The use of the terms ‘white’ and ‘black’ to refer to specific ethnic and geographic groups of the human population has a long and complicated history. Both were used by Indians, Chinese and Muslims before Europeans rose to power that, like the Muslims before them, is unparalleled in history. Indian, Chinese, Persian and then Europeans have used the term ‘white’ to describe themselves favorably and have used the term ‘black’ to describe other people unfavorably, but the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans did not regularly use these terms.
The Rg Veda, unfortunately, uses the term ‘black skinned’ negatively in one of the first and rare recorded instances sometime between 1500 and 1200 BCE. Xenophon, the philosopher and historian who lived in Athens in the time of Socrates, refers to the Persians as white compared to his own Athenian people. Aristotle and Aristotelians after him argued that a balanced complexion like the Greeks, neither light like the Germans and Celts to the North nor dark like the Egyptians and Ethiopians, is the best for a people, and likewise a people should not be too brawny like the Germans nor too brainy like the Persians.
It is likely that the terms originated in Asia, amongst the Indians and the Chinese, where they are sometimes still used today. The Chinese portray the Buddha, who was Indian, to be Chinese and sometimes call Indian people ‘black’, even though the high caste Indians were referring to themselves as ‘white’ far longer than the Chinese. A Persian playwright of the 12th century CE wrote a comedy titled, “The Whites versus the Blacks” mocking the similarities and differences between Africans, who Middle Eastern Muslims often called ‘black’, and the civilized Persians, who sometimes referred to themselves as the playwright did as ‘white’. The use of the terms most likely passed through the middle east and the Islamic empires into Europe, along with much culture, science and technology. The term became consistently used in Europe in the 1600s, and was given support by the sciences. Before that, it was Catholicism and then Christianity that was the common identity of Europeans just as Muslims identified across ethnic and political groups by religion.
There have even been great differences in the use of these terms among later European cultures. The British refer to both Africans and Indians as ‘black’, both the high caste with lighter skin who have called themselves ‘white’ centuries earlier than Europeans and the low caste with darker skin who are labeled such by the Rg Veda thousands of years before the British took over India. Americans refer exclusively to Africans and the African diaspora as ‘black’.
As Europe rose in the wake of Islamic empire, Renaissance artists presented the Israelites, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans to look like themselves. This is very much like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean people presenting the Buddha and other Indian figures to look like themselves and not Indian. After the Protestant reformation and along with the rise of the sciences, Europeans began to referring to themselves, as well as the Greeks and Romans, as ‘white’ and ‘the European race’. It is more accurate to describe the Greeks, Romans, and Germans and Celts as interrelated but distinct ethnicities, as the ancient Greeks and Romans saw it. The word ‘white’ does not cover the differences. The Greeks and the Romans presented themselves as a bronzed and olive-skinned Mediterranean people, and neither the Greeks nor the Romans identified with the Germanic tribes to the North and West and they did not identify with each other. The ancient Romans did borrow much from Greek culture and thought, as they did from Persia and Egypt, but they identified themselves as a separate and superior people.
During the Renaissance, the Italians in each warring city state (Florence, Venice, and Rome) were convinced that they were each the original Roman Catholic Christian people though they often did not identify with each other. Renaissance thinkers, like Ficino and Pico, believed that Greek thinking originated in Egypt and Persia, speaking proudly of standing in the same tradition of philosophy with Zarathustra and Hermes (known to be the Greek version of Thoth, the Egyptian god of knowledge and scribes). While the Renaissance Italians read the bible in Latin, with the Protestant reformation Europeans began increasingly turning to Greek sources, particularly to retranslate the Christian New Testament of the Bible originally written in Greek. Thus, the Greeks and Romans have been portrayed by Western Germanic Europeans (like myself) as European, Christian, later ‘white’ and scientific, people from the Renaissance up until the present time. Muslims, the previous politically and materially dominant culture, see the Greeks along with the Persians and Egyptians as part of their own culture, and they often portray the Greeks with dark skin.
