For both archaic poet and classical tragedian, the world of myth endowed human experience with an ennobling clarity of vision, a higher order that redeemed the wayward pathos of life. The universal gave comprehensibility to the concrete. If, in the tragic vision, character determined fate, yet both were mythically perceived. Compared with the Homeric epics, Athenian tragedy reflected a more conscious sense of the gods’ metaphorical significance and a more poignant appreciation of human self-awareness and suffering. Yet through profound suffering came profound learning, and the history and drama of human existence, for all its harsh conflict and wrenching contradiction, still held overarching purpose and meaning. The myths were the living body of that meaning, constituting a language that both reflected and illuminated the essential processes of life.
The Birth of Philosophy
With its Olympian order, the mythic world of Homer and Sophocles possessed a complex intelligibility, but this persistent desire for system and clarity in the Greek vision, as well as the growing humanism visible in the tragedies, was beginning to take new forms. The great shift had already commenced in the early sixth century B.C. in the large and prosperous Ionian city of Miletus, situated in the eastern part of the Greek world on the coast of Asia Minor. Here Thales and his successors Anaximander and Anaximenes, endowed with both leisure and curiosity, initiated an approach to understanding the world that was radically novel and extraordinarily consequential. Perhaps they were impelled by their Ionian location, where they were confronted with neighboring civilizations that possessed mythologies differing both from each other and from the Greek. Perhaps, too, they were influenced by the social organization of the Greek polis, which was governed by impersonal, uniform laws rather than the arbitrary acts of a despot. Yet whatever their immediate inspiration, these prototypical scientists made the remarkable assumption that an underlying rational unity and order existed within the flux and variety of the world, and established for themselves the task of discovering a simple fundamental principle, or arche, that both governed nature and composed its basic substance. In so doing, they began to complement their traditional mythological understanding with more impersonal and conceptual explanations based on their observations of natural phenomena.
At this pivotal stage, there was a distinct overlap of the mythic and scientific modes, visible in the principal statement attributed to Thales in which he affirmed both a single unifying primary substance and a divine omnipresence: “All is water, and the world is full of gods.” Thales and his successors proposed that nature arose from a self-animated substance that continued to move and change itself into various forms.3 Because it was author of its own ordered motions and transmutations, and because it was everlasting, this primary substance was considered to be not only material but also alive and divine. Much like Homer, these earliest philosophers perceived nature and divinity as yet intertwined. They also maintained something of the old Homeric sense of a moral order governing the cosmos, an impersonal fate that preserved the world’s equilibrium amidst all its changes.
But the decisive step had been taken. The Greek mind now strove to discover a natural explanation for the cosmos by means of observation and reasoning, and these explanations soon began to shed their residual mythological components. Ultimate, universal questions were being asked, and answers were being sought from a new quarter—the human mind’s critical analysis of material phenomena. Nature was to be explained in terms of nature itself, not of something fundamentally beyond nature, and in impersonal terms rather than by means of personal gods and goddesses. The primitive universe ruled by anthropomorphic deities began to give way to a world whose source and substance was a primary natural element such as water, air, or fire. In time, these primary substances would cease to be endowed with divinity or intelligence, and would instead be understood as purely material entities mechanically moved by chance or blind necessity. But already a rudimentary naturalistic empiricism was being born. And as man’s independent intelligence grew stronger, the sovereign power of the old gods grew weak.
The next step in this philosophical revolution, a step no less consequential than that of Thales a century earlier, was taken in the western part of the Greek world in southern Italy (Magna Graecia) when Parmenides of Elea approached the problem of what was genuinely real by means of a purely abstract rational logic. Again, as with the early Ionians, Parmenides’s thought possessed a peculiar combination of traditional religious and novel secular elements. From what he described as a divine revelation emerged his achievement of an unprecedentedly rigorous deductive logic. In their search for simplicity in explaining nature, the Ionian philosophers had stated that the world was one thing, but had become many. But in Parmenides’s early struggle with language and logic, “to be” something made it impossible for it to change into something it is not, for what “is not” cannot be said to exist at all. Similarly, he argued that “what is” can never have come into being or pass away, since something cannot come from nothing or turn into nothing if nothing cannot exist at all. Things cannot be as they appear to the senses: the familiar world of change, motion, and multiplicity must be mere opinion, for the true reality by logical necessity is changeless and unitary.
These rudimentary but foundational developments in logic necessitated thinking through for the first time such matters as the difference between the real and the apparent, between rational truth and sensory perception, and between being and becoming. Of equal importance, Parmenides’s logic eventually forced into the open the distinction between a static material substance and a dynamic ordering life-force (which had been presumed identical by the Ionians), and thereby highlighted the basic problem of what caused motion in the universe. But most significant was Parmenides’s declaration of the autonomy and superiority of the human reason as judge of reality. For what was real was intelligible—an object of intellectual apprehension, not of sense perception.
