Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

  147. Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. Marianne Cowan (Chicago: Regnery, 1962), 50ff. This book was left unfinished at Nietzsche’s death; his notes and fragments were published posthumously.

  148. Charles H. Kahn provides an excellent introduction in The Art and TboughtofHeraclitus: An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Heraclitus seems to dare his reader to not just read what he says, but to “perform” it, in that the riddle-like quality of his sayings require a very active response if one is to make any sense of them.

  149. Havelock, Literate Revolution, 240-246.

  150. Ibid., 245.

  151. Ibid., 246. Havelock does not give this honor to Anaximander, whether because he doesn’t consider him to have been writing philosophical prose, or because we have only one sentence of the prose he was said to have written.

  152. Kahn, Art and 7bougbt, 88-89.

  153. Heraclitus, D.41, in Kahn, Art and Thought, 55.

  154. Ibid., 172.

  155. Heraclitus, D.32, in Kahn, Art and Thought, 83. Heraclitus puns in Ionic dialect, so that “the name of Zeus” can also mean “the name of life” (267).

  156. Edward Hussey, “Heraclitus,” in The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy, ed. A. A. Long (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 88-112; the quotation is on 108.

  157. Heraclitus, D.1, in Kahn, Art and Tbougbt, 29. Anthony Long treats logos, which he leaves untranslated, as perhaps the key term in Heraclitus. Long also notes two important innovations in the thought of Heraclitus: “Heraclitus is the earliest Greek thinker to postulate an everlasting world, and he is also the earliest to apply the term kosmos (meaning a beautiful structure) to the World.” A. A. Long, “Heraclitus” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 4 (New York: Routledge, 1998), 368.

  158. Heraclitus, D.34, in Kahn, Art and Thought, 29.

  159. Voegelin, The World of the Polis, 209.

  160. Ibid., 211.

  161. Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age, 77. Nietzsche describes the “moment” in Parmenides’s life when he discovered Being as a turning point not only in his own life but in the history of early Greek thought: “Once in his life Parmenides, perhaps at a fairly advanced age, had a moment of purest absolutely bloodless abstraction, unclouded by any reality. This moment-un-Greek as no other in the two centuries of the Tragic Age-whose product is the doctrine of Being-became for Parmenides’ own life the boundary stone that separates two periods. At the same time however, this moment divides Presocratic thinking into two halves. The first might be called the Anaximandrian period, the second the Parmenidean proper” (69).

  162. There is a wide consensus that Parmenides represents a significant break in the history of Greek thought. Detienne’s Masters of Truth is described in the foreword by Pierre Vidal-Naquet as “a prehistory of Parmenides’ poem” (8). Detienne, after pointing out that the whole setting of the poem “refers back to the attitudes of the diviner, the poet, and the magus,” that the form of the poem owes more than a little to Hesiod, and that the prologue “resorts to the religious vocabulary of the sects and brotherhoods,” holds that it nonetheless represents something radically new: “Parmenides’ Aletbeia, truth pronounced by a man connected in some way with the masters of truth, is also the first kind of truth in ancient Greece that is open to rational challenge. It is the first version of objective truth, a truth established in and through dialogue” (130-134). Lloyd, in Magic, Reason and Experience, describes what the new kind of truth is: in the “rigorous deductive form of its argument” it is “revolutionary” (70). But he also points out that “what we may broadly call empirical methods and evidence are not merely not used: they are ruled out” (71).

  163. Alexander Mourelatos, The Route ofParmenides: A Study of Word, Image andArgument in the Fragments (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 36-37.

  164. Ibid., 160-161

  165. Ibid., 177.

  166. Michael Frede, “The Philosopher,” in Greek Thought: A Guide to Classical Knowledge, ed. Jacques Brunschwig and Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 8, 10. Frede develops further his characterization of the difference between classical and modern conceptions of rationality in the introduction to Michael Frede and Gisela Striker, eds., Rationality in Greek Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 1-28. On the “practical” aspect of classical thought, see Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed. Arnold Davidson, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).

  167. Paul Woodruff, “Rhetoric and Relativism: Protagoras and Gorgias,” in Long, Early Greek Philosophy, 305.

  168. Fernanda Decleva Caizzi, “Protagoras and Antiphon: Sophistic Debates on justice,” in Long, Early Greek Philosophy, 322.

  169. Ibid., 324-325.

  170. Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945), esp. vol. 1, bk. 2, “The Sophists,” 286-381. See also Hegel, History ofPhilosophy, 1:355: “Indeed, the sophists are the teachers of Greece through whom culture first came into existence in Greece, and thus they took the place of poets and rhapsodists, who before this were the ordinary instructors.”

  171. Jaeger, Paideia, 1:316.

  172. But if the sophists can be considered the forerunners of reductionist and positivistic social science, it was surely Plato and Aristotle who invented humanistic social science. When Durkheim first began to teach, he assigned Aristotle’s Politics to his graduate students as their basic text.

  173. On the sophists in general and Protagoras in particular as progressive democrats, see particularly Eric Havelock’s The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957).

