Greek Philosophy: Thales, Anaximander & Anaximenes

The Milesian School

As mentioned last time, Miletus was a city state on the coast of the Aegean sea in Ionia (modern day Turkey) which had served as the center of the Ionian rebellion that sought freedom from the Persian Empire.  The first ancient Greek philosophers, Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, were all from Miletus, and so they are known as the Milesian School.  They were primarily invested in cosmology, the order and interaction of the elements, and observation of nature.  In the ancient world, cosmology and science were primarily passive observation.  As the Chinese, Muslims and then Europeans developed the mechanics and mathematics of the modern world, science was increasingly driven by active experimentation.  Experimentation is still observation, but set in an active arrangement.

The Ionian city states such as Miletus were settled around 1000 BCE.  By 600 BCE, just after the times of Homer and Hesiod, around the time of Archilochos and Sappho, Miletus had become a wealthy center of trade exchanging goods and ideas with the cities of Egypt, Persia, Western Greece, and others such as what is today Libya and Italy.  ‘Greece’ was not yet a political entity at the time, but shared a Homeric culture with other Greek city states such as Athens we discussed last time.  Miletus was ruled by an aristocracy, powerful families who had the leisure to enjoy education and the arts.  They had connections to the empires of Egypt and Persia, shown by the influence of these empires on science and art, but independence to develop a new culture out of what was imported.  The Milesians were known as daring sailors and traders.  In particular, that the first philosophers come from Miletus suggests Persia had a particularly powerful influence, which would be corroborated by Christianity (influenced by Persian Zoroastrianism) spreading through Syria and Ionia to the rest of Greece and Egypt centuries later.  There was not much difference between Miletus and Athens other than Miletus having been under the Persian Empire in the centuries before its greatest thinkers arose.


Thales

Thales was the first member of the Milesian School, which was not a formal school in a building but a label applied today to the three interrelated thinkers from Miletus.  Thales is believed to have lived sometime between 620 and 550 BCE based largely on his prediction of a solar eclipse in 585 BCE.  According to Diogenes Laertius, a historian who chronicled the lives of Greek philosophers, Thales was a phoenician born to phoenician noble parents who emigrated to Miletus.  He became famous for his accomplishments, shown by a line from Aristophanes’ comedy The Birds, “The man’s a Thales!”.  Either he wrote nothing, or none of his writings survived.  Some sources say he wrote two treatises on astronomy, but if he did they are now lost to history.

Thales was known for having his head in the clouds, the stereotypical “absent-minded professor”.  There are many stories of intellectuals spacing out and almost dying while thinking up the ideas that made them famous.  Human thought: it may make you a legend, or get you killed.  Plato and other sources repeat the story that Thales was gazing at the stars while walking, contemplating astronomy, when he fell into a well.  A similar story is said of Gautama, the founder of the Logic/Debate school of Indian thought, also called “Eyes in the Feet” as he fell into a well while deep in thought, so Brahma, head father god, gives him eyes in his feet so he won’t fall into wells while thinking anymore.  We will later see of how Gautama’s logic from India is similar to Aristotle’s logic from Athens.  

Both stories may have more to them than first appear.  For Gautama, as a logician he looks at particular examples and draws general conclusions (for example, looking at many cows and generalizing that all cows have horns).  For Thales, gazing into wells serves as a refracting device for gazing at particular stars and the moon without interference from others, as well as measuring angles and degrees.  Thales might have fallen into the well while gazing at stars in the well rather than missing the well entirely.  Either way, Plato says Thales was mocked by a Thracian slave girl for falling in a well while gazing into the heavens.

One source says that Thales had no family or children of his own, and when asked about it he said that it would be a distraction.  While Thales was mocked by some in his time for speculating about the cosmos while failing to raise a family, Aristotle tells us that Thales showed the Milesians philosophy and science are not useless abstraction but practical and useful.  Thales saw that the seasons were going to yield a large olive crop, so he rented and bought all the olive presses he could find to corner the olive oil market, making him a great deal of money when the olive crop came through and olive oil remained in great demand.  Aristotle says Thales did not do this for the money, which like family he saw as a distraction from his astronomical studies, but to show the skeptical Milesians that abstract speculation can yield worldly results, and so philosophers can get rich but they are more interested in gaining knowledge and wisdom.

Another story from various sources tells us Thales channelled a river for King Croesus so his soldiers could cross and attack Persia with far fewer soldiers than he needed.  Croesus realized his situation, and surrendered to Cyrus who spared him and Miletus, granting them relative independence and autonomy.  If Cyrus had razed Miletus rather than giving it independence, he would have prevented it from becoming the center of rebellion against his son Darius, and Greek philosophy would have had to start elsewhere or nowhere at all.

Many sources said that Thales received instruction from Egyptian priests, which would have aided his geometry and astronomy.  This is questionable but it fits with the often mentioned story of Thales using geometry already known to the Egyptians (found in papyrus scrolls) to measure the height of pyramids by measuring the length of their shadows.  It is just as often said Thales used the same method to calculate how far out ships were from shore.  Travel to Egypt was not difficult for a Milesian, as it could be done by boat in under a week, and Miletus was a trade center through which much Egyptian goods flowed and numerous boats were departing to Egyptian ports if one needed to catch a ride.  Thales was said by Diogenes Laertius to have discovered there were 365 days a year, but Egyptians knew this previously not only from the stars but the flooding of the Nile River.  It was also said Thales was the first to claim the soul is immortal, but this also matches earlier Egyptian thought, with reincarnation of souls being followed by achievement of heavenly star birth with the Osiris movement.

Thales is also said to have been to Babylon, and access to their astronomical records allowed him to predict the eclipse in 585 BCE.  Did he travel to these places, or did he gain access to their knowledge without need to travel and this simply got associated with him to make it seem that he had all the knowledge of the ancient world?  Thales is said by sources to have engaged in trade, a possible reason he was interested in monopolizing the olive presses as olive oil was a major commodity.  His method of predicting eclipses is in accord with Babylonian methods.

Thales believed that the elements are alive, that “all things are full of gods” or spirits.  He saw the static charge from polish amber and the movement of iron by magnets as proof that all things are alive, including dead things.  Thales argued there was “no difference” between being alive and being dead.  When asked by a skeptical critic why then Thales should not just die, Thales replied, “because there is no difference”.  Like Plato and Aristotle, Thales had a teleological view of the cosmos.  The cosmos is alive and sentient, and movements have purposes.  A Roman stoic (we will cover stoicism near the end of the class) wrote hundreds of years after these Greek thinkers about being horrified by stalactites and stalagmites in a cave devoid of life, as there should not be beautiful things that are unwitnessed.  Beauty only exists to be attractive, not as something random that may or may not be attractive depending on whether or not anyone is looking.  While Hesiod personifies the forces of nature as Zeus, the Roman orator and philosopher Cicero says Thales believed that God was the intelligence that gives form to everything out of water.  This is like the Old Testament Genesis creation, which itself parallels earlier Sumerian and Babylonian mythology and cosmology.

For Thales, water is the primary element, similar to Anaximenes saying air is, similar to Heraclitus saying that fire is.  All these are fluid elements, unlike earth.  Water is the principle of all things for Thales, which is very similar to Heraclitus saying all things flow and change like a river while maintaining this is basically fire.  Things are born out of chaos and flux (just as in Hesiod’s Theogony), stabilizing to become what they are, then destabilizing and falling back into the general flow.  There is a dispute today among modern scholars whether Thales said that things come from water but become something different (transmutation) or that all things are in fact always made of water no matter what their form.

