Out of Our Minds

by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

  For science to thrive, the idea of it was not enough. People needed to observe nature systematically, test the ensuing hypotheses, and classify the resulting data.52 The method we call empiricism answered those needs. Where did it come from? We can detect intellectual origins in Taoist doctrines of nature, and early applications in medicine.

  Magical and divinatory practices of early Taoism privileged observation and experiment. Confucians often dismiss Taoism as magical mumbo-jumbo, while Westerners often revere it as mystical, but the only Taoist word for a temple literally means ‘watch-tower’ – a platform from which to study nature. Commonplace observations launch Taoist teachings. Water, for instance, reflects the world, permeates every other substance, yields, embraces, changes shape at a touch, and yet erodes the hardest rock. Thus it becomes the symbol of all-shaping, all-encompassing, all-pervading Tao. In the Taoist image of a circle halved by a serpentine line, the cosmos is depicted like two waves mingling. For Taoists wisdom is attainable only through the accumulation of knowledge. They sideline magic by seeing nature as resembling any beast to be tamed or foe to be dominated: you must know her first. Taoism impels empirical habits, which probably reached the West from China. Chinese science has always been weak on theory, strong on technology, but it is probably no coincidence that the modern tradition of experimental science flourished in the West in the first millennium bce, when ideas were travelling back and forth across Eurasia, and resumed – never again to be reversed – in the thirteenth century, at a time, as we shall see, of greatly multiplied contacts between the extremities of the landmass, when numerous Chinese ideas and inventions were reaching Europe across the steppelands and the Silk Roads.53

  Some of the earliest evidence of empiricism in practice is identifiable in medical lore.54 That all illness is physically explicable is unquestioned today but was a strange idea when it was first proposed. Like any abnormal state, including madness, illness could be the result of possession or infestation by a spirit. Some diseases could have material causes, others spiritual. Or a mixture of the two could be responsible. Or sickness could be divine retribution for sin. In China and Greece, from about the middle of the first millennium bce professional healers tried to work out the balance. Controversy between magic and medicine arose in consequence; or was it just between rival forms of magic? In an incident in China, attributed by the chronicle that recorded it to 540 bce, an official told his prince to rely on diet, work, and personal morale for bodily health, not the spirits of rivers, mountains, and stars. Nearly two hundred years later the Confucian scholar Xunzi scorned a man who, ‘having got rheumatism from dampness, beats a drum and boils a suckling pig as an offering to the spirits’. Result: ‘a worn-out drum and a lost pig, but he will not have the happiness of recovering from sickness’.55 In Greece in the late fifth century bce, secular physicians contended with rivals who were attached to temples. The lay school condemned patients to emetics, bloodletting, and capricious diets, because they thought that health was essentially a state of equilibrium between four substances in human bodies: blood, phlegm, and black and yellow bile. Adjust the balance and you alter the patient’s state of health. The theory was wrong, but genuinely scientific, because its advocates based it on observation of the substances the body expels in pain or sickness. Epilepsy was assumed to be a form of divine possession until a treatise sometimes attributed to Hippocrates proposed a naturalistic explanation. The text advances a bizarre proof of its impressive conclusion: find a goat exhibiting symptoms like those of epilepsy. ‘If you cut open the head, you will find that the brain is … full of fluid and foul-smelling, convincing proof that the disease and not the deity is harming the body … I do not believe’, the Hippocratic writer went on, ‘that the Sacred Disease is any more divine or sacred than any other disease but, on the contrary, has specific characteristics and a definite cause … I believe that human bodies cannot be polluted by a god.’56

  Temple healing survived alongside professional medicine. Religious explanations of disease retained adherents when the secular professionals were baffled – which they often were: folk medicine, homeopathy, faith healing, quackery, miracles, and psychoanalysis can all still help nowadays when conventional therapies fail. Nonetheless, medics of the first millennium bce revolutionized healing, spoke and acted for science, and started a presumption that has gained ground ever since: nothing needs to be explained in divine terms. Biology, chemistry, and physics can – or, given a bit more time, will – account for everything.

