Suddenly I find myself desiring a year numbering system that has no negative numbers. Unfortunately, documented human history doesn't quite stretch far back enough...
Unless otherwise stated, any dates i give are going to be using the BC/AD system, due to personal preference.
In most respects, not really any more so than any other religion of the time; most of the taboos were probably borrowed from existing superstitions. The killing of Hippasus was a travesty, though.
In general with historical philosophy, i'm going to take a charitable approach, and try to treat the ideas of the ancient thinkers as serious and significant (and any thinker who is the subject of one of these initial overview posts is someone who has historically been considered important), even when they contradict subsequent scientific developments or run counter to our commonplace assumptions today.
(i'm conscious, as well, that i'm a guest in the house of philosophy, and that i won't learn if i don't listen.)
> Some Pythagoreans believed in a cosmic cycle of rebirth: after a person died, his or her soul would be reborn into every kind of animal over the course of 3000 years before being reborn as a human once again.
What do the Hare Krishna folks say about this duration? For some reason I am thinking 300,000 years but maybe that was the duration of the longest-period world layer or something. I remember hearing this from them on one occasion.
i'm not familiar with Hare Krishna beliefs, sorry.
To be fair even today we don't exactly have a good way of representing irrational numbers.
You mean in the sense that it's the problem of representing infinities?
Dedekind cuts are probably the best known method of defining the reals.
(If all goes as planned, i'll be covering Dedekind in a post once we get up to 19th century number theory and the birth of analytic philosophy. That's unlikely to be for quite a while, though.)
Someone I got myself mixed in with the local Hare Krishnas at school so I've hung out with them too much; that's the only reason it came to mind.
Also, the "weirdos" bit was just for fun. Though if they really killed someone for discovering irrational numbers, that is...dickish, to say the least.
Dedekind cuts are a new thing to me, and I was also just now introduced, through them, to "surreal numbers", though it's too late for me to make sense of them right now.
The reason I was thinking it'd be nice to have all positive numbers for year counts is that it was a little weird for me to think of someone living from 510 BC to the "end of the century", said end being just 10 years rather than 90 years, and then I realized that people back then almost certainly didn't count time backwards, so it'd be nice to have a bit more of their perspective. Then I started thinking of the Mayan calendar, the Chinese calendar, etc. and wanting to complain that we don't use those calendar systems.
Incidentally the Mayans had another like super-period length for something, if I recall correctly. I can't remember if it meant anything more than just a digit in their year recording system though.
i actually have a copy of Knuth's Surreal Numbers, a dialogue in which he explains the concept. i might liveblog it at some point.
i agree, it can be a bit confusing counting backwards in terms of years. It's the calendar i'm most familiar with, though, so counting backwards for the ancient dates is a necessary trade-off if i want to retain that familiarity. i might bring in the Chinese calendar when i'm looking at Chinese philosophers, though.
The most important mythic works in Ancient Greece were the poems of Homer and Hesiod. Homer supposedly lived in Ionia during the 8th century BC, but it is now believed that his great epic works, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were assembled from the works of multiple authors, not the work of a single poet. Hesiod lived in Boeotia, probably during the 8th century, and was best known for two poems: Works and Days, an account of farming life, and the Theogony, about the birth of the gods. These poems were all hugely respected in Ancient Greece, enjoying a cultural status comparable to both Shakespeare and the Bible in Christian England. They may be regarded as roughly equivalent to sacred texts.
Hesiod's Theogony opens with prayer to the muses, then launches into Hesiod's account of how the universe came to be. According to Hesiod, the first to come into being was Chaos, the void, out of which sprung Gaia, the Earth; Tartarus, the underworld; Erebus, the darkness; Nyx, night; and Eros, love. Nyx mated with Erebus and gave birth to Aether, the atmosphere, and Hemera, day. Gaia then gave birth to Uranus, the sky; Pontus, the sea; and the various Mountains. Gaia then mated with Uranus and gave birth to the Titans, who included Zeus' parents Cronos and Rhea; the Cyclopes, one-eyed giants; and the Hekatoncheires, hundred-armed giants.
The Theogony is a hymn, not a philosophical text, but we might note some similarities between this account and the speculative cosmologies of the Milesians. Most of the gods are obviously personified concepts, and read with this in mind Hesiod's account of the creation of the universe is that out of void arose the Earth, the underworld, the darkness, night and love, and these gave rise to everything else that exists. Void and Earth are by this reading cosmic principles, much like Anaximander's apeiron and Anaximenes' air. Like the Presocratic philosophers, Hesiod is supplying an explanation for why things are the way they are.
However, Hesiod's explanations extend into the origins of human customs. For instance, he offers an explanation for why people are permitted to eat the best parts of the animals they sacrifice. Prometheus, the titan who created the human race, made two bundles: one containing the best cuts of meat, wrapped in a stomach, and one containing entrails wrapped in fat. Zeus chose the fatty bundle, mistakenly believing it contained the choicest meat, and from then on the sacrifices offered by mankind would consist of fat and entrails.