Why would Thales claim that water transforms into various elements? Miletus was on the mouth of the Maeander River, which deposited silt and sediment that built up on the banks of the river and small islands in the midst of its flow.  To an observer, it would appear that water condenses into earth when impacted.  Thales argued that land floats on water, which is true if you put an handful of earth over a pool.  This meant that the continents are floating on the ocean, and so earthquakes are caused when the ocean is disturbed underneath the land.

Thales saw that water breaks things into their components, which he saw as evidence that water was the primordial element.  Water’s ability to clean and separate gives water a dual role as destroyer yet purifier.  Egyptian priests focused on water as blessing via cleansing, and so sprinkled holy water in rituals and required priests to bathe three times a day.  Persian Zoroastrians focused on fire as purifying, and kept a flame burning during daily reenactments of the birth of the cosmos.  Influences of both are still found in Catholic ritual today.  When Thales claims that water is the basic element, this puts him in line with Hesiod’s cosmology, as out of chaos comes order and distinction of elements.  Modern science post-chaos theory calls order out of chaos ‘emergence’.


Anaximander

Some sources claim Anaximander (610 - 546 BCE) was a student of Thales.  This was assumed for a long time, but as is often the case in accross cultures, followers are thought to be direct students but are then discovered to have merely studied the teacher without knowing them.  This is also believed today to have been true of Socrates and Plato.  Anaximander did have a famous student named Pythagoras (who we will study next week).  Pythagoras is said to have visited Thales on advice from Anaximander, and that Thales told Pythagoras to study in Egypt to understand mathematics and physics.

As we have no writings from Thales, Anaximander gives us the first preserved written lines ( a single fragment) of Greek philosophy.  His ‘On Nature’, unlike the works of Homer and Hesiod but like treatises written by the Sumerians, Egyptians and others, is not poetry but prose, unstructured by rhythmic constraints.  The book is lost, but one fragment of it comes to us quoted by Simplicius in his Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics::

The things that are perish into the things out of which they come to be, according to necessity, for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice in accordance with the ordering of time.

Like Newton, there is a balance such that for every motion there is an equal and opposite motion, a balance or ‘justice’ that works throughout the cosmos.  For Anaximander, justice was the goddess Dike, keeper of the order, balance, and justice of the cosmos presided over by Zeus, her father.  Zeus is order, and Dike settles disorders.  Dike is sometimes pictured with scales to weigh things, just like Anubis from Egypt.

While some have said that Anaximander was the first in world history to present rational arguments for his beliefs, just as Thales is said to be the first to believe in natural explanations, it is rather that people naturally observe and argue, but Anaximander was the first Greek (technically Milesian) whose arguments come down to us through various sources.

For Anaximander, the basic element out of which spring the others is not water but the limitless, the infinite, Apeiron, unlimited by time or space (temporally and spatially infinite), unlimited in potency and power, unlimited by quality or quantity.  Anaximander argued it was unborn, and will not die (Heraclitus says the same, unlike the Olympic gods of Hesiod who are born in time).  While the infinite is the generation and decay of things continuously, it is itself without generation or decay.  Things begin and end, and this itself does not begin or end.  This is a similar abstraction like polytheism to abstract monotheism, with elements in fact being facets or branches of one common abstract element, also eternal and without birth, unlike Zeus.  The infinite is also that which is not bounded by human reason or concepts, that which remains ungrasped and beyond understanding.

Whether we live in an open infinite universe or a closed finite universe is still debated by astrophysicists today.  In my undergrad astronomy class, we were told there are three theories or possibilities: 1) the universe is closed with an edge, so a rocket could hit the edge, 2) the universe is closed but loops back on itself, so a rocket would eventually wind up back where it started if it kept flying in a single direction, or 3) the universe is open and infinite, so a rocket would never hit an edge or return if it kept flying.  Anaximander argues the third and last of these.

Apparently, Anaximander argued that because the elements are opposed to each other, with fire being hot, water being wet, earth being dry and air being cool, if one of these were the primary element or infinite in potency itself, it would have destroyed its opposite long ago.  Thus, if Thales was right and all things are made of water, fire would have been obliterated long ago or never existed in the first place.  Note that Anaximander assumes that something must be infinite, and so this thing must not have a particular character or that character would obliterate anything else given an infinite amount of time (something an infinite thing would by necessity have).

Out of Apeiron come the elements fire, air, earth, and water, and then these are the components of all particular things.  This works according to the four qualities of hot, cold, wet, dry.  Specifically, fire is hot, water is wet, air is cold, and earth is dry.  When things are in balance everything flows smoothly, and when they are out of balance, they must “pay for their injustice”, getting rebalanced by counter-reaction.  The elements encroach on each other and commit injustice against each other like nations fighting for disputed territory.  Heraclitus, as we will see, thinks the elements are conceited and hungry, which is why this happens.  For Anaximander, lightning and thunder come from clouds bumping into each other, a settling of the injustice.

The infinite apeiron was seen as a negative thing by the Pythagoreans and Aristotle, who put order and restraint on the side of perfection and the infinite on the side of chaotic and imperfect.  Typically, Greek thought was uncomfortable with the idea of the infinite, unlike Indian thought.  It is for this reason that we use Indian-Arabic numerals today, as Indian mathematics was comfortable with infinites such as infinite series and unknowns such as variables, which contributed to Islamic algebra.  While we still use the Greek letter pi to symbolize the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its radius, the Greeks would be uncomfortable with a value of pi that trailed on endlessly, and struggled to represent it as a whole number ratio (22/7 was often used).

According to Anaximander’s own cosmology, the world grew out of a seed encased in fire and air, which then fall apart into rings, which then compose the sun, moon, planets and stars.  Modern scholars are still perplexed as to the workings of much of his astronomical system.

Anaximander introduced the gnomon into Greece, a tool the Babylonians and Egyptians had used for centuries before.  Basically, it is a stick in the ground, which functions as a sundial.  This allows shadows to be measured on the ground and then studied.  The sun draws a curve, moving from long to the west in the morning, shortest at noon, and long to the east in the evening.

Anaximander said that the sun and moon make full circles, passing beneath the earth, and earth floats unsupported in space.  This is odd, as it would be unsupported by water, or air, or Atlas, or a pillar, or turtles, or anything, which made it different from many previous cultures’ beliefs.  It was not until people got into space, thousands of years later, that this could be directly observed.  Anaximander did not believe the earth was round, however, at least not round as a sphere.  The earth was a flat disc, a belief much more common in the ancient world.  For Homer and Hesiod, the world was a pillar or drum, as was the shape of the cosmos, which explained why the earth was flat, things fall downward and the stars circle overhead.  Hesiod says in the Theogony that it would take an anvil nine days to fall from the height of heaven to earth.  Anaximander also uses the number nine as the ratio of the length of the earth to the distance to the stars and in several other places.

