THE EVOLUTION OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY
Written Specially for the Present Work
By Dr. HERMANN DIELS
Professor in the University of Berlin.
It is a primary law of development that each generation should supplant and supersede that which preceded it. The parents bring forth the child, and when the child has advanced to full maturity they themselves lapse into oblivion; and the same fate overtakes their children and children’s children.
So it is with nations. One civilisation rises above the level of the rest, then sinks, yielding place to the fresh vigour of younger nations, to which it bequeaths its heritage of culture. For a while the elder mother-nation is held in remembrance as a teacher and model; but ultimately—when the new generation of nations has grown strong enough to maintain an independent existence—the elder vanishes to return no more.
Such a stage we ourselves seem to have reached. The peoples of the Classic Age have long passed away, but in the Renaissance the culture of their time rose again from the dead. A bevy of daughters entered upon the heritage of this mother—Italy, France, England, Germany, and many others—and added to it, each after her own fashion. Then they outgrew the imitation and mere echo of the antique, passing on to express in act an independent culture of their own; and now the time seems to have come when the modern spirit claims absolute liberty of action in every sphere, without the slightest reference to the traditions of antiquity. For the modern technician, the modern naturalist, the modern historian, the modern artist, the modern poet, the ancient world has no message. It is dead—dead past recovery, as we may say.
There is, however, one sphere in which it is not dead, where it still imparts fresh stimulus to the minds of men from day to day, in which it is still recognised as the guide to every fresh enterprise. This sphere is philosophy.
The last and loftiest height to which thinking humanity can climb is that comprehensive vision of all things which we Germans call Weltanschauung, and which the Greeks called Philosophia. In speculation of this illimitable range we have made but little advance upon the Greeks; nay, even those most modern of philosophers who, on the basis of biological knowledge, have built up the most modern of all conceptions of the world, are in unconscious agreement with the rudiments of Greek natural science in the sixth century B.C. Let anyone compare the “cosmological perspective” to which Ernest Haeckel has attained in his book Die Welträthsel [The Riddle of the Universe] (1900) p. 15, “from the highest point of monistic science yet reached,” with what Anaximandros taught in the reign of Cyrus, and he will perceive with amazement that modern times have hardly gone further by a single step. The eternity, infinity, and illimitability of the Cosmos; the substance thereof, with its attributes of matter and energy, which in perpetual motion occupy the boundless space; perpetual motion itself in its periodic changes of becoming and ceasing to be; the constant progress of decay and destruction in the innumerable celestial bodies which give place to fresh formations of a similar character; the process of biogenesis on our own planet, by which in the course of æons animal life was brought forth, and by which, through gradual metamorphoses, the vertebrates were evolved from its earliest forms, the mammalia from vertebrates, the primary apes from mammalia, and lastly, through progressive evolution, man was brought into being towards the end of the tertiary period—all these propositions had already been recognised and stated in germ by the Greek thinker who lived during the first generation of Greek philosophy. The sum total of the progress made in twenty-five hundred years, that what was then surmised from, rather than disclosed by, an empiric consideration of some few facts, has now been demonstrated in detail by scientific observation.
But these main propositions, which the modern scientist regards as his own gains, because he has had to win them afresh by his own toil from the errors of the ancient and mediæval world, are of no great significance when compared with the far greater residuum of questions that still remain unanswered. Du Bois-Raymond, as is well known, described these “world riddles” in the year 1880 as in part unsolved, in part insoluble. They are seven in number: (1) The nature of matter and force; (2) the origin of motion; (3) the first beginning of life; (4) the adaptation of nature to certain ends; (5) the rise of sensation and consciousness; (6) the origin of thought and speech; (7) freedom of will.
It is easy to see that, compared with these fundamental questions, which may be summed up in the great question of all, “God and the world,” the whole sequence of cosmic research from Anaximander to Haeckel is merely of secondary importance. It is, as it were, the surface of the matter; and even if, with Goethe, we feel the inadequacy of the apothegm of Haller, the poet and naturalist, “Into the heart of nature no created spirit may penetrate,” yet we cannot but see that as yet we poor mortals are only nibbling at the rind, and that centuries more of labour are needed to penetrate its diamond hardness.
Thus everything that has hitherto been achieved is, as it were, a mere prelude to the abstract presentment of cosmic principles, and consequently the rudimentary beginnings of study in this sphere are far less remote from its present condition than is the case in any other department of the intellectual activity of mankind. And hence, even at the present day, the consideration of Greek philosophy is not only the most interesting, but also by far the most directly profitable part of the study of antiquity. No man who has not thoroughly studied the systems of Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle can become a profound philosopher in our own time.