These two advancing trends of naturalism and rationalism impelled the development of a series of increasingly sophisticated theories to explain the natural world. Obliged to reconcile the conflicting demands of sensory observation with the new logical rigor, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and finally the atomists attempted to explain the world’s apparent change and multiplicity by reinterpreting and modifying Parmenides’s absolute monism—reality as one, motionless, and changeless—in terms of more pluralistic systems. Each of these systems adhered to Parmenides’s view that what was real could not ultimately come into being or pass away, but they interpreted the apparent birth and destruction of natural objects as being the consequence of a multiplicity of fundamental unchanging elements which alone were truly real, and which moved into and out of various combinations to form the objects of the world. The elements themselves did not come into being or pass away. Only their constantly shifting combinations were subject to such change. Empedocles posited four ultimate root elements—earth, water, air, and fire—which were eternal, and which were moved together and apart by the primary forces of Love and Strife. Anaxagoras proposed that the universe was constituted by an infinite number of minute, qualitatively different seeds. But instead of explaining matter’s movement in terms of blind semimythic forces (such as Love and Strife), he postulated a transcendent primordial Mind (Nous), which set the material universe into motion and gave it form and order.
But the most comprehensive system in this development was that of atomism. In an attempt to fulfill the Ionians’ search for an elementary substance constituting the material world, while also overcoming the Parmenidean argument against change and multiplicity, Leucippus and his successor Democritus constructed a complex explanation of all phenomena in purely materialistic terms: The world was composed exclusively of uncaused and immutable material atoms—a unitary changeless substance, as Parmenides required, though of infinite number. These invisibly minute and indivisible particles perpetually moved about in a boundless void and by their random collisions and varying combinations produced the phenomena of t
he visible world. The atoms were qualitatively identical, different only in shape and size—i.e., in quantitative and hence measurable terms. Democritus further answered Parmenides’s objection by stating that what “is not” could indeed exist, in the sense of a void—an empty but real space which made room for the atoms to move and combine. The atoms were moved mechanically, not by any cosmic intelligence such as the Nous, but by the blind chance of natural necessity (anankē). All human knowledge was derived simply from the impact of the material atoms on the senses. Much of human experience, however, such as that of hot and cold or bitter and sweet, derived not from the atoms’ inherent qualities but from human “convention.” Qualities were subjective human perceptions, for the atoms possessed only quantitative differences. What was real was matter in space, atoms moving randomly in the void. When a man died, his soul perished; matter, however, was conserved and did not perish. Only the specific combinations of atoms changed, with the same atoms constantly colliding and forming different bodies in various stages of increase and decrease, conglomerating and breaking apart, thereby creating and dissolving over time an infinite number of worlds throughout the void.
In atomism, the mythological residue of the earliest philosophers’ self-animated substance was now fully removed: the void alone caused the random motions of the atoms, which were entirely material and possessed neither divine order nor purpose. For some, this explanation succeeded as the most lucid rational effort to escape the distortions of human subjectivity and desire, and to grasp the unadorned mechanisms of the universe. For others, however, much was left unresolved—the issue of forms and their duration, the question of purpose in the world, the need for a more satisfying answer to the problem of a first cause of motion. Significant advances in understanding the world seemed to be developing, yet much that had been certain for the primitive, pre-philosophical mind was now problematic. By implication of these early philosophical forays, not only the gods but the immediate evidence of one’s own senses might be an illusion, and the human mind alone must be relied upon to discover rationally what is real.
There was one major exception to this intellectual progress among the Greeks away from the mythic and toward the naturalistic, and this was Pythagoras. The dichotomy of religion and reason seems to have not so much pressed Pythagoras antithetically away from one in favor of the other, but rather provided for him an impetus toward synthesis. Indeed, his reputation among the ancients was that of a man whose genius was as much religious as scientific. Yet little can be said about Pythagoras with any definiteness. A rule of strict secrecy was maintained by his school, and an aura of legend surrounded it from its beginnings. Originally from the Ionian island of Samos, Pythagoras probably traveled and studied in Egypt and Mesopotamia before migrating westward to the Greek colony of Croton in southern Italy. There he established a philosophical school and religious brotherhood centered on the cult of Apollo and the Muses, and dedicated to the pursuit of moral purification, spiritual salvation, and the intellectual penetration of nature—all of which were understood as intimately interconnected.