Why, then, does the earth not fall but floats?  Aristotle says that Anaximander argued the earth was at the dead center of the cosmos, and because of this there was no reason for it to move one way or the other.  This is odd, because an infinite should either not have a center point, or equally have its center at all points.  Aristotle argues that if Anaximander is right, then a man who is hungry and thirsty between food and drink would necessarily remain where he is.  Again, note that Aristotle compares the moving earth to a hungry man, just as Anaximander believes the elements do injustice to each other.  What is likely going on is that Anaximander sees the cosmos as generated outward from the earth, and the earth is, in a sense, floating on being at the center.

Anaximander put the stars nearest to earth, then the planets, then the moon, and farthest away the Sun.  This means he thought stars disappeared because they pass in front of the moon, not behind it, and the moon outshines them at night the way the sun does during the day.  The cosmos is shaped like a drum, with the planets on wheels circling around the sides and the disc of the earth in the center, rising and falling with the seasons.

Anaximander made a map of the world, supposedly the first in ancient Greece, with the circle of the earth surrounded by the ocean, which assumably also floats in place.  The Mediterranean Sea is in the center of the earth, Delphi is the navel at the very center, the northern part of the world is “Europe”, the eastern part of the world is Asia, and the southern half Libya (Africa), divided into thirds .  Only the coasts were habitable, the north coast including Greece, the south coast including Egypt, and the east coast including Babylon, Assyria and Persia.  In the far north, lived mythical snow people ( northern Europeans), and in the far south mythical fire people (southern Africans).  Herodotus follows Anaximander and divides the world into the same three continents.  “Europe” would not be the culturally accepted name of the continent in Europe until the late middle ages, just before the Renaissance.

In biology, Anaximander argued that life comes from moisture that stays on the earth that does not get dried up by the sun.  The water cycle was known in Egypt, India and elsewhere from the observation of vapors rising up and rain coming down with the heating and cooling of the seasons.  Fish are made of warmed water and earth, out of which they spontaneously arise.  They then become other animals, which become others, which become humans.  This does not include natural selection of Darwin.  Humans do not come from monkeys, as they did according to some Indian sources, but were trapped in animals until they burst out.


Anaximenes

As Anaximander followed Thales, so too did Anaximenes (585 - 528 BCE) follow Anaximander, though just like in the relationship between Thales and Anaximander, Anaximenes did not simply follow Anaximander but corrected and differed from him.  Anaximenes’ arche, his primary essence or principle element, was infinite like Anaximander, however it was not simply qualityless but the element air.  Air is the element in ancient cosmology associated with breath and along with fire, life.  When an animal or human dies, the heat and breath leaves the earthly and watery behind, which then sinks downward while the fire and air presumably rise.  Anaximenes argued that through dissipation and concentration all substances are produced from air.  Air condenses into visual vapor, fog and rain, and from water, as Anaximander supposed, is condensed earth and even stone.  The two agree that earth is condensed water, but Anaximenes argues that water is itself not the primary element, the most elemental element, but condensed air.  Air, when dissipated, ignites and becomes fire.

To prove this, Anaximenes explained that when we blow on a hand with an open mouth, it is hot, but with tightened lips, it is cold.  This shows that condensed air is cold and dispersed air is hot.  Unfortunately, we now know that when you condense a gas it heats up as the molecules move more rapidly, the opposite of what he proposed.  Anaximenes also refers to felt, which is condensed wool, to show that various density gives various properties.  The earth was formed through a felting process, condensed from air and shooting out the stars in the process, like sparks kicked out of a campfire.  The earth does not float simply on the center, but as a leaf on air.  So are the sun and moon, which are themselves floating discs on air, on fire due to their speed.  

For Anaximenes, earthquakes are not due to the earth floating on water, but due to air drying out the earth, which then cracks and in places collapses.  Lightning is caused by winds cutting into clouds at great speeds.  Hippocrates, the famed Greek doctor, seems to have followed Anaximenes and saw air as central to understanding disease, disorders of the body.

Asian Philosophy: Indian Thought, Hinduism & The Vedas

Since this is the first lecture of the course, and because we are studying Eastern philosophy rather than Western, it is important to introduce philosophy and why the West does not have a monopoly on it.

Human thought, and thus the human world, is dominated by pairs of opposites. It is often useful to think of these opposites in terms of positive and negative. Good is positive, while bad is negative. Happy is positive, while sad is negative. Being is positive, while non-being is negative. Full is positive, while empty is negative.

Notice that "positive" does not always mean happy or good and "negative" does not always mean sad or bad. When we say "order" and "chaos", closure (stability) sounds good and openness (instability) sounds bad. However, when we say "freedom" and "restraint", openness (unconstrained) sounds good and closure (constrained) sounds bad. When we want stability or order, openness is bad ("chaos"). When we want to be free and unconstrained, openness is good ("freedom"). A person, place or thing can be positive in some ways and negative in others. It depends on context, position and location.  In many ways, places and times, happiness and solidity are good and in others they are bad.  Also, no particular thing is perfectly good or completely solid.  We judge the table (and the wheel, as Lao Zi the patriarch of Daoism will explain soon) to be simply solid and the space around it to be simply empty, but no table is immortal or unbreakable, and no space is a perfect vacuum.  Even outer space is full of dust, light and everything else in the universe.  In the same way, particular things that are good or make us happy do not always make us happy and do not make everyone happy.  Often, things that make one person happy continue to make another unhappy because they make the first person happy.

Human belief/judgment has its own special pairs of opposites. The most basic is belief (positive) and doubt (negative).  Belief is an answer or answering, and doubt is a question or questioning. In politics, conservatives lean towards believing and affirming the institution (often looking to the stability and consistency of the past) while progressives lean towards doubting and questioning the institution (often looking to the openness and change of the future). In systems of thought, dogmatists (also called positivists today) lean towards answers and affirming the truths of the system ("There are certain facts, morals and truths.") while skeptics lean towards questions and doubting the truths of the system ("Are there certain facts, morals and truths?"). According to Hegel, one of my favorite philosophers, human thought is an endless battle between dogmatism and skepticism. This battle is also a symbiotic evolution requiring both sides.

When we look at the history of human thought, from its origins in shamanism to its evolution and specialization with religion, philosophy, art and science, we can see that both dogmatism and skepticism play necessary roles. Without a base that is assumed and unquestioned, nothing new can be produced. However, without reaching for the new and questioning the old there is no growth to improve and fit new circumstances. The great thinkers in human thought, across all systems, incorporate the old while bringing us the new. Often they are called heretics in their time and only canonized after they are safely dead because they have to question the very system that they stand for.

Many unfortunately believe that philosophy was born in ancient Greece, when in fact wisdom is universal to human kind even though it is difficult to achieve.  The wise, though rarer than we would like, have been celebrated in all cultures, and their wisdom has similarity across all cultures even though their beliefs can differ widely.  While the word ‘philosophy’ is an ancient Greek word, great thinkers and questioners can be called philosophers and sages in any culture.

Consider the following passage from Euclid in the Rainforest (first published in 2006) by Mazur, a professor of Logic and Mathematics.  I like much about this work, which examines how logic and math require not only deductive rule following but individual leaps of intuition and interpretation.  Keep in mind that “Western” is a recent word that has replaced “European race” only within the last century:

Sometime early in the sixth century B.C., two things happened to dramatically alter the way Western civilization explained the world.  The first was the use of cause and effect, as opposed to the supernatural in explaining natural phenomena; we might say that nature was first discovered then.  The second was the practice of rational criticism and debate.  These fresh developments occurred after a time of great political upheaval in the eastern Mediterranean, which led to profound changes in the political structures of Greek cities.  Democracy in Athens meant that citizens could participate in government and law, freely debating and questioning political ideas.  Before the establishment of the Greek city state, a change in rule usually meant merely a change from one tyrant to another.

