HISTORY OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

The Origins of
Western Thought

Philosophical
Thinking

Philosophy as a
discipline isn't easy to define precisely. Issuing from a sense of wonderment
about life and the world, it often involves a keen interest in major questions
about ourselves, our experience, and our place in the universe as a whole. But
philosophy is also reflectively
concerned with the methods its practitioners employ in the effort to
resolve such questions. Emerging as a central feature of Western culture,
philosophy is a tradition of thinking and writing about particular issues in
special ways.

Thus, philosophy must be regarded both
as content and as activity: It considers alternative views of what is real and
the development of reasons for accepting them. It requires both a careful,
sympathetic reading of classical texts and a critical, logical examination of
the arguments they
express. It offers all of us the chance to create and adopt significant beliefs
about life and the world, but it also requires each of us to acquire the habits
of criticical thinking. Philosophy is both sublime and nitpicking.

Since our personal growth in these
matters naturally retraces the process of cultural development, study of the
history of philosophy in our culture provides an excellent introduction to the
discipline as a whole. Here our aim is to examine the appearance of Western
philosophy as an interesting and valuable component of our cultural heritage.

Greek
Philosophy

Abstract thought about the ultimate
nature of the world and of human life began to appear in cultures all over the
world during the sixth
century B.C.E., as an urge to move beyond superstition toward explanation.
We focus here on its embodiment among the ancient
Greeks, whose active and tumultuous social life provided ample
opportunities for the expression of philosophical thinking of three sorts:

Speculative thinking expresses human
curiosity about the world, striving to understand in natural (rather than super-natural)
terms how things really are, what they are made of, and how they function.

Practical thinking emphasizes the
desire to guide conduct by comprehending the nature of life and the place of
human beings and human behavior in the greater scheme of reality.

Critical thinking (the hallmark of
philosophy itself) involves a careful examination of the foundations upon which
thinking of any sort must rely, trying to achieve an effective method for
assessing the reliability of positions adopted on the significant issues.

Beginning
with clear examples of thinking of the first two sorts, we will see the gradual
emergence of inclinations toward the third.

Milesian
Speculation

During the sixth century, in the Greek
colony at Miletus, a group of thinkers began to engage in an extended
exploration of the speculative issues. Although these Milesians wrote little
themselves, other ancient authorities recorded some of their central tenets.
Their central urge was to show that the complex world has a simple, permanent
underpinning in the reality
of a single kind of stuff from which all else emerges.

The
philosopher Thales,
for example, is remembered as having asserted that all comes from water. (Fragments)
Although we have no record of the reasoning that led Thales to this conclusion,
it isn't hard to imagine what it might have been. If we suppose that the
ultimate stuff of the world must be chosen from among things familiar to us,
water isn't a bad choice: most of the earth is covered with it, it appears in
solid, liquid, and gaseous forms, and it is clearly essential to the existence
of life. Everything is moist.

Thales's
student Anaximander,
however, found this answer far too simple. Proper attention to the changing
face of the universe, he supposed, requires us to consider the cyclical
interaction of things of at least four sorts: the hot, the cold, the dry, and
the wet. (Fragments) Anaximander held that all of these elements
originally arise from a primal, turbulent mass, the the Boundless or
Infinite {Gk. apeirwn [apeirn]}. It is only by a
gradual process of distillation that everything else emergesearth, air, fire,
water, of courseand even living things evolve.

The
next Milesian, Anaximenes,
returned to the conviction that there must be a single kind of stuff at the
heart of everything, and he proposed vapor or mist {Gk. aer [aer]} as the most likely candidate. (Fragments)
Not only does this warm, wet air combine two of the four elements together, but
it also provides a familiar pair of processes for changes in its state:
condensation and evaporation. Thus, in its most rarified form of breath or
spirit, Anaximenes's air constitutes the highest representation of life.

As interesting as Milesian speculations
are, they embody only the most primitive variety of philosophical speculation.
Although they disagreed with each other on many points, each of the thinkers
appears to have been satisfied with the activity of proposing his own views in
relative isolation from those of his teacher or contemporaries. Later
generations initiated the move toward critical thinking by arguing with each
other.

