Intro Philosophy: Socrates & Plato

Socrates (470-400 BCE) is a very famous yet controversial and obscure figure.  Like many great thinkers of the ancient world, he did not write his own thoughts down but taught others and it was Plato (430-350 BCE) and another philosopher and historian named Xenophon who wrote about Socrates and his teachings after his death.  The third source of ancient Athenian literature that speaks about Socrates is Aristophanes who wrote plays mocking Socrates and portraying him as an idealistic fool.  It was believed and still is by many that Plato and Xenophon were Socrates’ students, but new scholarship has shown that this may well not have been the case.  Plato was a playwright who wrote several unpopular plays before writing the dialogues between Socrates and his students that became celebrated as some of the first and central works of ancient Greek philosophy.  While Plato never appears in his plays himself, he does put his own family members in roles.  He has characters mention him as a young devoted follower of Socrates, but in one place it is said that Plato was sick which explains why he could not be with Socrates before his court ordered death by drinking hemlock.

As already mentioned last week before covering Heraclitus, it is often said that Plato’s dialogues such as the Republic are some of the first works of philosophy and ‘Western’ European thought, but really Plato and his student Aristotle were revered by Muslims and Christians alike and their texts survive because they were important to the Abrahamic religions, not because they started a new way of European thinking.  Modern European philosophy is quite diverse in its opinions, and Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the three celebrated Athenian thinkers, did not identify with Northern Europeans and did not believe that they were the first to be concerned with wisdom and the world.  Before the rediscovery of the “presocratics” (like Thales and Heraclitus) they were even considered to be the birth of philosophy in ancient Greece by many, even though this proved also to be untrue.

It is generally accepted by scholars today that Plato’s early dialogues are one of the best sources for understanding Socrates and his ideas, but in Plato’s later dialogues Socrates is a mouthpiece for Plato’s own ideas.  We will consider Socrates and his thought first, then turn to two of Plato’s most important later dialogues, the Republic and the Timaeus, to study Plato’s thought.  Socrates and Plato were both influenced by Heraclitus (our subject last week), and while Socrates seemed to have been quite similar to Heraclitus, Plato’s thought changed and he began putting quite different views into Socrates’ mouth.

Consider two polar opposite views one can have of reality and the world.  In the first view, everything changes constantly and all permanence is an illusion.  In the second opposite view, everything remains the same and change is the illusion.  Both of these views, in fact, can be found in Indian thought, particularly in Buddhism.  As we saw last week, Heraclitus was a famous champion of the first view.  He argued that only Being, the One and All, the cosmic fire or energy, is eternal and all other beings are temporary in spite of what our judgments tell us.  Another presocratic thinker named Parmenides (who lived sometime before 500 BCE) argued for the second and opposite view.  He argued that there is one unchanging reality that is eternal and all change and temporary beings are the illusion in spite of what our judgments tell us.  This would mean, similar to some scientific theories today, that there is only one moment of time and it is our position and perspective within that moment that changes.

Socrates and Plato were both influenced by Heraclitus, but in his later dialogues Plato has Socrates argue for views that sound much more like Parmenides.  Originally, Socrates questioned everyone to show that we know very little and it is the job of the philosopher to show this to people.  He would argue with others, including famous thinkers and sages, who believed that they possessed certain truth and point out the contradictions in their reasoning.  This is much like Heraclitus telling us to beware of experts and being seduced into thinking that one school of thought or perspective is simply correct but instead continue to investigate the self and world as both have no limit to their depth or the things we can learn.  It is also very similar to Pyrrho and his skeptical school of thought, as well as Buddhist logic and debate, particularly Nagarjuna, one of the most famous Buddhist teachers and the central Buddhist logician.

While according to Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes Socrates did not put forward views of his own but rather attacked others to show that human beliefs are imperfect and incomplete, in Plato’s later dialogues Socrates argues that there is one unchanging reality above the temporary perceivable world and it is the job of the philosopher to seek and understand this eternal reality.  Plato uses Socrates to teach his own increasingly Parmenidean view that there are unchanging and eternal forms of things in the heavens and only the educated and the persistent come to see and understand these forms.


Socrates and his Method of Questioning

We know very little about Socrates’ early life other than the details supplied in Plato’s works.  He mentions several influences, including two women.  He says that the witch/shaman Diotima taught him about love and how it is central to life and the cosmos.  Like Buddha we studied last week and Confucius we will study next week, Socrates identified love with wisdom and objectivity.  There is an interesting dynamic in human thought about whether learning and acquiring knowledge make one passionate or dispassionate, whether science for example fills our hearts with awe or stills them.  The word ‘philosophy’ is often translated ‘love of wisdom’, but in fact ‘wisdom love’ could refer either to the loving of wisdom or wisdom that is also love.

Socrates also gives credit to Aspasia, the mistress of the general Pericles, who he says taught him rhetoric.  If true, this shows that Socrates was not a common person but just like almost everyone in Plato’s dialogues an aristocrat who knew politicians and the wealthy.  Socrates, Plato and Aristotle lived at a time when the glory days of Athens were in decline.  Eventually, Alexander (Aristotle’s student) would conquer the city and the surrounding city-states.  Socrates was a critic of Athenian society, called “the horsefly” because he believed in stinging Athens into action, and he was eventually condemned to commit suicide for corrupting the youth of the city after there was a riot.