In Homer's Iliad, an epic poem concerning the Trojan War, we see divine explanations being supplied for other aspects of human life. At one point, Hera, the Goddess of Marriage and Women, wants to help the Greeks to win the battle, but her husband, Zeus, is supporting the Trojans. So she borrows a girdle from Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love, and visits Hypnos, the God of Sleep. She offers him the hand in marriage of the grace Pasithea in exchange for his help. Then Hera approaches Zeus, who is watching the battle from Mount Ida, and seduces him. Meanwhile, Hypnos is hiding in a nearby tree, having taken the form of a nightjar. When Zeus and Hera finish making love, Hypnos puts him to sleep. While Zeus is absent, the Trojan hero, Hector, is wounded.
So we see that, in Homer, the gods are present in every aspect of life: a seduction requires the assistance of the Goddess of Love, sleep requires the involvement of the God of Sleep, and the absence of Zeus turns the tide of a battle between human beings. Human agency appears to disappear altogether, although the gods themselves behave very like human beings. Indeed, they are prone to petty bickering and outright errors of judgment. When they're not fighting amongst themselves, very often they're devising horrific punishments for mortals who have offended them for one reason or another. Arguably, then, the gods as represented in Homer and Hesiod are really just the extension of the sphere of human thought and behaviour to explain things that occur in nature. Nevertheless, animals were sacrificed to them, and they were worshipped in temples and prayed to for a variety of reasons.
The most important of these gods were the Olympians, who ruled from the summit of Mount Olympus, or in later Greek thought, far above it. Zeus, the supreme ruler of the gods, was originally worshipped as a weather god, and thunderbolts were his weapons. During the earliest stages of Greek civilization his authority broadened, making him the king of the entire universe. Although the gods did not control destiny, Zeus was its interpreter, and owned a set of scales that told him what the Fates had in store. He was also the protector of kings, lending rulers in Ancient Greece divine authority. This detail is significant, since the Olympians were principally the gods of the aristocracy.
Distinct from the Olympians, but part of the same belief system, was Hades, the ruler of the underworld. Hades was a brother of Zeus who acted as a kind of gaoler, often depicted holding a key. His name was thought to be unlucky and was often avoided, so he was known by a variety of euphemistic titles, among them "Pluto", meaning "the rich". He was neither evil nor injust, but was certainly an ominous figure, and rarely appears in mythology. He was believed to have absolute dominion over the realm of the dead.
Classical Greek beliefs about the afterlife were decidedly bleak. The dead were shades, shadows of their former selves, bloodless and without consciousness. They were escorted to the underworld by Hermes, the Messenger of Zeus, where they had to pay a coin to Charon, the boatman, who would ferry them across the River Styx; the Greeks buried their dead with coins in their mouths for this reason. On arriving on the opposite shore, the shades would be judged. The most wicked were sent to Tartarus, a dark place of eternal torment. A virtuous few were sent to Elysium, the Isles of the Blest. Most, however, remained in the dreary Plain of Asphodel, the final dwelling place of even the shades of Achilles and Heracles. There was no escape from here, since the way out was guarded by a vicious three-headed dog, Cerberus.
The worship of the Olympians was not the only religion in Ancient Greece. There were other religions, distinct from but compatible with the worship of the Olympians. In rural Arcadia, religion often took the form of local fertility cults. Typically these were dedicated to Pan, the son of Hermes but not himself an Olympian. He was a fertility god, and during times of bad harvest or when livestock did not reproduce, the local statue of Pan would be flogged with poisonous squills.
The Eleusinian Mysteries, which became the most sacred part of the state religion of Athens, also began as a fertility cult. These were a series of secret rites dedicated to Demeter, whose name means Mother Earth. Demeter had a daughter, Persephone, who was carried off to the underworld by Hades, who wanted her for his bride. Demeter descended from Olympus and wandered the Earth until she arrived at Eleusis, where the king built a temple to her. Distraught at the loss of her daughter, she caused the earth to become barren, resulting in a disastrous famine. Zeus, seeking to appease her, sent Hermes to retrieve Persephone from Hades. While she was in the underworld, however, Persephone ate some pomegranate seeds, and those who ate the food of the underworld were not allowed to leave. As a compromise, Zeus decreed that Persephone must spend a portion of the year with her husband, Hades. Consequently, during the summer months, Persephone is in the underworld and the earth is dry and barren. During the rest of the year, however, she is restored to the upper world and the ground is fertile again, and those who practiced the Eleusinian Mysteries believed that faithful worshippers would likewise be restored to the upper world after death.
The Eleusinian Mysteries were connected with Dionysus, also called Bacchus, the God of Wine and Ecstatic Liberation. Dionysus was originally only a Thracian fertility god, but grew in significance over time, becoming the most important Greek deity in the later, Hellenistic period. The aristocracy initially resisted the Bacchic religion as a foreign superstition that competed with the Olympian religion. However, Dionysus offered his followers things the Olympian religion didn't: the liberation of wild, frenzied rituals in life, and the hope of salvation after death. Performing these rituals was said to result in a state of enthusiasm, which literally meant fusion with a god. Women held a special status among the worshippers of Dionysus, who were known as Bacchae. Bacchic women called Maenads would dress themselves in animal skins and danced on the hillsides, where they would tear wild animals to pieces and eat them raw.