Pythagorean
Life

The Greek colony in Italy at the same
time devoted much more concern to practical matters. Followers of the legendary
Pythagoras
developed a comprehensive view of a human life in harmony with all of the
natural world. Since the Pythagoreans persisted for many generations as a
quasi-religious sect, protecting themselves behind a veil of secrecy, it is
difficult to recover a detailed account of the original doctrines of their
leader, but the basic outlines are clear.

Pythagoras
was interested in mathematics: he discovered a proof of the geometrical theorem
that still bears his name, described the relationship between the length of
strings and the musical pitches they produce when plucked, and engaged in
extensive observation of the apparent motion of celestial objects. In each of
these aspects of the world, Pythagoras saw order, a regularity of occurrences
that could be described in terms of mathematical ratios.

The aim of human life, then, must be to
live in harmony with this natural regularity. Our lives are merely small
portions of a greater whole. (Fragments)
Since the spirit (or breath) of human beings is divine air, Pythagoras
supposed, it is naturally immortal; its existence naturally outlives the
relatively temporary functions of the human body. Pythagoreans therefore
believed that the soul
"transmigrates" into other living bodies at death, with animals and
plants participating along with human beings in a grand cycle of reincarnation.

Even those who did not fully accept the
religious implications of Pythagorean thought were often influenced by its
thematic structure. As we'll see later, many Western philosophers have been
interested in the immortality of the human soul and in the relationship between
human beings and the natural world.

During the fifth century B.C.E.,
Greek philosophers began to engage in extended controversies that represent a
movement toward the development of genuinely critical thinking. Although they
often lacked enough common ground upon which to adjudicate their disputes and
rarely engaged in the self-criticism that is characteristic of genuine
philosophy, these thinkers did try to defend their own positions and attack
those of their rivals by providing attempts at rational argumentation.

Heraclitus
and the Eleatics

Dissatisfied with earlier efforts to
comprehend the world, Heraclitus
of Ephesus earned his reputation as "the Riddler" by delivering
his pronouncements in deliberately contradictory (or at least paradoxical) form. The
structure of puzzling statements, he believed, mirrors the chaotic structure of
thought, which in turn is parallel to the complex, dynamic character of the
world itself.

Rejecting the Pythagorean ideal of harmony as
peaceful coexistence, Heraclitus saw the natural world as an environment of
perpetual struggle and strife. "All is flux," he supposed; everything
is changing all the time. As Heraclitus is often reported to have said,
"Upon those who step into the same river, different waters flow." The
tension and conflict which govern everything in our experience are moderated
only by the operation of a universal principle of proportionality in all
things.

Against
this position, the Eleatics
defended the unity and stability of the universe. Their
leader, Parmenides
supposed that language embodies a logic of perfect immutability: "What is,
is." (Fragments) Since everything is what it is and not something
else, he argued in Peri FusiV (On Nature),
it can never correct to say that one and the same thing both has and does not
have some feature, so the supposed change from having the feature to not having
it is utterly impossible. Of course, change does seem to occur, so we
must distinguish sharply between the many mere appearances that are part of our
experience and the one true reality that is discernible only by intellect.

Other
Eleatics delighted in attacking Heraclitus with arguments designed to show
the absurdity of his notion that the world is perpetual changing. Zeno of Elea in
particular fashioned four paradoxes about motion, covering every possible
combination of continuous or discrete intervals and the direct motion of single
bodies or the relative motion of several:

1. The Dichotomy: It is
impossible to move around a racetrack since we must first go halfway, and
before that go half of halfway, and before that half of half of halfway,
and . . . . If space is infinitely divisible, we have
infinitely many partial distances to cover, and cannot get under way in any
finite time.

2. Achilles and the Tortoise:
Similarly, given a ten meter head-start, a tortoise can never be overtaken by
Achilles in a race, since Achilles must catch up to where the tortoise began.
But by then the tortoise has moved ahead, and Achilles must catch up to that
new point, and so on. Again, the suppostition that things really move leads to
an infinite regress.

3. The Arrow: If, on
the other hand, motion occurs in discrete intervals, then at any given moment
during its flight through the air, an arrow is not moving. But since its entire
flight comprises only such moments, the arrow never moves.