Socrates’ career as a philosopher began when his friend Chaerephon went to the oracle of Delphi to ask if anyone was wiser than his friend Socrates.  Socrates, with characteristic modesty, protests that this was a very crass question to ask of the great oracle.  Notice that Socrates does believe in the oracle and in the gods.  His last wish, the last thing he said before he died, was that a rooster should be sacrificed to Asclepius, the ancient Greek god of healing and mystical insight who is associated with Thoth the Egyptian god of knowledge and insight.  Socrates loved irony, and it seems that he viewed his death as being cured of life and its limitations.

Religious people, including Christians and Muslims for centuries, often view Socrates, Plato and Aristotle as making way for solar monotheism already popular in Egypt and Persia in their time and seeing the gods as many human shaped anthropomorphisms of what is rather one and without and above human form.  Non-religious people often view the three Athenians as moving away from religion and toward atheism and questioning traditional understandings.  Interestingly, traditional polytheists in Athens in their time said the same thing and called them atheists as well, along with other increasingly monotheistic thinkers such as Heraclitus who are likely being influenced by the latest developments of Egyptian and Persian thought.  It seems that if you want thinking to evolve towards your own thought, you could view it either way.

The oracle replied to Chaerephon that no one was wiser than Socrates.  Upon hearing this, Socrates says, with either genuine or false modesty, he was very troubled by this because he did not believe that he was very wise at all and this would mean that humanity is quite ignorant overall.  He decided that he needed to determine if what the oracle said was in fact true, and so he began to wander and debate others, seeking someone wiser than himself.

Socrates felt that he knew nothing, but as he questioned the experts of Athens he came upon a horrible discovery and paradox.  The experts believed themselves to be wise and possess great knowledge, but when questioned it turned out they knew very little.  Socrates knew that he himself knew nothing.  Therefore, Socrates says he discovered that he was wiser than the experts because he knew that he knew nothing, while the experts knew nothing but thought that they knew a great deal.  Humble and modest Socrates was aware that mortal humans know nothing, but the politicians, artists and warriors were unaware of this great equality they shared with Socrates.  The ignorance of Socrates was thus the greatest wisdom in all of Athens.  It is certainly true that the more one knows, the more one knows there is an endless amount to know and that we are all quite equal in knowing very little even when we know a great deal.  There is another paradox here: the more one surpasses others in wisdom, becoming different, one identifies with them more, seeing the similarity.

Notice the similarity between Socrates and Heraclitus, who argued that the experts believe themselves to know a great deal but do not understand that their knowledge and perspectives are mortal and we are all mere apes to the gods.  Socrates argued, like Heraclitus, that the greatest wisdom is found in questioning oneself and others.  Remember that great city-states and empires had risen and fallen along with increasingly specialized experts.  Philosophy questions experts and the basis of our knowledge, which humans find useful particularly in times of crisis when hard questions must be asked.

Socrates argued that one should accept one’s own ignorance and the guidance of the world through intuition.  He believed that he had a spirit, a ‘daemon’ in the Greek, a word which became “demon” as Christianity replaced the polytheism and spirits with monotheism and angels.  This spirit was much like what we would call a conscience, a word which means “co-seeing” or seeing along with, an intuition that one should or should not do a particular thing, something Christians identified with angels sitting on shoulders just as ancient Greeks did with spirits.

Socrates says that his daemon told him to stay out of politics.  Good advice, seeing as how his death was quite political.  Not only did politics get Socrates killed in spite of this, but Plato has Socrates get increasingly political in his later dialogues, particularly in the Republic where Socrates debates the best form of the city.  This is another piece of evidence that Plato may not have known Socrates and is using him as a mouthpiece for his own ideas.  Socrates also praised the divinity of poetry, mysticism, love and getting drunk with friends as he does at the Symposium, a dialogue about a drinking party that turns into a philosophical discussion about the nature of love.


Plato & his Dialogues

Plato was long assumed to be a student of Socrates simply because Plato writes as much in many of his dialogues and he is the best source on him, though if he turns him into a mere mouthpiece for very different ideas in the later dialogues he may also be the worst.  As Socrates is about to die, Plato has Socrates ask where the young Plato is, to which another student replies that Plato was sick and thus could not be there at the time.  Scholars now are critical of this, and think that Plato had a habit of writing himself and his family into Socrates’ circle in his dialogues.  Because they are our best sources on Socrates, it is difficult to tell whether or not Plato’s older cousin Critias or Plato himself were actual students of Socrates or whether they were simply influenced by this figure who became quite famous following his trial and death.

Plato’s actual name was Aristocles, but according to the story his wrestling instructor named him Platon or ‘Broad’ because he had a wide figure and wrestling stance.  This may be merely a story, because Plato was known to have a wide and thus ‘broad’ breadth of knowledge covering all subjects of ancient thought and might have acquired the nickname in this way.  Plato’s father died when he was young, and his stepfather became the Athenian ambassador to the Persian royal court.  Remember that Persia was a great source of ancient world cosmology at the time, and Zoroastrianism, Persia’s solar monotheism, would be a major influence on the Abrahamic religions just as Plato himself would.

Long after his attempts to become an established playwright, after his dialogues about Socrates had gathered some fame, Plato founded his Academy in 385 BCE, an open area near a sacred tree grove where he, his students and other lecturers would teach and debate matters of philosophy and cosmology.  Academy in fact means ‘porch’ or ‘step’, an open area in front of a building, a fact it took scholars long to understand for they believed that the Academy must have been a building itself.  Scholars made a similar error looking for the famed Library of Alexandria (an Egyptian center of ancient world cosmology, Platonism and Christianity), when in fact the library was a shelf that ran along a hall that connected two buildings, just as one would say a collection of books is a personal library.  Plato writes in the Timaeus, his book on the cosmology of the world, that ancient Egypt was the birthplace of philosophy and science, which again he would have understood to be the same thing acquired through knowledge of the self and the cosmos.

