The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophy

Chapter 1

THE LEGACY OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY

THE GREEKS AND THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

The legacy of Greece to Western philosophy is Western philosophy. Here it is not merely a matter, as in science, of the Greeks having set out on certain paths in which modern developments have left their achievements far behind. Nor is it just a matter, as in the arts, of the Greeks having produced certain forms, and certain works in those forms, which succeeding times would--some more, some very much less--look back to as paradigms of achievement. In philosophy, the Greeks initiated almost all its major fields--metaphysics, logic, the philosophy of language, the theory of knowledge; ethics, political philosophy, and (though to a much more restricted degree) the philosophy of art. Not only did they start these areas of enquiry, but they progressively distinguished what would still be recognized as many of the most basic questions in those areas. In addition, among those who brought about these developments there were two, Plato and Aristotle, who have always, where philosophy has been known and studied in the Western world, been counted as supreme in philosophical genius and breadth of achievement, and whose influence, directly or indirectly, more or less consciously, under widely varying kinds of interpretation, has been a constant presence in the development of the Western philosophical tradition ever since.

Of course philosophy, except at its most scholastic and run down, does not consist of the endless reworking of ancient problems, and the idea that Western philosophy was given almost its entire content by the Greeks is sound only if that content is identified in the most vague and general way--at the level of such questions as 'what is knowledge?' or 'what is time?' or 'does sense-perception tell us about things as they really are?' Philosophical problems are posed not just by earlier philosophy, but by developments in all areas of human life and knowledge; and all aspects of Western history have affected the subject-matter of philosophy--the development of the nation-state as much as the rise and fall of Christianity or the progress of the sciences. Yet even with issues created by such later developments, it is often possible to trace contemporary differences in philosophical view to some general contrast of outlooks which had its first expression in the Greek world.

Granted the size of the Greek achievement in philosophy, and the depth of its influence, it would be quite impossible to attempt anything except a drastically selective account of either. Some very important and influential aspects of Greek philosophy I shall leave out entirely: these include political philosophy (which is the concern of another chapter), and also Greek contributions to the science of logic, which were very important but demand separate, and moderately technical, treatment.1 Moreover, in the matter of influences, I shall not attempt to say anything about what is certainly the most evident and concentratedly important influence of Greek philosophy on subsequent thought, the influence of Aristotle on the thought of the Middle Ages. Aristotle, who was for Thomas Aquinas 'The Philosopher', for Dante il maestro di color che sanno, 'the master of those who know', did much to form, through his various and diverse interpreters, the philosophical, scientific, and cosmological outlook of an entire culture, and the subject of Aristotelianism would inevitably be too much for any essay which wanted to discuss anything else as well. Aristotle's representation in what follows has suffered from his own importance.

After saying something in general about the Greeks and the history of philosophy, and about the special positions of Plato and Aristotle, I shall try to convey some idea of the variety of Greek philosophical interests; but, more particularly, I shall pursue two or three subjects in greater detail than any attempt at a general survey would have allowed, in the belief that no catalogue of persons and doctrines is of much interest in philosophy, and that a feel for what certain thinkers were about can be conveyed only through some enactment of the type of reasons and arguments that weighed with them: of not just what, but how, they thought. In this spirit, if still very sketchily, I shall take up some arguments of Greek philosophers about two groups of questions--on the one hand, about being, appearance, and reality, on the other about knowledge and scepticism. In both, the depth of the Greek achievement is matched by the persistence of similar questions in later philosophy. In another matter, ethical enquiry, I shall lay the emphasis rather more on the contrasts between Greek thought and most modern outlooks, contrasts which seem to me very important to an understanding of our own outlooks and of how problematical they are.

I have said that the Greeks initiated most fields of enquiry in philosophy, and many of its major questions. It may be, by contrast, that there are just two important kinds of speculation in the later history of philosophy which are so radically different in spirit from anything in Greek thought as to escape from this generalization. Greek philosophy was deeply concerned, and particularly at its beginnings, with issues involved in the contrast between monism and pluralism. It is not always easy to capture what was at issue in these discussions: in some of the earlier Greek disputes, the question seems to be whether there is in reality only one thing or more than one thing, but--as we shall see later--it is not easy to make clear what exactly was believed by someone who believed that there was, literally, only one thing. In later philosophy, and already in some Greek philosophy, questions of monism and pluralism are questions rather of whether the world contains one or more than one fundamental or irreducible kind of thing. One sort of monism in this sense which has been known both to the ancient and to the modern world is materialism, the view that everything that exists is material, and that other things, in particular mental experiences, are in some sense reducible to this material basis. Besides dualism, the outlook that accepts that there are both matter and mind, not reducible to one another, philosophy since the Renaissance has also found room for another kind of monism, idealism, the monism of mind, which holds that nothing ultimately exists except minds and their experiences. It is this kind of view, with its numerous variations, descendants, and modifications, which we do not find in the ancient world. Largely speculative though Greek philosophy could be, and interested as it was in many of the same kinds of issues as those which generated idealism, it did not form that particular set of ideas, so important in much modern philosophy, according to which the entire world consists of the contents of mind: as opposed, of course, to the idea of a material world formed and governed by mind, a theistic conception which the Greeks most certainly had.