Among the Bacchae there was said to have existed a man named Orpheus. Orpheus is a largely mythic figure, but if he existed at all, he seems to have been a reformer of the Bacchic religion who founded a tradition known as Orphism. The mythological Orpheus was a minstrel, and he had a wife called Eurydice. When Eurydice was bitten by a snake and died, Orpheus travelled to the underworld. When he reached the Styx he played his lyre, which moved Charon and Cerberus so much that they allowed him to pass. Even Hades and Persephone were moved, and they allowed him to rescue Eurydice, on one condition: he must not look back at her, or he will lose her forever. According to earlier versions of the myth, he succeeded, thereby proving the power of Dionysus over death itself. In the more famous version, however, he looked back, and Eurydice turned into mist before his eyes, and was returned to the house of Hades. Heartbroken, he wandered the hills, where he was torn to pieces by the Maenads. Only his head survived, and fell into the River Hebrus, still crying out for Eurydice.
There is a parallel myth regarding Dionysus' birth. In this story, Zeus seduced Demeter in the form of a snake and she gave birth to a child, Zagreus. The jealous Hera sent a group of titans to kill the child, who was disguised as a kid (as in, a young goat; goats were a fertility symbol in Ancient Greece). The titans caught him, tore him limb from limb and ate him, leaving only his heart, which was rescued by Zeus' daughter Athena. Zeus then gave this heart to his Theban mistress, Semele, who ate it and gave birth to a child. That child, according to the Orphics, was Dionysus.
Zeus punished the titans who killed Zagreus by blasting them into ashes. These ashes became the human race. The titans, according to the Orphics, came from the earth but had eaten the flesh of a god, meaning that the human race is both earthly and divine.
The Orphics were an ascetic sect within the Bacchic religion. By living a virtuous life, they believed they could increase the divine element within themselves and become one with Dionysus. They also believed that in the underworld there existed two well-springs, Lethe and Mnemosyne. Lethe ran with the waters of forgetfulness, but Mnemosyne ran with the waters of remembrance. Only those who drank from Mnemosyne were able to achieve salvation.
The Orphic religion entered philosophy via the Pythagorean school. We see this influence on Pythagoras expressed in the form of, for example, his view of women as especially pious, and his claim that he could remember past lives. Enthusiasm, in his teachings, was achieved through the contemplation of mathematical proofs. Evocatively, we find among his dietary rules the teaching that his followers are 'not to eat the heart'.
A very different Presocratic approach to religion, however, is found in the philosophical verses of Xenophanes, who was born in Colophon, north of Miletus, but was expelled from there in his twenties. He made his living as a wandering minstrel, travelling at least as far as Sicily. Of all the Presocratics, Xenophanes is the most theological, and noteworthy for being the first philosopher in the Western tradition to openly attack religion.
Xenophanes mocked the identification of the rainbow with the goddess Iris, claiming that a rainbow is only a colourful cloud. He also fiercely satirized Homer and Hesiod for their overly anthropomorphic view of the gods. He observed that the Ethiopians made their gods resemble Ethiopians and the Thracians made their gods resemble Thracians, and remarked that if animals had gods they would surely depict them as animals. He was equally scathing of the Pythagorean doctrine of metempsychosis, and alleged that Pythagoras once stopped a man from beating a dog because he claimed to recognize its voice as that of his dead friend.
Xenophanes was no atheist, however. On the contrary: he felt that the works of Homer and Hesiod, with their depictions of the gods sleeping around, beating their wives, eating their young and castrating their parents, were highly disrespectful. He argued instead for a God who was entirely unlike humanity - one God, since if there were multiple gods, Xenophanes argued, none of them would be the most powerful, and therefore none of them would be able to do as they wished.
God, for Xenophanes, doesn't move, and may not even have a body, but can shake the entire world just by thinking. He does nothing but think and perceive, but governs the universe effortlessly using his mind. He is not divisible into separate organs, but has existed as a whole for all eternity. In addition to arguing that there could only be one God, Xenophanes argued that nothing besides a god could have created God, as something lesser can't create something greater. Xenophanes was not the first monotheist, but he is notable for arriving at monotheism through reasoned argument, rather than claiming divine revelation.
Xenophanes also propounded a cosmology similar to those of the Milesians. In Xenophanes' cosmology, all things had their origins in water and earth. According to Xenophanes, the earth goes on forever beneath our feet. On this basis, he argued that the Sun couldn't possibly pass under the Earth. He argued, instead, that every morning tiny sparks came together to form a new Sun, which would last until the end of the day. Much more impressive, from a modern scientific perspective, were his observations of shells in the fossil record, from which he concluded that at one time the Earth must have been underwater.
Heraclitus was born around 535 BC in Ephesus, a city not far from Miletus. At the time, Ionia was occupied by the Persian Empire. Heraclitus was born to an aristocratic family, but abandoned his home to live in the hills as an ascetic. He was self-taught, and regarded almost all the philosophers, poets and sages who came before him with contempt. Surviving fragments of his work suggest a misanthropic character, although he seems to have thought more kindly of children. He took no students, but left his "book" (that is, a roll of papyrus), On Nature, in the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, where it gained a cult of followers, the Heracliteans. The book has not survived, and the some 15,000 words we have of Heraclitus' writing take the form of a series of aphorisms, such as "You can't step in the same river twice", or "The road up and the road down are one and the same". The aphorisms are often highly ambiguous or even riddle-like. While it's possible that the complete book was something more resembling a conventional narrative or argument, it is more likely that Heraclitus actually did write only in these aphorisms; even in ancient times, he had a reputation for obscurity. Socrates is reported as saying of On Nature, "What I understand of it is excellent. What I don't understand may well be excellent also; but only a deep-sea diver could get to the bottom of it."
