Introduction to Ancient Philosophy

Don E. Marietta Jr.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315502670
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

This survey of the history of Western philosophy, from Thales to Augustine, introduces the central tenets of each philosopher or school within the cultural and historical aspect of the particular time. Topics covered include metaphysics, ethics and politics, and Epicureanism.

1   GREEK CULTURAL BACKGROUND

Greek philosophy shows the influence of ideas current in early Greek culture. Myths and religious beliefs and beliefs, about the nature of the world, were not the same in all parts of the Greek civilization, however. The ideas that had the most profound influence on the development of philosophy are associated with the mainland of Greece and with Ionia, and these two areas differed markedly in some respects. The people who settled Greece came there at different times and from different places, and these different backgrounds are reflected in various words in the Greek language and in other cultural differences. The topography of Greece also, among other factors, led to the development of separate city-states, with laws and customs peculiar to each state.

Beginning in the eighth century B.C., the Greeks established colonies in the area of the Mediterranean, including parts of Italy and North Africa. The cultures of the colonies reflected the beliefs and practices of the city-states that founded them. Many of the philosophers we will study came from such colonies.

The people living on islands in the Aegean Sea and on the coast of what is now Turkey, an area known then as Ionia, contributed to the development of philosophy in ways mainland Greeks could not, but ideas from the mainland made their own way into philosophical thinking. We will look at the different ways these two divisions of Greek culture influenced developing philosophy.

Ionia

The origin of the Ionian culture is an interesting topic that we cannot go into deeply here. It seems to have had roots in the Minoan culture of Crete and in the culture of the early Dorian invaders, who brought ideas and language that we call Indo-European. We know this culture from the works of Homer and Hesiod. Even though the familiar pantheon of gods and goddesses is a part of the Homeric tradition, however, the Ionian worldview did not include some of the aspects of religion with which Western societies are familiar. There was no religious organization or clergy. There was no body of dogma and no concept of heresy. The religion, if we want to call it that, was largely a matter of civic ceremony, not of personal piety, inwardness, religious feeling, or involvement. John Burnet has described the culture as “secular.”¹ W.K.C. Guthrie says the Ionians’ “interests lay in this world,” and explanations of the origin and nature of the world in terms of the actions of divinities were no longer acceptable.² This allowed great freedom of religious thought and freedom for speculation about the nature of the world. The intellectual openness of Ionia stands in contrast to the more restrictive approach of Athens, which banished people for “wrong” religious beliefs, as was done to several philosophers.

The attitude of Homeric religion was optimistic, not oriented toward fear and guilt. It can be described as “this-worldly.” There was little concern for an afterlife. There is reference in Homer to Hades, but this does not indicate belief in a meaningful immortality as the reward of living a righteous life. Hades seems to have been a place were “shades” of the dead gradually fade away. The attitude toward it can be seen in Achilles’ speech to Odysseus, in which he says that any life on earth is better than being in Hades.³

What were the gods and goddesses of the Homeric epics, that they did not give rise to the familiar features of religion? According to the Ionic mythology, the Olympian deities were not the creators of the world. They evolved, along with humans and the world, from a primitive chaos. They were immortal (in the sense of being very long-lived), but were not eternal, not beings who had always existed. There were stories of their interacting with mortals on occasion, but they were not the protectors of humanity.⁴

The Ionian culture contributed significantly to philosophy through providing the freedom and openness in which scientific speculation and metaphysical thought could develop. The freedom to speculate about the origin and nature of the world enabled ideas to develop that might have been suppressed in a different culture. Even though no one seems to have denied that the gods existed, it was not dangerous to interpret them as forces of nature or as having their origin in stories of heroes of times past. Some philosophers freely criticized the moral weaknesses of the gods that were reported in myth and legend.

The Ionians also held some significant ideas about life and the world that influenced the development of philosophical beliefs. In particular, notions that were related to the mythology or folklore of Ionia influenced philosophical views.

One of these notions is the belief that all things have an allotted portion (moira) in the scheme of things. Not only humans, but gods and natural forces as well have a role from which they must not deviate. Moera was the goddess of fate, but each thing’s allotted place, its moira, was not a god, not a personal being, but an impersonal restriction on everything. We might think of it as a force of nature, but using the concept of a “force” might be reading into the concept our modern way of thinking about nature. We should not think of a thing having a given place as “fate,” either, for we tend to associate fate with what lies in store for an individual person as an individual, rather than what one has in common with all humans. Even though the goddess Moera was replaced in Hesiod’s epics by the Fates, three female beings who determine such aspects of a person’s life as the time of death, we miss the depth of the concept of moira if we think of it as personal fate. What the early concept involved was a cosmic order affecting all beings and keeping everything in place.⁵

To depart from the allotted place is an act of húbris, a transgression that will bring punishment as the offending person, god, or natural element is forced back into its place. The enforcement of the restrictions of moira is variously personified as the work of the avenging deities, the Furies or Erinyes or Eumenides. Jean-Paul Sartre employs this theme in his work The Flies, in which the avenging force is pictured as flies that torment the offender.