This is the sort of view that is orthodox in academics today, and one I love to hate.  Many claim that the Greeks invented or discovered nature, explaining things through material cause and effect, rational criticism and debate, Democracy, and questioning political ideas.  This is odd, considering the democratic assembly of Athens, put Socrates to death for encouraging the youth to question truth, tradition and politics.

Let us carefully work through this, point by point.  First, cause and effect are basic to human explanation, whether that explanation could be called supernatural or natural.  The spirits and gods were thought to cause things, they were considered part of the natural world and made of fire as was the individual soul or mind, and most ancient Greek thinkers, including Socrates, Plato and Aristotle all believed in polytheistic gods even as they pushed towards a more monotheistic/monistic cosmos beyond the many gods which is why Plato and Aristotle were, even though polytheists, revered and brought to us by the Islamic and Christian traditions.  Doing Logic was largely doing Aristotle to many of the Islamic and Christian logicians we will study in this class, though others questioned Aristotle.

Second, rational criticism and debate are basic to human cultures.  Athens was the only temporary democracy in ancient Greece, so it was not a profound change to the structure of the Greek city state nor was it established with the Greek city state, as there were several.  During most of ancient Greek history, change in rule was merely a change from one tyrant to another.  As far as democracy being invented in Athens, in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh we can see that king Gilgamesh wants a war, so he goes to the higher senate, composed of the rich elites like Athenian democracy, and they reject his proposal, so he then appeals to the lower house composed of lesser but a greater number of elites, who accept and help him to override the consensus of the senate.  In African villages, we can see everyone sitting down and men and women standing one at a time and airing their grievances, and then the chief makes a decision based on the debate.  The brief period of Athenian democracy was not categorically free debate, nor was previous politics categorical tyranny.  Individual and group decision making are found in complex arrangements in all cultures, including the earliest and most primitive, ancient Athens, and our America today.

It should also be mentioned that philosophers were not welcome in ancient Greece as they questioned the ways of things (traditional polytheism) and as such Socrates was put to death for “inciting the youth to riot”, Aristotle was chased out of Athens after the death of his student Alexander (a foreign Macedonian who conquered Athens by the sword, Aristotle being an unwelcome foreigner from Strageira in Athens himself), and Heraclitus, my favorite Greek philosopher, complains that his city state Ephesus exiled their best thinker for questioning things and it would be best if all Ephesians went and hanged themselves to leave the city in the abler hands of children.

What is philosophy? Philosophy has been called "thinking about thinking", questioning and answering the very process of questioning and answering itself. The ancient Greek philosophers (such as Heraclitus, Socrates and Plato) critically examined their own thinking and their traditions of thought and brought new answers by questioning the human mind and society. While these Greek thinkers should be read and admired, they were not the first or only ancient thinkers to ask abstract questions about thought itself.

The Greek word "philosophy" means "love of wisdom". What is wisdom? The German philosophers Kant and Hegel tell us that there are dueling parts of our individual mind that fight and cooperate on the individual level just as dogmatism and skepticism fight and cooperate on the social level. These two parts are understanding and reason, and these correspond to knowledge and wisdom. Understanding tries to hold things set and steady (the conservative force) while reason tries to challenge and rearrange things (the progressive force). Knowledge is a set understanding, while wisdom is the ability to reason. All systems of thought use both understanding and reason to produce both knowledge and wisdom.

The Greek philosophers were known for wisdom, for questioning the ways that individuals and societies can have knowledge, beliefs and answers. Were the Greeks the first or only ancient people to have philosophers? In Miguel Leon-Pontilla's book Aztec Thought and Culture, he argues that the Aztec and Mayan poets questioned their societies and systems of knowledge, asking open ended questions such as "Do we know the gods exist?", "Is there an afterlife, like the ancestors said there is?", and "Can we ever know these things?". Indeed, when we look at ancient cultures we find both questioning and answering, knowledge as well as wisdom, in ancient Greece and ancient everywhere else. No society would survive without pushing in both directions.  Systems of thought are always sites of disagreement as much as they are of agreement.

Recently, the Attorney General of Arizona crafted legislation against teachers who provide programs celebrating Latino culture as they are dangerously “anti-Western”, and pointed specifically to teaching that Aztecs and Mayans had philosophers as Leon-Pontilla argues.  Apparently, it is biased and thus un-Western to teach that concepts such as “you are my other self” (much like Confucius, who we will study) and “continue to investigate things endlessly” (much like Heraclitus, who we will study) is evidence that the Aztecs and Mayans had philosophy.  It is perceived as a threat to American culture to equate the ancient Mayans with the ancient Greeks.  It is not just the Attorney General who thinks this, but academics with PhDs who continue to provide the ground for this belief in their publications.

As far as the ancient Greeks or the Attorney General of Arizona being part of a specifically rational culture, let us consider the definition of logical validity.  An argument is logically valid if the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises.  Consider the following argument: “Because all elevators play jazz music, jazz is the Devil’s playground, and one should avoid the Devil, elevators are to be avoided.”  You can follow this argument because it is logical.  It does not matter whether or not the premises are true, but only that IF they are true so would the conclusion.  You can construct logical arguments that include the premise, “All puppies are green”, which is useful to show how logic works.  The elevator argument is in the form of Aristotle’s first syllogism, and because human reasoning employs chains so frequently it does not appear that he invented the form but rather examined it critically.


Introducing Indian Thought

Now, on to introducing Indian thought, but first a note on pronouncing Indian (and for later, Japanese) terms correctly for English speakers.  In order to pronounce Indian terms correctly, it is important to remember that, just like in Japanese but unlike in English and other European languages, often, but not always, the third to last syllable is accented or stressed (like in the word ‘SYllable’, which is not pronounced ‘sylLAble’), not the second to last (as in ‘disCOvery’, which is not pronounced ‘DIScovery’).  English and European speakers often pronounce Indian and Japanese terms wrong because of this difference.  For instance, while many say ‘suDOku’ or ‘kaTAna’, in Japanese these are properly pronounced ‘SUdoku’ and ‘KAtana’.  In Indian dialects, likewise, the Buddhist movement is pronounced ‘MaHAyana’, not ‘MAhaYAna’, as it is often said, a Jain patriarch is a ‘tirTHANkara’, the Hindu epic is the ‘MAhaBHArata’, not ‘MAhabhaRAta’, and the Buddhist doctrine of codependent arising is ‘praTITyasaMUDpada’.  Note that the emphasis is always the third to last syllable as much as possible given the number of syllables in the word.

‘Hindu’ is the Persian name for India (Persia and India are next door to each other and have traded for thousands of years).  Our society borrows the term from the British, who get the term from the Persians.  As we read in the Vedas, Hinduism brought together many traditions from many regions with many gods, but there are three levels that are equally interchangeable and separable.  First, each can have a particular god that is the emphasis of one’s particular branch of the tradition.  Second, the many gods are each one aspect of a single god, often the great father and creator, named by most traditions Brahma.  Third, there is a philosophical monism that goes beyond god or not god, living or dead, conscious or unconscious, that is the One.  Locals practicing devotional worship often operate on the first level, priests who study the Vedas often operate on the second level, while philosophers and unorthodox Indian schools that do not accept the authority of the Vedas such as Jains, Buddhists and the materialist Charvakas operate on the third.  