  Science finds purpose hard to detect. It raises suspicion that the world is purposeless – in which case, a lot of early orthodoxies crumble. If the world is a random event, it was not made for humans. We shrink to insignificance. What Aristotle called the final cause – the purpose of a thing, which explains its nature – becomes an incoherent notion. Materialist thinkers still assert with pride that the whole notion of purpose is superstitious and that it is pointless to ask why the world exists or why it is as it is. In around 200 bce in China, the sage Liezi anticipated them. He used a small boy in an anecdote as a mouthpiece for purposelessness, presumably to evade orthodox critics of so dangerous an idea. When – so his story went – a pious host praised divine bounty for lavish provender, ‘Mosquitoes’, the little boy observed, ‘suck human blood, and wolves devour human flesh, but we do not therefore assert that Heaven created man for their benefit.’ About three hundred years later, the greatest-ever exponent of a purposeless cosmos, Wang Chong, expressed himself with greater freedom. Humans in the cosmos, he said, ‘live like lice in the folds of a garment. You are unaware of fleas buzzing in your ear. So how could God even hear men, let alone concede their wishes?’57

  In a purposeless universe, God is redundant. Atheism becomes conceivable.58 ‘The fool hath said in his heart’, sang the psalmist, ‘there is no God.’ But what did this mean? Accusations of atheism in ancient times rarely amount to outright denial of God. Anaxagoras in the mid-fifth century bce was the first philosopher prosecuted under the anti-atheism laws of Athens; but his creed was not atheism as we now know it. His only alleged offences were to call the sun a hot stone and say the moon was ‘made of earth’. If Protagoras was an atheist, he wore agnosticism’s mask. He supposedly said, ‘Concerning the gods, I do not know whether they exist or not. For many are the obstacles to knowledge: the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life.’59 Socrates was condemned for atheism only because the God he acknowledged was too subtle for popular Athenian taste. Diogenes of Sinope was an irrepressibly sceptical ascetic farceur, who supposedly exchanged witticisms with Alexander the Great and reputedly plucked a chicken to debunk Socrates’s definition of man as a featherless biped. His hearers and readers in antiquity generally regarded his allusions to the gods as ironic.60

  By about the end of the first century ce, Sextus Empiricus, who specialized in exploding other people’s ideas, could express unambiguous rejection of belief. He is proof of how unoriginal Marx was in dismissing religion as the opiate of the masses. Quoting an adage already half a millennium old in his day, Sextus suggested, ‘Some shrewd man invented fear of the gods’ as a means of social control. Divine omnipotence and omniscience were bogies invented to suppress freedom of conscience. ‘If they say’, Sextus concluded, ‘that God controls everything, they make him the author of evil. We speak of the gods but express no belief and avoid the evil of the dogmatizers.’61

  Rejection of God is intelligible in broader contexts: retreat from rationalism, rehabilitation of sense perception as a guide to truth, recovery of materialism. Materialism is the default state of incurious minds and, as we have seen, predated most of the other -isms in this book (see here). Crudely simple-minded, and therefore, perhaps, long rejected, materialism was ripe for reassertion by the mid-first millennium bce when the obscure but intriguing Indian sage, Ajita Kesakambala, revived it. Later, outraged denunciations by Buddhist critics are the only surviving sources; if they are reliable, Ajita denied the existence of any w
orld beyond the here and now. Everything, he maintained, including humans, was physical, composed of earth, air, fire, and water. ‘When the body dies’, he asserted, ‘fool and wise alike are cut off and perish. They do not survive after death.’ When he said that there was no point in pious conduct and no real difference between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ deeds, he also perfectly anticipated a perhaps distinct but related tradition: a system of values that places quantifiable goods, such as wealth and physical pleasure, above morals or intellectual or aesthetic pleasures, or asserts that the latter are merely misunderstood manifestations of the former.62 Mainstream Buddhists, Jains, and Hindus never fully suppressed Indian materialism.

