by Peter Watson
6
The Origins of Science, Philosophy
and the Humanities
To Chapter 6 Notes and References
When Allan Bloom, a professor at the University of Chicago, published his book The Closing of the American Mind in 1987, he had no idea he was about to become notorious. Incensed by the ‘dumbing down’ that he saw everywhere about him, he pugnaciously advanced his view that the study of ‘high culture’ has to be the main aim of education. Above all, he said, we must pay attention to ancient Greece, because it provided ‘the models for modern achievement’. Bloom believed that the philosophers and poets of the classical world are those from whom we have most to learn, because the big issues they raised have not changed as the years have passed. They still have the power to inform and transform us, he said, to move us, and ‘to make us wise’.1
His book provoked a storm of controversy. It became a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic and Bloom was himself transformed into a celebrity and a rich man. At the same time he was vilified. At a conference of academics at Chapel Hill, the campus of the University of North Carolina, about a year after his book appeared, called to consider the future of liberal education, ‘speaker after speaker’ denounced Bloom and other ‘cultural conservatives’ like him. According to the New York Times, these academics saw Bloom’s book as an attempt to foist the ‘elitist views of dead, white, European males’ on a generation of students who were now living in a different world, where the preoccupations of small city-states 2,500 years ago were long out of date.
These ‘culture wars’ are not so sharp as once they were but it is still necessary to highlight why the history of a small European country, thousands of years ago, is so important. In his book The Greeks, H. D. F. Kitto opens with these words: ‘The reader is asked, for the moment, to accept this as a reasonable statement of fact, that in a part of the world that had for centuries been civilised, and quite highly civilised, there gradually emerged a people, not very numerous, not very powerful, not very well organised, who had a totally new conception of what human life was for, and showed for the first time what the human mind was for.’2 Or, as Sir Peter Hall puts it, in a chapter on ancient Athens which he calls ‘The fountainhead’: ‘The crucial point about Athens is that it was first. And first in no small sense: first in so many of the things that have mattered, ever since, to western civilisation and its meaning. Athens in the fifth century BCE gave us democracy, in a form as pure as we are likely to see;…It gave us philosophy, including political philosophy, in a form so rounded, so complete, that hardly anyone added anything of moment to it for well over a millennium. It gave us the world’s first systematic written history. It systematised medical and scientific knowledge, and for the first time began to base them on generalisations from empirical observation. It gave us the first lyric poetry and then comedy and tragedy, all again at so completely an extraordinary pitch of sophistication and maturity, such that they might have been germinating under the Greek sun for hundreds of years. It left us the first naturalistic art; for the first time, human beings caught and registered for ever the breath of a wind, the quality of a smile. It single-handedly invented the principles and the norms of architecture…’3
A new conception of what human life is for. The fountainhead. First in so many ways that have mattered. That is why ancient Greece is so important, even today. The ancient Greeks may be long dead, were indeed overwhelmingly white, and, yes, by modern standards, unforgiveably male. Yet in discovering what the historian (and Librarian of Congress) Daniel Boorstin calls ‘the wondrous instrument within’–the courageous human brain and its powers of observation and reason–the Greeks left us far more than any other comparable group. Their legacy is the greatest the world has yet known.4
There are two principal aspects to that legacy. One is that the Greeks were the first to truly understand that the world may be known, that knowledge can be acquired by systematic observation, without aid from the gods, that there is an order to the world and the universe which goes beyond the myths of our ancestors. And second, that there is a difference between nature–which operates according to invariable laws–and the affairs of men, which have no such order, but where order is imposed or agreed and can take various forms and is mutable. Compared with the idea that the world could be known only through or in relation to God, or even could be known not at all, this was a massive transformation.