The concept of moira can be seen in the way some early Greek philosophers describe the forces of nature. The ideas of order and balance in the world and in human life might be influenced by the notion of moira, a mythological concept that is thus restated in early philosophical and scientific doctrines.

Another influential idea is hylozoism, also called panpsychism, the belief that matter is in some sense alive.⁶ In most modern thought, with some significant exceptions, matter is treated as inert, dead stuff. If it moves, grows, changes, or is involved with mental activity, some explanation is sought in something outside matter itself. People have not always thought of matter as dead stuff, however. A firm distinction between matter on one hand, and life and thought on the other, is just one way of thinking. With contemporary developments in physics, it appears that those philosophers who did not think of matter as lifeless stuff (and they were not limited to the Ionians or to ancient times) might have had a keener insight into the nature of the world than those who thought that matter is dead until something else acts upon it.

Exactly what the Ionians, and some other philosophers, meant by attributing motion and aspects of mentality to matter is difficult to explain. They did not think that rocks sat about contemplating things or reminiscing about people who had passed them by, but they thought that matter inherently has some aspects of life and is by its nature closely involved with that which we consider mental. This means that some questions that seem very important to those who rigidly separate matter from life and mentality are not problems at all for those who do not accept the firm separation. That some matter displays life and thought is simply what one should expect.

The Greek Mainland

The worldly and optimistic approach of the Ionians was not common to all of Greece. Outside of Ionia, mainly among the poor, and especially in times of grave crisis, people found hope and solace in different kinds of religion, such as worship of household gods or gods associated with special places, and cults based on the nature cycle: the alternation of the growing season, warm in Europe and wet in Egypt, and the dormant season, when crops did not grow and domestic animals did not reproduce.

Philosophy was influenced by the religions based on the nature cycle, referred to as mystery cults because they kept their rites and ceremonies only for the eyes of the initiated. This secrecy was breached by a few writers, such as Apuleius, who described the Isis—Osiris cult of Egypt in his Metamorphoses. We now know that most of the popular cults were based on the myth of a divine lord who was killed, and the grief of his consort, a goddess on whom certain crops depended, who failed to attend to the growth of the crops until her lord was restored to life and returned to her. These myths of a dying-rising lord took a number of forms. Some told of a divine being killed by wicked mythological creatures such as the Titans, while others told of emasculation or other evil done to the lord that made him unavailable to his female consort.

One mystery religion with a story suitable for children was the Eleusinian cult, which included a myth of the goddess of grain, Ceres, who is also known as Demeter and by other names. It was not the loss of a lover that made Ceres neglect her task of protecting the growing of grain. Her daughter Proserpine, or Persephone, was kidnapped and taken to Hades by Pluto, god of the underworld. Ceres finally found her daughter but could not keep her except during part of the year, because Proserpine had eaten some of a pomegranate in Hades and therefore had to spend part of every year with Pluto. When Ceres had her daughter with her, she made the grain grow, but when Proserpine was in Hades Ceres grieved and neglected her agricultural duties. A point of the religion was the ceremonies in which the worshipers identified with Ceres, and by acting out aspects of the myth ensured the return of the season in which grain grew.⁷

I learned the story of Ceres and her daughter in grade school but did not then learn of its religious significance. It was just a sweet story of motherly love. The other mystery cult myths would not have been thought suitable for the schoolboy’s ears, since they dealt with interruptions in the sexual bliss of a divine couple who had a role to play in the growth of food or making of wine or the fertility of farm animals. The basic pattern of identification with the suffering of the divine pair and use of ceremonies to bring them back together for the sake of a new growing season appears in all of the mystery cults.