4. The Stadium:
Similarly, if three chariots of equal length, one stationary and the others
travelling in opposite directions, were to pass by each other at the same time,
then each of the supposedly moving ones would take only half as long to pass
the other as to pass the third, making 1=2!

The patent absurdity that
results in each of these cases, Zeno concluded, shows that motion (and, hence,
change of any sort) is impossible. (Fragments)

What all of this raises is the question
of "the one and the many." How can there be any genuine unity in a
world that appears to be multiple? To the extent that a satisfactory answer
involves a distinction between appearance and reality
and the use of dialectical
reasoning in the effort to understand what is real, this pursuit of the
Eleatics set important standards for the future development of Western thought.

Empedocles
and Anaxagoras

In the next generation, Empedocles introduced
the plurality from the very beginning. Everything in the world, he supposed, is
ultimately made up of some mixture of the four elements, considered as
irreducible components. The unique character of each item depends solely upon
the special balance of the four that is present only in it. Change takes place
because there are two competing forces at work in the world. Love {Gk. filia [philia]} is always putting things together, while
Strife {Gk. neikoV [neikos]} is always tearing them apart.
The interplay of the two constitutes the activity we see in nature.

His
rival, Anaxagoras of
Clazomenae, returned in some measure to the Milesian effort to
identify a common stuff
out of which everything is composed. Matter is, indeed, a chaotic primordial
mass, infinitely divisible in principle, yet in which nothing is
differentiated. But Anaxagoras held that order is brought to this mass by the
power of Mind {Gk. nouV [nous]}, the source of all
explanation by reference to cosmic intelligence. Although later philosophers
praised Anaxagoras for this explicit introduction of mind into the description
of the world, it is not clear whether he meant by his use of this word what
they would suppose. (Fragments)

Greek
Atomism

The inclination to regard the world as
pluralistic took its most extreme form in the work of the ancient atomists. Although the
basic outlines of the view were apparently developed by Leucippus, the more
complete exposition by Democritus,
including a discussion of its ethical implications, was more influential. Our
best source of information about the atomists is the poem De Rerum Natura (On the
Nature of Things) by the later Roman philosopher Lucretius.

For the atomists, all substance is
material and the true elements of the natural world are the tiny, indivisible,
unobservable solid bodies called "atoms." Since these particles
exist, packed more or less densely together, in an infinite empty space, their
motion is not only possible but ineveitable. Everything that happens in the
world, the atomists supposed, is a result of microscopic collisions among atoms.
Thus, as Epicurus would later make clear, the actions and passions
of human life are also inevitable consequences of material motions.
Although atomism has a decidedly modern ring, notice that, since it could not
be based on observation of microscopic particles in the way that modern science
is, ancient atomism was merely another fashionable form of cosmological
speculation.

The
Sophists

Fifth-century Athens was a politically
troubled city-state: it underwent a sequence of external attacks and internal
rebellions that no social entity could envy. During several decades, however,
the Athenians maintained a nominally democratic government in which (at least
some) citizens had the opportunity to participate directly in important social
decisions. This contributed to a renewed interest in practical philosophy.
Itinerate teachers known as the sophists offered to
provide their students with training in the effective exercise of citizenship.

Since the central goal of political
manipulation was to outwit and publicly defeat an opponent, the rhetorical
techniques of persuasion naturally played an important role. But the best of
the Sophists also made use of Eleatic methods of
logical argumentation in pursuit of similar aims. Driven by the urge to defend
expedient solutions to particular problems, their efforts often encouraged
relativism or evan an extreme skepticism about the
likelihood of discovering the truth.

A Sophist named Gorgias, for example,
argued (perhaps ironically) that: (a) Nothing exists; (b) If it did, we could
not know it; and (c) If we knew anything, we could not talk about it. Protagoras, on the
other hand, supposed that since human beings are "the measure of all
things," it follows that truth is subjectively unique to each individual.
In a more political vein, Thrasymachus argued that it is better to perform
unjust actions than to be the victim of the injustice committed by others. The
ideas and methods of these thinkers provided the lively intellectual
environment in which the greatest Athenian philosophers thrived.