2. Greek Philosophers
Mythology is the heart and soul of every civilization.
In academic terms, the mythology of the people is the very soil from which any civilization grows. Whenever people ask themselves what is good or bad, and what they shall do in this or that context, the answer will always reflect their mythology. It is well nigh impossible to read from conscious thinking back into reconstructing a lost mythology, but if we know anything at all about how the people thought, we can easily discern a myth that they never believed, because it had no effect on how they lived.
It would be easy enough to find an abbreviated discussion of Ancient Greece on sites like Wikipedia. The very depth and breadth of the subject itself, and the vast horde of sources behind it, help to ensure that whatever Wikipedia can share with us on the subject is broadly trustworthy even as it skips over a vast amount of detail. While we could find a sizable library of reading material in Ancient Greece, it’s neither the facts nor exactly the literature that informs our objective. We need to understand it, not as an entity in its own right, but as a critical influence in what Western Civilization is now.
We don’t need to invest a large amount of time and attention to threshing out the facts of history and winnowing them from the legends of literature. Instead of that vast wealth of knowledge that has already consumed a great many minds and lives, we need juicy bits of understanding how art and history worked together. One textbook describes the early Greeks and the essence of their disunity within a common cultural background. If they were to ever get anything done, they had to find a way to harness their passions or remain forever vulnerable to threats from other nations.
Perhaps because they were a restless and vehement people, the Greeks came to prize the “classical” virtues, which they were the first to define. For them, the ideal lay in moderation, or a golden mean. They valued order, balance, symmetry, clarity, and control. Their statues revealed their conception of what man ought to be — a noble creature, dignified, poised, unterrified by life or death, master of himself and his feelings. Their architecture, as in the Parthenon, made use of exactly measured angles and rows of columns. The classical “order,” or set of carefully wrought pillars placed in a straight line at specified intervals, represented the firm impress of human reason on the brute materials of nature. The same sense of form was thrown over the torrent of human words. Written language became contrived, carefully planned, organized for effect. The epic poem, the lyric, the drama, the oration, along with history and the philosophic dialogue, each with its own rules and principles of composition, became the “forms” with which, in Western Civilization, writers long continued to express their thoughts.
[From page 12 of R.R. Palmer and Joel Colton, A History of the Modern World, subtitled “To 1815” (volume one of a two volume set). 8th edition, McGraw-Hill, 1995. Available at Amazon, among other places.]
It can be argued the Greeks were the first to decide that advanced math was not magic, nor properly part of magical lore. There might be plenty the eye could not discern, but human logic was sufficient to tease out everything a man could act upon consciously. The Greeks were stoutly and self-consciously human-centered in their philosophical assumptions. Man was the measure of all things. Not average persons here and there, but the ideals that men could conceive and reason about could lead to the ultimate answers to all the proper questions about reality.
Among the many Greek philosophers, three names continue demanding our attention: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Socrates taught Plato, and we know of him only what Plato tells us. Plato taught Aristotle, and the latter refers to a wealth of material from Plato that apparently never got into written form. Among the random accidents of history, Aristotle was selected to educate Alexander the Great, who went on to become the single greatest evangelist of Greek learning even as he conquered a large portion of the earth’s surface. It was not a mere projection of power, but a passionate ardor in offering what he believed was the greatest gift he could offer mankind. He didn’t enforce the Greek tongue on his realm; he persuaded the people to embrace it as a lover.
We are told Alexander paid from own personal treasury for the building of libraries, filling them with books, and establishing Greek styled academies and gymnasiums. His successors struggled to maintain that self-conscious Greek culture of learning. They do no call themselves “Greek” but “Hellenes” (English spellings vary) based on the legend of Helen of Troy. Thus, Alexander the Great was the premier Hellenizer in history. So deeply did Greek learning penetrate that, some time later when Greece was but a glorious memory, the recognized center of Greek culture was Alexandria, Egypt.
One signal element in the underlying assumptions of Greek culture, as noted above in the quotation from Palmer and Colton, is a conscious approach to the use of language. One of the most powerful and lasting influences on Western Civilization was how language was used to communicate thoughts. Western languages as a group are described broadly as concrete, descriptive and nominative, with all sharing a tendency to precision. That is, scholars of each language struggle to set forth limits and constraints to prevent words being so flexible as to have no practical use. The primary power of language in the West is how clearly and concretely the idea can be expressed.
This is closely wedded to the fundamental approach to thought itself. The philosophers themselves would discuss words, their etymology and how they should be used. While Plato is credited with the basic idea, it is Aristotle who invested so much effort in defining what we can call “knowledge”: What can we say is real? However, in practice, the question is more of, “What can we claim to know such that we can act on it?” While Aristotle acknowledged there could well be gods and such, mythology was not a trustworthy witness in the sense of man having a meaningful interaction with them. Religion was useful in quelling the fears of some minds, perhaps, but when it came down to the business of constructing a broad understanding of the universe in which we live, we can relegate it to a lower status. Belief is distinguished from knowledge.
Yet mythology did answer some very real questions, in the sense that Aristotle simply accepted the notion inherent in Greek myths about the limits of the universe. It’s not so much what Aristotle said as how he said it. His underlying assumption was that this universe is the fullest extent of reality. If there were gods, they were inside it, despite being unseen by human eyes (most of the time). Whatever the underworld might be, though the River Styx might not be on any maps, it was part of this universe. Whatever reason and logic men could summon, it must of necessity apply to anything and everything worthy of discussion. Otherwise, it wasn’t worthy of consideration. Thus, the logic of Aristotle, particularly as it came to be understood and used by others, placed all knowable things inside the boundaries of reason, and by default, within this one universe.
The legacy of the Greek philosophers made man the master of all things, and his rightful god was reason.
Recommended readings: Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”; any survey or summary of Aristotle’s works, as his surviving works are too condensed and challenging for most folks; a survey of Greek mythology.
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I invite reader comments for suggestions, corrections and other nominations for reading materials.