As Hinduism was brought together as a tradition that brought together many separate people with separate traditions, first the Vedas spoke largely though not entirely on the first level, then particular passages of the Vedas and the later Upanishads spoke on the second level, and then many schools went beyond the Upanishads and understood a simple, neither theistic nor atheistic One to be the real underlying truth of the first and second levels.  Vedanta, literally “Veda’s End”, debated back and forth between the second and third levels in the tradition of the Upanishads.

This came together over many periods in the history of Indian thought.  About 2000 BCE, India was invaded by a fire worshiping people who likely came from modern day Iran.  This was a big influence on the Vedas and Indian culture, however today scholars are critical of just how influential as it was said only recently that the Aryans civilized India and brought the Vedas with them, but now archaeologists have uncovered past civilizations who had incredible bathrooms with complex plumbing and while the Vedas may have been strongly influenced by the Aryans, it is debatable how much is composed of earlier native Indian pre-Aryan traditions.  The Nazis, following earlier German historians, believed that the Aryans were Germanic tribes who civilized not only India but Egypt, Greece, and Persia.  The swastika, and Indian name for a symbol that can be found in much of the world, including tribal German lands, was thought to be the sun symbol of the Aryans, and so it was used by the Nazis.  Unfortunately for this Germanic theory of history, we know that the Aryans were indeed from modern day Iran, what became Persia very soon after the Aryan conquests in India.

Next, in the Vedic period, 1500-800 BCE, the four Vedas were composed as oral traditions that eventually were written down in texts, including the foremost Rg Veda of which there are selections in your reader.  The golden age of Indian thought followed from 800-200 BCE, the time when the Upanishads distilled the Vedic hymns to the gods into inner philosophical/psychological teachings, the six orthodox schools that follow the Vedas (Vedanta, Yoga, Mimamsa, Samkhya, Nyaya and Vaisheshika) as well as the unorthodox schools (Charvaka, Jainism and Buddhism) flourished, and the great Hindu epics (the Mahabharata and Ramayana) were written.  After this, from 200 BCE – 500 CE is a period when the schools and traditions of the golden age were systematized into sutras or central texts.  Finally, after 500 CE and up to the present time, is the period of commentaries written on the earlier systems and their sutras.  This persisted through the period of conquest by Muslims of North India in the 1500s and then by the British in the 1800s.

There are three paths of worship in Hinduism.  First, there is devotional worship, known as Bhakti Yoga (‘Yoga’ means ‘discipline’, or practice).  In Bhakti devotional worship, the devotee prays, sings hymns, lights incense, and performs rituals to gain favor with the gods and heavens.  It is impossible not to notice that most of what we call ‘religion’ the world over is in fact forms of Bhakti practice, devotion to particular gods and ancestral spirits.  The two most populous forms of Bhakti Hinduism are Shaivism, the worship of Shiva (the transformer and destroyer) and his incarnations such as Ganesh (the elephant headed god), and Vaishnavism, the worship of Vishnu (the savior or preserver) and his incarnations such as Krishna.  Worship is often called ‘darshana’, or seeing/experiencing, and Hindus will say, I am going to the seeing, meaning I am going to see and be seen by the god.  Another common form of Bhakti devotion is worship of a particular goddess such as Kali.  Notice that, like a scientist, Bhakti practitioners also believe in learning by experience and seeing, but their subject matter is quite different.

Raja yoga, the second path, is worship by meditation and asceticism (living in isolation, standing in place for days, fasting chanting the names of gods for hours, sitting on spikes, and other means of hard activity) meant to gain a meditative state of insight.  Raja means ‘force’ or ‘effort’, and India is famous for its forest sages practicing these techniques.  

Jnana yoga (“zshna-na”), the third path and my personal favorite, is worship by acquiring knowledge, wisdom and understanding the order of things through study and philosophizing.  This class itself could be seen as a form of Jnana yoga, designed to bring you closer to the core by studying the ways of the world.  All three paths, or any mixture of the three, are understood to work towards the same goal: liberation from the bonds of attachment and desire, rising into enlightenment and release from the constraints of identity to join together with the whole.

There are two ultimate goals to this process.  First, there is hope for a better next life.  Many are familiar already with the Hindu idea of reincarnation.  This is not a form of afterlife particular to India, but in fact there is evidence that many tribal cultures and early Egypt believed that one’s present life will be reincarnated in another life on earth based on one’s actions and intentions.  This interconnection is called ‘Karma’, which simply means ‘action’ in Sanskrit.  Interestingly, physical causation is ‘karma’, just as metaphysical causation (next life physics) is ‘karma’, same word and understanding of cause and effect applied to a different sphere of existence.  If you punch someone in the head, it is karma that makes their head reel backward, and karma that also weighs down your chance for a favorable life after death in the Hindu tradition.

Second, there is hope for release, for freedom from rounds of rebirth on earth.  This can be thought of as dwelling in a heaven with one’s personal or family god, but also as a dwelling with the order of things without residing in any particular place.  Bhakti yoga tends to favor the dwelling with a lord, while Raja and Jnana tends to favor the dwelling with the universe as a whole, however it is important to remember that some Hindus believe that both amount to the same exact thing (while others will insist that their school’s truth is ‘more true’, the same variation one finds in any religion and in our own culture).  This release is also called Moksha and Samadhi, but in America we know this first and foremost by the same name as the famous grunge band, Nirvana.

While moksha is the ultimate goal, via the more immediate goal of positioning oneself favorably for moksha either in this life (dwelling in the forest or a monastery) or in a next life, there are three other goals that Indian philosophy points to as desirable making four in total.  In addition to moksha/nirvana, there is law or morality, ‘dharma’ (the term Jains and Buddhists use to describe their traditions and rules), pleasure, ‘kama’ (as from the Kama Sutra), and material well-being or comfort, ‘artha’.  Clearly, the overall idea is that pleasure and comfort (kama and artha) are not in themselves evil, but one should pursue liberation through discipline (moksha through dharma).

Ancient India saw a great deal of development in science and technology.  They observed the natural world and put phenomena into families and categories as did the ancient Greeks and as we still do today.  The Romans would trade Germanic and Celtic slaves to India in exchange for Indian wootz, the metal most prized for weapons in the ancient world.  In mathematics the Indians were unsurpassed by ancient civilizations, developing the base ten system and the Indian-Arabic numerals we use today.  They laid down the basics of symbolic equations, the concept and symbolization of zero, and invented the variable (originally a thick dot).  All of this got picked up by the Muslims, who turned it into algebra, which then got picked up by the Europeans, who turned it into Calculus.  Typically, we learn about Euclid and the Greeks doing geometry as the source of the Western mathematical tradition.  Muslims were influenced by the Greeks and Euclid, but Euclid argued about lines drawn in sand and did not use equations.  It was the Indians who invented the sorts of mathematical symbolism that the Muslims turned into step by step symbolic mathematics as we know it today and teach it up through high school.

In spite of all of these developments, Indian thought is typically anti-materialistic and concerned with spirituality or psychology depending on one’s vocabulary.  Knowing the mind/spirit is knowing the essence of the whole as self-knowledge, or ‘atmavidya’.  Hindus believe that one has an eternal self/soul/mind, the ‘atma’, as opposed to Jains and Buddhists who believe in ‘anatma’, or no-self (permanent, anyway).