To examine Plato’s thought in its later and mature form we will look at his two most influential dialogues which both come from his later period and are certainly to be read together.  It is sad that the dialogue of the Timaeus is supposed to happen on the day after the dialogue of the Republic, and the Republic covers the proper order of the self and city while the Timaeus covers the cosmos and how it also works in the same way that the self and city should if ordered properly and justly, but it is difficult to find the Timaeus in print while every Intro Philosophy course covers the Republic.  I made sure to give you both texts in your reader.  It is much easier to believe that Plato and Aristotle invented secular scientific reasoning when you do not read the cosmology of the Timaeus.  For Muslims and Christians, the Timaeus was understandably Plato’s most important work and Aristotle would be making modifications to this picture, that the world is a living being and vegetation is the body hair of the world.  On campuses today, however, students read sections of the Republic that speak of the self and city and are often told that this is the birth of speaking abstractly about subject matters this way.  Plato and Aristotle had much greater reverence for Egypt and Persia to believe such a thing.

In these two late dialogues, believed to have been written about 360 BCE, Socrates was no longer sharing much of the conversation with other debaters, but dominates the texts with monologues that are now Plato’s own Parmenides-like views of the unchanging form that is the hidden source of the temporary.  Plato believed that Heraclitus was right about the world below, but Parmenides was right about the eternal world above, the unchanging model, form, order and cause of the ever-changing world below.  Plato has Socrates argue that those who think they know the world below have mere opinions, but the one who knows the world above, the true eternal pattern of reality, has true knowledge.  In this way, wisdom for Plato was not simply knowing that one knows little to nothing, but rather is acquired through the gathering of knowledge of the world and its patterns.  


The Republic

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates debates with others on justice and the Good.  Socrates debunks several common views, then constructs an ideal model of the city.  The well ordered city is compared to the well ordered soul, three faculties that must be kept in their places.  Thus, the Good is the proper order of the elements perfectly in accord with ancient cosmology.  Just as the individual is a microcosm to the city, the city is a microcosm to the cosmos, and again the elements must be separated and put in their places with the highest element on top and the lowest beneath.  The cosmos is ordered in its unfolding, producing the ideal order of the soul and the city.

Socrates talks to several “interlocutors” and argues against their concepts of justice.
This is Socrates acting like the original Socrates.  Polemarchus argues that justice is paying debts, helping friends and harming enemies.  Socrates argues that in some situations, helping friends and harming enemies are wrong.  Thrasymachus argues that justice is ‘the good of the stronger’.  Glaucon similarly argues that without threat of punishment, no one would do good.  Socrates argues that the strong will corrupt themselves if they only act for their own interests and not for the good of the whole.  Remember the politics of the time, and that many tyrants and forms of rule came and fell, had some success but also great failure.  This is the substance of Book 1.

Starting with Book 2, Socrates now turns into Plato.  He says to those who remain and do not leave upset that he did not feel he had convincingly refuted these other views, and that perhaps they should continue to debate to figure out what justice actually is.  This is the turn from Socratic questioning to Platonic forms and separate structures that should have ideal forms.  Unfortunately, everyone who is critical of Socrates has left the party, and the two who stay are mindless yes men who agree enthusiastically to everything Socrates says and praises it as the most certain and good wisdom they have ever heard.

Plato, as Socrates, argues for an eternal form of the Good over the world of many temporary beings and desires.  Socrates is challenged to give a positive account of justice, not just defeat opponents as Thrasymachus accuses him of doing before leaving similar to Hindu debaters accusing Jains and Buddhists of tearing down other positions rather than arguing for a consistent truth.  Socrates argues that first they must construct the ideal or just city, and this will show how the ideal or just individual should be.  Essentially, the just city is a threefold caste system, identical in many ways to the Hindu caste system of India.  There are many similarities between metaphors and teachings of the Republic and Indian thought.  While originally I believed that this was due to an Indian influence on ancient Greece, it is likelier that the cosmology and thought of Egypt and Persia, the interconnectedness of ancient cultures and the similarity of ancient cosmology are responsible.

This threefold division corresponds to the physical human being and the cosmic being.  The head is fire as an element, reason, thought and consciousness in the individual, and the ruling philosopher kings in the city.  The heart or chest is air as an element, spirit, breath and courage in the individual, and the police or guardians in the city.  The hands and stomach is earth as an element, desire, craving and thirst in the individual, and workers, farmers and craftspeople in the city.  The individual, city and cosmos form a continuum, a set of Russian dolls.  Notice that authority and the good come from above, evil and chaos to be ordered from below.

Plato and Aristotle were not fans of democracy.  Not only were they aristocrats and connected to royal courts like the educated often were in ancient Athens, Socrates was condemned to death by the Athenian assembly thinking and questioning too much.  Unlike how it is often taught today with sections of the Republic, Plato and Aristotle thought much higher of the royal dynasties of Egypt and Persia than they did of the brief period of Athenian democracy.  Like other educated Athenians, they revered King Darius of Persia, particularly because he gave Athenian nobles much freedom and rights.

