Ancient Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction

Chapter 6 When did it all begin? (and what is it anyway?)

Many people have turned expectantly to the beginnings of Greek philosophy, only to find that the first philosopher they meet, Thales in the sixth century BC, held, apparently, that ‘everything is water’. Anyone teaching ancient philosophy has to cope with the bafflement that this discovery tends to produce. It is an odd beginning to a philosophical tradition. Yet something happens in the sixth century, later to acquire the name philosophia or love of wisdom, which we can recognize as philosophical. What exactly is it?

It is in keeping with what we have seen of the varied and disputatious nature of ancient philosophy that this question is quite hard to answer. There is little that non-trivially unites philosophers from Thales to the end of antiquity. There is a tradition, but a mixed and contested one.

In view of the great cultural prestige of Greek philosophy, it has at times been resented, and sometimes groups that have felt themselves culturally marginalized by it have claimed that Greek philosophy is nothing new at all, but just a tradition taken over without acknowledgement – usually, it is claimed, from the group in question. The early Church fathers held that the pagan philosophers stole their ideas from the Jewish scriptures. Afrocentric writers in the twentieth century have made the same claim for Egyptian mystery religion. These claims, however, are historically non-starters.

Differing views on the Greeks’ originality

The Greeks themselves did not think that philosophy was original with them; they thought of it as coming from a variety of sources outside Greece, usually Eastern. But then, they did not value originality as such very highly, and they certainly did think that philosophy was something that they did distinctively and well. And indeed, when we read the fragments even of an author as elusive as Thales we can see an interesting and distinctive way of thinking emerging.

What makes it philosophical? Usually this is characterized as explicit appeal to reason and argument. Stated as generally as this, the claim is undoubtedly true. Philosophers are distinguished by arguing for their conclusions and against other philosophers’ conclusions, and by demanding reasons for others’ claims and giving reasons for their own. But while this may mark philosophy off from poetry and the like, it does not give us a very determinate way of proceeding, or of marking philosophy off from other intellectual endeavours. There are many kinds of reason and argument – which is to count? When we look at the different kinds of project that the Presocratics produced, we are hard put to find a single kind of reasoning at work, or a demand for a single kind of argument.

The first Presocratics, Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes – from Miletus in Asia Minor – were concerned to provide cosmologies, reasoned accounts of the world we live in. As Aristotle acutely saw, they focused on what he called the material cause – the question of what our world is composed of. This is the question to which we find answers in terms of water, air and ‘the boundless’. These answers show a very striking degree of simplicity and economy, and bring with them explanations of a wide variety of puzzling physical phenomena. Because of this, these philosophers have at times been seen as precursors of science, with its explanatory hypotheses. It is clear, however, that there is little in these very speculative theories that can be usefully compared with any precise concept of scientific enquiry. A just account has to see these Presocratic figures as transitional, with an intellectual impulse to render our world explicable which has much in common with later philosophy and science.

_{7. A late representation of Anaximander with a sundial he is credited with inventing}

Other Presocratics are anything but scientific. Heraclitus of Ephesus writes in aphorisms of notorious obscurity, uniting an account of the world as fire with concern for the individual’s self-knowledge. His account of both appeals to reason (logos), both your individual reason and the big Reason in the universe that your reason should try to conform to; yet there is little reason or argument to convince us of this. Xenophanes of Colophon uses reason and argument to undermine naive beliefs about the gods. In him we see clearly for the first time reason being used to fault and replace ordinary beliefs by something the philosopher argues to be more rationally adequate. Anthropomorphic views of God are shown to be defective in a convincing way: every people, Xenophanes says, makes gods in their own image (and so would animals, if they could). But his allegedly more rationally adequate conception of God is so peculiar – God seems to be a kind of sphere – that the issue is bound to arise of what the authority is of the reasoning that overthrows our beliefs and gets us to this point.

A new way of thinking?

