The beginning of philosophy isn’t philosophy. Rather, it is poetry. Greek poetry to be specific. While we know the names of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, they did not arise in a vacuum. It is also true that the pre-Socratics existed, some you may know: Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Thales. The pre-Socratics and Socratics can be assessed for their visions of philosophy, both already contained in the poetic tradition. The poetic tradition concerned itself with man and the cosmos, human nature and cosmogony to be more specific. These were the issues dealt later by the first philosophers: the pre-Socratics were concerned with the nature of the cosmos and the Socratics concerned with human nature—though we can say with Plato that he was also concerned with the nature of the cosmos just like Aristotle would be in his Metaphysics. But why does philosophy begin with poetry?
Greek poetry deals with the human condition and the cosmos that the human condition inhabits. That is what philosophy is about: the human condition and the environment that it finds itself inhabiting, the cosmos. The history of philosophy is the history of human inquiry into our nature and the world around us, from the Greeks and Christians to the moderns and postmoderns. This is the story of the rise of reason with the Greeks, the integration of reason and love with Christianity, the eclipse of reason and the turn to human sentiment and pragmatism (modern science) with the moderns, whom we may also know as the Enlightenment philosophers. Then comes the demolition of the entire inquiry into reason, love, and pragmatic science by the postmoderns.
In this lecture, the first of four dealing with this history, we begin with the Greeks and the rise of reason out of poetry. As already mentioned, poetry deals with the human condition and the cosmos, any reader of Hesiod, Homer, or Aeschylus can readily see this. The early Enlightenment Italian humanist and philosopher Giambattista Vico, in the New Science, articulated the vision that origins and evolution of philosophy that we will follow: the birth of human thinking begins with human imagery and stories, the images and stories found in poetry, which eventually give way to the rise of rationality. Rationality, then, has its beginnings in imagery and stories, what we sometimes call “myth,” a word, which in Greek, means proclamation—or “to tell.” In other words, myth means story. And story is how conceptual thinking begins. For in a story we have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. We who live in a nominal Christian culture in the west are familiar with those famous first words. But that’s not how the Greeks understood their cosmos. The God of Reason and Love envisioned by Christianity who created the universe out of love and endowed it with rational understanding is not the cosmos of Hesiod. If we can imaginatively rearticulate Hesiod’s beginning, in the Theogony, we can say: In the beginning was Chaos, and Chaos ruled over the heavens and the earth. Chaos is the beginning of everything according to Hesiod. Chaos is the beginning of philosophy. The fundamental question of philosophy can be reduced to this: how do we make order from chaos? The Greeks, the Christians, the moderns, and the postmoderns will all give us answers—and the answers given is the story of philosophy.
Let us return to Hesiod’s Theogony and hear the origins of the cosmos:
…at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundations of all the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, and Eros (Love), fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them. From Chaos came forth Erebus and black Night; but of Night were born Aether and Day, whom she conceived and bare from union in love with Erebus.
As we can hear, Chaos is the beginning as we just said. Chaos rules over everything. And out of this Chaos will come the gods: the Titans born of Uranus and Gaia, the most famous of them being Cronus, who will castrate his father for his tyrannical raping of Mother Earth, whose castrated phallus will fall into the sea and give birth to Aphrodite and the Olympians, the most famous of them being Zeus. Zeus, assuming the leadership of the Olympians, will rally the newly born gods against the Titans. This is the war of the gods, known to us as the Titanomachy. Cronus and the Titans are overthrown and Zeus ascends Olympus as the supreme deity.
Hesiod’s Theogony is a violent poem. Chaos necessitates power. And the most powerful are the ones who bring order to the world. Thus, Hesiod sings praises of Zeus, the most powerful of all the deities in the epic. Hesiod and the muses sing praise to Zeus simply because Zeus is the most powerful. The most powerful is worthy of being admired for out of that power comes the order of the world that brings life.
Hesiod’s primitive philosophy is this: In the beginning is chaos. Chaos is bad. Chaos is represented most especially by the god Uranus. Chaos is tyrannical. Chaos is sexual. Uranus rapes Gaia. Order is good. Order is the antithesis to Chaos. Order is represented by Power. Power is manifested most clearly in Zeus. Chaos and Power, Uranus and Zeus do battle, Power (Zeus) emerges victorious from which Order is brought to the world.
This, however, doesn’t seem to be a very good world to live in. It’s a world of chaos. Confusion. Sex. Lust. Violence. War. Readers of Plato will find overtures of Hesiod in Thrasymachus, who in The Republic explains justice as the rule of the strong. Zeus is the strongest of the gods and thus is worthy of praise.
Plato’s Republic also sets an early contrast between the old cosmos of power and the new cosmos of rationality right from the beginning:
[Socrates]: I went down to the Piraeus yesterday with Glaucon, son of Ariston, to pray to the goddess; and, at the same time, I wanted to observe how they would put on the festival, since they were now holding it for the first time. Now, in my opinion, the procession of the native inhabitants was fine; but the one the Thracians conducted was no less fitting a show. After we had prayed and looked on, we went off toward town.