Unsurprisingly, Heraclitus' aphorisms have been interpreted in numerous ways. When he says that the road up is the road down, is he suggesting that his philosophy applies on all levels of reality (from the fundamentals of physics to complicated human structures like politics), or is he talking about actual roads, perhaps as an example of something which has two seemingly mutually contradictory properties? Likewise, when he says "Donkeys prefer garbage to gold," is he expressing relativism, the view that truth is in the eye of the beholder (which some of his aphorisms appear to endorse), or is he just insulting people who don't like his philosophy? Aristotle, when commenting on Heraclitus, complains that he is unclear, but to some extent the ambiguities appear to be deliberate. He uses the language in a distinctly crafted, unconventional way.
An important concept for Heraclitus is the "logos". In the Greek of his time, this word had a number of meanings, including "account", "word", "ratio", "reason", "law", "principle" and "measurement". It is the root of the suffix in words like "sociology", "theology" and "psychology". In what is believed to be his introduction, Heraclitus claims that the logos he speaks of is always the case, but people always fail to understand it. All things come to be according to this logos, but people seem not to have experienced it, because they pay no more attention to what they do when they are awake than they do when they're asleep. It doesn't sound as though he's just talking about his book; the logos, for Heraclitus, appears to be some kind of universal principle. It is, he says, both willing and unwilling to go by the name of Zeus. The logos exists independently of his teaching. "Having harkened not to me but the logos," Heraclitus writes, "It is wise to agree that all things are one." The view that there is only one thing is known as monism, but it is typical of Heraclitus that he phrases it, paradoxically, as "all things are one."
This brings us to another recurring idea in Heraclitus' aphorisms, the unity of opposites. He states, for instance, that seawater is both pure and poisonous; it's healthy for fish, but undrinkable for human beings. Not all of his oppositions are easily resolvable by reference to relativism, either, even when they might appear trivial. The road up is the road down, no matter which way you're going. Heraclitus seems to go further, suggesting that the universe is actually constituted from opposites. Perhaps reacting to Anaximander, he claims that all things happen out of strife and necessity. He is, apparently, quite literal in suggesting that strife is a universal principle; in praying for an end to war, he claims, Homer was unwittingly praying for the end of the universe. However, he does offer one way in which the oppositions are resolved, and that is God, for whom all things are fair, good and right.
Heraclitus also takes the view that everything is made of fire, which transforms into water, earth and wind. He claims that the sun and moon are bowls of fire, turned towards the earth, and that the phases of the moon are caused by the bowl tilting. He also identifies the human soul with fire, apparently because living bodies are warm. Drunkenness, he claims, is caused by a moistened soul, which he also associates with weakness and cowardice. If a person's soul becomes too moist, the fire goes out and the person dies.
Heraclitus is also associated with something called the "flux doctrine," which is the teaching that everything is constantly changing all the time. Traditionally, Heraclitus is taught alongside Parmenides, an Eleatic philosopher who taught that change is impossible, and their views are contrasted. Both Plato and Aristotle associate the flux doctrine with Heraclitus, and some Heracliteans certainly subscribed to it, among them Cratylus, who famously said that you can't step in the same river once. Nowadays, however, some experts do not believe that Heraclitus taught the flux doctrine, at least not in the extreme form usually attributed to him. The fragments we have suggest that, unlike Cratylus, Heraclitus didn't think that reality changed so constantly that there could be no fixed meaning. Nevertheless, some of the fragments are clearly concerned with change. It's possible, of course, that he thought things changed only intermittently, or that all things are subject to change. We'll return to Heraclitus in more depth later, so for now I'll just note that there is academic disagreement on this point.
Whether or not Heraclitus himself believed in the flux doctrine, it's worth remembering that it's an influential idea that's associated with him. In my next philosophy post I'll be talking about Parmenides, who may have been responding to said doctrine.
Simon Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, revised second edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) 978-0-19-954143-0
Melvyn Bragg, In Our Time, Heraclitus (with Peter Adamson, Angie Hobbs and James Warren) (BBC Radio 4, 2011-12-08)
Daniel W. Graham, Heraclitus, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy(Fall 2015 Edition) (forthcoming URL, not yet active but included for posterity), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
Anthony Kenny, A New History of Western Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) 978-0-19-965649-3
Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004) 978-0-415-32505-9
really everything that happens in Western philosophy between Aristotle and the Enlightenment is just kind of a blank for me, i know the odd name or idea but that's it
i like the period, but for its political and historical aspects... not really a lot of thinking about "higher" (not related to keeping people from starving or whatever) stuff as far as i can tell
i know "dark ages" isn't really accepted in historiography anymore but there really does seem to be a kind of lack, if only cos of a lack of stable sponsors
really everything that happens in Western philosophy between Aristotle and the Enlightenment is just kind of a blank for me, i know the odd name or idea but that's it
i like the period, but for its political and historical aspects... not really a lot of thinking about "higher" (not related to keeping people from starving or whatever) stuff as far as i can tell
i know "dark ages" isn't really accepted in historiography anymore but there really does seem to be a kind of lack, if only cos of a lack of stable sponsors
idk I feel like I should stick up for the intelligence of the "Dark Age" man and denigrate the use of that term and maybe say something about Clovis I but idk I'm not really feelin it right now.