The first farmers appear to have settled around Thessalonika, in the north of Greece, about 6500 BC. The Greek language is believed to have been brought to the area not before 2500 BC, possibly by invading Aryan-type people from the Russian steppes. (In other words, similar people to those who invaded northern India at much the same time.) Until at least 2000 BC, the prosperous towns of Greece were still unfortified, though bronze daggers began to lengthen into swords.5
Greece is a very broken-up country, with many islands and several peninsulas, which may have influenced the development there of the city-state. Kingship, and the aristocratic hero culture, which in Homer is the universal political arrangement, had vanished from most cities by the dawn of history (roughly 700 BC). The experience of Athens shows why–and how–monarchy was abolished.6 The first encroachment on the royal prerogative took place when the nobles elected a separate war chief, the Archon, because the priestly king of the time was not a fighter. This was followed by the promotion of the Archon over the king. According to tradition, the first Archon was Medon, who held office for life, and his family after him. The king lost power but he continued to be the city’s chief priest. Legal duties were divided: the Archon took cases concerning property, whereas the king tried religious cases and homicide. Thus there are parallels here with what was happening in Mesopotamia.7
War was also the background to a set of stories that became central to Greek self-consciousness, and the first written masterpieces of Western literature. They concerned the Achaean (i.e., Mycenean) expedition to Troy, a city in Asia Minor (now Turkey). Homer’s two great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, are often described as the earliest literature, the ‘primary source’ from which all European literature derives, the ‘gateway’ to new avenues of thought. Between them they contain around 28,000 lines and preceding their appearance and for hundreds of years following them, ‘there is nothing remotely resembling these amazing achievements’. Homer’s genius was recognised in Greece from the very beginning. Athenians referred to his books the way devout Christians nowadays refer to the Bible, or Muslims to the Qur’an. Socrates quoted lines from the Iliad when he was on trial for his life.8
One important thing to say about these achievements is how very different they are from the early biblical narratives, which most scholars now accept as having been composed at more or less the same time. The Hebrew Bible, as we shall see in the next chapter, is the fruit of many hands but concerns itself with one theme: the history of the Israelites and what that reveals about God’s purpose. It is a history of ordinary mortals, essentially small, everyday people, trying to understand the divine will. Other nations, other peoples, worship different gods and that puts them in the wrong: they deserve–and receive–no sympathy. In strong contrast, Homer’s epics do not concern ordinary people so much as heroes and the gods themselves, who enshrine excellence in one form or another. But the stories are not really histories. They are more like modern novels which take an episode and examine it in detail for what it reveals about human nature. In Horace’s words, Homer plunges in, in medias res, in the middle of things. But in Homer the gods are not ‘unknowable’. They are in fact all too human, with human problems and failings. No less significantly, in Homer, the heroes’ enemies are themselves heroes, treated with sympathy at times, allowed their own dignity and honour. In composing his epics, Homer drew upon a vast number of poems and songs that had been transmitted orally for generations. They depended on myths and mythos, in Greek, from which the English word ‘myth’ derives, actually meant ‘word’, in the sense of ‘the last w
ord’, a final pronouncement. This contrasted with logos, which also meant ‘word’ but in the sense of a truth which can be argued and maybe changed (as in, ‘what’s the word on…?’). Unlike logoi, which were written in prose, myths were recorded in verse.
The stories of Homer are in some ways the first ‘modern’ narratives. His characters are fully rounded, three-dimensional, with weaknesses as well as strengths, with differing motives and emotions, courageous at one moment, hesitant the next, more like real people than gods. Women are treated as sympathetically–and as fully–as men: for example, in Helen we see that beauty can be a curse as much as a blessing. Above all, as the story unfolds, Odysseus learns–his character develops–making him more interesting, and more dignified, than the deities. Odysseus shows himself as capable of rational thought, independent of the gods.
The same rationalising process that finds its first expression in Homer was brought to bear on communal life, with momentous consequences for mankind. As in the Iliad and the Odyssey, war played a part.