In Germany during the protestant Reformation there was a rejection of Rome and the Catholic Church and intellectuals of the time turned to Greek sources such as the original Greek New Testament. The Protestant scholars took Greek texts and made leaps in Biblical studies, philosophy, history, science and mathematics. This was not a rediscovery of their own people, as it was often misrepresented, but a rediscovery of the wider Christian tradition that included people of many different ethnicities such as the ancient Greeks and Romans.
This situation rose along with Europe’s wealth and power, such that in the late 1700s, in the time of Hegel and the rise of German thought, philosophy and academics the Greeks were called the birthplace of civilization. Many scholars even theorized that the Greeks were descended from the North (the Germanic slave peoples who the Greeks called uncivilized and stupid). While many of these scholars’ theories have been debunked, the impact of this theorizing remains with us today. This is the theory that we can disprove but we still believe and enshrine in museums, textbooks and most importantly, fictional and nonfictional cinema. In this process, the Greeks ceased to be part of Christian heritage and became the birth of secular society, philosophy and science. They became the origin of the modern European nation state as these states ceased to be officially part of Christian empires.
After WWII and the horrors of the Holocaust, the ‘European Race’ that was spoken of by scholars openly before became an eyesore. It was uncomfortable for Jewish and Christian professors and researchers to use the term after the oppression and massacre of Jews as an inferior race. In academic speak, ancient Greece, ancient Rome and modern Europe slowly ceased to be ‘the European Race’ and became increasingly ‘The West’. While the terms ‘West’ and ‘Western’ to identify European culture and ethnicity was not unheard of before, it only became common in recent decades. It is consistently used today across academic disciplines, including philosophy and the sciences.
There is still the understanding of a European race underneath the new vocabulary, but it is ‘Western Culture’ and also ‘the Western Mind’, associated with greater reason and freedom than other cultures and ethnic groups. These terms hide all of the differences between cultures and ethnicities among Europeans. I myself am half Germanic (my father’s side) and half Celtic British Isles mix (my mother’s side). ‘White’ people, like myself, are the ancestors of the Celts and Germanic tribes, but this has been almost entirely forgotten and these cultures are not celebrated as the origins of anything modern or European.
The Germanic people, like the Arabs, came to inherit civilization from more ancient peoples and then wrote up the history books as if they themselves were civilization’s origins. If we do use the term ‘West’ to include both America and ancient Athens, we are talking about a multi-cultural transmission and tradition that includes many religions and philosophies. The inheritance of ancient Greek sources from medieval Muslims and ancient Romans is a cross-cultural tradition, not an inner-cultural tradition. It is one more example that cultures that trade and interact with other cultures flourish, not that cultures are successful, intelligent or individualistic in and of themselves.
As we will discuss when focusing on Islam, our civilization gets much from Muslims, arguably more than ancient Greece. We do not call this an Islamic culture, though we do not believe in the ancient Greek gods any more than we believe in Islam. It is clear, from the example of European modern day Greek mythology, the myth of ‘The West’, that power and position are not ultimately as satisfying as convincing others that the power and position are inherited, earned, justified and deserved.
Now that we have talked about race, identity and ‘Western’ history, it is time to turn to ancient Greek thought and the presocratics.
The Beginnings of Greek Philosophy: The Pre-Socratics
The beginnings of Greek thought started in what today is Turkey, the Eastern half of ancient Greece, the half that is not known as Greece today. Like Italy during the Renaissance, Greece was a set of city-states that often did not identify with each other and viewed themselves as separate peoples of territories circling the Aegean sea in what is today Greece and Turkey. While they shared a common culture and mythology which included gods like Zeus and Apollo, as well as the origin legend of a common ancestor King Hellen, each of whose children founding a city state, Greece was united for the first time by Alexander, a Macedonian. Macedonia is not part of Greece today, and Macedonians are often viewed as unwanted immigrants while the Greeks celebrate Alexander as their great ancestor. Alexander conquered Athens and the other Greek city states and proclaimed that all these peoples were in fact descended from his own lineage, which was of course that of King Hellen, and thus the Greeks and Macedonians were all ‘Hellenes’. Athens, the birthplace of Socrates and home to Plato and Aristotle was one of these city-states, and Ephesus, the birthplace of Heraclitus and other thinkers active before Socrates, was another.