  Meanwhile, a similar materialist tradition persisted in Greece, represented and perhaps initiated by Democritus of Abdera, a wandering scholar whose life spanned the turn of the fifth and fourth centuries bce. He generally gets the credit for being the first to deny that matter is continuous. He claimed instead that everything is made of tiny, discrete particles, which make substances different from each other by zooming around in different patterns, like specks of dust in a sunbeam. The doctrine was remarkable, because it so closely resembles the world modern science depicts; indeed, we think of atomic theory as model science: a reliable guide to the true nature of the universe. Yet Democritus and his collaborators achieved it by unaided contemplation. The argument they thought decisive was that because things move, there must be space between them, whereas, if matter were continuous, there would be no space. Not surprisingly, few opponents were convinced. The scientific consensus in the Western world remained hostile to the atomic theory for most of the next two and a half millennia.

  Epicurus, who died in 270 bce, was in the dissenting minority. His name is now indelibly linked with the pursuit of physical pleasure, which he recommended, though with far more restraint than in the popular image of Epicureanism as sinful self-indulgence. His interpretation of the atomic theory was more important in the history of ideas, because in the world he imagined – monopolized by atoms and voids – there is no room for spirits. Nor is there scope for fate, as atoms are subject to ‘random swerves’. Nor can there be any such thing as an immortal soul, since atoms, which are perishable matter, comprise everything. Gods do not exist except in fantasies from which we have nothing to hope and nothing to fear. Materialists have never ceased to deploy Epicurus’s formidable arguments.63

  Materialists were simplifiers who sidelined big, unanswerable questions about the nature of reality. Other philosophers responded by focusing on practical issues. Pyrrho of Elis was among them. He was one of those great eccentrics who inspire anecdotes. Accompanying Alexander to India Pyrrho allegedly imitated the indifference of the naked sages he met there. He was absent-minded and accident-prone, which made him seem unworldly. On board ship on the way home, he admired and shared a pig’s unpanicky response to a storm. He turned on reason with the same indifference. You can find, he said, equally good reasons on offer on both sides of any argument. The wise man, therefore, may as well resign from thinking and judge by appearances. He also pointed out that all reasoning starts from assumptions; therefore none of it is secure. Mozi had developed a similar insight in China around the beginning of the fourth century bce: most problems, he averred, were matters of doubt, because no evidence was truly current. ‘As for what we now know’, he asked, ‘is it not mostly derived from past experience?’64 From such lines of thought scepticism proceeded: in its extreme form, the idea that nothing is knowable and that the very notion of knowledge is delusive.

  Paradoxical as it may seem, science and scepticism throve together, since if reason and experience are equally unreliable one may as well prefer experience and the practical advantages it can teach. In second-century bce China, for instance, The Tao of the Huainan Masters told of Yi the archer: on the advice of a sage he sought the herb of immortality in the far west, unaware that it was growing outside his door: impractical wisdom is worthless, however well informed.65 Among Taoist writers’ favourite characters are craftsmen who know their work and rationalists who persuade them to do it otherwise, with ruinous results.

  ‌Morals and Politics

  If the sages’ efforts led to science and scepticism, a further strand encouraged thinking about ethics and politics: minds unconcerned about the distinction between truth and falsehood can turn to that between good and evil. To make men good, or constrain them from evil, one obvious resource is the state.

  In Greece, for instance, after Plato and Aristotle had seemingly exhausted the interest of epistemology, philosophers turned to the problems of how to deliver the best practical choices for personal happiness or for the good of society. Altruism, moderation, and self-discipline were the components identified in stoicism. ‘Show me’, said Epictetus, an ex-slave who became a famous teacher in Nero’s Rome, ‘one who is sick and yet happy, in peril and yet happy, dying and yet happy, in exile or disgrace and yet happy. By the gods, I would see a Stoic!’66 Happiness is hard to fit into a history of ideas because so many thinkers, and so many unreflective hedonists, have sought it and defined it in contrasting ways, but Stoics were its most effective partisans in the West: their thinking had an enormous effect on Christians, who esteemed a similar list of virtues and espoused a similar formula for happiness. Stoicism supplied, in effect, the source of the guiding principles of the ethics of most Western elites ever since its emergence. Further Stoic prescriptions, such as fatalism and indifference as a remedy for pain, were uncongenial in Christianity, but resembled teachings from the far end of Eurasia, especially those of the Buddha and his followers.67

