The History of Philosophy and Background to Stoicism, Romanticism and Existentialism

Death, Cicero, the Roman philosopher and statesman, Cicero said that Socrates had brought philosophy down from the heavens. But by wresting it away from the gods and bringing it down to earth, Socrates also helped precipitate a crisis in Greek religion. You might broadly define the crisis as a questioning of civic religion.

Each polis had its civic gods and its civic laws, and worshipping the ones and obeying the others was part of being a citizen, part of being a member of the political community. But neither the gods nor the laws had much to say about morality, about real justice, let alone about the soul or what happened to the soul after death. And those were precisely the issues that Socrates and the other sophists were most concerned about.

Is your first duty to civil law or to your conscience? If public and private duty clash, what are you supposed to do? Which is more important, the individual or the state? None of these questions has an obvious answer. The novelty was that they were being asked at all. And once you start asking questions, it's very hard to stop.

You might even end by questioning the gods themselves. For instance, the sophists argue that if these traditional gods, like Athena, are inextricably linked to the city and their worship is linked to the laws of the city, then the gods must vary from city to city because different cities have different laws. Which means that gods like Poseidon here have only relative importance and no absolute validity and what kind of god is a relative god? As the philosopher Xenophonus said, mortals suppose that the gods are born and that they have voices and bodies and clothes like humans, but if oxen or horses or lions had hands and could draw with their hands and paint pictures as men do, they would portray their gods as having bodies like their own.

Horses would portray them as horses, oxen like oxen. Ethiopians have gods with snub noses and black hair, Thracians have gods with grey eyes and red hair. Furthermore, you only had to look around in the streets to see that bad men prospered and good men sometimes suffered unjustly, so that either everything is a matter of luck and there are no gods, or else the gods are stupid, nasty and unjust, with a very twisted sense of humor.

Every Greek knew that the gods particularly enjoyed imposing tests on innocent sufferers like Oedipus here, who after being abandoned at birth was set up by the gods to kill his father and then marry his mother. How can you respect unjust gods? All you can do is bribe them or appease them with sacrifices or prayers, but even that doesn't seem to work very well. As a young man in one of Plato's dialogues concludes, either there are no gods, or if there are, they take no care of men.

Another set of difficult questions had to do with the order of the world. Greek philosophers of nature called physicists had been trying to answer the riddle of creation since the 6th century BC. Fish, said the philosopher Anaximander, are the ancestors of human beings who originated in water and evolved through several stages.

Xenophanes, who died in 475 BC, noticed fossils and pretty much understood what they were, and there were other attempts to develop a scientific approach to knowledge. Hippocrates, who founded a medical school, applied the new approach to what was called then the sacred disease, the common term for epilepsy. I do not believe that the sacred disease is any more divine or sacred than any other disease, but on the contrary, has specific characteristics and a definite cause.

It's my opinion that those who first called this disease sacred were the sort of people we call witch doctors, faith healers, quacks, or charlatans. If the patient be cured, their reputation for cleverness is enhanced. If he dies, they can excuse themselves by explaining that the gods are to blame.

At the same time, mathematicians like Thales borrowed geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy from the Babylonians and Egyptians and improved on them. They found that the application of geometrical rules could help to locate ships at sea and stars in the heavens and help to divide sundials more accurately. Thales himself predicted the eclipse of 585 BC.

He accompanied King Croesus of Lydia as his military engineer and advisor, and he diverted a river. Other 6th century engineers at Samos used geometry to plan a tunnel one third of a mile long, which conveyed water through a mountain. But even if the applications of the new sciences could be very practical, the discoveries had been made in pursuit of higher ends.

The Greek philosophers thought that the universal truths of mathematics could reveal an immutable, eternal reality behind the passing drama of everyday life. They believed that geometry could provide a model of timeless nature, just as a pyramid was supposed to do. Plato suggested that the truths of geometry were not reasoned deductions from experiment from figures that people drew or constructed, but that they were ideal memories, memories of the properties of ideal geometrical shapes that existed in some timeless realm which reason could barely apprehend.

And Plato argued further that there was an eternal world of ideas, prototypes of the debased reflections of things that we glimpse here on Earth. This theory, that we do not experience reality in the so-called real world, but only its dim shadow, this theory has haunted philosophy ever since. At the same time, the physicists were also asking what was behind life.

Did everything start with fire, or with water, or with some other material element? Thales thought it started with water, which by successive evolutions became the other element. An aximander, on the other hand, thought it started with a spiritual force, nos, or the mind, whose action on matter produced both movement and order. From this idea, there grew a tradition which regarded this first principle, which was the or, if you like, this prime mover of life, which regarded these as divine, in fact, as God, a cosmic God, who wasn't just responsible for the creation of things and their order on Earth and in the skies, but who stood for the ultimate truth, justice, beauty, goodness, harmony, that you could not find on Earth, and that you could not find either among the traditional gods on Olympus.