Can we have this argument again in like a month when I get really into CK2 again
Comments
You're very welcome. Glad it was of interest. No idea, but "samos" apparently meant "sand dune" or "seaside hill". Unless otherwise stated, any dates i give are going to be using the BC/AD system, due to personal preference. In most respects, not really any more so than any other religion of the time; most of the taboos were probably borrowed from existing superstitions. The killing of Hippasus was a travesty, though.
In general with historical philosophy, i'm going to take a charitable approach, and try to treat the ideas of the ancient thinkers as serious and significant (and any thinker who is the subject of one of these initial overview posts is someone who has historically been considered important), even when they contradict subsequent scientific developments or run counter to our commonplace assumptions today.
(i'm conscious, as well, that i'm a guest in the house of philosophy, and that i won't learn if i don't listen.) i'm not familiar with Hare Krishna beliefs, sorry. You mean in the sense that it's the problem of representing infinities?
Dedekind cuts are probably the best known method of defining the reals.
(If all goes as planned, i'll be covering Dedekind in a post once we get up to 19th century number theory and the birth of analytic philosophy. That's unlikely to be for quite a while, though.)
Also, the "weirdos" bit was just for fun. Though if they really killed someone for discovering irrational numbers, that is...dickish, to say the least.
Dedekind cuts are a new thing to me, and I was also just now introduced, through them, to "surreal numbers", though it's too late for me to make sense of them right now.
The reason I was thinking it'd be nice to have all positive numbers for year counts is that it was a little weird for me to think of someone living from 510 BC to the "end of the century", said end being just 10 years rather than 90 years, and then I realized that people back then almost certainly didn't count time backwards, so it'd be nice to have a bit more of their perspective. Then I started thinking of the Mayan calendar, the Chinese calendar, etc. and wanting to complain that we don't use those calendar systems.
Incidentally the Mayans had another like super-period length for something, if I recall correctly. I can't remember if it meant anything more than just a digit in their year recording system though.
i agree, it can be a bit confusing counting backwards in terms of years. It's the calendar i'm most familiar with, though, so counting backwards for the ancient dates is a necessary trade-off if i want to retain that familiarity. i might bring in the Chinese calendar when i'm looking at Chinese philosophers, though.
Greek Religion and Xenophanes: A Brief Overview
The most important mythic works in Ancient Greece were the poems of Homer and Hesiod. Homer supposedly lived in Ionia during the 8th century BC, but it is now believed that his great epic works, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were assembled from the works of multiple authors, not the work of a single poet. Hesiod lived in Boeotia, probably during the 8th century, and was best known for two poems: Works and Days, an account of farming life, and the Theogony, about the birth of the gods. These poems were all hugely respected in Ancient Greece, enjoying a cultural status comparable to both Shakespeare and the Bible in Christian England. They may be regarded as roughly equivalent to sacred texts.Hesiod's Theogony opens with prayer to the muses, then launches into Hesiod's account of how the universe came to be. According to Hesiod, the first to come into being was Chaos, the void, out of which sprung Gaia, the Earth; Tartarus, the underworld; Erebus, the darkness; Nyx, night; and Eros, love. Nyx mated with Erebus and gave birth to Aether, the atmosphere, and Hemera, day. Gaia then gave birth to Uranus, the sky; Pontus, the sea; and the various Mountains. Gaia then mated with Uranus and gave birth to the Titans, who included Zeus' parents Cronos and Rhea; the Cyclopes, one-eyed giants; and the Hekatoncheires, hundred-armed giants.
The Theogony is a hymn, not a philosophical text, but we might note some similarities between this account and the speculative cosmologies of the Milesians. Most of the gods are obviously personified concepts, and read with this in mind Hesiod's account of the creation of the universe is that out of void arose the Earth, the underworld, the darkness, night and love, and these gave rise to everything else that exists. Void and Earth are by this reading cosmic principles, much like Anaximander's apeiron and Anaximenes' air. Like the Presocratic philosophers, Hesiod is supplying an explanation for why things are the way they are.
However, Hesiod's explanations extend into the origins of human customs. For instance, he offers an explanation for why people are permitted to eat the best parts of the animals they sacrifice. Prometheus, the titan who created the human race, made two bundles: one containing the best cuts of meat, wrapped in a stomach, and one containing entrails wrapped in fat. Zeus chose the fatty bundle, mistakenly believing it contained the choicest meat, and from then on the sacrifices offered by mankind would consist of fat and entrails.
In Homer's Iliad, an epic poem concerning the Trojan War, we see divine explanations being supplied for other aspects of human life. At one point, Hera, the Goddess of Marriage and Women, wants to help the Greeks to win the battle, but her husband, Zeus, is supporting the Trojans. So she borrows a girdle from Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love, and visits Hypnos, the God of Sleep. She offers him the hand in marriage of the grace Pasithea in exchange for his help. Then Hera approaches Zeus, who is watching the battle from Mount Ida, and seduces him. Meanwhile, Hypnos is hiding in a nearby tree, having taken the form of a nightjar. When Zeus and Hera finish making love, Hypnos puts him to sleep. While Zeus is absent, the Trojan hero, Hector, is wounded.