All is sacrificed for the common good.  There is to be no private property or partners or children, for any of the three classes.  Socrates argues that the ruler who grabs for themselves will not be happy, filled with “horrid pains and pangs”, and will physically and mentally fall apart.  This tyrant will never “taste true freedom or friendship”.  Because this is not the order of the cosmos, it will not stick and will fall apart just like many tyrants have recently in ancient Athens.  Similarly, if everyone shares everything in common, there will be greater justice and less selfishness.

The Soviet Union and America funded scholarship during the cold war that argued each was more like Athens than the other.  The Soviet Union pointed out that they were much more like the Republic than America, a democracy fueled by individual consumption and private property.  America pointed out that Aristotle was critical of Plato and argued there should be a balance of public and private property and Plato’s ideal city was impossible in the real world, while using the language of ‘West’ and ‘East’ to separate Russia from the ‘true’ Western tradition.  I myself would like more of a balance today between the public and private, but to many this is very socialist and thus un-Western, like Soviet Russia.

Socrates argues that each person is best suited to one thing, and should be assigned this one job.  If people do more than one job, they will not be able to do this one job as best as they can.  He argues that we will lie to the people, tell them the ‘noble lie’ of a Phoenician story, that people were born from the earth and there are three races of people because the metals of gold, silver and bronze flow in their veins.  While people will raise all children in common, they will be tested from early ages to see whether they can be athletic and educated.  Those who cannot be athletic will be workers.  Those who can be athletic but can’t study will be police.  Those who are both athletic and educated are the philosophers, educators and rulers.

Why tell the lie, if we are striving for ideal good and justice?  Because the common will not understand and grab for themselves, very much Plato’s opinion of the brief period of Athenian democracy when the rich each grabbed for themselves in the absence of a powerful and just king.  Plato’s cave, which we will discuss, reinforces this point.  If you tell the truth to everyone, they will not believe you and try to destroy you as they did Socrates.

Socrates argues and the interlocutors naively agree without much of a fight that if they separate out the police and train them as best as can be, and then take the philosophers out of the police and educate them as best as can be, no injustice will be possible.  There is the simple belief that the order itself will generate justice throughout the whole.  The police and philosophers will thus never be greedy or unjust to the people below.  Plato elsewhere argues that this is how the Egyptians in Thebes did it, by elevating priests as a class.  He also says to imitate Sparta as well separating out the warriors.

In the same way, if you put your desires and appetites in check with your feelings, and your feelings in check with your reason, you will be a well ordered soul or individual.  The appetites crave, the spirit is passionate, and the mind is reasonable.  These are their jobs, the single thing they do the best, their purpose.  Socrates argues that sometimes we are very thirsty, but if we know the drink is poisoned our reason puts our desire in check.  Other times we may want honor but realize that it is not the smart thing to do, putting our spirit and emotions in check by our reason.  This is interesting, for in the Apology Socrates argues not only that he should not be condemned to death but given free food and drink for life because he is helping Athens out, but then when this angers the assembly (as one could have reasoned), Socrates argues with his students that he must drink the poison and not escape by bribing the guards because it is the right thing to follow the law even when the law is unjust.

Plato also suggests banning all art (music, poetry and theatre) that is counterproductive, which pretty much means everything that isn’t impressing the highest good and order.
The youth are to be taught that they must improve themselves for the good of the state, and that the gods never to injustice or desire.  Remember that Heraclitus also thought it foolish to believe that the gods had the same problems and flaws as humans.

The Allegory of the Cave

After being questioned about lying for the purpose of the good and justice, Socrates says that this is best explained with an analogy.  He describes the masses and the assent of the philosopher beyond opinion of the earthly realm to knowledge of the heavenly and eternal realm, showing why the philosopher alone should have authority.  It also illustrates Plato’s placing of Parmenides above Heraclitus, the eternal and heavenly above the mortal and earthly.

Imagine that everyone is chained in a dark cave, watching shadows of puppets carried before a fire at the mouth of the cave.  The people think that the shadows are reality, the real things.  The one who escapes, breaking the bondage of appetites and earthly things much like Jainism and Buddhism teach, first sees that the shadows are shadows of puppets, and sees the fire that casts the shadows.  This draws the seeker to the mouth of the cave.  Coming out of the cave and past the small fire, the seeker is at first blinded by the sunlight, but then sees real things outside of the cave and realizes that the puppets were just poor copies of the real things casting shadows that were shaped like real things.  The seeker now has knowledge and wisdom, not mere earthly opinion and belief.


The Timaeus

The Timaeus, the work of Plato which he as well as Christians and Muslims believed to the most important, is not in spell check when typed today.  Aristotle refers to it more than any other text of Plato’s, and it was the most important book for philosophers and scientists of the Italian Renaissance, one of the only works of Plato that Christian Europeans kept until they got other works of Plato and Aristotle from Muslims.  It is, again, sad that we have largely forgotten it while remembering to praise the ancient Greeks and Renaissance Italians for being the great sources of European culture and study.  It is very clear after reading the text why both religious and non-religious people ignore the text, because both have forgotten what used to be central religious and scientific beliefs in the European tradition.

Socrates the day after the party where the ideal Republic is discussed says that he would like to talk more about the ideal state and how it corresponds to the cosmos.  Then, Critas tells the story of Solon going to Egypt and that the Egyptians told him of the story of Atlantis.  This is, indeed, where the story of Atlantis comes from and it is not found earlier in Egypt as Critas says.  The Egyptian Priest tells Solon that the Athenians do not remember because they have just become educated and civilized, but the Egyptians know from their history records that thousands of years ago the Athenians stopped the people of Atlantis, who were threatening to take over the world.  We now know that Egypt was not as many thousands of years old as Plato believed, but this does show Plato believed that they were civilized long before Athens.  The story, which is now believed to have been an invention by Plato or a story told to him that he believed, is very similar to the Battle of Marathon, and the Athenians and Spartans repelling the Persians.

