Metaphor and History

The Western Idea of Social Development

Robert Nisbet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351505628
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

The primary purpose of Metaphor and History is to explain the sources and contexts of the Western idea of social development. Nisbet explores the concept of social change across the whole range of Western culture, from ancient Greece to the present day. He does not see the idea of social development as a nineteenth-century phenomenon or a by-product of the idea of biological evolution.

PART I


CIVILIZATION AS GROWTH IN TIME:

THE BIOGRAPHY OF A METAPHOR

ONE…

THE GREEKS

For that which encompasses us will be enough

for the student of how things grow; seeing it

is reasonable and intelligent.

Heraclitus

It follows that the coming-to-be of anything,

if it is absolutely necessary, must be cyclical—

i.e., must return upon itself.

Aristotle

For time changes the nature of the whole world

and all things must pass on from one condition

to another, and nothing continues like to itself;

all things quit their bounds; all things nature

changes and compels to alter.

Lucretius

Whether the world is a soul, or a body under

government of nature, like trees and crops, it

embraces in its constitution all that it is destined

to experience actively or passively from its

beginning right on to its end; it resembles a

human being, all whose capacities are wrapped

up in the embryo before birth. Ere the child

has seen light, the principle of beard and grey

hairs is innate.

Seneca

1. BEING AS BECOMING

“What sort of being must being be when being becomes?” This question, which we are told was an obsessive one to much Greek philosophy and science, is at the very heart of what concerns us in this book: ideas of growth and development applied to human society and institutions.

The Greeks, above any people known to us in antiquity, were fascinated by change, its sources, properties, directions, and its relation to the principles of organic growth. Aristotle built an entire system of philosophy around the principle of growth. So, long before him, were the early physical philosophers of Miletus equally preoccupied by change. “All is change.” This is a lasting theme in Greek thought from beginning to end, and it transferred itself to Rome and then to all subsequent Western intellectual inquiry. True, there were Greeks, as there have been individuals in all ages, our own included, who turned their backs on change, so to speak, and who in the interests of seeking refuge in the abiding and the permanent, declared change to be mere appearance, not reality. From early to late in Greek thought this theme may be found; and, as I say, so may it be found in our own day. But to conclude, as some have, that Greeks were fearful of change, blind to change, ignorant of growth and development in time, is one of the rankest calumnies ever hurled at a civilized people. The Greeks not only knew, accepted, and even liked change, they were the first in history, so far as we know, to make a science of the study of change. When the first Greek declared that change is a part of the nature of each living thing and that it has its own laws of cause, mechanism, and purpose, he began, in an almost literal sense, a scientific pursuit that is one of the principal glories of Western intellectual history.

Change, the Greeks were fascinated by; growth, they virtually adored. From the model of growth in the organic world around them they drew some of the deepest and most far-reaching ideas in Western philosophy. High among these is the idea of physis; I shall come back to this in a moment. Suffice it to say here that this word—meaning quite literally growth—signifies the key concept in all of Greek science. From it the Romans, and then the Latinized West, derived their equally crucial concept of nature. We shall have to look most carefully at this word and its meanings.

It is hardly strange that the Greeks should have become early fascinated by growth and its myriad manifestations of genesis and decay. As John Linton Myres has emphasized, in his vastly illuminating essay “The Background of Greek Science,”¹ behind all the physical and organic theories that abounded in Greece from early times lay direct exposure to a kind of natural theater of geographical, biological, and vegetative contrasts perhaps more vivid than anywhere else in the ancient world. As Myres notes, there were in this part of the world the evocative contrasts of wet and dry, hot and cold, light and darkness, hard and soft, sweet and bitter, contrasts all of which, as we know, loom large in Greek myth, literature, and also science.

But rising above any of these contrasts in importance is that between growth and decay which is to be seen so strikingly in a type of climate in which the seasonal cycle of plant life is made brief by the concentration of rains in one part of the year and in which aridity and drought are only too well known. We can scarcely even guess what subtle processes of thought were first involved, how long a time must have elapsed, before the Greeks and, before them, other peoples, many peoples, transferred what they saw in the plant and animal world to representations of reality. It must have been very early, once man discovered the uses of the seed-plant, once agriculture and human settlement began to replace what had previously been an existence of incessant wandering in search of food supply. Given the life-assuring dependence of the early human community upon the precious seed, it is easily imagined that the seed and plant would early become objects of man’s wonder, adoration, and myth. For what more precious and also awe-inspiring elements were there in his environment?

Even today in our information-cluttered, science-saturated, and disenchanted age, it is hard to resist the mystery and drama of what is involved in the seed and its transfiguration in time.