“The love of wisdom” was the name which, from the fifth century B.C. onwards, the Greeks bestowed on any kind of intellectual endeavour which was diverted from the practice and directed to the theory of life. The scope of this striving naturally varied in different periods. In the infancy of Greek speculation, i.e., in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., men pored with wide, childlike eyes over the marvels of nature that lay about them and tried to find in natural science the solution of the riddle of existence. Philosophy was then mainly the embodiment of scientific and mathematical research, that is to say, it was what we nowadays call “Science.”
A troublous period followed, represented by the Sophists, a time of youthful storm and stress, out of which the mature philosophy of ideas developed towards the end of the fifth century. The term “philosopher” begins to acquire a professional meaning. Side by side with the Sophist, who supplied “culture” in return for money, stood the philosopher, who directed the course of education without remuneration. At first, it is true, this education was confined to morals. But in Plato it proceeded to expand into a study that comprised mathematics, logic, physics, and ethics, as well as politics, forming a pyramid built on the broadest of possible bases and culminating in the idea of Good. By that time a “philosopher” had come to mean one who is capable of grasping the eternal idea (Plato, Rep. VI, 484 A). Next, in the Universal Encyclopædia of Aristotle, this platonic structure is completed and made habitable within and fitted to human requirements. Under him the idea and the term “philosopher” attained its maximum extension. Thereafter both begin to narrow down. The end of the fourth century witnessed the collapse of the Greek state, to the insecure structure of which the philosophers had never been blind.
With the fall of the Hellenic municipal system and the rise of the Macedonian sovereignty a new world comes into being, in which the leaders are monarchs and no longer individual citizens. The outlook and sphere of action of the individual is restricted. Men grow to be eminent in practical affairs, experts in the art of living, less eager to solve the riddle of the universe than that of the personal Ego, by withdrawing men from the tumult of external affairs and guiding them into the imperturbable calm of philosophic conviction as into a sure haven. Hence in the systems of the Stoa and of Epicurus and Pyrrho the designation of philosopher assumes the meaning of a counsellor in the conduct of life, who, in the lack of political liberty then prevailing, held up an ideal of liberty within, which no tyrant could menace.
In proportion as the sphere of philosophy in the Hellenistic world narrowed to the consideration of the Useful and the Practicable, the sphere of its influence widened. Alexander’s expedition had thrown the East open to Greek civilisation, and the assiduous and subjective temperament of the youth of the Semitic peoples was drawn to the wisdom of the Greeks. An active process of endosmosis and exosmosis set in between the countries of the West and East. During the period from the third to the first century B.C. this interchange created a new civilisation, destined to form the basis of the Imperium Romanum in matters temporal and the Imperium Christi in matters spiritual. But at this period the clear outlines of development tend to become blurred.
As the Hellenic nation expands into the Hellenistic peoples, as the national language of Greece becomes the common medium of the East, nay, of the whole civilised world, the eclecticism which had been formed out of certain elements of the old Greek philosophy under the dominant influence of the Stoa gained ground on all sides. In the time of Christ, Greek philosophy is an indispensable requisite of the higher culture, and the university of Athens, with its professors, whose appointment the state soon took upon itself, is the one where the educated Roman and Cappadocian alike must have studied. The Greek private tutor, recommended by the head of some school or other at Athens, becomes a standing institution in Roman families of distinction, and is treated with the contempt due to such a Græculus, ranking first among the slaves of the household.
Times soon change, however. Under the philosopher Marcus, philosophy gained admission to courtly circles, and presently became indispensable in the conflict with the increasing might of Christianity. After the Christian conception of the world had conquered under Constantine, the university of Athens became the bulwark of Paganism. Neo-Platonism, a new philosophy bred of the enthusiastic temperament of the East, the congenial philosophy of Plato and the erudition of Aristotle, fought the last fight with the courage of despair. But though its champions were, for the most part, superior in courage, moral character, and scientific learning to the bishops whom they withstood, philosophy and the ancient world had played out their part. In the latter end of the period of antiquity the overseer of any craft (as, for example, the overseer of the quarrymen in the Passio Sanctorum IV Coronatorum) was called in popular parlance philosophus to distinguish him from the artisans. Sic transit gloria mundi.