ Μηνάς
Τσικριτσής, ειδικός στις αιγαιακές γραφές.