Timaeus now speaks of the creation of the cosmos out of the One, showing the order already described of the elements and how the individual human was created as a microcosm of the macrocosm.  This implies that you put your faculties of desire, spirit and reason in their proper order to be good and healthy, which is the order of the cosmos.  The One sprouts the eternal order or model of things, which includes all eternal models or archetypes of things, and the demiurge, the sky father being that is the small fire at the mouth of the cave, then produces copies of the models in the ever changing world of earth below.  The whole is a living creature, with the heavens as soul and the all as reason.  Timaeus, as Plato, says that human beings are a plant with their roots in the heavens.  The demiurge fashions reason in soul, and soul in body in individuals.  The demiurge then moves everything in a circle, bringing about the life and death in circles of earth beings from planetary orbits and starlight.

This is all done by sameness and difference.  Sameness has the higher and encompassing role, difference being proportional downward.  The four elements have certain shapes, which are then glued together by the fifth element, quintessence or ether.  This is the cosmology of Christianity and Europe well through the middle ages, up to Newton and Leibniz, who read Islamic scholar’s commentaries on the Timaeus.  The Medieval Christians had to retranslate Plato, with central interest in the cosmology of the Timaeus, from Arabic into Latin.

Social & Political Philosophy: First Paper Prompt & Topics

For each of the four response papers, you must write at least three typed and double spaced pages on a topic of your choice that concerns the material we have covered in the class so far.  Do not spend time summarizing the material, but rather focus on your own thoughts and questions.  You are welcome to use your own life experiences as well as fictional and nonfictional material from outside class.  While you are welcome to reflect on anything you have found interesting, the following are possible topics for your response.

1) The two major Confucians after Confucius, Mencius and Xunzi, agree that Confucius’ teachings are wise and that we should cultivate ourselves through education and participating in society.  However, they completely disagree on whether human nature is good or evil.  Mencius argues that human nature is good, and education expands what we originally are.  Xunzi argues that human nature is evil, and society is necessary to change us from what we originally are.  Who do you find yourself agreeing with more, and why?

2) Mozi argues for universal love versus the Confucians such as Mencius who argue that love is naturally varied depending on familiarity. Are the two positions compatible? Is one more favorable than the other?

3) Plato and Aristotle both argue that we should have a meritocracy and elevate those who are more intelligent into a ruling class.  Given that authority is impossible, and that we want expert opinion but also must avoid abuses of power, how should authority and expertise be utilized such that it does not become abusive?

Social & Political Philosophy: Machiavelli & Hobbes

Machiavelli (1469 – 1527 CE) & The Prince

Niccolo Machiavelli is possibly one of the most misunderstood political philosophers in history.  The word Machiavellian was an English word before there was an English translation of The Prince, his most famous work.  While he does advocate holding power by ruthless brutality and deception in The Prince, some scholars point out that his other works argue for the very opposite of ruthless dictatorship and Machiavelli held a position in a republic like those he prized.  It is still a debate as to whether Machiavelli meant The Prince to be taken as a joke and unmasking of the realities of power or whether he meant it as a work of political realism that is brutally honest about how power must be held.  Rousseau, who we will soon study, believed The Prince to be a satire of the powerful Medici family.  The Italian Communist Gramsci, who we will study in the second half of the class, believed that Machiavelli was serious but was explaining to the poor how politics work and not the rich who already understand how politics work.  Either way, joke or treatise, it is a classic read by many thinkers and leaders we will study in this class because of its insightful descriptions of the reality and brutality of politics.

Machiavelli was not known for his political writings during his lifetime, and The Prince was published years after his death.  He was a politician, and ambassador and a writer.  While he was alive he was famous for his comic plays (another piece of evidence that may indicate The Prince is a farce).  It was only after his death and the infamy of The Prince that he became primarily identified with this text and the word Machiavellian became a new word in several languages.

His political career flourished in the years of the republic that ruled the city of Florence between 1494 and 1512 when the Medici family was briefly out of power.  At the time, there was no unified Italy.  In fact, many living in Italy at the time would have no idea what Italy was.  In addition, none of the great Renaissance artists or thinkers would have heard of the Renaissance, as it is a French word applied by a French historian to the period two hundred years later.  Four city states, Florence, Venice, Milan and Naples, were warring powers and were involved against each other with the Catholic Church and the kings of France and Spain.  The Medici family were the great patrons of the painters, sculptors and philosophers of the Renaissance and ruled Florence before and after the brief republic.  The republic was ruled by nine citizens elected by drawing lots every two months.  Citizenship was not common, however, as Machiavelli himself was well off but not high enough in the ranks to have citizenship himself.  Nonetheless, he held powerful positions in the republic as chancellor, ambassador to France and Spain, and head of the military.  This, and the time of warring states (like China) set the backdrop for The Prince.  

After the Medici family regained control of Florence and abolished the republic, Machiavelli was accused of conspiracy and tortured.  After he was found innocent and released, he withdrew into his estate and spent his time writing the comedies and political works that made him famous in his life and infamous after his death.

Speaking of comedy, here is a wonderfully Machiavellian joke before diving into The Prince.
Two young kids are talking about their families.
“My father is a politician”, says one.
“Really?  Honest?”, asks the other.
“No, the regular kind”, replies the first.