Catching sight of us from afar as we were pressing homewards, Polemarchus, son of Cephalus, ordered his slave boy to run after us and order us to wait for him. The boy took hold of my cloak from behind and said, “Polemarchus orders you to wait.”
And I turned around and asked him where his master was. “He is coming up behind,” he said, “just wait.”
“Of course we’ll wait,” said Glaucon.
A moment later Polemarchus came along with Adeimantus, Glaucon’s brother, Niceratus, son of Nicias, and some others—apparently from the procession. Polemarchus said, “Socrates, I guess you two are hurrying to get away to town.”
“That’s not a bad guess,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “do you see how many of us there are?”
“Of course.”
“Well, then,” he said, “either prove stronger than these men or stay here.”
“Isn’t there still one other possibility.” I said, “our persuading you that you must let us go?”
“Could you really persuade,” he said, “if we don’t listen?”
Listen again. After Polemarchus sends his slave boy to forcibly hold Socrates against his will, and later when Polemarchus catches up and he converses with Socrates, Polemarchus brags that he has more people than Socrates and therefore has more power to force Socrates to do what he wants. “Well then, either prove stronger than these men or stay here,” Polemarchus says. “Isn’t there still one other possibility,” Socrates responds. “Our persuading you that you must let us go.” Power vs. Persuasion. Force vs. Reason. This is the dialectic that Plato inaugurates for us. This is what Greek philosophy is all about, reason and persuasion as the basis of the cosmos and not power and violence as was the case with the poets. The rest of The Republic is really a giant dialogue of power, advocated by the Sophists, in contest with rationality, articulated by Socrates.
The cosmos of reason offered up by Plato reaches its climax in The Timaeus. The Demiurge doesn’t create through brute force or war as the case in Hesiod. Rather, the Demiurge establishes all things through rational order. Timaeus’s long-winded discourses in the dialogue that bears his name has him then discuss mathematics as a necessary manifested of rational order—math proves the cosmos to be rationally ordered and rationally understandable.
Even though Platonism is sometimes called the philosophy of intelligibility, the intelligible world that we can know from rational thought, the soul, which exists within us, Platonism’s application isn’t inwardly but outwardly. Plato’s Forms exist beyond and above the material world. But we are still contemplating the cosmos and what lies beyond it: outward nature.
Plato’s most famous student, Aristotle, picks up where Plato left off. But rather than look beyond the cosmos for the rational order of all things, Aristotle looks to nature itself—the material world. Aristotle’s most famous gift to philosophy is the idea that we are manifestations of the material world, of material nature, that we grow into the nature that we are endowed with. To understand ourselves we must understand nature because we are nature. As with Plato, though augmented, Aristotle’s philosophical empiricism is one of outward contemplation: the contemplation of observable nature.
This idea of contemplating observable nature to understand ourselves is continued with the Stoics. The cosmos is rationally determined by fixed patterns and movement. The Stoics were cosmic determinists, but they believed we had the power to control our emotions and how we respond to the world of movement. We can be more like the cosmos, accepting the movement of nature and being happy as a result, or we can fight against nature and be miserable. The Stoics, as we can see, share in the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition of looking outward at the world in order to better understand about ourselves: this is what rational living is all about – the observation of the movement of nature, recognizing we are a part of nature, accepting that we are part of nature, and then growing into that nature. This produces our happiness.
The Greek philosophical tradition of reason, then, is premised on a cosmos of rationality. In order to understand reason we must observe nature then live by the nature we observe. Greek rationalism is contemplative, it is the contemplation of outward things, of outward nature. It also takes a negative view of love, of the emotions, which is associated with chaos and the violence of the poets. Any reader of the Stoics is familiar with the negativity the Stoics place on the emotions: the emotions are irrational, following the emotions leads to bad decisions, and to live by one’s emotions is to be enslaved to pathos. To be free is to live rationally, in conformity with the observable nature of the universe.
This tension, however, between reason and love was unresolved by Greek philosophy. This is the world that Christian philosophy emerged into, a world where reason and love were pitted against each other and a world where understanding the self was through understanding the outer world. The Christian revolution in philosophy changed all of that. Although it shares with Greek philosophy a priority of the contemplative, its emphasis would turn inward. Christianity would try to reconcile the tension between reason and love by turning away from the outer world to the inner world, to the world of the human heart.
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Hesiod, Paul Krause in real life, is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is writer, classicist, and historian. He has written on the arts, culture, classics, literature, philosophy, religion, and history for numerous journals, magazines, and newspapers. He is the author of Finding Arcadia, The Odyssey of Love and the Politics of Plato, and a contributor to the College Lecture Today and Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters. He holds master’s degrees in philosophy and religious studies (biblical studies & theology) from the University of Buckingham and Yale, and a bachelor’s degree in economics, history, and philosophy from Baldwin Wallace University.
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