This question arises extremely sharply for Parmenides and Zeno of Elea, authors of some of the most notorious arguments in antiquity. Parmenides produced an abstract argument to a conclusion that nobody could accept: namely, that there is really only one object we can think of or refer to, which cannot without absurdity be said to be pluralized, qualified or divided. Thus our experience of a varied and changing plurality of objects is totally misleading. Zeno produced many arguments reducing to absurdity our everyday assumptions about plurality and change. The problem here is that the arguments are hard to fault, but the conclusions cannot be accepted. This creates a discomfort about reasoned argument: what do we do when its results conflict with our beliefs?

Responses to this differ. Some thinkers continue to produce big explanatory theories of the world, taking on board the point that their theories undermine common-sense beliefs. Anaxagoras of Clazomenae tells us that ‘the Greeks are mistaken’ in saying that things come into and go out of existence; in terms of his theory what emerges was there already. Similarly Empedocles of Acragas and the Atomists Leucippus and Democritus of Abdera produce theories which revise our commonsense beliefs about reality and change in accordance with their own hypotheses. None of them doubt that their reasoning has the power to do this. None of them deal adequately with the question of how we get to their theories from the beliefs we all start with – indeed Democritus. recognizes a problem in that we get from our experience to the deliverances of reason, which then devalues our experience.

Other thinkers, however, including some of the sophists, fasten on the point that there is something suspicious about the way that philosophical reasoning leads by arguments that you can’t fault to conclusions that you can’t accept. Cleverness in argument becomes something to be feared and envied, and seen as a technique in its own right. Seen this way, there is little distinguishing philosophical reasoning from the amoral cleverness of the effective speaker in politics or the law courts.

This situation can reasonably be seen as rather a mess, and goes some way to explain why these philosophers have come to be called ‘Presocratics’, implying that Socrates is the crucial reference point. Whatever their individual accomplishments, they do not clearly belong within a unified tradition in which reasoning has a clear philosophical role. That begins with Socrates.

At first sight, as we have seen in Chapter 4, Socrates seems an unlikely figure to characterize the philosophical tradition. He is the perpetual amateur, who refuses to do any of the things which philosophers of his time did. Moreover, he utterly despises all these things – producing theories of the world, giving displays of oratory, winning debates – as being a pretentious waste of everybody’s time. So what made him such a founding philosophical figure?

Socrates, as we have seen, argued against the views of others, showing them by their inability to withstand his arguments that they lacked understanding of what they were talking about. To have understanding of something, it emerged, you have to be able to ‘give an account’ of it, where this means giving reasons, and ultimately a rational account of what the subject in question is. But this will not be possible until you have rigorously asked yourself what reasons there are for the belief you hold. Thus, when you ask someone what reasons they have for what they say, you can show that they lack understanding if they have none, or have reasons that are confused or inconsistent. But, particularly if you are good at this sort of questioning (as Socrates undoubtedly was), you will realize that the same applies to you; you may have developed views, but you cannot be said to understand them, and hence have the right to put them forward authoritatively, unless you can withstand the challenges of others by giving reasons for them.

From Socrates on, reasoned argument is the lifeblood of philosophy because it is only in the give and take of argument that we achieve understanding of the positions we hold and want to put forward to others. (Understanding, as we have seen, is a kind of knowledge, and we can know only the truth; hence philosophy can also be characterized as the search for truth.) Hence the emphasis on reasoning and arguing that we find in all schools of philosophy. Now we find emerging a clear sense of philosophical reason and argument, distinguished from merely arguing others down and linked to the search for truth and understanding.

From the outside, then as now, all the arguing can seem aggressive and unattractive, and to those with no gift for philosophy it can seem pointless. (There is a story of a Roman bureaucrat who summoned all the Athenian philosophers and offered conflict mediation so as finally to settle all their disputes.) But from now on the importance in philosophy of reasoned argument lies in its crucial role for understanding. Figures who dismiss argument – like the Pythagoreans, who reverence their Master and want only to treasure his words – are always seen as philosophically marginal. And Epicurus’ relative de-emphasis of argument led to criticism by other philosophical schools.