The Prince

Machiavelli dedicated his most famous work to Lorenzo de Medici, the great patron of Renaissance art and Neo-Platonism.  Was this book making fun of the terrible power of the Medici, or was it a practical guide for maintaining public good in times of great war and terror?  Scholars still debate.  Either way, the work was privately circulated by Machiavelli amongst his friends and was only published years after his death.

The Prince focuses on “new princes”, leaders who come to power by rising up through the ranks and who do not receive power from a noble lineage.  Machiavelli provides several examples from ancient times and his own time of such rulers.  When a new ruler comes into power they must stabilize and consolidate their power to maintain it and the security of the public they rule.  The main argument of the work is that one should cultivate both love and fear as a ruler, and one must be prepared to act with complete brutality and hypocritical deception.  This is done out of necessity at inevitable times when the ruler and ruled are threatened.  Like Hobbes, who was influenced by Machiavelli and we will study next time, he argues that a strong king is necessary in the brutal world and so evil is sometimes justified.

Unlike Plato & Aristotle, who were a great influence on Machiavelli as well as most Renaissance thinkers, Machiavelli does not believe in constructing an ideal city as a model and does not believe it to be good to rule people in terms of an ideal.  Like Nietzsche, who we will study later and who was influenced by Machiavelli, he was a brute realist who believed in theorizing about how people and power is and not how things ought to be.  He believed that people are naturally ambitious and warlike, so we must prepare for this and balance the bad in human nature with the good.  Also like Nietzsche, Machiavelli considered religion to be a means of control and that a ruler should not be overly religious or pious because it will make them unable to be brutal when they must be.  He does suggest, however, that it is in the ruler’s interests to make the ruled people as religious as possible, and I suggest that this equally applies to idealizing the objectivity of the sciences and the freedom and good will of democracies.

Like John Stuart Mill, who we will study soon, Machiavelli can be called a pragmatist who considers the true to be the useful and practical, not the perfect or immutable.  Machiavelli, like Mill, is associated with the principle “the ends justify the means”.  Like Mill, Machiavelli argues that sometimes this can result in harm, but if we consider the long view and the social view it is in the interest of everyone overall.  Machiavelli argues that if a state is too nice, it will be overrun by conquerors and there will be terrible times for everyone.  It is bad to routinely abuse people as this will lead to ruin, but brutality must be used occasionally or the state will be equally ruined.  A good ruler must know how and when to be brutal as life is tough and some situations require violence or deception (like Plato suggested last week in the noble lie of The Republic).

Machiavelli argues that one should befriend weak rivals but crush strong ones.  He writes that one should wipe out the entire family of those one crushes and completely destroy the lands of those one conquers such that one does not have to fear revenge or counter-attack.  Consider the warring families of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as well as modern gang warfare (such as the Black Widow, Griselda Blanca, who murdered entire families along with the children as one of the early cocaine kingpins of Miami in the early 80s).

One should not be brutal casually or needlessly, but if you have to be brutal then you have to go whole hog and ensure that your enemy will not be able to retaliate.  When one has to be brutal, one should be brutal all at once such that it does not have to be a daily routine for maintaining authority.  Otherwise, he writes, one must “always keep a knife in hand”.  In other words, treat people the way you want to be treated unless you absolutely have to kill them and their entire family.  He writes that it is best to delegate this task to someone else in the administration such that the ruler can be feared but also appear benevolent and blameless to the greatest extent possible.  This was classic politics of middle age Europe, where kings would rely on particular noble houses to commit great atrocities and then condemn them publicly long after agreeing on exchange of favors in private.

Machiavelli famously writes that it is best to be both loved and feared, but if one has to choose between the two one should be feared.  It is best to appear liberal to most of the people most of the time but be ruthlessly authoritarian to the individual who steps out of line.  One should seek the safety of being feared, but avoid being despised and hated.  One should be a patron of the arts, of festivals and spectacles, but prepare for trouble.  One should try to keep one’s hands off the property and women of others, but be ready for total war.  He refers to the myth of Achilles being nursed by the centaur Chiron of Greek mythology to illustrate how one must learn to be both human and animal to be, like Achilles, a great leader.


Influence and Legacy of The Prince and Machiavelli

The Pope put The Prince on the banned index in 1559, but it spread aided by the new development of the printing press.  Block printing had arrived in Europe from China, where it was first used to print Buddhist texts.  Interestingly, “humanist” thinkers like Erasmus who resisted Catholic authority equally despised the book.  Catholics and Protestant kings read The Prince, while the Catholic kings condemned the work as Protestant rebellion and the Protestant kings condemned them as Catholic authoritarianism.  One critic accused Machiavelli of being an atheist while simultaneously calling The Prince “the Koran of the courtiers”.
Hobbes, who we will study next time, was influenced by The Prince and came to similar conclusions about the power of the sovereign.  Locke, who we will cover soon and who influenced the American founding fathers on the issue of rights, was influenced by the political writings of Machiavelli.

Hitler claimed he read Machiavelli’s Prince frequently in bed before falling asleep.  Mussolini was fond of quoting the book, as is the Italian mafia don John Gotti.  Gramsci, the communist opponent to the fascist Mussolini and jailed when Mussolini rose to power, considered The Prince to be a brilliant book that teaches everyone how power operates.

The founders of the American Republic and authors of the Constitution such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and James Madison all made use of Machiavelli’s idea of checks and balances between powers as a good way of securing a good republic.
As a final thought, Machiavelli did write in his other political works that the life of the king was a sad life and that the common person was much happier not to have to engage in necessary violence and lies.  Perhaps unnecessary violence and lies are much more fun.