On a final note, it used to be the opinion not only of most Hindus but also European scholarship until very recently, that Jainism and Buddhism took parts of Hinduism and broke away to form their own traditions.  Recently, new studies have shown that Jainism and Buddhism were forming at the same time as Hinduism was becoming an official tradition.  The Hindus accepted the Vedas and Upanishads while the Jains and Buddhists broke from the Vedas to follow more Upanishad-like understandings, but Hinduism as a centralized tradition was, in part, a reaction to the development of the Jain and Buddhist traditions.  Thus, similar doctrines of reincarnation and psychological skepticism/idealism may have developed at the same time or been borrowed by Hinduism in its fully developed form rather than borrowed from Hinduism as it was previously thought.  Even so, there is some truth to the common Hindu understanding that “Buddhism is Hinduism for export”, as Buddhists took the ideas in the Upanishads and Indian tradition, removed the dietary restrictions, caste system and other traditional purity laws, and became possibly the world’s largest system of thought in history, although it is debatable whether Christianity or Buddhism has that title.

Logic: Reason & Wisdom in the Earliest Human Cultures

This lecture covers three things.  First, we are going to sketch a broad picture of human thought and its basic dynamics.  Second, we are going to consider articles including Rational Mastery by Man of his Surroundings by Malinowski, Baseball Superstition, and the Shotgun Cult to show that humans had reason and logical thinking in the earliest and most primitive human cultures.  The first article shows us that the earliest and most basic human cultures are logical and rational, and the next two articles build on the work of the first.  Third and finally, we will look at selections from Riddling Tales from Around the World to show that humans, again in the earliest cultures, question truth and appreciate paradox and contradiction.


The Positives and Negatives of Human Thought

Human thought, and thus the human world, is dominated by pairs of opposites. It is often useful to think of these opposites in terms of positive and negative. Good is positive, while bad is negative. Happy is positive, while sad is negative. Being is positive, while non-being is negative. Full is positive, while empty is negative.

Notice that "positive" does not always mean happy or good and "negative" does not always mean sad or bad. When we say "order" and "chaos", closure (stability) sounds good and openness (instability) sounds bad. However, when we say "freedom" and "restraint", openness (unconstrained) sounds good and closure (constrained) sounds bad. When we want stability or order, openness is bad ("chaos"). When we want to be free and unconstrained, openness is good ("freedom"). A person, place or thing can be positive in some ways and negative in others. It depends on context, position and location.  In many ways, places and times, happiness and solidity are good and in others they are bad.  Also, no particular thing is perfectly good or completely solid.  We judge the table (and the wheel, as Lao Zi the patriarch of Daoism will explain soon) to be simply solid and the space around it to be simply empty, but no table is immortal or unbreakable, and no space is a perfect vacuum.  Even outer space is full of dust, light and everything else in the universe.  In the same way, particular things that are good or make us happy do not always make us happy and do not make everyone happy.  Often, things that make one person happy continue to make another unhappy because they make the first person happy.

Human belief/judgment has its own special pairs of opposites. The most basic is belief (positive) and doubt (negative).  Belief is an answer or answering, and doubt is a question or questioning. In politics, conservatives lean towards believing and affirming the institution (often looking to the stability and consistency of the past) while progressives lean towards doubting and questioning the institution (often looking to the openness and change of the future). In systems of thought, dogmatists (also called positivists today) lean towards answers and affirming the truths of the system ("There are certain facts, morals and truths.") while skeptics lean towards questions and doubting the truths of the system ("Are there certain facts, morals and truths?"). According to Hegel, one of my favorite philosophers, human thought is an endless battle between dogmatism and skepticism. This battle is also a symbiotic evolution requiring both sides.

When we look at the history of human thought, from its origins in shamanism to its evolution and specialization with religion, philosophy, art and science, we can see that both dogmatism and skepticism play necessary roles. Without a base that is assumed and unquestioned, nothing new can be produced. However, without reaching for the new and questioning the old there is no growth to improve and fit new circumstances. The great thinkers in human thought, across all systems, incorporate the old while bringing us the new. Often they are called heretics in their time and only canonized after they are safely dead because they have to question the very system that they stand for.

In this class, we will see that in the earliest cultures, and then in ancient India, Greece and China, dogmatic logicians tried to demonstrate how to argue rationally for atomic truths (principles of knowledge that are unquestionably certain) while skeptics tried to demonstrate that no truth is unquestionable or absolute.

Many unfortunately believe that philosophy was born in ancient Greece, when in fact wisdom is universal to human kind even though it is difficult to achieve.  The wise, though rarer than we would like, have been celebrated in all cultures, and their wisdom has similarity across all cultures even though their beliefs can differ widely.  While the word ‘philosophy’ is an ancient Greek word, great thinkers and questioners can be called philosophers and sages in any culture.

Consider the following passage from Euclid in the Rainforest (first published in 2006) by Mazur, a professor of Logic and Mathematics.  I like much about this work, which examines how logic and math require not only deductive rule following but individual leaps of intuition and interpretation.  Keep in mind that “Western” is a recent word that has replaced “European race” only within the last century:

“Sometime early in the sixth century B.C., two things happened to dramatically alter the way Western civilization explained the world.  The first was the use of cause and effect, as opposed to the supernatural in explaining natural phenomena; we might say that nature was first discovered then.  The second was the practice of rational criticism and debate.  These fresh developments occurred after a time of great political upheaval in the eastern Mediterranean, which led to profound changes in the political structures of Greek cities.  Democracy in Athens meant that citizens could participate in government and law, freely debating and questioning political ideas.  Before the establishment of the Greek city state, a change in rule usually meant merely a change from one tyrant to another.”

This is the sort of view that is orthodox in academics today, and one I love to hate.  Many claim that the Greeks invented or discovered nature, explaining things through material cause and effect, rational criticism and debate, Democracy, and questioning political ideas.  This is odd, considering the democratic assembly of Athens, put Socrates to death for encouraging the youth to question truth, tradition and politics.

Let us carefully work through this, point by point.  First, cause and effect are basic to human explanation, whether that explanation could be called supernatural or natural.  The spirits and gods were thought to cause things, they were considered part of the natural world and made of fire as was the individual soul or mind, and most ancient Greek thinkers, including Socrates, Plato and Aristotle all believed in polytheistic gods even as they pushed towards a more monotheistic/monistic cosmos beyond the many gods which is why Plato and Aristotle were, even though polytheists, revered and brought to us by the Islamic and Christian traditions.  Doing Logic was largely doing Aristotle to many of the Islamic and Christian logicians we will study in this class, though others questioned Aristotle.

Second, rational criticism and debate are basic to human cultures.  Athens was the only temporary democracy in ancient Greece, so it was not a profound change to the structure of the Greek city state nor was it established with the Greek city state, as there were several.  During most of ancient Greek history, change in rule was merely a change from one tyrant to another.  As far as democracy being invented in Athens, in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh we can see that king Gilgamesh wants a war, so he goes to the higher senate, composed of the rich elites like Athenian democracy, and they reject his proposal, so he then appeals to the lower house composed of lesser but a greater number of elites, who accept and help him to override the consensus of the senate.  In African villages, we can see everyone sitting down and men and women standing one at a time and airing their grievances, and then the chief makes a decision based on the debate.  The brief period of Athenian democracy was not categorically free debate, nor was previous politics categorical tyranny.  Individual and group decision making are found in complex arrangements in all cultures, including the earliest and most primitive, ancient Athens, and our America today.