Plato has a claim to be the first philosopher to establish philosophy as a subject. He did so by taking over from Socrates two elements: argument as crucial for understanding, and positive views on a variety of matters. Plato added three other important elements. One is system, a variety of ideas seen as holding together. A second is seeing philosophy as self-consciously demarcated from other ways of thinking. And a third is the institutionalization of philosophy as a subject for study.

In the ancient world Plato was seen as a pivotal figure, the first philosopher who was concerned to systematize his ideas and thus to hold views on a wide variety of topics as holding together in a mutually supportive way. It is unclear whether it is quite fair to see Plato as the pioneer here – Democritus the Atomist also had views on a range of topics – but Plato is certainly the first to do it whose works we have. Later writers ascribed to Plato the honour of being the first to see philosophy as a system of ideas with three parts – logic, ethics and physics. This is anachronistic, but it is true that Plato held positions over most of the range that later thinkers were to cover.

Plato does not tell us how his positive systematic ideas relate to the need for understanding to be grounded by argument. But he shows us clearly enough, in writing dialogues in which he is personally never a speaker, thus detaching himself from the positions put forward, that what matters is not just having the right position, but holding it in the right way – understanding it on the basis of reasoned argument. For it is up to the reader to think about the positions put forward and test her own understanding of them. Plato, even where it is clear that he believes a position strongly, never puts it forward authoritatively. If the reader accepts it on Plato’s authority, she is missing something crucial. It has to be tested and argued for before she understands it.

Plato’s legacy has been a divided one. His own school, the Academy, for most of its life took philosophizing in Plato’s way to be arguing against the views of contemporaries ad hominem, without commitment to a position of your own. It was not till after the end of the school, in the first century BC, that philosophers started to study and promote Plato’s own ideas as a system. Interpretations of Plato perpetually risk overstressing one side at the expense of the other – seeing him as throwing the argument over to us, and seeing him as passionately concerned to put forward certain positions.

It is modern rather than ancient interpreters who have stressed Plato’s evident desire to establish philosophy as a distinct way of thinking. When he has Socrates tell us at the end of the Republic that there is an old quarrel between poetry (or literature more generally) and philosophy, he seems to be projecting his own view back. For one of the most striking things about Plato is the way that he is willing to use his own brilliant literary gifts to establish that philosophy is crucially about ‘dialectic’, sheer argument which does not rely on rhetorical or literary skill. Philosophy, he keeps insisting, is just for this reason different from what other people, such as orators, poets and sophists do.

Whatever the tensions this produces in Plato’s own work, one of his lessons was well learned. Later philosophy develops for itself a professional style: straightforward, transparent, relying only on the force of rational argument. Unsurprisingly, this is often unattractive to ordinary readers, and we find that a gulf comes about between easier, more literary works written for the general public and ‘real’ philosophy, written in an uncompromisingly professional and technical way.

This gulf is also strengthened by philosophy’s institutionalization. We know almost no detail about the organization of Plato’s school, the Academy, though in every age philosophers have interpreted it on the model of their own university or college. But it was something new, a philosophical school, to which young men like Aristotle came to study philosophy. They probably learned Plato’s ideas; they also learned how to argue. When, later in life, Aristotle set up his own philosophical school, this was seen by some as an uppity gesture, but it established the pattern whereby an original philosopher would set up his own school, finding pupils and disciples who would learn, further and spread his ideas. Hence Plato’s philosophy and Aristotle’s philosophy came to have a history in their own schools; they became objects of study to other philosophers.

Once we get schools of philosophy – the Stoic and Epicurean schools getting established on similar principles – we can see the activity of ancient philosophers as astonishingly like the activity of modern philosophers. Although Plato, who was rich, refused to take fees for teaching, payment by pupils soon became a necessary feature of the system. Young men (and occasionally young women) would join a philosophical school as part of their education. (Or they might have a trained philosopher as a tutor at home.) They were educated to understand and appreciate important philosophical ideas, many of which were already part of their cultural heritage. In the schools, they were also trained in argument, acquiring abilities which had more practical application when they left, in politics and law, for example. Those most gifted at philosophy, and committed to it, would stay and become part of the school’s permanent philosophical community. This does not sound so unlike the picture of philosophy teaching in universities today. (Or rather, in the less rigid university system that existed before degrees and grades came to be important as credentials.) This idea of philosophy as a kind of university education continued on until late in the ancient world, throughout vast political and cultural changes.