So we see that, in Homer, the gods are present in every aspect of life: a seduction requires the assistance of the Goddess of Love, sleep requires the involvement of the God of Sleep, and the absence of Zeus turns the tide of a battle between human beings. Human agency appears to disappear altogether, although the gods themselves behave very like human beings. Indeed, they are prone to petty bickering and outright errors of judgment. When they're not fighting amongst themselves, very often they're devising horrific punishments for mortals who have offended them for one reason or another. Arguably, then, the gods as represented in Homer and Hesiod are really just the extension of the sphere of human thought and behaviour to explain things that occur in nature. Nevertheless, animals were sacrificed to them, and they were worshipped in temples and prayed to for a variety of reasons.
The most important of these gods were the Olympians, who ruled from the summit of Mount Olympus, or in later Greek thought, far above it. Zeus, the supreme ruler of the gods, was originally worshipped as a weather god, and thunderbolts were his weapons. During the earliest stages of Greek civilization his authority broadened, making him the king of the entire universe. Although the gods did not control destiny, Zeus was its interpreter, and owned a set of scales that told him what the Fates had in store. He was also the protector of kings, lending rulers in Ancient Greece divine authority. This detail is significant, since the Olympians were principally the gods of the aristocracy.
Distinct from the Olympians, but part of the same belief system, was Hades, the ruler of the underworld. Hades was a brother of Zeus who acted as a kind of gaoler, often depicted holding a key. His name was thought to be unlucky and was often avoided, so he was known by a variety of euphemistic titles, among them "Pluto", meaning "the rich". He was neither evil nor injust, but was certainly an ominous figure, and rarely appears in mythology. He was believed to have absolute dominion over the realm of the dead.
Classical Greek beliefs about the afterlife were decidedly bleak. The dead were shades, shadows of their former selves, bloodless and without consciousness. They were escorted to the underworld by Hermes, the Messenger of Zeus, where they had to pay a coin to Charon, the boatman, who would ferry them across the River Styx; the Greeks buried their dead with coins in their mouths for this reason. On arriving on the opposite shore, the shades would be judged. The most wicked were sent to Tartarus, a dark place of eternal torment. A virtuous few were sent to Elysium, the Isles of the Blest. Most, however, remained in the dreary Plain of Asphodel, the final dwelling place of even the shades of Achilles and Heracles. There was no escape from here, since the way out was guarded by a vicious three-headed dog, Cerberus.
The Eleusinian Mysteries, which became the most sacred part of the state religion of Athens, also began as a fertility cult. These were a series of secret rites dedicated to Demeter, whose name means Mother Earth. Demeter had a daughter, Persephone, who was carried off to the underworld by Hades, who wanted her for his bride. Demeter descended from Olympus and wandered the Earth until she arrived at Eleusis, where the king built a temple to her. Distraught at the loss of her daughter, she caused the earth to become barren, resulting in a disastrous famine. Zeus, seeking to appease her, sent Hermes to retrieve Persephone from Hades. While she was in the underworld, however, Persephone ate some pomegranate seeds, and those who ate the food of the underworld were not allowed to leave. As a compromise, Zeus decreed that Persephone must spend a portion of the year with her husband, Hades. Consequently, during the summer months, Persephone is in the underworld and the earth is dry and barren. During the rest of the year, however, she is restored to the upper world and the ground is fertile again, and those who practiced the Eleusinian Mysteries believed that faithful worshippers would likewise be restored to the upper world after death.
The Eleusinian Mysteries were connected with Dionysus, also called Bacchus, the God of Wine and Ecstatic Liberation. Dionysus was originally only a Thracian fertility god, but grew in significance over time, becoming the most important Greek deity in the later, Hellenistic period. The aristocracy initially resisted the Bacchic religion as a foreign superstition that competed with the Olympian religion. However, Dionysus offered his followers things the Olympian religion didn't: the liberation of wild, frenzied rituals in life, and the hope of salvation after death. Performing these rituals was said to result in a state of enthusiasm, which literally meant fusion with a god. Women held a special status among the worshippers of Dionysus, who were known as Bacchae. Bacchic women called Maenads would dress themselves in animal skins and danced on the hillsides, where they would tear wild animals to pieces and eat them raw.
Among the Bacchae there was said to have existed a man named Orpheus. Orpheus is a largely mythic figure, but if he existed at all, he seems to have been a reformer of the Bacchic religion who founded a tradition known as Orphism. The mythological Orpheus was a minstrel, and he had a wife called Eurydice. When Eurydice was bitten by a snake and died, Orpheus travelled to the underworld. When he reached the Styx he played his lyre, which moved Charon and Cerberus so much that they allowed him to pass. Even Hades and Persephone were moved, and they allowed him to rescue Eurydice, on one condition: he must not look back at her, or he will lose her forever. According to earlier versions of the myth, he succeeded, thereby proving the power of Dionysus over death itself. In the more famous version, however, he looked back, and Eurydice turned into mist before his eyes, and was returned to the house of Hades. Heartbroken, he wandered the hills, where he was torn to pieces by the Maenads. Only his head survived, and fell into the River Hebrus, still crying out for Eurydice.
