A Beginner's History of Philosophy, Vol. 1: Ancient and Mediæval Philosophy

by Herbert Ernest Cushman

2. The Practical Need of Knowledge. But mere curiosity will not entirely explain the Greek intellectual movement. There had grown up an imperative practical need for knowledge. In Athens and other Greek cities the democracy of the fifth century B. C. had supplanted the tyranny of the sixth century. Duty and inclination together forced the citizen into active participation in public affairs. In these democratic cities family tradition and character were no longer sufficient for success; but it became generally recognized that the most useful and successful man was the educated man. The complex relations existing between states and between the citizens in the states made education absolutely necessary for the politician. Nowhere was the need of an education more imperative than in Athens; nowhere was the need more easily filled. In a very short time after the Persian Wars the social position of science changed to one of power; and the inner character of science changed from the study of nature to the study of ethical and political problems. Scientists became teachers of eloquence, for the citizen now needed to be an orator and a rhetorician. Statesmen and generals must know how to persuade. Courts of law were public,their proceeding oral, and personal attendance was therefore required. There was no man in Athens who might not be condemned, if he could not personally in court refute falsehoods and disentangle sophistries. Besides, to be beaten in debate was as disgraceful in the eyes of the public as to lose one’s cause.

Two classes of men, with an importance hitherto unknown, appear in Greek history,—the rhetoricians and the dialecticians. Rhetoric was public oratory, necessary for the public defense of one’s rights, or for the maintenance of one’s dignity, or for the gratification of one’s ambition. The dialectic was, on the other hand, argument employed in private between two persons, usually friends, to unravel an obscurity, to reduce an opponent to silence, to exercise one’s self in the mastery of a subject, or to sift evidence. The dialectic, therefore, became a distinct mental pursuit for men who had a natural defect in public speaking or rhetoric. Besides rhetoric and dialectic, there grew up somewhat later what was called the eristic. Eristic was polemical argument consisting of catch-phrases and logical subtleties. It was taught as an art of adroit argument.

The great Greek tragedies occupy a place in the development of the dialectic and the satisfying of the need of knowledge. Science, through the drama, transformed the old religious views and brought its new interpretation to the common people. The development of the fifth-century drama out of the epic of the sixth century was not merely a change in architectonic, but a transformation of its ethical and religious spirit. The germ was in the previous ethics, lyrics, and gnomics, yet it was fully amplified in the drama. Instead of a summary of deeds the tragic poet makes his characters talk, defend,refute, accuse, lament, etc. This gives rise to exigencies that require the dialectic. In the conflicting duties and in the justification of the wrong done by the wrong suffered, dialectical skill is called for in the drama to weigh the ethical motives in a manner that the epic does not demand. Thus the drama of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides was a link between the lyric and gnomic poetry of the sixth century B. C.and the dialogue literature of Plato.[15]

3. The Critical Attitude of Mind. The most important characteristic of this period is neither the intensified social curiosity nor the increased social needs. It is rather ethical in its character. It is the “critical” or “individualistic” attitude of mind. This began with the “free city feeling”—the consciousness of the free man in a free state—in the first half of the fifth century B. C., and developed rapidly into individualism and critical skepticism toward the end of that century.

If one were to compare in a single word the history of Greece before the Persian Wars with that after the Persian Wars, he would say that the former was traditional and the latter was critical. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the Cosmological Period Greek traditional customs were being weakened by attacks upon them. Religious ideas were threatened by the Cosmologists. The subordination of the gods to the cosmic substance was an attack upon the established polytheism of the Epic, and the attack became direct in the hands of Xenophanes. It was “the divestiture of Nature of its gods by science.” The Mysteries were a part of this departure from the traditional religion. But the new and more critical scientific attitude toward traditionalreligion was only incidental to the growing criticism of law. In the days of the oligarchy there were two self-evident political assumptions: (1) that law has validity because it is law; (2) that obedience to law is for one’s advantage. When, however, the political disturbances began, a self-conscious individualism developed among the Greeks. The Gnomic Poets had been the first to appeal to the individual consciousness of the people. All through the sixth century B. C. Greece had stern experiences, and the individual found himself questioning the sanctity of tradition and of time-honored laws. There was no longer a tacit acquiescence in established order, and the claims of authority were no longer, as formerly, unchallenged. Confidence in political assumptions began to waver, and a critical attitude was taken toward laws which changed from year to year. The appearance everywhere of the tyrant, the vigorous personality who could set up his will against the will of a traditional aristocracy, impressed the age with the power of individual egoism. The seat of authority was shifted from tradition to the individual reason, and all institutions were brought under individual criticism.