There is first the seed itself: hard, dry, seemingly as lifeless as any pebble. We commit it to the earth, and thereby begin, with the aid of sun and moisture, a truly amazing succession of changes, changes that in their entirety compose what we call its life-cycle. For days no change is visible, then slowly and inexorably the processof genesis and growth becomes manifest—manifest in the tiny green shoots which for all their fragility push through the crust of the earth. There follow in fixed order the successive phases of the plant’s growth, reaching at climax the full being of the plant, with its life-giving bounty for man. And then comes, with the same relentless regularity that had marked its growth, the decline, decay, gradual loss of life, culminating in the death of the plant, with only the sere and yellow to remind man of what had preceded it. But death is only an interlude, for now comes the most awe-inspiring of all the seed’s transfigurations: the dead becomes, once again, the living. What had appeared to be death and termination turns out to have been but a cloak covering an inner reality that is eternal in its capacity for life. Once again genesis occurs, and once again the wonderful cycle of genesis and growth and decay and death.

In primitive consciousness nothing, of course, happens naturally. It was no doubt inevitable therefore that the arcane processes of genesis and decay would become the elements of religious myth. Nothing so vital to man as food supply could be taken for granted; it had to be made the object of thanksgiving, of supplication, and of rites designed to ward off malign interferences that, all too often, could result in drought or pestilence with famine as the consequence to man. There are, as Frazer has told us in opulent detail in his The Golden Bough, numerous gods and goddesses of the seed and the plant to be found throughout the earliest manifestations of man’s religious belief. Where and when worship of the seed began in man’s history we cannot even guess accurately. All we know is that by the time Western civilization makes its beginning in the areas surrounding the Mediterranean, rites and ceremonies pertaining to the seed are in full abundance. Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, Dionysis are but a few of the better known of the sacred representations of a fascination with the seed that must have begun long before the times of even the earliest of the peoples who lie in our records.

So far as Western thought is concerned, the most famous and, by all odds, most influential of the seed-deities was Demeter. And the reason for this is the relation of Demeter to the Greeks, especially the Athenians whose own worship of her is almost indistinguishable from the beginnings of Greek sacred and, then, philosophical thought. Of all the gods and goddesses, Demeter was closest to Athenian hearts, and it is entirely fitting that the Athenians should have, at a fairly early time, annexed Eleusis, scene of the awesome Eleusinian mysteries, themselves the representation of Demeter’s relation to mankind. The story of Demeter is told in the beautiful Hymn to Demeter, written in the seventh century B.C.²

Persephone, lovely daughter of Demeter, was one day playing in a field, alone, gathering crocuses, roses, lilies, and violets, when suddenly the earth burst open and Pluto, Lord of the Dead, ruler of the lower world, appeared, to carry off Persephone to live with him, as he intended, forever. Demeter, grief-stricken upon learning of her daughter’s abduction, “caused a most dreadful and cruel year for mankind over the all-flourishing earth: the ground would not make the seed sprout, for rich-crowned Demeter kept it hid.” This was, of course, the most terrible punishment that could have befallen man—as it is the most terrible that could befall the human race today—and every possible form of expiation was employed, we learn, to seek to undo the curse that Demeter had placed upon the world. But nothing availed. Such was Demeter’s sorrow at the loss of her daughter that she would have allowed the whole human race to become destroyed by famine had not the mighty Zeus himself come at last to man’s rescue. He commanded Pluto to return Persephone to her mother, the only way by which mankind could be redeemed from the curse placed by Demeter upon it. Pluto was forced to obey, but, loving Persephone deeply and irremediably, he released her to her mother only after he had given her a pomegranate seed to eat in which he had instilled an elixir, one that would, by the spell cast, force her to return to him for at least a third of each year.

Demeter, now appeased, hurried down from the peaks of Olympus to the plain of Rharus, “once a rich and fertile corn-land but now in nowise fruitful, for it lay hidden by design of trim-ankled Demeter. But afterwards, as springtime, it was soon to be waving with long ears of corn, and its rich furrows to be loaded with grain in upon the ground, while others would already be bound in sheaves.”

Then, having given back to the people the fertility of their ground with promise of life once again, Demeter showed them “the conduct of her rites and taught them all her mysteries, awful mysteries which no one may in any way transgress or pry into or utter, for deep awe of the gods checks the voice.”