It was not in their original, often crude or barbaric, form that the mystery cults influenced philosophy, but as the reformed version of the cult of Dionysus (Bacchus in the Latin pantheon). The legendary Thrasian bard and religious reformer Orpheus reinterpreted the myth of the original cult of Dionysus to make it apply not to the season of wine growing but to spiritual growth. The original cult was popular with the lower classes, especially women, who behaved disgracefully by running in a frenzy through the woods, in which they caught, tore apart, and ate hapless small animals that fell into their clutches. This crude behavior was a reenactment of the death of Dionysus, who was killed and eaten by evil mythical beings known as the Titans.⁸

The reformed cult, known as Orphism, intellectualized the myth, building on the story that Zeus (Jupiter in the Roman pantheon) ate the heart of Dionysus, the only part the Titans had not eaten, and gave birth to a renewed Dionysus. (How he did this is not explained in clear detail.) Zeus also killed the Titans, burned their bodies, and created humanity from the ashes. The Orphic interpretation is that humans are made from evil material, except for the remains of Dionysus, whom the Titans had eaten. This divine material in humans is associated with our one good part, the mind or soul, which must be kept pure so that it can be reincarnated in a better body than the one it occupies at present. The point of the Orphic religion was the progressive purification of the mind so that eventually, after thousands of years and many incarnations, it would be pure enough to escape embodiment and exist as pure intellect.⁹

The Pythagoreans based their communal life on beliefs that were similar to those of the Orphic religion. They influenced Plato, who taught that the goal of life is tending the soul. Plato stressed the distinction between mind or soul and body, and he used Orphic symbols in his writings. How committed he was to Orphism is not known, but through later philosophical schools, especially that of the Neo-Platonists, the influence of Orphism was carried into medieval and Renaissance thought. The continuing influence of Orphism can be seen in philosophies that hold that the mind and body are radically distinct.

We now see that philosophy was influenced by both the Ionic culture and the Orphic religion. The freedom of Ionia facilitated the development of scientific curiosity and philosophy, and ideas of the Ionian culture were often expressed, in less mythological ways, in subsequent philosophies. The concepts of Orphism greatly influenced the Pythagoreans and Plato, and through them centuries of thought. Greek philosophy clearly grew out of the fertile ground of early Greek culture.

2 THE PRIMARY STUFF AND STRUCTURE OF THE WORLD

THE MILESIANS AND PYTHAGOREANS

When most people think of Greek philosophers, they think of Athens; but before there was a native-born Athenian philosopher, a group of philosophers were contemplating metaphysical issues related to the nature of the world. They are called the Presocratics. This chapter will explore the thought of the Milesians and Pythagoreans, who dealt with the basic nature and structure of matter. Then we will examine the ideas of Heraclitus, who held that the world is in the process of orderly change, and the Eleatics, who argued that change is impossible. In chapter 4, we will look at efforts to reconcile the obvious change and multiplicity in the world with the Eleatic claim—which had been supported with logical argument—that there is no change.

Studying the Presocratics is difficult because either they did not write, or their writings have been lost except for reports of their thought and quotations in other ancient writers. These are referred to as fragments. Plato and Aristotle, especially the latter, preserved some of the sayings of the Presocratics and commented on their philosophies. Some of the quotations and reports of the Presocratics in writers from the second century A.D. on are considered accurate, while others are in expanded or corrupt form. Some later writers who used early sources may be more accurate than some earlier writers. The reports of Simplicius, for example, in the sixth century, are considered reliable. Some second- and third-century writers based their reports on those of earlier writers. Sextus Empiricus, for example, relied on the work of Aenesidemus, who was writing two centuries earlier. Diogenes Laertius relied on works from the Hellenistic era for his Lives of Eminent Philosophers, probably written in the third century A.D.

The most often used source of the fragments of the Presocratics, Hermann Diels’s Fragmenta der Presocraticer, will not be useful to students who do not read German, but there are translations, such as Kathleen Freeman’s Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers, but Freeman does not identify or index the passages translated, so they are not easy to approach except through Diels’s book. More useful is G.S. Kirk and J.E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers. It provides an extensive survey of fragments and identifies the ancient writers. Translations of the fragments are in footnotes. Kirk and Raven present the fragments in thematic order instead of in the order used by Hermann Diels, but the index (starting on ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Greek Cultural Background
• 2 The Primary Stuff and Structure of the World: The Milesians and Pythagoreans
• 3 Change, Stability, and Permanence: Heraclitus and the Eleatics
• 4 Reconciliation of Eleaticism and Experience: The Pluralists and Atomists
• 5 The Sophists
• 6 Socrates
• 7 Plato: Metaphysics and Theology
• 8 Plato: Theory of Knowledge
• 9 Plato: Ethics and Politics
• 10 Aristotle: Metaphysics
• 11 Aristotle: Physics, Biology, and Psychology
• 12 Aristotle: Knowledge and Logic
• 13 Aristotle: Ethics and Politics
• 14 Hellenistic Cultural Background
• 15 Epicureanism
• 16 Stoicism
• 17 Skepticism
• 18 Neo-Platonism
• 19 Augustine
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index