Where the Ionian physicists were interested in the material substance of phenomena, the Pythagoreans focused on the forms, particularly mathematical, that governed and ordered those phenomena. And while the main current of Greek thought was breaking away from the mythological and religious ground of archaic Greek culture, Pythagoras and his followers conducted philosophy and science in a framework permeated by the beliefs of the mystery religions, especially Orphism. To comprehend scientifically the order of the natural universe was the Pythagorean via regia to spiritual illumination. The forms of mathematics, the harmonies of music, the motions of the planets, and the gods of the mysteries were all essentially related for Pythagoreans, and the meaning of that relation was revealed in an education that culminated in the human soul’s assimilation to the world soul, and thence to the divine creative mind of the universe. Because of the Pythagorean commitment to cultic secrecy, the specifics of that meaning and of the process by which that meaning was disclosed remain largely unknown. What is certain is that the Pythagorean school charted its independent philosophical course according to a belief system that decisively maintained the ancient structures of myth and the mystery religions while advancing scientific discoveries of immense consequence for later Western thought.
But the general tenor of Greek intellectual evolution was otherwise, as from Thales and Anaximander to Leucippus and Democritus a naturalistic science matured in step with an increasingly skeptical rationalism. Although none of these philosophers commanded universal cultural influence, and although for most Greeks the Olympian gods were never seriously in doubt, the gradual rise of these different strands of early philosophy—Ionian physics, Eleatic rationalism, Democritean atomism—represented the seminal vanguard of Greek thought in its development out of the era of traditional belief into the era of reason. With the exception of the relatively autonomous Pythagoreans, the Hellenic mind before Socrates followed a definite, if at times ambiguous, direction away from the supernatural and toward the natural: from the divine to the mundane, from the mythical to the conceptual, from poetry and story to prose and analysis. To the more critical intellects of this later age, the gods of the ancient poets’ stories seemed all too human, made in man’s own image, and increasingly dubious as real divine entities. Already near the start of the fifth century B.C. the poet-philosopher Xenophanes had disparaged the popular acceptance of Homeric mythology, with its anthropomorphic gods engaged in immoral activities: if oxen, lions, or horses had hands with which to make images, they would undoubtedly form gods with bodies and shapes like their own. A generation later, Anaxagoras declared that the Sun was not the god Helios but was rather an incandescent stone larger than the Peloponnese, and that the Moon was composed of an earthy substance which received its light from the Sun. Democritus considered that human belief in gods was no more than an attempt to explain extraordinary events like thunderstorms or earthquakes by means of imagined supernatural forces. An equivocal skepticism toward the ancient myths could be seen even in Euripides, the last of the great tragedians, while the comic dramatist Aristophanes openly parodied them. In the face of such diverging speculations, the time-honored cosmology was no longer self-evident.
Yet the more the Greek developed a sense of individual critical judgment and emerged from the collective primordial vision of earlier generations, the more conjectural became his understanding, the more narrow the compass of infallible knowledge. “As for certain truth,” Xenophanes asserted, “no man has known it, nor will he know it.” Philosophical contributions such as the irresolvable logical paradoxes of Zeno of Elea, or Heraclitus’s doctrine of the world as constant flux, often seemed only to exacerbate the new uncertainties. With the advent of reason, everything seemed open to doubt, and each succeeding philosopher offered solutions differing from his predecessor’s. If the world was governed exclusively by mechanical natural forces, then there remained no evident basis upon which firm moral judgments could be founded. And if the true reality was entirely divorced from common experience, then the very foundations of human knowledge were called into question. It seemed that the more man became freely and consciously self-determining, the less sure was his footing. Still, that price appeared well worth paying if human beings could be emancipated from the superstitious fears and beliefs of conventional piety and allowed insight, however provisional, into the genuine order of things. Despite the continual emergence of new problems and new attempted solutions, a heartening sense of intellectual progress seemed to override the various confusions accompanying it. Thus Xenophanes could affirm: “The gods did not reveal, from the beginning, all things to us; but in the course of time, through seeking, men find that which is the better.…”4
The Greek Enlightenment
This intellectual development reached its climax in Athens as the various streams of Greek thought and art converged there during the fifth century B.C. The age of Pericles and the
building of the Parthenon saw Athens at the peak of its cultural creativity and political influence in Greece, and Athenian man asserted himself within his world with a new sense of his own power and intelligence. After its triumph over the Persian invaders and its establishment as leader of the Greek states, Athens rapidly emerged as an expansive commercial and maritime city with imperial ambitions. Its burgeoning activities provided Athenian citizens with increased contact with other cultures and outlooks and a new urban sophistication Athens had become the first Greek metropolis. The development of democratic self-government and technical advances in agriculture and navigation both expressed and encouraged the new humanistic spirit. Earlier philosophers had been relatively isolated in their speculations, with one or perhaps a few disciples to carry on their work. Now in Athens such speculation became more representative of the city’s intellectual life as a whole, which continued to move toward conceptual thought, critical analysis, reflection, and dialectic.
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