  174. Caizzi, “Protagoras and Antiphon,” 331.

  175. Kahn, in his very large book on the verb “to be” in ancient Greek thought, a book originally undertaken to “get behind,” as it were, the concept of Being in Parmenides, confirms Hegel’s idea of “objective reason” when he writes of Parmenides, but also of much later Greek thought, that there was “a virtual non-existence of the concept of the self or subject in classical Greek metaphysics” as a “consequence of the great positive achievement in this field: the serenely objective concerns with the concepts of predication, existence, and truth in their general form.” Charles H. Kahn, The Verb “Be” in Ancient Greek (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003 [1973]), 418.

  176. Hegel, History of Philosophy, 1:368-371. There is a subjective element in Heraclitus when he wrote (D.101) “I went in search of myself” (or “I searched into myself”), but it is hardly central in his work.

  177. Eric Voegelin, Plato and Aristotle, vol. 3 of Order and History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1957), 8. Socrates’s daemon had no positive teaching and was heard only when it wished to restrain Socrates from something.

  178. It has been tempting for translators of the Apology to use the word “God,” because of the feeling that Socrates, as early Christians believed, was so close to the Christian usage, but it is much safer to translate theos as “god” or “the god,” though it would be equally unwise to identify this unspecific term with Apollo or any particular Greek god.

  179. Apology 29d-e, 30a, trans. G. M. A. Grube, in Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 27-28.

  180. Eli Sagan, The Honey and the Hemlock: Democracy and Paranoia in Ancient Athens and Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 1991).

  181. Jaeger, Paideia, 2:13.

  182. Hegel, History of Philosophy, 425-448.

  183. Jaeger, Paideia, 2:27.

  184. Ibid., 75.

  185. Voegelin, Plato andAristotle, 13.

  186. Gabriela Roxana Carone, Plato’s Cosmology and Its Ethical Dimensions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

  187. Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue.

  188. Terry Penner, “Socrates,” in Rowe and Sch
ofield, Greek and Roman Political Thought, 164-189.

  189. Bernard Williams makes the point when he writes, “Plato invented the subject of philosophy as we know it … Western Philosophy not only started with Plato, but has spent most of its life in his company.” The Sense of the Past, 148.

  190. Malcolm Schofield, “Approaching the Republic,” in Rowe and Schofield, Greek and Roman Political Thought, 202. He says this in specific refutation of views like those of Popper and Strauss.

  191. Simon Goldhill, Who Needs Greek? Contexts in the Cultural History of Hellenism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 63.

  192. Ibid., 61.

  193. Those states described as totalitarian in modern times have uniformly been presided over by tyrants: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Ceausescu, and so on.

  194. Republic, trans. Paul Shorey, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935), 417 (592b).

  195. Marcel Detienne in The Creation of Mythology shows that early on, in Hesiod, for example, muthos and logos are virtually synonymous, both meaning story or account, but that in Pindar and Herodotus muthos appears rarely and is largely pejorative-rather most of what we (and Plato) would call myth is referred to as logos. Thucydides firmly banishes both mythos and logos insofar as they apply to early unknowable events. Detienne’s view of muthos in Plato differs from Brisson’s but in the end does not contradict Brisson’s claim that it was Plato who first made the distinction that we assume is natural.

  196. Luc Brisson, Plato the Myth Maker, trans. and ed. Gerard Naddaf (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998 [1994]), 90.

  197. Brisson suggests that Plato’s ambivalence about writing is in part due to his historical situation, a moment when oral culture was still vital but writing was becoming ever more important: “Plato’s testimony on myth is thus balanced on a razor’s edge. At the turning point between two civilizations, one founded on orality and the other on writing. Plato in fact describes the twilight of myths. In other words, Plato describes that moment when, in ancient Greece in general and at Athens in particular, memory changes; if not in its nature, then at least in its means of functioning. A memory shared by all the members of a community is now opposed by a memory which is the privilege of a more limited number of people: those for whom the use of writing is a matter of everyday habit.” Plato the Myth Maker, 38-39.

  198. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Plato and the Poets,” in Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980 [19341), 46.

  199. Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, xiii-xiv. Bernard Williams says something similar: “The resonance of [Plato’s] images and the imaginative power of his style, the most beautiful ever devised for the expression of abstract thought, implicitly affirm the reality of the world of the senses even when the content denies it.” The Sense of the Past, 24.

  200. Laws 654a-b, trans. Trevor J. Saunders, in Cooper, Works, 1345.

  201. Ibid., 653c-d.

  202. Kathryn A. Morgan, in her Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), gives a valuable reading of Plato’s myths. Carone also appreciates the myths in Plato’s later dialogues, which she says supplement the arguments and carry a degree of their own truth. She argues, however, that in cases where a myth used to supplement an argument seems to contradict it, the argument has to be given priority. See Plato’s Cosmology, 14-16. Neither Morgan nor Carone discusses myth in Plato outside of what he himself designates as myth.

  203. David K. O’Connor, “Rewriting the Poets in Plato’s Characters,” in The Cambridge Companion to Plato’s Republic, ed. G. R. F. Ferrari (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). O’Connor points out that it was Leo Strauss who first developed the argument about the use of Hesiod’s races of metal in the Republic in Strauss’s “On Plato’s Republic” in The City and Man (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964), 50-138.