The similarity extends to many of the specific ways in which philosophy was carried on. We find philosophers writing treatises and essays, and also books of arguments against other philosophers’ treatises and essays. We find commentaries on texts of past philosophers, especially Plato and Aristotle. We find controversies within a school, for example as to which of two contemporaries has got Epicurus right. We also find extensive arguments against other contemporary schools. In their style and purpose many of these works are quite like modern philosophy journal articles and books. Indeed, modern philosophy students can find it easier to relate to works of this kind, the products of philosophical professionalism, than to Plato’s dialogues, which are in form unlike any modern kind of philosophical writing.

Philosophy after Plato is, then, the history of philosophical schools (with two exceptions, to which we shall return). There is an interesting shadow side to it – a running complaint till the end of antiquity about bogus philosophers, who use philosophy’s prestige to further their private agenda, whether money or reputation. The bogus philosopher, high-minded in class and money-grubbing outside it, is a stock figure of ridicule. This brings home the fact that in the ancient world philosophy was taken to offer people not only intellectual challenge but also practical help in living a better life and finding answers to the search for the meaning of life. Philosophers were expected not only to convey intellectual skills but also to provide in their own persons examples of the search for living well. Nowadays we are more likely to seek the latter in religion, or in less intellectual pursuits. Ancient philosophers did not offer just one subject among many, but a subject that was uniquely close to the hearts of their audience.

Although Aristotle was Plato’s pupil, in some ways his is the least representative of the schools which formed after the Academy. This is because of Aristotle’s own huge range of interests. He studied, furthered or invented a wide range of subjects, from literary theory to logic, from economics to biology. The works he left behind are vast, some of them theoretical treatises and others more like records of research. In this respect Aristotle’s school differs from the philosophical schools that come after him, which had narrower interests.

The Stoics’ school began, as the earlier ones had, in a public place; Epicurus was unusual in holding his school in a private residence, the Garden. And Epicurus was unusual also in requiring his views to be held deferentially and memorized. But before very long the Epicurean school and its offshoots in other places were doing very similar things to the Stoics and other schools – arguing and counter-arguing, commenting on founding texts, generally continuing the philosophical activity of the founders. Every generation of students needs to learn afresh and understand philosophical positions for themselves, and hence even philosophical schools dedicated to teaching the thought of the founders will develop philosophically in the give and take of philosophical interpretation. Moreover, with changing political and social circumstances new issues had to be dealt with and new challenges met. When the Romans became rulers of the Mediterranean, for example, Greek intellectuals started educating unintellectual Romans.

From the first century BC we find that the continuing debates between the schools give rise to some schools which are hybrids, or ‘eclectic’ – combining positions from different schools to form a new stance. One who was influential in his day was Antiochus, who thought that the core views of Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics on a number of issues were compatible, and that the differences had been overplayed. Histories of philosophy tend to rank these schools lower in interest than those founded by more original thinkers. But we can sympathize with their position. Once philosophy has formed a teaching tradition, it can well seem foolish to seek originality at all costs, and sounder to argue from and build on what are already going positions. This is what most philosophers do today, so we should pause before turning up our noses at it.

_{8. Philosophers discussing and arguing together}

In the late Roman republic and early Empire, ancient philosophy arguably had a heyday. There were no more great original thinkers, but a variety of philosophical schools flourished and interacted. A serious student would have widespread opportunities to learn and think about the ideas of a variety of philosophical schools spread throughout the Roman Empire. (By this time Athens had lost its previous dominance as a centre of philosophy, which it had held from Plato to the first century BC, and cities like Alexandria and Rome itself were as important intellectually.) Philosophy was familiar and accessible to educated people throughout the Empire. It has seldom been the case that so rich and varied an intellectual tradition has been so culturally widespread and so important to many people. Until the end of antiquity the only significant new school was a third century AD reformulation of an old one – Plotinus’ rethinking of Plato’s ideas in a new and original synthesis, giving rise to the school we call Neoplatonism, one which flourished in later centuries.