Thus the mythic origin of the cycle of seasons, of the commitment of mankind to a winter as well as a spring. Thus too the origin of the Greeks’ worship of Demeter, whose symbolization of the life-giving plant and its arcane wonders of growth and decay, of death and rebirth, seemed to Athenians even more sacred than the fire-giving feat of Prometheus. Veneration of Demeter in Athens would continue well into the age of Greek rationalism.

If we look closely at the myth of Demeter, all of the essential elements of conceptualization of growth are to be seen immediately: fecundity and sterility, of course, but also cyclical development and recurrence, potentiality, immanence, and telic purpose. Above all, Sir James Frazer has written, “the thought of the seed buried in the earth in order to spring up to new and higher life readily suggested a comparison to human destiny.”³ If—as it was for long in Greece, and indeed ever after in one formulation or other, including Christianity—human destiny was conceived in religious terms of transmundane fulfillment, this was assuredly not its only possible formulation. A great deal of Greek rational philosophy and specifically Greek philosophy of civilization and its development was also suggested by the seed buried in the earth, unfolding, developing, and reaching its purpose before the cycle ended, with a new cycle then to commence.

“There is no sudden transition,” Professor Guthrie reminds us, “from a mythical to a rational mentality. Mythical thinking does not die a sudden death, if indeed it ever dies at all.…” There are, surely, abundant evidences of this in our own time when, as Guthrie suggests, we find physicians solemnly referring to diseases as entities acting in certain predetermined ways—instead of to sick people—and the scholarly and lay alike treating “nature” as though they were deferring to an arbiter. In how many instances, asks Guthrie, have we not simply given up the language of mythology and overlaid its figures with the terminology of reason? “In Greece too one can find the concepts of myth dressed up in rational terms and living on in the guise of rational ideas.”⁴

Born of religious awe and thanksgiving, the metaphor of the seed, of growth, of becoming acquired transcending importance very early in Greek philosophy and science. From representation of the divine and supernatural, the metaphor became the basis of an entire world view. On this point, which is so essential to our understanding of the Greek perspective of historical change, I cannot do better than quote the erudite Professor Sambursky:

The Greek remained closely attached to the cosmos as the result of his viewing the cosmos as a living organism, a body that can be understood and comprehended in its entirety. The Greek had a profound awareness which was characterized by his biological approach to the world of matter. The teleological principle is essentially biological and anthropomorphic, so that the first basis for the conception of order in the universe was found in the system of the world of living things.⁵

This basis, considered as concept, was what the Greeks called physis, one of the profoundest and most far-reaching of all ideas in classical thought. Although the word and its meanings are well known to classicists and have been fully explored by such classical scholars as John Linton Myres and Francis Cornford, it remains a fact both extraordinary and lamentable that this word and its meanings are nearly absent from treatments of the social and political thought of the Greeks.

In part this neglect is the result of the translation—mistranslation—that the Romans gave to the word physis. They used the word natura, from which, of course, our own word nature derives. The Romans, however, generally meant by natura the physical world, including the physical aspects of man and society. Unwittingly, they set in existence that fateful dualism between the physical, or between the “natural,” and the social that has plagued Western thought ever since. Of the number and diversity of meanings Western thought has assigned to the word nature there is no end.

But for the Greeks—and this is true as early as Heraclitus-physis is at once less than and more than the meaning the Romans gave to natura. Physis is more than that “inner essence” or “residual being” that is the most frequently encountered philosophical meaning of nature; and it means much less than the sum total of all that is physical in the universe, which is the more popular meaning of the word nature. Physis was no doubt each of these in some degree, but what the word meant most tellingly to the Greek mind was growth. Originally, according to Cornford, physis meant “to give birth to”; this of course at a time when “the mythical imagery of sex—the marriage of Father Heaven and Mother Earth and the genealogical scheme of cosmogony”—was still regnant in the Greek consciousness. Physis thus referred to the principle of generation or, more precisely, the generative power in the world, which was conceived in the manner of sexual generation. Hesiod’s Theogony is rich in this kind of mythic sexuality.⁶

But by the time of the rise of Greek scientific rationalism physis had taken on the related but more encompassing meaning of growth: growth in general and in the sense of each element. “The Greek word ϕὑσιζ,” writes Myres, “is simply the verbal substantive from ϕὑειυ, ‘to grow’; but it can share the causative meaning of the aorist-stem ϕὑσαι, ‘to make grow.’ In phrases from the Ionian physicists, however, it seems always to be used intransitively; and also to be used always in its strict verbal sense.”⁷ If the nature of a thing, then, is how it grows, and if everything in the unive...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I. Civilization as Growth in Time: The Biography of a Metaphor
• Part II. The Theory of Social Development
• Part III. Persistence and Change
• Notes and References
• Index