We only have fragments of the pre-Socratic (before Socrates) thinkers’ thought and writings. These thinkers were believed to have been active between 600 and 400 BCE. We have no writings of Socrates and only some of the writings of Plato. As best as we know, Greek thought began with Thales, the first thinker/philosopher/scientist of whom we have fragments from other ancient authors who write about him and his theories. Thales and several other early Greek thinkers lived in the ancient city-state of Miletus, like Ephesus in what is today Turkey. Thales believed that the cosmos and all things are made of water. Miletus is quite close to Ephesus, where Heraclitus, who was born just before 500 BCE and shortly after Thales, believed that all things are made of fire. Both cities had been provinces of the Persian empire, and Zoroastrianism, possibly the world’s first solar monotheism, worshiped fire and considered it to be the highest element, identifying it with reason, truth and purity.
The Skepticism of Heraclitus
According to one source, Heraclitus was a king who abandoned the title to become a philosopher. This has been identified as a close resemblance to the story of the Buddha in India, and some scholars have argued that Heraclitus was in fact the Buddha from India while others have argued that the Buddha was in fact Heraclitus from Greece. Both thinkers were mythologized as a king who left powerful king position and became a sage, putting the mental and spiritual above the corporeal and material. Both believe in the enlightening sun rising above the watery chaos of human perception and desire, but it is far more likely that the two were not the same individual and simply share the cosmology common to the cultures of the ancient world. Plato, who we will study next, shares this as well.
We do not know much at all about Heraclitus’ life, but he likely lived about 540 BCE. It is said in some sources that he was a king who gave up his throne to his brother to be a sage, but this is impossible to confirm and as mentioned quite allegorical which is always suspicious. He is said by other sources to have been a doctor, and many of his fragments do speak about the workings of physiology within the larger frame of physics as a thinker who is immersed in ancient cosmology would. A fragment reads:
Moisture makes the soul succumb to joy. Dry, the soul grows wise and good.
Heraclitus believed that the soul, mind and self becomes soggy and intoxicated when one indulges in desire and pleasure (drinking and sex are moist by nature), and likewise when one studies with the fire of the mind and abstains from pleasure the soul dries out. While this could come from a physician, some fragments seem critical of physicians and the practice of medicine just as others are critical of philosophers, spiritual groups and politics. A fragment reads:
The
cosmos works by harmony of tensions, like the lyre and bow. Therefore,
good and ill are one. Good and ill to the physician must be one, since
he derives his fee from torturing the sick.
Heraclitus did write a book which he entrusted to the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, though we only have the very beginning today. There was a popular book of Heraclitus’ philosophy in ancient Greece, but this may or may not have been the original text. While we do not have any of his writings today, he is mentioned often by other writers, philosophers and historians who quote him and his work, and these pieces are put together as the fragments of Heraclitus which we read as a single text.
The ‘word’ Heraclitus mentions is ‘logos’ in the ancient Greek. Plato, other philosophers and Christian thought adopted Heraclitus’ use of ‘logos’, the speech or breath of the cosmos as a formative force. This may come from Zoroastrianism, which saw the orders of things spoken downward by the fires above, fire and air being identified with the eternal and the order of the cosmos just as speech or orders is how discipline and direction is maintained in a social group. In class, the lecturer is the authority and author of the class, and has the ability to speak and select who else speaks, and the words structure the concepts and ideas of the class. Just as our minds are constructed and reconstructed by words, Zoroastrians, Heraclitus, Plato and later Christians influenced by all of these believed that the world is formed by thought and language.
That
which always was, and is, and will be ever-living fire, the same for
all, the cosmos, made neither by god nor man, replenishes in measure as
it burns away…As all things change to fire, and fire exhausted falls
back into things, the crops are sold for money spent on food…How, from a
fire that never sinks or sets, would you escape? One thunderbolt
strikes root through everything.