It should also be mentioned that philosophers were not welcome in ancient Greece as they questioned the ways of things (traditional polytheism) and as such Socrates was put to death for “inciting the youth to riot”, Aristotle was chased out of Athens after the death of his student Alexander (a foreign Macedonian who conquered Athens by the sword, Aristotle being an unwelcome foreigner from Strageira in Athens himself), and Heraclitus, my favorite Greek philosopher, complains that his city state Ephesus exiled their best thinker for questioning things and it would be best if all Ephesians went and hanged themselves to leave the city in the abler hands of children.


What is philosophy?

Philosophy has been called "thinking about thinking", questioning and answering the very process of questioning and answering itself. The ancient Greek philosophers (such as Heraclitus, Socrates and Plato) critically examined their own thinking and their traditions of thought and brought new answers by questioning the human mind and society. While these Greek thinkers should be read and admired, they were not the first or only ancient thinkers to ask abstract questions about thought itself.


The Greek word "philosophy" means "love of wisdom". What is wisdom?

The German philosophers Kant and Hegel tell us that there are dueling parts of our individual mind that fight and cooperate on the individual level just as dogmatism and skepticism fight and cooperate on the social level. These two parts are understanding and reason, and these correspond to knowledge and wisdom. Understanding tries to hold things set and steady (the conservative force) while reason tries to challenge and rearrange things (the progressive force). Knowledge is a set understanding, while wisdom is the ability to reason. All systems of thought use both understanding and reason to produce both knowledge and wisdom.

The Greek philosophers were known for wisdom, for questioning the ways that individuals and societies can have knowledge, beliefs and answers. Were the Greeks the first or only ancient people to have philosophers? In Miguel Leon-Pontilla's book Aztec Thought and Culture, he argues that the Aztec and Mayan poets questioned their societies and systems of knowledge, asking open ended questions such as "Do we know the gods exist?", "Is there an afterlife, like the ancestors said there is?", and "Can we ever know these things?". Indeed, when we look at ancient cultures we find both questioning and answering, knowledge as well as wisdom, in ancient Greece and ancient everywhere else. No society would survive without pushing in both directions.  Systems of thought are always sites of disagreement as much as they are of agreement.

Recently, the Attorney General of Arizona crafted legislation against teachers who provide programs celebrating Latino culture as they are dangerously “anti-Western”, and pointed specifically to teaching that Aztecs and Mayans had philosophers as Leon-Pontilla argues.  Apparently, it is biased and thus un-Western to teach that concepts such as “you are my other self” (much like Confucius, who we will study) and “continue to investigate things endlessly” (much like Heraclitus, who we will study) is evidence that the Aztecs and Mayans had philosophy.  It is perceived as a threat to American culture to equate the ancient Mayans with the ancient Greeks.  It is not just the Attorney General who thinks this, but academics with PhDs who continue to provide the ground for this belief in their publications.

As far as the ancient Greeks or the Attorney General of Arizona being part of a specifically rational culture, let us consider the definition of logical validity.  An argument is logically valid if the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises.  Consider the following argument: “Because all elevators play jazz music, jazz is the Devil’s playground, and one should avoid the Devil, elevators are to be avoided.”  You can follow this argument because it is logical.  It does not matter whether or not the premises are true, but only that IF they are true so would the conclusion.  You can construct logical arguments that include the premise, “All puppies are green”, which is useful to show how logic works.  The elevator argument is in the form of Aristotle’s first syllogism, and because human reasoning employs chains so frequently it does not appear that he invented the form but rather examined it critically.


Reason in the Earliest Human Cultures

Let us look at Rational Mastery by Man of his Surroundings by Malinowski, who lived with and studied the tribes of Papua New Guinea as an anthropologist.  Unfortunately, he uses the word “savages” throughout the article, as it was written in the 1940s when a primitive and savage tribe known as Americans were just rising to dominance.  Thankfully, Malinowski asks if we should continue to assume that primitive tribes are irrational and illogical, and he argues that they are, contrary to popular and academic orthodox opinion, rational and logical.  This would mean that they argue systematically amongst themselves, just like the ancient Greeks and ourselves.  Malinowski argues this based on three observations.

First, all cultures, including the basic cultures of New Guinea tribes, have words for whole and part (being/existence and substance/attribute/quality), cause and effect, and if and then.  These are the terms and concepts of ancient Greek Logic (Aristotle) and modern European Logic (Wittgenstein).  This suggests that logic and reason are basic to the human mind, language and culture.  While it is often asserted that the ancient Greeks turned toward material causation and hypothesis, these are also basic to humanity.  If a bush rustles, one may suspect that there is, hypothetically, an all-too-material tiger lurking behind it.  One may investigate, and hopefully one will discover that, contrary to the previous hypothetical theory, it is merely one’s all-too-material fellow tribes-member and friend Bob.  If however, hypothetically, one finds a tiger in material fact, aforementioned tiger may cause the effect of one’s death.  Whether or not spirits or gods are involved or what materials compose them seems irrelevant to the material matter.

Second, there is a basic difference between the everyday, safe and known practices and the special, dangerous and unknown practices of the tribes people.  This can be described as the difference between the practical and the theoretical.  Malinowski uses the example of shallow and deep sea fishing.  When fishing in shallow seas, or glancing behind bushes for tigers, no theory, ritual or magic is required, but when fishing in deep water the tribe gets theoretical and brings in a system of thought involving rituals and “magic” to influence their outcomes.  When one is building a fishhook, one does not call on the gods or spirits.  When one is asking for fertile crops for the year, one calls on gods and spirits with ritualized activity.  In a similar way, one does not need philosophy, logic or science when one is opening a door.  However, if one is designing a door no one has invented before, one needs to bring theoretical systems for understanding the unknown.  “Science” literally means “seeing” or “cutting into many” in Latin (Sciencia), a culture of thought and theory that looks into the unknown from the base of the practical.  Likewise, “Logic” literally means “speaking” in ancient Greek (Logia), as Logic was the art of debate, speaking and arguing well about the unknown.

If you ask what would happen if one did not use the theory and rituals, no one could tell you because they have never tried it.  However, if you suggested that ritual and magic alone will grow crops without farming and practical work the tribes people would laugh at you.  Thus, the theoretical is an extension of the practical into the unknown and the two are always building on each other.  Tribes people do not believe in magic such that rationality is excluded.  Rather, theoretical systems like magic and science are extensions of rationality and logic into the realms of the unknown that concern this life on earth.

Third, tribes people do not all share the same views and beliefs within the cultural system, but rather humans display individual as well as collective thought, just as ancient Greeks shared traditional views but debated amongst themselves rationally.  Most think that we are the individualistic and earlier civilizations did not question their systems.  This is true to a degree due to technology and new complexes of culture, but tribes people disagree with one another within a cultural system.  One good example is a person thinks their failure means they are cursed by an evil spirit, while their neighbor argues with them and says they are just stupid and clumsy.  Another is when you bring the elders of a tribe into the same place and ask the meaning of a shared legend, they often get into a debate about it.  Thus, a theoretical system allows for debate and progressive understandings, including early “magical” systems and later “scientific” systems.