There is a parallel myth regarding Dionysus' birth. In this story, Zeus seduced Demeter in the form of a snake and she gave birth to a child, Zagreus. The jealous Hera sent a group of titans to kill the child, who was disguised as a kid (as in, a young goat; goats were a fertility symbol in Ancient Greece). The titans caught him, tore him limb from limb and ate him, leaving only his heart, which was rescued by Zeus' daughter Athena. Zeus then gave this heart to his Theban mistress, Semele, who ate it and gave birth to a child. That child, according to the Orphics, was Dionysus.
Zeus punished the titans who killed Zagreus by blasting them into ashes. These ashes became the human race. The titans, according to the Orphics, came from the earth but had eaten the flesh of a god, meaning that the human race is both earthly and divine.
The Orphics were an ascetic sect within the Bacchic religion. By living a virtuous life, they believed they could increase the divine element within themselves and become one with Dionysus. They also believed that in the underworld there existed two well-springs, Lethe and Mnemosyne. Lethe ran with the waters of forgetfulness, but Mnemosyne ran with the waters of remembrance. Only those who drank from Mnemosyne were able to achieve salvation.
The Orphic religion entered philosophy via the Pythagorean school. We see this influence on Pythagoras expressed in the form of, for example, his view of women as especially pious, and his claim that he could remember past lives. Enthusiasm, in his teachings, was achieved through the contemplation of mathematical proofs. Evocatively, we find among his dietary rules the teaching that his followers are 'not to eat the heart'.
A very different Presocratic approach to religion, however, is found in the philosophical verses of Xenophanes, who was born in Colophon, north of Miletus, but was expelled from there in his twenties. He made his living as a wandering minstrel, travelling at least as far as Sicily. Of all the Presocratics, Xenophanes is the most theological, and noteworthy for being the first philosopher in the Western tradition to openly attack religion.
Xenophanes mocked the identification of the rainbow with the goddess Iris, claiming that a rainbow is only a colourful cloud. He also fiercely satirized Homer and Hesiod for their overly anthropomorphic view of the gods. He observed that the Ethiopians made their gods resemble Ethiopians and the Thracians made their gods resemble Thracians, and remarked that if animals had gods they would surely depict them as animals. He was equally scathing of the Pythagorean doctrine of metempsychosis, and alleged that Pythagoras once stopped a man from beating a dog because he claimed to recognize its voice as that of his dead friend.
Xenophanes was no atheist, however. On the contrary: he felt that the works of Homer and Hesiod, with their depictions of the gods sleeping around, beating their wives, eating their young and castrating their parents, were highly disrespectful. He argued instead for a God who was entirely unlike humanity - one God, since if there were multiple gods, Xenophanes argued, none of them would be the most powerful, and therefore none of them would be able to do as they wished.
God, for Xenophanes, doesn't move, and may not even have a body, but can shake the entire world just by thinking. He does nothing but think and perceive, but governs the universe effortlessly using his mind. He is not divisible into separate organs, but has existed as a whole for all eternity. In addition to arguing that there could only be one God, Xenophanes argued that nothing besides a god could have created God, as something lesser can't create something greater. Xenophanes was not the first monotheist, but he is notable for arriving at monotheism through reasoned argument, rather than claiming divine revelation.
Xenophanes also propounded a cosmology similar to those of the Milesians. In Xenophanes' cosmology, all things had their origins in water and earth. According to Xenophanes, the earth goes on forever beneath our feet. On this basis, he argued that the Sun couldn't possibly pass under the Earth. He argued, instead, that every morning tiny sparks came together to form a new Sun, which would last until the end of the day. Much more impressive, from a modern scientific perspective, were his observations of shells in the fossil record, from which he concluded that at one time the Earth must have been underwater.
References used:
Peter Adamson, A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, Created In Our Image: Xenophanes Against Greek Religion, The Man With The Golden Thigh: Pythagoras
Margaret Drabble and Jenny Stringer, ed., The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) 0-19-282667-0
Michael Grant and John Hazel, Who's Who in Classical Mythology (New York, NY: Hodder and Stoughton, 1979) 0-340-23846-1
Anthony Kenny, A New History of Western Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) 978-0-19-965649-3
Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004) 978-0-415-32505-9
Heraclitus: A Brief Overview
Heraclitus was born around 535 BC in Ephesus, a city not far from Miletus. At the time, Ionia was occupied by the Persian Empire. Heraclitus was born to an aristocratic family, but abandoned his home to live in the hills as an ascetic. He was self-taught, and regarded almost all the philosophers, poets and sages who came before him with contempt. Surviving fragments of his work suggest a misanthropic character, although he seems to have thought more kindly of children. He took no students, but left his "book" (that is, a roll of papyrus), On Nature, in the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, where it gained a cult of followers, the Heracliteans. The book has not survived, and the some 15,000 words we have of Heraclitus' writing take the form of a series of aphorisms, such as "You can't step in the same river twice", or "The road up and the road down are one and the same". The aphorisms are often highly ambiguous or even riddle-like. While it's possible that the complete book was something more resembling a conventional narrative or argument, it is more likely that Heraclitus actually did write only in these aphorisms; even in ancient times, he had a reputation for obscurity. Socrates is reported as saying of On Nature, "What I understand of it is excellent. What I don't understand may well be excellent also; but only a deep-sea diver could get to the bottom of it."Unsurprisingly, Heraclitus' aphorisms have been interpreted in numerous ways. When he says that the road up is the road down, is he suggesting that his philosophy applies on all levels of reality (from the fundamentals of physics to complicated human structures like politics), or is he talking about actual roads, perhaps as an example of something which has two seemingly mutually contradictory properties? Likewise, when he says "Donkeys prefer garbage to gold," is he expressing relativism, the view that truth is in the eye of the beholder (which some of his aphorisms appear to endorse), or is he just insulting people who don't like his philosophy? Aristotle, when commenting on Heraclitus, complains that he is unclear, but to some extent the ambiguities appear to be deliberate. He uses the language in a distinctly crafted, unconventional way.