Heraclitus is a very skeptical thinker. He is sometimes portrayed as sad or depressed, called the ‘weeping philosopher’ by some and looking very down in Raphael’s painting, The School of Athens. He may, however, have been quite happy and misconstrued as sad by others, particularly Platonists who are opposed to his idea of formless fire and were supported in the Christian tradition. Raphael, who painted in the period of the Neoplatonic Renaissance, would have seen Heraclitus in this light. Heraclitus is angry at the politics of his city state Miletus. Like the Athenians killed Socrates for questioning too much and so “inciting the youth to riot”, Miletus exiled Hermadoros (whose name means ‘lover of Hermes’, Hermes being a god of wisdom and knowledge who was identified with Thoth, the Egyptian god of knowledge) because was ‘worthier than average’, presumably doing philosophy and cosmology. Heraclitus responded:
As
for the Ephesians, I would have them, youths, elders, and all those
between, go hang themselves, leaving the city in the abler hands of
children.
Just like the ancient Sumerian lamenter, Confucius, and many other great thinkers, Heraclitus did not like the politics of his day and was critical of traditions of thought in general. Heraclitus was not, however, sad or angry as much as he was a skeptic. Many of his fragments appear playful jokes. Despising the beliefs, traditions and politics of the day does not make one a sad or angry person relative to others. Rather, it turns criticism of the other into criticism of the self and one’s own civilization. Heraclitus was convinced that wisdom and inquiring within show us that all is one big cosmic fire, and things that unify the community and the individual bring wholeness and true happiness. However, he believed that humans are often foolish and let their minds divide themselves from the whole and from each other such that their understandings are disjointed and ignorant.
This is very typical thinking of skeptics the world over. A dogmatist would say that there are specific truths that are certain and must be separated from the uncertain, specific goods that must be separated from the evil. A skeptic would say, like Heraclitus and the Daoists from China, that the truth and the good is the whole and the great One, and the tendency of the mind to divide the good and the true from the rest is the opposite of true understanding and wisdom.
Heraclitus was not a fan of experts and specialists, and he ridiculed the cultural leaders of his time. He says that the common people are completely asleep, but far more dangerous are the experts who have a small piece of the puzzle and say that they know the entire truth. He calls the poets (Hesiod and Homer) and the Pythagoreans frauds, and says that there are no permanent truths or laws other than the constant formation of watery chaos by the sun and cosmic fire. Notice that this does not question the set up of the cosmos as we have studied it everywhere (and what the Persians gave to the Eastern Greek city states). Many often ask, “Why, then, should I listen to Heraclitus, since he is simply an expert?”. Heraclitus replies as most skeptics do: don’t take my word for it, but look into the world and within yourself and you will find that it is true. The beginning of his book, which we still have, reads:
The
word proves those first hearing it as numb to understanding as the ones
who have not heard, yet all things follow from the word. Some,
blundering with what I set before you, try in vain with empty talk to
separate the essences of things and say how each thing truly is, and all
the rest make no attempt. They no more see how they behave broad
waking than remember clearly what they did asleep.
For
wisdom, listen not to me but to the word and know that all is one.
Those unmindful when they hear, for all they make of their
intelligence, may be regarded as the walking dead. People dull their
wits with gibberish, and cannot use their ears and eyes. Many fail to
grasp what they have seen, and cannot judge what they have learned,
although they tell themselves they know. Yet they lack the skill to
listen or to speak. Whoever cannot seek the unforeseen sees nothing,
for the known way is an impasse. Things keep their secrets.
Now
that we can travel anywhere, we need no longer take the poets and
myth-makers for sure witnesses over disputed facts…If learning were a
path of wisdom, those most learned about myth would not believe, with
Hesiod, that Pallas in her wisdom gloats over the noise of battle.
Pythagoras may well have been the deepest in his learning of all men,
and still he claimed to recollect details of former lives, being in one a
cucumber and one time a sardine.
Of
all the words yet spoken, none comes quite as far as wisdom, which is
the action of the mind beyond all things that may be said. Wisdom is
the oneness of mind that guides and permeates all things.
Many who have learned from Hesiod the countless names of gods and monsters never understand that night and day are one.
Time is a game played beautifully by children. Applicants for wisdom do what I have done: inquire within.