If all this is true and humans have always been logical and rational, why is science so successful and powerful?  What makes science different from earlier systems?  In early and ancient cultures, religion, physics and psychology were all one theoretical system (often referred to today as cosmology).  Particularly as Islamic and European civilizations rose, technology and education meant many specialized equipment and areas of study.  While the theoretical systems have always observed the natural world and this life we live, observation was increasingly supplemented and supported by experimentation.  Today, we have many cultures of experimentation that are powerful at expanding and overturning our views.  However, as already noted, humans have always been experimenting, changing and evolving.

Gmelch, the author of the article Baseball Superstition, says he is taking Malinowski’s distinction of shallow fishing and deep sea fishing and applying it to superstitions of modern day baseball players.  Baseball players are modern day human beings who are raised in a “scientific” culture, but they show the same differences in behavior as the tribes people when it comes to theorizing and the unknown.

In baseball, there is a great difference between fielding and hitting/pitching.  Fielding is successful 9 times out of 10, and so it is not dangerous or risky.  Hitting and pitching, however, are quite risky.  There is far less chance of success, and success does not guarantee winning the game overall.  What do we observe?  Baseball players come up with superstitious practices that follow basic cause-effect reasoning regarding their pre-game behaviors and their performance in hitting and pitching but not in fielding.  A pitcher or slugger will, for instance, eat two chili dogs the night before every big game to pitch or hit well, but fielders do not.  While we may not consider these superstitions “scientific”, we can see that theory grows in the gap of the unknown and it follows the basic mechanisms of logic (hypothetical reasoning of cause to effect).  Again, it seems that reason and logic are basic to human culture and language, and they extend from the observable and practical into the unknown and theoretical.

In the third article, A new Weapon Stirs Up Old Ghosts by Mitchell, we can see a new growth of theoretical culture that has practical purposes in the Shotgun cult of a tribes people given one shotgun shell at a time to hunt wild boar (guess why the Europeans give them one shell at a time).  If a hunter misses a shot, the whole community comes together and they try to figure out where the social issue is in the community that caused the hunter to miss the boar.  This brings the community together to solve its problems (created by individual differences of views and opinions) and it is impossible to say this group debate has no positive effect on the hunter or next hunt whatsoever.  Again, we see that the practical is extended by the theoretical for figuring out the unknown as a culture.


Wisdom in the Earliest Human Cultures

What is wisdom?  Believing and doubting are basic to the human mind.  The human mind, like logicians in India (Kanada and Gotama) and Greece (Aristotle) we will be covering in the next few weeks, seeks basic constant truths (or atomic truths) about its world in order to know things that are certain and constant (like “Fire is always hot” or “Water is always wet”).  However, the human mind can both believe and doubt its truths.  Wisdom is the ability to see beyond knowledge, to know when to question truths that are often true but not always true.  Hegel tells us that we start with categorical truths (“Fire is simply hot so it is not cold at all”) and grow in wisdom to understand the relativity and context of our truths (“Fire is quite hot for the human being, but fire is cold relative to a star”).

Consider the story of the man who goes to his rabbi and complains that his house is too noisy.  The rabbi is wise, and tells the man to bring his livestock into his house.  After the man is at his wits end, the rabbi tells him to remove the livestock, and the man is pleased with how quiet his house has become.  The house is just as noisy as it was before, but the rabbi has shown the man how relatively quiet his house is compared to a barnyard.
In myths and riddles from around the world (many often traded between many cultures) we see an appreciation of wisdom and questioning knowledge, assumptions and intuitive understandings.  While positivistic thinking seeks constant and necessary truths, skeptical thinking seeks to overturn and find counter examples.  We will see this in the skeptical thinkers of India (Jainism and Buddhism), Greece (Heraclitus and Pyrrho) and China (Zhuan Zi and Gong Zi).

Questioning truths is not simply for mysticism or skeptical philosophy.  Wisdom and skepticism have real and practical value in science and technology.  Consider that a refrigerator cools by heating.  The back of a refrigerator heats up, and this draws the heat from the inside of the refrigerator.  If you believe that heat does not cool, you would not be able to invent the refrigerator.  Consider that the Wright Brothers wrote to the US Army and told them of their glider, but it took the Army three years and the accounts of others to believe it because it was understood that humans could not fly like birds (and the US now has air superiority in the world).

In early human tales, there are often trickster characters who steal, cheat, lie and deceive, and through this bring about the necessary sustenance of life.  Crow and Coyote are examples from Native American tales.  Lot’s daughters are examples from the Torah or Old Testament of the Bible: by committing incest with their father they keep the Israelites’ line and covenant alive, though the laws in previous Torah books, such as Deuteronomy, explicitly prohibit incest as a crime.

In the readings from Riddling Tales from Around the World, we have several stories that show us the human appreciation of wisdom and seeing the relative rather than the categorical.

In the story of Trousers Mehmet, the sultan asks for someone to bring him a person who hunts, who throws away what he catches and who carries with him what he cannot find.  Mehmet brings him a beggar who is scratching himself for fleas.  Notice that typically, in the majority of instances, we hunt for something we keep after we catch it and we hunt for something we do not have on our person.  This situation is reversed in the case of the beggar, so reversing aspects of the typical situation of hunting is what distinguishes Mehmet’s brilliance.  The sultan later asks for a thousand forests in a handkerchief, and Mehmet, who has likely read the Koran, brings an acorn, as a single acorn has, potentially, a thousand forests in it.  Hegel, who we will study, talks about how potentiality is a specific sort of non-being, just as the potentially infinite is a specific sort of infinite.

In the story of the Afghani riddling ogre, a brilliant young girl realizes that if she lays across the threshold of the palace doorway, wearing a net after being dragged there by a mountain goat, she is neither inside nor outside, neither clothed nor naked, and neither riding nor on foot.  She then kills the ogre by realizing that she is neither man nor beast (as she is a young girl), she presents a bird that flies away which is both a gift and not a gift, and chewing a piece of bark she is neither fasting nor eating.

In the Chinese story of the Thief Who Kept his Hands Clean, Magistrate Chen (one of a long list of Chinese detectives who seek criminals through rational inquiry and evidence) finds a thief by telling everyone that a Buddhist temple bell will ring when the thief touches it in the dark, and because he covered the bell in soot beforehand the thief is the only one who is afraid to touch it and thus has clean hands.

In the final story selected, a king tells his two sons that they should ride to Jerusalem and whoever’s horse arrives last will inherit his kingdom.  The two ride, then trot, then get off the horses and stare at each other, but then they each have the same thought and leap on the horses and ride as fast as they can.  What did they both realize?  That if they take the other horse to Jerusalem first, their own horse will necessarily finish last.

Final Question:
Is following a cultural system more rational or logical than questioning or changing it?  Both are in fact reasonable and logical.  Belief and doubt, positivism and skepticism, are in constant tension in all societies.  If human beings are always rational and logical because this is the way that thinking works naturally, then humans are rational and logical when they conform to their systems and when they question their systems.

The great Dada art movement’s manifesto writer Tzara said that we must have the courage to stand for and against thought.  If one loves ancient culture but hates modern culture or loves modern culture and hates ancient culture, one is standing for and against human thinking and logic in either case.