In the mix were two philosophical movements mentioned earlier, which were anti-schools rather than schools.

The first of these movements is Pyrrhonian scepticism, which, as we saw in Chapter 4, was a breakaway movement from the scepticism of Plato’s Academy. Pyrrhonism is perfectly viable as a methodology, and as such can be systematized, rather as we find it in our main source, Sextus Empiricus. But in its own terms it is self-defeating for a Pyrrhonist to set up as an authority on anything, even the nature of Pyrrhonism. For this would convict him of firm enough commitment to some beliefs to threaten sceptical tranquillity. Hence Pyrrhonism could never coherently be an institutionalized school. This is one reason why we know so little about its spread and influence.

The second ‘anti-school’ movement is the Cynics, deriving from the fourth-century figure Diogenes of Sinope, who set a model which was followed rather than setting up any formal institution. Cynics took their name from dogs (the ancient symbol of shamelessness), went in for street preaching and lived in ways which deliberately flouted social norms, the aim being to ‘return to nature’ by rejecting social convention. Some Cynics did teach informally, but as a philosophy it remained a way of life, attracting moralizing drop-outs. It could never be a philosophical school, since Cynics rejected reasoned argument, taking it that there is really nothing difficult to understand and that the answers to life’s problems are simple.

The end of ancient philosophy as a living tradition is hard to date, especially since the end of antiquity – the culture of Greece and Rome – is also not something to which a neat date can be given. When the Roman Empire split, the Eastern, Byzantine empire retained political and cultural unity, and philosophy remained there as an academic study, though in partial and restricted form. In the Western part all such unity crumbled, and philosophical texts were (some of them) preserved in monasteries by people who were no longer part of the tradition they contained. Even knowledge of Greek, the language of the major texts, was lost. When philosophy developed again, some of the tradition, mainly Aristotle and some Plato, became part of it, but within a different, theological framework. Not until the Renaissance did it become possible to study the ancient texts independently, and study of Aristotle still has to contend with the after-effects of his medieval transformation.

There is therefore something to be said for dating the end of ancient philosophy, as a living tradition, in AD 529, the year in which the Christian Emperor Justinian closed the schools of pagan philosophy in Athens. Like many famous historical moments, this one crumbles somewhat under historical investigation. Athens had long ceased to be the major philosophical centre; it is not clear that any philosophical schools were functioning there other than the Platonists; Justinian did not actually close the schools, but at most seems to have forbidden pagans to teach, and the decree does not seem to have been effective. Pagan philosophy was in trouble before 529, and trickled on to some extent afterwards.

Yet there is a rightness to the idea that it was intolerance by a Christian Emperor that marked the tradition’s end. Jews and Christians in the ancient world had always faced a choice between rejecting philosophy entirely in favour of faith and loyalty to scripture, and trying to incorporate at least some philosophy into their own traditions. They did this by claiming that philosophy was a development in distorted form of some of the deep truths in Judaism and Christianity. Such an approach, however, is not only selective but curtails drastically the space for reason and argument, always so central to the activity of ancient philosophers. Jewish and Christian writers in the ancient world have by and large served as transmitters to us of (parts of) the philosophical tradition, rather than as participants in it. With Christianity a single intellectual view of the world was imposed, and philosophy was mostly unable to continue its task of questioning and reasoning about our beliefs.

_{9. On a Christian tomb, a philosopher sits next to a praying figure}

Since its recovery, ancient philosophy has played a mostly respected and occasionally influential role in the development of philosophy in Western European countries, which have seen themselves as the inheritors of the culture of the ancient Greek and Roman world, and also in philosophy in countries culturally influenced by Western Europe, such as North America and Australia. Different parts of the hugely varied ancient tradition have been found compelling at different times. The Stoics were influential in the eighteenth century, relegated to specialist studies in the nineteenth; exactly the opposite happened to Plato. At times the idea of Great Thinkers has led to a view of ‘the canon’ as a parade of Great Thoughts, to the neglect of their argumentative context. The tradition has been capacious enough to give rise to an variety of differing engagements – all, for the last three centuries at least, appreciating the importance to it of reasoned argument for philosophical understanding.