An important concept for Heraclitus is the "logos". In the Greek of his time, this word had a number of meanings, including "account", "word", "ratio", "reason", "law", "principle" and "measurement". It is the root of the suffix in words like "sociology", "theology" and "psychology". In what is believed to be his introduction, Heraclitus claims that the logos he speaks of is always the case, but people always fail to understand it. All things come to be according to this logos, but people seem not to have experienced it, because they pay no more attention to what they do when they are awake than they do when they're asleep. It doesn't sound as though he's just talking about his book; the logos, for Heraclitus, appears to be some kind of universal principle. It is, he says, both willing and unwilling to go by the name of Zeus. The logos exists independently of his teaching. "Having harkened not to me but the logos," Heraclitus writes, "It is wise to agree that all things are one." The view that there is only one thing is known as monism, but it is typical of Heraclitus that he phrases it, paradoxically, as "all things are one."
This brings us to another recurring idea in Heraclitus' aphorisms, the unity of opposites. He states, for instance, that seawater is both pure and poisonous; it's healthy for fish, but undrinkable for human beings. Not all of his oppositions are easily resolvable by reference to relativism, either, even when they might appear trivial. The road up is the road down, no matter which way you're going. Heraclitus seems to go further, suggesting that the universe is actually constituted from opposites. Perhaps reacting to Anaximander, he claims that all things happen out of strife and necessity. He is, apparently, quite literal in suggesting that strife is a universal principle; in praying for an end to war, he claims, Homer was unwittingly praying for the end of the universe. However, he does offer one way in which the oppositions are resolved, and that is God, for whom all things are fair, good and right.
Heraclitus also takes the view that everything is made of fire, which transforms into water, earth and wind. He claims that the sun and moon are bowls of fire, turned towards the earth, and that the phases of the moon are caused by the bowl tilting. He also identifies the human soul with fire, apparently because living bodies are warm. Drunkenness, he claims, is caused by a moistened soul, which he also associates with weakness and cowardice. If a person's soul becomes too moist, the fire goes out and the person dies.
Heraclitus is also associated with something called the "flux doctrine," which is the teaching that everything is constantly changing all the time. Traditionally, Heraclitus is taught alongside Parmenides, an Eleatic philosopher who taught that change is impossible, and their views are contrasted. Both Plato and Aristotle associate the flux doctrine with Heraclitus, and some Heracliteans certainly subscribed to it, among them Cratylus, who famously said that you can't step in the same river once. Nowadays, however, some experts do not believe that Heraclitus taught the flux doctrine, at least not in the extreme form usually attributed to him. The fragments we have suggest that, unlike Cratylus, Heraclitus didn't think that reality changed so constantly that there could be no fixed meaning. Nevertheless, some of the fragments are clearly concerned with change. It's possible, of course, that he thought things changed only intermittently, or that all things are subject to change. We'll return to Heraclitus in more depth later, so for now I'll just note that there is academic disagreement on this point.
Whether or not Heraclitus himself believed in the flux doctrine, it's worth remembering that it's an influential idea that's associated with him. In my next philosophy post I'll be talking about Parmenides, who may have been responding to said doctrine.
References used:
Peter Adamson, A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, Old Man River: Heraclitus, MM McCabe on Heraclitus (with MM McCabe)
Simon Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, revised second edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) 978-0-19-954143-0
Melvyn Bragg, In Our Time, Heraclitus (with Peter Adamson, Angie Hobbs and James Warren) (BBC Radio 4, 2011-12-08)
Daniel W. Graham, Heraclitus, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2015 Edition) (forthcoming URL, not yet active but included for posterity), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
Anthony Kenny, A New History of Western Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) 978-0-19-965649-3
Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004) 978-0-415-32505-9
(It's also a word that cropped up in English class a bunch, mostly because of Derrida)
i know far too little about the history of Christianity, tbh.
(the enneads are really boring)
really everything that happens in Western philosophy between Aristotle and the Enlightenment is just kind of a blank for me, i know the odd name or idea but that's it
not even joking
just straight terrible most of the time with a few smart fellas
church fathers are alright, but like, 900? who gives a shit what anyone was thinking in France in 900? nobody that's who
i like the period, but for its political and historical aspects... not really a lot of thinking about "higher" (not related to keeping people from starving or whatever) stuff as far as i can tell
i know "dark ages" isn't really accepted in historiography anymore but there really does seem to be a kind of lack, if only cos of a lack of stable sponsors
carolingian renaissance i guess