Hobbes and Leviathan

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is often called the second great philosopher (the first being Descartes) in the modern European philosophical tradition.  He is known for his 1651 book Leviathan which argues that the people agree to transfer their rights to a sovereign by social contract, and that this agreement justly allows the sovereign to do whatever is necessary to protect the people including use of brute force and deception.  Machiavelli, who influenced Hobbes and was the subject of the last lecture, argued that any sovereign must be good at these two evil but necessary aspects of society.  Like Machiavelli, Hobbes was a realist and though he supported the traditional monarchy got in trouble even with the loyal Royalists he was trying to support by arguing that the king/sovereign derives authority not from God but from natural law (the basic way humanity and nature work).  Like Machiavelli, Hobbes is infamous for supporting the brute power of the king but he is also famous and influential for his discussion of natural rights (self-evident liberties), the equality of humanity, and social contracts (government as an artificial agreement of individuals that concedes power to authority through consent).

Hobbes was working as a tutor and scholar in Florence and Paris, and had been working on a complete physics of natural motions that built up from inanimate objects to the motions of the body to the motions of society.  He returned home to England in 1637, finding a country torn by civil wars and complex politics.  While things were quite complicated between England, Scotland and Ireland, the two main sides of the English civil war were the Royalists who supported the rule of King Charles the first and the Parliamentarians who supported the rights of nobles in Parliament to check the powers of the king and guarantee liberties for the nobility.  Just as in Florence in Machiavelli’s time, there was a brief period (10 years, 1649-1659) of Parliamentary rule after the execution of Charles the first before England returned to monarchy under Charles the second.

Before the civil war, Parliament was not a permanent body in English government.  Parliaments were called at the king’s request to aid the king’s purposes, particularly the collection of taxes and the waging of warfare.  Rulers have needed the help of local nobles for these purposes since the earliest city state societies, and so the earliest form of democracy in Sumer was just such a council of nobles as was Athenian democracy (though in Athens there was no ruler for a time above the council).  In England before the civil war, Parliament could send bills to be considered as potential laws to the king (like we have in American law still today) as well as petition grievances, but the king had the right to call the council as well as dissolve the council, so it was not a permanent body that held the king’s powers in check.

The king needed the nobility, but could also ignore the needs of the nobles for the sake of the crown (according to both Machiavelli and Hobbes, for the greater good of all embodied in the king).  Charles called and dismissed several parliaments that had grievances against him before ruling without a parliament for 11 years.  The nobles and later historians called this period the Eleven Years Tyranny, which is ironic if you consider that the nobles held power over the people without any form of representation.  Charles was forced to make peace with the kings of France and Spain, to levy great taxes on merchants, and occasionally torture and punish even nobles who rebelled (such as cutting off ears, a punishment common for the commoners but rare for the nobility).

Many in the cities of England and the military favored the parliament, while the rural areas favored the king.  Both sides believed that they fought for the traditional English way and wished for Charles to remain on the throne.  After several bloody wars and political back-stabbings, the Parliamentarians began to wonder whether Charles should remain king or whether Parliament itself could rule England (much like the brief period of Athenian democracy, a country ruled by a council of the noble families).  Captured by the Parliamentarians, Charles was tried and found guilty of high treason against England, and executed in 1649.  English Civil War Societies, much like those in America, reenact the wars every year (but with pikes and shields, not muskets as in America).

At this time, Hobbes was completing his book Leviathan, published the next year in 1650.  In Paris he had good contact with Royalists in exile who believed, like Hobbes, that a strong central authority prevented injustice and civil war.  The brief period of Parliamentary rule was messy and divided, which the Royalists and Hobbes watched from overseas.  In 1660 Charles II returned from exile and re-conquered England and restored the monarchy of his father (a period known as the Restoration).  Charles II, who had in fact been tutored by Hobbes as a boy, gave Hobbes protection during times of persecution and a pension.

While the Royalists did in this way win the long fight, only some were delighted by Hobbes’ Leviathan.  Many Royalists were outraged by Hobbes’ idea that the king derived authority from the natural rights and protection of the people, not by the divine decree of God.  Hobbes does mention God and divine covenants as a basic type of contract, but he argues that one can only enter a contract with God by God’s grace and not by natural right, unlike the mortal human contract that supports a human king.  This is why Charles II had to offer him protection during purges of atheism and “profanity” when Hobbes’ book Leviathan was targeted openly.  Like Machiavelli, Hobbes was intensely loved and hated and his work spread amongst those who hated him as much as anyone.  While many today loath the idea of a sovereign without checks and balances, Hobbes is important for his ideas about the natural nature of society, liberty, rights, and equality.


The Leviathan

In the selections I gave you from Leviathan, some of the most famous, Hobbes argues that in the natural condition, the basic state of humanity in nature, life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”.  Hobbes argues that human beings are more equal than they are different in strength and intelligence.  People think that they are above others but this merely confirms their equality (like the DMV reports that 80% of those questioned say they are an above average driver).  Everyone wants to obtain their ends and posses what they desire, but because they desire what others want they make enemies easily.  Without power over them, there is little happiness and much grief.  Each wants safety, even glory, at the expense of the others.  The state of nature is therefore a war of all vs. all, a war against every other person.