This sort of transcendent God was rather abstract and hard to imagine, and so Plato tried to produce a more accessible version. He began with a view that ideal reality is perfect because it is immutable and changing. The objects that we see all around us, on the other hand, are inferior because they change all the time.

A perfect object would not need to change precisely because it was perfect. There was one kind of visible object, however, that was not inferior, and that was the heavenly bodies. They change, but they always change in the same way.

Their movement is always constant. To Plato, such regularity, such constancy, were very special, and they couldn't have happened simply by accident. They presupposed a moving soul endowed with mind.

Therefore, Plato reasoned, there must be a divine mind that moves the heavens, and this mind is God. At the same time, the traditional city gods like Athena and the civic religion were declining. That's because, as the poleis themselves were declining during and after the Peloponnesian war, they were losing their autonomy, becoming part of bigger states which told them what to do.

And as the poleis civic religions lost their hold, at least over the elite, the platonic religion of a cosmic god kept increasing in influence. Plato, in his dialogue Timaeus, suggested that the human soul was akin to the soul of the stars. We come from the stars, he argued, and after death we return to them, to the celestial city of the stars.

It was a very attractive idea, and one which also had worldly implications, because if there be such a place as the celestial city, and it would have to be a city because where else would civilized people live, then why should we not conceive its counterpart on earth? Less perfect, naturally, but still something for the wise, educated man to strive for. And this became the prototype for what we now call the ivory tower. Whereas once a socially active life was the ideal, now the ideal becomes escape to the contemplative life.

As the 4th century BC ends, Aristotle, as depicted in this Roman fresco, follows Plato in pointing to the value of the theoretical, and celebrating the life of study that the scholar enjoy, the meditation on eternal things. By the time of Aristotle, who died in 322 BC, Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander had totally ended the autonomy of the Greek polis. The earthly city no longer offered the kind of noble aim which a wise man might live for, and so the sage took refuge in the heavenly city.

This is where he would find consolation and strength to bring the movements of the soul into harmony with the movements of the heavens. And so the disillusioned citizens of Athens tried to make their escape towards the city of the sky. This religion of cosmic forces and the cosmic god was going to become part of the Greek paideia, the intellectual equipment that everyone who aspired to be educated had to have in the Hellenistic world of the 3rd century BC and after.

So long after the 3rd century BC, in effect, that it is still with us today. In our next program, we shall take a closer look at what happened when Greece was conquered by Alexander the Great, one of the most brilliant generals of all time and a megalomaniac of genius until then. Although King Philip was assassinated in 336 BC before he could carry it out, his son Alexander proved equal to the task.

Alexander, who was 20 when he succeeded his father, was a pupil of Aristotle. He had read Xenophon and he knew what could be done and what could be won in Asia. So in 334 BC, he led the Greek and Macedonian forces across the Hellespont into Asia Minor.

He then overthrew the Persian Empire. He conquered all the lands from Libya to Afghanistan. He created a Greco-Macedonian Empire that would spread Greeks and Hellenism all over the East and he did all this in only 11 years, after which he died of a fever in Babylon, aged 32 or 33.

Alexander was truly one of the greatest generals of all time and a megalomaniac of genius. Time has softened his more brutal aspects, but it's worth remembering that the ruthless Macedonian general Cassander, who knew Alexander as a young man, could never pass his statue without shuddering. Because Alexander's conquest seemed impossible, everybody except those who knew him thought he was more than a hero.

He was a god. Soon, Alexander decided that he should be treated as a god, which was also rather convenient because it fitted in with oriental traditions where the divinity of a king was the basis of his authority. One of Alexander's bequests to history would be the memory of his megalomaniac ambition and the leader cult that grew up around him.

It would later inspire ambitious and ruthless men who wanted to equal his achievements. Men like Julius Caesar and Napoleon. Another aspect of this extraordinary man was the way he appears to behave as a philosopher king of the kind that Plato described and that Aristotle may have trained him to be.

Alexander made sure that philosophers and scientists would be part of his expeditions to observe and record everything they could, and he sought greatness in everything he did. When he burnt down the Persian royal palace at Persepolis in retaliation for the Persians' burning of Athens a century and a half before, he followed it up with a mass marriage between Persian maidens and Greek nobles, a symbol of the fusion he hoped to accomplish of Greeks and other peoples in order to create one great everlasting empire. But reality couldn't be bent to obey Alexander's dream.

The worlds his conquests brought together were too different, and when he died, they split apart. These new empires and the culture they represented were neither Greek nor Asian, but rather a bit of both, which is why they are described not as Hellenic, not purely Greek, but as Hellenistic. The subsequent period, called the Hellenistic age, spanned the three eventful centuries between the death of Alexander in 323 BC and the death in 30 BC of Cleopatra, who was descended from one of Alexander's generals.