One of the inventions in that area of the world, among the Lydians–as we have seen–was coins. This spread quickly among the Greeks and the growing use of money enabled wealth to grow and more men acquired land. This land needed defending and, in conjunction with new weapons, in the seventh century BC a new sort of warrior, and a new sort of warfare, appeared. This was the development of the ‘hoplite’ infantry, boasting bronze helmets, spears and shields (hoplon is Greek for shield). Earlier fighting had mainly consisted of single combat: now, in the hoplite formations, men advanced (mainly in the valleys, to protect or attack the crops grown there) in disciplined masses, in careful formation of eight rows, with each man protected on his right-hand side by the shield of his comrade. If he fell the man in the row behind him took his place.9 As more men shared military experience, this had two consequences. One, power slipped from the old aristocracies, and two, a big gap opened up between rich and poor. (The hoplites had to provide their own armour, so they came mainly from middling to rich peasants.)
This gap opened up because land in Attica was poor, certainly so far as growing grain was concerned. Therefore, in bad years the poorer farmers had to borrow from their richer neighbours. With the invention of coins, however, instead of borrowing a sack of corn in the old way, to be repaid by a sack, the farmer now borrowed the price of a sack. But this sack was bought when corn was scarce–and therefore relatively expensive–and was generally repaid in times of plenty, in other words when corn was cheap. This caused debt to grow and in Attica the law allowed for creditors to seize an insolvent debtor and take him and his family into slavery. This ‘rich man’s law’ was bad enough, but the spread of writing, when the laws were set down, under the supervision of Dracon, made it worse, encouraging people to enforce their written rights. ‘Draconian law’, it was said, was written in blood.10
Dissatisfaction spread, so much so that the Athenians took what for us would be an unthinkable step. They appointed a tyrant to mediate. Originally, when it was first used in the Near East, tyrant was not a pejorative word. It was an informal title, equivalent to ‘boss’ or ‘chief’, and tyrants usually arose after a war, when their most important function was the equitable distribution of the enemy’s lands among the victorious troops. In Athens, Solon was chosen as tyrant because of his wide experience. A distant descendant of the kings, he had also written poems attacking the rich for their greed. He took office in 594 or 592 BC and his first move was to abolish enslavement for debt, and at the same time he cancelled all debts outstanding. He embargoed the export of all agricultural produce, except olive oil, in which Athens was swimming, arguing that the big landowners could not sell their produce in richer markets while fellow Athenians went hungry. His other move was to change the constitution. Until his period in office Athens had been governed by a tripartite system. By this time, there were the nine Archons at the top; next came the Council of Best Men, or aristoi, who met to discuss all major questions; and finally the Assembly of the People (ekklesia, from which we take the French word église, church). Solon transformed the Assembly, extending membership to tradespeople, and not just landowners, and also widened the eligibility for election to Archon. More than that, Archons had to account for their year in office before the Assembly and only those judged a success were eligible for the Council of Best Men. Thus the whole system became a good deal fairer and more open than it had been in the past, and the power of the Assembly was much enhanced. (This somewhat oversimplifies Athenian democracy but it does at least make clear that what we regard as democracy in the twenty-first century is actually elective oligarchy.11)
Athenian democracy, however, cannot be understood without a full appreciation of what a polis was, and without taking on board how small–by modern standards–Greek city-states were. Both Plato and Aristotle thought that the ideal polis should have around 5,000 citizens and in fact very few had more than 20,000. ‘Citizen’ here means free males, so to these figures should be added women, children, foreigners and slaves. Peter Jones calculates that in 431 BC the total population of Athens was 325,000 and in 317 BC it was 185,000. In general, Greek poleis were roughly the size of a small English county and the polis owed a lot to Greece’s geography–with many islands and peninsulas, and with the country broken up into many smaller, self-contained geographical entities. But the polis also owed something to Greek nature. Whereas it originally meant ‘citadel’, it came to mean ‘the whole communal life of the people, political, cultural, moral…’12 Greeks came to regard the polis as a form of life that enabled each individual to live life to the full, to realise his true potential. They tried hard not to forget what politics was for.13
Democracy was introduced into Athens in 507 BC by Cleisthenes and, by the time of Pericles (c. 495–429)–Athens’ so-called golden age–the Assembly was supreme, and with good reason. Though he had no shortage of enemies, Pericles was one of Greece’s greatest generals, among its finest orators and an exceptional leader. He installed state pay for jurors and council members, completed the city walls, which made Athens all but impregnable and, unusually for a military man and a politician (though this was the Athenian ideal), took a great interest in philosophical, artistic and scientific matters. His friends included Protagoras, Anaxagoras and Phidias, all of whom we shall meet shortly, while Socrates himself was close to both Alcibiades, Pericles’ ward, and Aspasia, his morganatic wife. Pericles rebuilt the Parthenon, which provided employment for countless craftsmen and helped to kick-start Athens’ golden age.