Since
mindfulness, of all things, is the ground of being, to speak one’s true
mind and to keep things known in common, serves all being, just as laws
made clear uphold the city, yet with greater strength. Of all
pronouncements of the law the one source is the word whereby we choose
what helps true mindfulness prevail. Although we need the word to keep
things known in common, people still treat specialists as if their
nonsense were a form of wisdom. Fools seek counsel from the ones they
doubt. People need not act and speak as if they were asleep. The
waking have one world in common. Sleepers meanwhile turn aside, each
into a darkness of his own.
Homer
I deem worthy, in a trial by combat, of a good cudgeling…They raise
their voices at stone idols as a man might argue with his doorpost.
They have understood so little of the gods.
This goes also for laws, which Heraclitus says have to be defended as if they were city walls. This is sometimes read that Heraclitus thought human law was important and had to be defended, which he did, but in fact he is also telling us that human laws are impermanent like walls made out of earth. They may seem eternal and permanent, but as any former citizen or city of the Persian empire knows, empires fall and impressive city states are overthrown and change hands. The eternal word of the fire forever forms the cosmos, but human speech and walls are temporary, and therefore take force and effort to maintain. As a skeptic, Heraclitus believes that the divisions made by the mind are mortal, not eternal, like the human body. Our knowledge and laws are impermanent like mounds of dirt. Heraclitus says many things to humble us, including pointing out our similarity to apes to put our achievements in perspective:
The
language of a grown man, to the cosmic powers, sounds like baby-talk to
men. To a god the wisdom of the wisest man sounds apish. Beauty in a
human face looks apish too. In everything we have attained the
excellence of apes. The ape apes find most beautiful looks apish to
non-apes.
Heraclitus’ most famous idea is a memorable image: you can never step in the same river twice. Just as a river is always flowing and changing, so is reality always flowing and changing, such that nothing stays exactly the same for any two moments. You step in a river, then step out, then step back in the same river, but it is no longer ‘the same river’. Heraclitus says this is also true of the cosmos and the human individual. Fire also flows, and individual tongues of flame rise out of the fire and then return and integrate with the whole. Fire, like water, flows in a consistent manner that is always self-similar but never exactly the same twice. Heraclitus argued that the world is always in flux, as a single thing stable and eternal but as many things in constant change and tension. Paradoxically, changing constantly in the way that things do is the stability and being of things. Rivers flow, fire burns, life thrives, always in motion to be stable in what it is. He says, “Goat cheese congeals in wine if not well stirred”. It is an example of a motion keeping a mixture what it is. When the motion stops, the elements disintegrate. In the same way that stability is motion, opposites work together:
From
the strain of binding opposites comes harmony. The harmony past
knowing sounds more deeply than the known…The sea is both pure and
tainted, healthy and good haven to the fish, to humans undrinkable and
deadly. Poultry bathe in dust and ashes, swine in filth…Two made one
are never one. Arguing the same we disagree. Singing together we
compete…Without injustices, the name of justice would mean what?..The
way up is the way back. The beginning is the end.
Heraclitus was one of the most famous thinkers of the Greek and Roman world. He was a big influence on Plato, though Plato is very much opposed to his thinking as we will see next week. Both Heraclitus and Plato were big influences on Christianity which initially flourished not in Israel but in Greece and Syria. If a primal speaking of the Word or Logos sounds familiar, Heraclitus was a central influence on the Greek and Roman stoics, and the author of the Gospel of John was almost certainly a Greek stoic writing in Roman times. The opening of the Gospel of John famously reads: the Logos/Word/Order was with God (Fire/Cosmos), and God spoke (“let there be light”) and light was separated from darkness. Schleiermacher, one of the most famous and central protestant theologians and an opponent of Hegel, was a major force in bringing popularity to Heraclitus and a major translator of Plato. The philosopher Hegel, who we will study later, saw Heraclitus as a skeptic who is put in balance with Plato and other positivists by the course of history itself. Nietzsche, the great skeptical philosopher who we will also study, wrote that he felt closer to Heraclitus than any other thinker. Nietzsche believed, like Heraclitus, that we are proud of our learning and achievement but we are in fact little better than apes.