It was an age that looks remarkably like our own time. We find the same reversion from representative institutions to authoritarian regimes, the same sense of psychological and aesthetic fragmentation, the same anti-rationalist trends, the same self-absorbed interest in the self, the same obsessive pursuit of affluence, exotic cults, peculiar fads, astrology, magic, eroticism, the same preoccupation with bigness, the same detachment from the hometown, with a concomitant but not very comforting feeling that the whole cosmos is your polis, the same social conflicts and class wars and colonialism and wars of national liberation designed to expel foreign oppressors and to allow the locals to oppress each other, the same bureaucracy more interested in making and keeping rules rather than in making things more productive or more efficient, the same retreat from political involvement, the same cringing sense of depersonalization in the big city, in Megalopolis, a place of which name actually exists in Greece, in Arcadia. So let's take a closer look at this strangely familiar period.

The states that Alexander's generals founded in the Hellenistic age, like that of Ptolemy in Egypt or Seleucus in Babylon, these states were traditional monarchies, highly regulated and bureaucratic, but the cities and the royal courts and the armies and the higher officials were mostly Greek with cosmopolitan Greek values. Although the Greeks and Macedonians intermarried with the local people and a lot of the locals were Hellenized, none of this integration went very deep. The difference was too great between the people in the relatively sophisticated, relatively free, literate Greek-speaking urban centers and the people in the unfree countryside, those immense regions where the king exercised direct authority as absolute master over his servile subjects.

Greeks were reluctant to accept the authority of monarchs who demanded adoration in the oriental fashion, and they didn't believe in their divinity or infallibility either. Instead, the Greeks continued to maintain that law and institutions were products of reason, not of some divine revelation. So there was no true cultural synthesis in the Hellenistic age.

As you can see from this Roman fresco of Syria on the right contemplating Macedonia, the two cultures remained mostly suspicious and contemptuous of one another, even though they lived side by side. One way of looking at the Greek and Macedonian colonies during this period is to compare them with the settlements of the British in India in the 19th and 20th centuries. In both cases, an expatriate ruling class in an ocean of foreigners keeps the flag flying in their clubs and contunements with their peculiar social rituals which are designed to mark not synthesis but distinction and superiority.

This kind of separatism could provide no basis for real integration, nor was any kind of integration desired, but it did offer impressive models for the surrounding populations, just as British laws and administrative practices and the English language and even cricket have been taken over and adapted in India and throughout the rest of the empire which the British hold no more. Unintegrated as these Greek and Macedonian cities were in the Hellenistic age, they were going to be vehicles of Hellenization, spreading Greek culture, institutions, ideas, styles and language as far away from Greece as Afghanistan and India. Let me give you an example.

These are the ruins of a Greek city on the northern border of Afghanistan at Ai-Khanum. We know that the men who founded the city probably came from Thessaly in central Greece. And from the inscription on the pillar, we know also that another Greek, probably a philosopher, made an extraordinary journey here, presumably because he knew he would find communities interested in hearing him lecture.

In this particular city, which was only excavated about 20 years ago, there was a gymnasium, that very Greek institution of culture and training where youths met for exercise and discussion. And there was a large administration area which contained a library. This papyrus document was found in the library ruins and it's written in Greek.

And here is the temple inside the city walls and the residential area with mosaic floors. And all sorts of things that typify a Greek city. And these Greek institutions and Greek traditions continued strong here at the end of the world until the city was destroyed by nomads from the steppes in the late second century.

So this is how the Greeks exported their urban culture throughout the Hellenistic world, a world which grew to be larger and more closely linked than anything before it. When Alexander's wars of conquest were over, he had quadrupled the size of the Greek's known world and that gave a great impetus to travel and trade. Most of the overland trade went by caravan over tracks beaten hard by the hooves of pack animals.

But the Persian kings had also built an impressive post road which ran 1500 miles from Sardis on the coast to their capital at Susa. It was lined with stables, with hostelries, with forts. During the Hellenistic age, roads and tracks were used mostly by soldiers and officials but they also improved the movement of goods when these couldn't be shipped by water which was of course much easier.

And this trade was going to grow tremendously because the wealth of rulers and of cities increasingly depended on exchange with other regions. In fact, Hellenistic rulers were really merchant princes. There were trade expeditions to Africa and Arabia and India for elephants and incense and spices and slaves.

The size of merchant ships kept growing as well. Syracuse in Sicily even launched a ship with a capacity of 4,500 tons. And the circulation of money grew too.

This is a silver coin from Phoenicia and here is one from Syracuse. At the same time, a Greek dialect called the Koine was providing a common language from Gibraltar to the Caspian Sea which greatly facilitated trade and the spread of Hellenistic culture as well. A Greek intellectual like this physician could feel equally at home in Alexandria which was in Egypt or in Syracuse in Sicily.

Actors had international associations with chapters in every important city like the Guild of Dionysiac Artists. And athletes joined such groups as the International Boxing Association.