  Almost all the ideas covered in this chapter so far were spin-offs and sidelines from the sages’ main job, as their patrons and pupils conceived it: politics. But all political thinking is shaped by moral and philosophical assumptions. You can predict thinkers’ place in the political spectrum by looking at how optimistic or pessimistic they are about the human condition. On the one hand, optimists, who think human nature is good, want to liberate the human spirit to fulfil itself. Pessimists, who think humans are irremediably wicked or corrupt, prefer restraining or repressive institutions that keep people under control.

  Humans like to claim they have a moral consciousness unique in the animal kingdom. The evidence lies in our awareness of good, and our willingness to do evil. So are we misguidedly benevolent, or inherently malign? It was a key question for the sages. We are still enmeshed in the consequences of their answers. Most of them thought human nature was essentially good. Confucius represented the optimists. He thought the purpose of the state was to help people fulfil their potential. ‘Man’, he said, ‘is born for uprightness. If he lose it and yet live, it is merely luck.’68 Hence the political doctrines of Confucianism, which demanded that the state should liberate subjects to fulfil their potential, and of Greek democracy, which entrusted citizens with a voice in affairs of state even if they were poor or ill-educated. On the other hand were the pessimists. ‘The nature of man is evil – his goodness is only acquired by training’, said Xunzi, for instance, in the mid-third century bce. For him, humans emerged morally beslimed from a primeval swamp of violence. Slowly, painfully, progress cleansed and raised them. ‘Hence the civilizing influence of teachers and laws, the guidance of rites and justice. Then courtesy appears, cultured behaviour is observed and good government is the consequence.’69 Optimism and pessimism remain at the root of modern political responses to the problem of human nature. Liberalism and socialism emphasize freedom, to release human goodness; conservatism emphasizes law and order, to restrain human wickedness. So is man – understood as a noun of common gender – good or bad? The Book of Genesis offered a widely favoured but logically dodgy answer. God made us good and free; the abuse of freedom made us bad. But if man was good, how could he use freedom for evil? Optimism’s apologists eluded the objection by adding a diabolical device. The serpent (or other devilish agents in other traditions) corrupted goodness. So even if humans are not inheren
tly evil, we cannot rely on them to be good without coercion. Ever since, devisers of political systems have striven and failed to balance freedom and force.70

  ‌‌Pessimism and the Exaltation of Power

  A strong state is one obvious remedy against individual evil. But as humans lead and manage states, most sages proposed to try to embody ethics in laws, which would bind rulers as well as subjects. Confucius pleaded for the priority of ethics over law in cases of conflict – a precept easier to utter than accomplish. Rules and rights are always in tension. In practice, law can function without respecting ethics. The thinkers known as legalists, who formed a school in fourth-century bce China, therefore prioritized law and left ethics to look after themselves. They called ethics a ‘gnawing worm’ that would destroy the state. Goodness, they argued, is irrelevant. Morality is bunk. All society requires is obedience. As the most complete legalist spokesman, Han Fei, said in the early third century bce, ‘Benevolence, righteousness, love and generosity are useless, but severe punishments and dire penalties can keep the state in order.’ Law and order are worth tyranny and injustice. The only good is the good of state.71 This was a remarkable new twist: previous thinkers tried to make man-made law more moral by aligning it with ‘divine’ or ‘natural’ law. Law-givers, as we have seen, strove to write codes in line with principles of equity (see here). The legalists overthrew tradition. They laughed off earlier sages’ belief in the innate goodness of people. For them law served only order, not justice. The best penalties were the most severe: severance at the neck or waist, boring a hole in the skull, roasting alive, filleting out a wrongdoer’s ribs or linking horse-drawn chariots to drag at his limbs and literally rend him apart.