The other principal element in modern philosophy which is independent of the Greeks is something that first established itself at the beginning of the nineteenth century--that type of philosophical thought (of which Marxism is now the leading example) which places fundamental emphasis on historical categories and on explanation in terms of the historical process. The Greeks had, or rather, gradually developed, a sense of historical time and the place of one's own period in it; and their thought also made use of various structures, more mythological than genuinely tied to any historical time, of the successive ages of mankind, which standardly pictured man as in a state of decline from a golden age (though an opposing view, in terms of progress, is also to be found). Some of the more radical thinkers, moreover, regarded standards of conduct and the value of political arrangements as relative to particular societies, and that conception had an application to societies distant in time. But the Greeks did not evolve any theoretical conception of men's categories of thought being conditioned by the material or social circumstances of their time, nor did they look for systematic explanations of them in terms of history. This type of historical consciousness is indeed not present in all philosophical thought of the present day, but its absence from Greek philosophy is certainly one thing that marks off that philosophy from much modern thought.

It may be that these two, idealism and the historical consciousness, are the only two really substantial respects in which later philosophy is quite removed from Greek philosophy, as opposed to its pursuing what are recognizably the same types of preoccupation as Greek philosophy pursued, but pursuing them, of course, in the context of a vastly changed, extended, and enriched subject-matter compared with that available to the Greeks.

This is not to say that the Greeks possessed our concept of 'philosophy': or, rather, that they possessed any one of the various concepts of philosophy which are used in different philosophical circles in the modern world. Classical Greek applies the word philosophia to a wide range of enquiries; wider certainly than the range of enquiries called 'philosophy' now, which are distinguished from scientific, mathematical, and historical enquiries. But we should bear in mind that it is not only Greek practice that differs from modern practice in this way: for centuries 'philosophy' covered a wide range of enquiries, including those into nature, as is witnessed by the old use of the phrase 'natural philosophy' to mean natural science--The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy is what Newton, at the end of the seventeenth century, called his great work on the foundations of mechanics. It does not follow, however, that these ages did not have some distinction between scientific and what would now be called philosophical enquiries--enquiries which, however they are precisely to be delimited, are concerned with the general presuppositions of knowledge, action, and values, and proceed by way of reflection on our concepts and ideas, not by way of observation and experiment. Earlier ages often did make, in one way or another, distinctions between such enquiries and others--it is merely that until comparatively recently the word 'philosophy' was not reserved to marking them.

It is important to bear this point in mind when dealing with the philosophy of the past, in particular ancient philosophy. It defines, so to speak, two grades of anachronism. The more superficial and fairly harmless grade of anachronism is displayed when we use some contemporary term to identify a class of enquiries which the past writers did themselves separate from other enquiries, though not by quite the same criteria or on the same principles as are suggested by the modern term. An example of this is offered by the branch of philosophy now called 'metaphysics'. This covers a range of very basic philosophical issues, including reality, existence, what it is for things to have qualities, and (in the more abstract and less religious aspects of the matter) God. There is a set of writings devoted to such subjects in the canon of Aristotle's works, and it is called the Metaphysics; and it is indeed from that title that the subject got its name. But the work was probably so called only from its position in the edition of Aristotle's works prepared by Andronicus of Rhodes in the first century B.C.--these treatises were ta meta ta phusika, the books that came 'after the books on nature'. Aristotle's own name for most of these metaphysical enquiries was 'first philosophy'. Nor is it just the name that was different, but so were the principles of classification, both in the rationale given of them and hence in what is included and excluded. Thus Aristotle has an account of his enquiries into 'being in general' which relates the themes of 'first philosophy' in a distinctively Aristotelian way to the rest of knowledge (roughly, he supposed that it was distinguished by having a subject-matter which was much more general than that of other enquiries); and it excludes some enquiries which might now be included in metaphysics, such as a priori reflections on the nature of space and time. These latter Aristotle takes up in the books now called the Physics, which were included among the books 'about nature'; the name Physics itself being misleading, since what their contents mostly resemble is parts of metaphysics, and also what we would now call the philosophy of science, rather than what we now call physics.