  204. My inclusion of the Laws among the great literary dialogues might need some defense. See the particularly appreciative essay on the Laws by Andre Laks in Rowe and Schofield, Greek and Roman Political Thought, 258-292; and, of course, Voegelin’s great chapter on the Laws, in Plato andAristotle, 215-268, which ends, “Plato died at the age of eighty-one. On the evening of his death he had a Thracian girl play the flute to him. The girl could not find the beat of the nomos. With a movement of his finger, Plato indicated to her the Measure.”

  205. Bernard Williams makes my point in his own way: “Plato did think that if you devoted your life to theory, this could change your life. He did think, at least at one period, that pure studies could lead to a transforming vision. But he never thought that the materials or conditions of such a transformation could be set down in a theory, or that a theory would, at some suitable advanced level, explain the vital thing you needed to know … Rather, Plato seems to have thought that the final significance of philosophy for one’s life does not lie in anything that could be embodied in its findings, but emerges, rather, in its activities.” The Sense of the Past, 179. Charles Kahn says something similar: “For Plato philosophy is essentially a form of life and not a set of doctrines.” Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, 383.

  206. Again, Williams’s insight is helpful: “Not everything asserted in a dialogue, even by Socrates, has been asserted by Plato: Socrates asserting may be Plato suggesting. Because Plato is an immensely serious philosopher, who indeed set philosophy on the path of claiming to address our deepest concerns by means of argument, orderly inquiry, and intellectual imagination … we may well underestimate the extent to which he could combine intensity, pessimism, and even a certain religious solemnity, with an ironical gaiety and an incapacity to take all his ideas equally seriously.” The Sense of the Past, 149-150.

  207. Plato in the Phaedrus had this insight but never developed it as Aristotle did in his Rhetoric.

  208. Could we say that Plato suffered the birth pangs of philosophy, but Aristotle found it already a healthy young person? Parmenides had put rigorous argument on the agenda of Greek thought, though his rigor was as much intimidating as appealing. Plato developed argument as a rich and subtle resource, but although he returned over and over again to a few central questions, he provided a series of not always compatible ways to answer them, rather than a single coherent system. (Kahn and Williams, among others, agree with this point.) Aristotle was the first to create something like a systematic philosophy, though not yet as modern philosophers would attempt to do, given the priority of practical concerns in Aristotle’s thought.

  209. Hadot in his Philosophy as a Way of Life shows that Aristotle and his followers were as devoted to a way of life as were the followers of Plato or any other philosophic school.

  210. See Luc Brisson, How Philosophers Saved Myths: Allegorical Interpretation and ClassicalMythology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004 [1996]).

  211. Paul Veyne, Bread and Circuses: Historical Sociology and Political Pluralism (London: Penguin, 1990 [1976]).

  212. Runciman, “Doomed to Extinction,” 348-367. Runciman very succinctly sums up his argument as to why no Greek polis was able to go the way of Rome or Venice: “the poleis were all, without exception, far too democratic” (364).

  213. W. G. Runciman, “The Exception That Proves the Rule? Rome in the Axial Age,” in Comparing Modernities: Pluralism versus Homogen[eJity, ed. Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Yitzhak Sternberg (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 125-140. He says that “in selectionist evolutionary theory” there is “a universal underlying process of heritable but interacting levels of biological, cultural, and social evolution. Distinctive species, cultures, and societies are all the outcome of the distinctive path dependent sequences in which selective pressure comes to bear on the extended phenotypic effects of information transmitted either genetically (by strings of DNA passed from parents to offspring), culturally (by imitation or learning), or socially (by imposition of institutional inducements and sanctions)” (139).

  8.
The Axial Age III

  1. Following current standard practice, I have used the pinyin system of Romanization throughout, and, even in direct quotations, have changed other systems to pinyin. For someone of my age, raised on the Wade-Giles system, this has not been easy. For the non-Sinological reader, pinyin has advantages and disadvantages. “Zhou” in this sentence is closer to the actual pronunciation than “Chou” in the Wade-Giles system. Daodejing is closer than Tao Te Ching. On the other hand, x and q may be challenging. X as in xin becomes clearer when we remember that it is “hsin” in Wade-Giles, and q as in qi becomes clearer when we remember that it is “ch’i” in Wade-Giles.

  2. It is important to remember that at the time of Confucius, and through most of the preimperial period, even though written texts of various sorts existed, teaching was primarily oral. The Odes, in particular, were memorized, but so were some of the Documents. The written texts we have are not necessarily the same as what is referred to in the Analects of Confucius. The books we know as the Odes and the Documents almost certainly include material that was written well after the time of Confucius, and perhaps lack some of what was available to him. For an extreme view that there were no references at all to the documents and the odes in the earliest stratum of theAnalects and that the books that came to be known by these names may not even have been written, but certainly were not compiled, until well after Confucius’s death, see E. Bruce Brooks and A. Taeko Brooks, The Original Analects: Sayings of Confucius and His Successors (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 255.