Under him, the Assembly now comprised every adult male who had not been disenfranchised by some serious offence. It was the sole legislative body and had complete control of both the administration and the judiciary. It met once a month, any citizen could speak and anyone could propose anything. But, with Assemblies of 5,000 and more, there was need of a committee to prepare business. This council was called the boule and it was scarcely less cumbersome, consisting of 500 citizens, not elected but chosen by ballot, the point being that in this way it never developed a corporate identity which might have corrupted and distorted the business of the Assembly. There were no professional lawyers. ‘The principle was preserved that the aggrieved man appealed directly to his fellow citizens for justice.’14 The jury was a selection of the Assembly and could vary from 101 to 1,001, according to the importance of the case. There was no appeal. If the offence did not carry a specific penalty then the prosecutor, if he won the case, would propose one penalty, while the accused proposed another. The jury then chose between the two. ‘To the Athenian, the responsibility of taking his own decisions, carrying them out, and accepting the consequences, was a necessary part of the life of a free man.’15
Given the size of Athens, democracy there was a remarkable–a unique–achievement. Not everyone liked it–Plato for one condemned it–and the arrangement was nothing like, say, parliamentary democracy in our own day. (To repeat Peter Jones’ point: modern democracies are elective oligarchie
s.) And this is one reason why another Greek idea, rhetoric, has not survived. Rhetoric was a way of speaking, arguing, persuading, that was necessary in a democracy where the assemblies were large, where there were no microphones, and where it was necessary to sway others in debate. Rhetoric developed its own rules and it encouraged great feats of eloquence and memory, which had a profound influence on the evolution of classical literature. In elective oligarchies, however, where the political etiquette is more intimate, and more cynical, rhetoric has no real place: to the modern ear it sounds forced and artificial.
If politics–democracy–is the most famous Greek idea that has come down to us, it is closely followed by science (scientia = knowledge, originally). This most profitable area of human activity is generally reckoned to have begun at Ionia, the western fringe of Asia Minor (modern Turkey) and the islands off the coast. According to Erwin Schrödinger, there are three main reasons why science began there. First, the region did not belong to a powerful state, which are usually hostile to free thinking. Second, the Ionians were a seafaring people, interposed between East and West, with strong trading links. Mercantile exchange is always the principal force in the exchange of ideas, which often stem from the solving of practical problems–navigation, means of transport, water supply, handicraft techniques. Third, the area was not ‘priest-ridden’; there was not, as in Babylon or Egypt, a hereditary, privileged, priestly caste with a vested interest in the status quo.16 In their comparison of early science in ancient Greece and China, Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin argue that the Greek philosopher/scientists enjoyed much less patronage than their contemporaries in China, who were employed by the emperor, and often charged with looking after the calendar, which was a state concern. This had the effect of making Chinese scientists much more circumspect in their views, and in embracing new concepts: they had much more to lose than in Greece, and they seldom argued as the Greeks argued. Instead, new ideas in China were invariably incorporated into existing theories, producing a ‘cascade’ of meanings; new notions never had to battle it out with old ones.17 In Greece on the other hand there was a ‘competition in wisdom’, just as in sports contests (sport was itself seen as a form of wisdom).18 Lloyd argues that there are far more first-person-singular statements in Greek science than in Chinese, much more egotism, individuals describe their mistakes more often, their uncertainties, and criticise themselves more.19 Greek plays poked fun at scientists and even this served a useful purpose.20