There has, however, been one unfortunate result of this stress on reason and argument. It has sometimes given rise, in the later ancient world and also in the twentieth century, to a simplifying tendency to see other philosophical traditions, particularly ‘Eastern’ ones, as radically different and ‘other’, characterized by lessened emphasis on argument and a greater stress on mysticism and a search for wisdom by non-rational means. This has sometimes led to the view that they are more primitive than the ‘Western’ tradition, because it honours reason. But it has also led, by reaction, to the view that they are more profound than the ‘Western’ tradition, which prizes what gets seen as superficial squabbling. In the late twentieth century especially, sweeping attacks have been made on reason and its place in the ‘Western’ tradition, and ancient philosophy has often been the subject of (usually ill-informed) attacks.

Both tendencies have been unfortunate; they lead to crude contrasts which are unhelpful and in large part untrue. This holds particularly with respect to the philosophy of India. Ancient India produced a large and wide philosophical tradition, encompassing materialism, scepticism and empiricism as well as schools tending to mysticism and forms of idealism – a tradition which is comparable to ancient Greek and Roman philosophy in extent and variety. Yet both Westerners and many Indians have (unless they are specialists) emphasized only those schools that form a contrast to Western philosophy. Students often think that ‘Eastern’ philosophy, including Indian, will be all similar and nothing like the ‘Western’ tradition. We have yet to reach a completely post-colonial view, which can get beyond the false contrast of ‘Western rationalism’ and ‘Eastern mysticism’ and recognizes the strong affinities between some of the Indian traditions and ancient Greek and Roman traditions more familiar in the West. (It has been suggested, for example, that there are affinities between Pyrrhonian scepticism and the Madhyamika school of North Indian Buddhism, whose founding figure is Nagarjuna, who was perhaps contemporary with Sextus Empiricus. In view of the story that Pyrrho earlier visited North India with Alexander’s army, there is even the possibility of historical influences on both sides, particularly given the continued Greek presence in Northern India.)

I shall close with a view of ancient philosophy by an intellectual insider with an outsider’s perspective – Lucian of Samosata, a second century AD satirical author. In his essay The Runaways he has Philosophy remind her father, the chief god Zeus, of the reason he sent her down to earth in the first place, namely so that humans, hitherto ignorantly and violently mismanaging their lives, would do better. First, she continues, she went to India, to the Brahmans, then to Ethiopia, Egypt and Babylon, and then to Thrace, the wild north. Finally she went to the Greeks, which she had thought would be the easy part, given their intellectual reputation. But it turned out to be harder than she expected. After a promising start, the Sophists mixed philosophy up with – well, sophistry. And then the Athenians executed Socrates! Philosophy goes on to complain about the less than wonderful time she went on to have in Greece. Most people respect her, she says, though without much understanding her, and there are genuine philosophers who love and strive for truth, and this makes it all worth while. But there are also bogus philosophers who aim only at money and status, and bring her into discredit, and they drive her crazy. She needs a bit of divine help to improve the situation.

In the ancient Greco-Roman world philosophy, for better and worse, became a subject, with its own practices, texts and institutions. It was a more urgent matter to its practitioners and its audience than it is for us now. Philosophy was seen as a natural extension of an ordinary good education, given the importance of living well, and the importance of philosophy for doing that. For us there is more of a tension than there was for the ancients between the idea that philosophy enables us to understand ourselves and the world, and the idea that it is a rigorous and intellectually demanding matter. The important role in life played by philosophy in the ancient world has been taken over by a variety of other interests and pursuits. But philosophy still matters, and in many ways we can still relate our concerns to those of the ancients, and find that our study of them leads naturally to direct philosophical engagement. We still have Philosophy’s problem and, lacking divine help, we still have to do the work, search for the truth, and expose the bogus for ourselves.