Hobbes writes that there may never have been such a pure state of nature for all of humanity, but argues that the “savages of America”, the native Americans, live in such a state in his time and thus have no government at all.  Next week, Rousseau will argue the opposite and look to the American tribes as well as others to argue that in the state of nature people were pure and uncorrupted.  In the state of nature, when there is no government, nothing is unjust.  There is neither justice nor injustice, neither right nor wrong.  Force and fraud are cardinal virtues (consider the similarity with Machiavelli’s Prince).  There is no permanent property that is rightfully one person’s or another’s (consider Plato & Aristotle arguing whether society provides or prohibits private property).  The only reason to seek peace is fear of death, which is ironic considering that we call peace a sort of rest when we say “rest in peace”.

For Hobbes, the basic “right of nature” is self-preservation (much like Darwin’s survival of the fittest as a kind of natural law).  Hobbes eventually argues that one can pledge one’s life to society, but one still has the right to defend oneself even when society comes to claim this debt.  Hobbes draws the useful distinction between a law (a prohibition) and a right (a prohibition of a prohibition, a freedom or liberty).  In the state of nature, everyone has the unchecked right to everything, including the lives of others.  People should seek peace and form societies for their own sakes, but before the social contract there is nothing preventing anyone from doing anything.  People should treat others the way they want to be treated, but to do this they have to voluntarily give up liberty.  They must give up the liberty of harming others to prevent harm from being done to themselves.

Hobbes makes the further distinction that liberties and rights can be renounced or transferred to another, such as an authority.  Basically, Hobbes argues through much of the Leviathan that people come to understand that they must transfer the liberty of harming others to the sovereign or state in order to ensure mutual peace and prosperity.  Once they have entered into such an agreement, a social contract, they have agreed to a standard of justice and this is what creates justice and injustice.  Following in accord with the contract is justice, and breaking the contract is injustice.  Following the contract creates duty as well as the difference between right and wrong.  A declaration of the contract is made by the participants, and now the participants are bound in duty to the contract and the authority in which the contract is embodied.

People naturally want liberty for themselves, but they also wish to dominate others.  Unlike other animals, however, people can create voluntary and artificial structures such as social contracts and nation-states.  The only way to do this is to confer/transfer power, strength and liberty to a sovereign.  The sovereign is either one person (king, queen, sultan) or a group of people (parliament, congress, pow wow).  Later in the text, Hobbes sides with the Royalists vs. the Parliamentarians and argues that it is best to have a single human sovereign (such as Charles the first, or second), because otherwise there will be civil war and strife (like that witnessed in the brief period between Charles the first and Charles the second).

The sovereign, the artificial and mortal God, as Hobbes calls it, is now owed allegiance underneath the authority of the natural and immortal God who only contacts humanity by grace and revelation.  When the sovereign acts, it is as if everyone acts.  This is famously captured in the image on the front of the publication of Leviathan with a king made out of smaller people, wielding a sword.  Because one has pledged one’s strength and life to the sovereign, if you try to rebel the sovereign actually punishes you with your own hand as well as the hand of everyone else.  If the sovereign believes you must be killed for the good of everyone else, it is as if you have condemned yourself to death voluntarily.  Hobbes argues that you still have the right to try to defend yourself, but the social contract makes it right and legal for the king to have the liberty to end your life and the lives of others, foreign and domestic, if it is in the interest of the sovereign who embodies the interests of the whole populace.  Also, Hobbes argues that even if the minority does not voluntarily enter the contract, they are bound to it through the interests of the majority and if they do not agree they can be killed without right to safety as this right only exists within the social contract through participation (consider colonialism, as we will near the end of the class, and how this can be used by foreign powers to set up empires and kill those who disagree in the name of security and liberty).

In the name of the social contract, the sovereign can’t commit injustice.  Consider that this was the charge of the Parliamentarians against Charles the first, and the reason Charles was executed while Hobbes is writing the work.  The sovereign has the right to censor all works of literature and art, to decide matters of property and war.  Hobbes quotes the gospels, “A house divided against itself cannot stand”, arguing that there must be an individual who embodies the whole as king or there will be continuous civil war.  The king must be “like the sun to the stars”, eclipsing all other authority by natural right.  He writes, “If there had not first been an opinion received of the greatest part of England, that these powers were divided between the King, and the Lords, and the House of Commons, the people had never been divided and fallen into this civil war…and so continue, till their miseries be forgotten”.  Consider that Hobbes is arguing against checks and balances to the King’s power, unlike Machiavelli did in his republican works.

Intro Philosophy: Greek Thought, the Presocratics & Heraclitus

We must start with the Greeks the way that we started with Egypt: with modern understandings of race and identity.  This is because just like Egypt, the identity of the Greeks is a political problem that must be discussed.  The Egyptians were an African people, though they did not call themselves ‘African’ or ‘black’.  Likewise, the Greeks and Romans did not call themselves ‘European’ or ‘white’.  

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 is a psychological skepticism that is criticizing the human ability to know particular things as permanent that are able to be separated from the One and All (the cosmic fire).  Only the All is permanent.  All the other things are wandering temporal forms.  The many beings arise from the energy of Being, and then they fall back into the fire and disappear.  The cosmos resembles the chaos yet order of the human community centered on authority by spoken word.  The LOGOS, the word/plan/order/command, is the formative force in the cosmos, the force of fire and light in the watery chaotic world.  The cosmic fire speaks with its ever-present Logos (fire over air) and this brings about the firmament in the chaos (the earth rising out of the water).  This process, however, does not bring about eternal or stable beings, but chains of beings that are in flux and interdependent.

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.