The Persian Wars mark the point of transition from the traditional attitude to the critical attitude of the Greek mind. In themselves the Persian Wars were a great moral uplift, and were a return for a time to the traditional institutions. The changes long since begun were suspended for a time in the united effort of the Greek nation. But the tendencies became more insistent when the danger was past. The Persian Wars had cleared the atmosphere of its pessimism and had given freedom to the intellectual movement. Then later, in the heat of that intellectual movement, individualismand criticism came to fullest fruitage. Doubt grew into positive skepticism.

In the last part of the fifth century B. C., critical skepticism became universal. In religion the anthropomorphism of the Epic passes under ridicule. Critias declares that the gods are the invention of shrewd statecraft. In literature the Epic, in which the gods interfere in all human details, yields to the naturalistic descriptions of Herodotus and Thucydides, and to the personal note of lyric and satirical poetry. More important than all was the change of attitude toward the laws. Instead of the law having a divine authority, the individual placed himself above it and sat in judgment upon it. The tribal conception of guilt, that when a member of a tribe sinned the whole tribe would suffer at the hands of the gods, had given way at the time of the Persian Wars to that of personal responsibility and retribution. It was noted that laws change in the same state, that they differ in different states, and that moral customs have a great variety. All laws seem therefore to be made by man, and the question then arose, Is there any law which has universal validity? Is there any real prius or “Nature” of laws? In the Anthropological Period, the important question was about the real prius or “Nature” of human institutions, just as in the Cosmological Period the question was about the real prius or “Nature” of the world of physical phenomena. Yet the question of the Anthropologists was a part of the Cosmological problem. The Cosmologists had called the real prius or “Nature” (φύσις), that which ever remains like itself, and it is now asked if “Nature” in itself contains any unchanging and eternal politico-moral law. The contrast is thusdrawn for all time between natural law and statute law, and the distinction dominates this period. Human legal institutions were regarded as only makeshifts, and often even as contradicting the divine law. The conflict between natural or divine law and human law appears worked out in the Antigone of Sophocles.

The same interest in the foundations of morality and moral relations opened up the whole subject of the power of human consciousness to discern such relations. It was a logical necessity that turned thought from a review of man’s relations with his fellows to a criticism of his own constitution. What is man? What are his faculties? Has he any that give him the truth and the reality? Or do they all deceive him so that he cannot detect the real from the sham of life? What are the mental faculties used in disputation, and how are they to be trained so that man may rise to an eminence of culture among his fellows? The Greek thus turned to a criticism of his knowing faculties, and the positive social and moral demands made such a criticism necessary to his well-being. Greek science took a strong anthropological direction, and logic, ethics, psychology, rhetoric, etc., took the place of natural science subjects. The Greek in the fifth century B. C. was interested in man—in his inner activities, his ideations and volitions. Of this critical and individualistic attitude Euripides is the literary exponent; Pericles is the political personification; Socrates and the Sophists are its philosophical expression.

The Significance of the Sophists. The Sophists were the direct means of bringing this intellectual change into Greek life. They were the bearers of this Greek Enlightenment, and they were the missionaries thatspread its influence far and wide. This significance of the Sophists to the culture of Greece was never understood by the historian until Hegel set them in their true light. The dark side of their character has been painted in blackest colors, so that the word “Sophist” has carried an opprobrium with it. They were, however, the exponents of the Greek illumination, and not the cause of it. They therefore share all its weaknesses and its excellencies; and any judgment upon them is a judgment upon the time itself. The most accurate description of them is that they were the exponents of Greek culture in the age of Pericles; the worst that can be said of them is that they stimulated the Greek spirit in directions in which it should have been controlled. Their true work was to carry the gospel of Greek individualism everywhere; their fault lay in the fact that too frequently they confused individualism with hypocrisy, and led their hearers to believe that appearance knowledge is the same as true knowledge.

The word “Sophist” had a development among the Greeks. It first meant a wise man (the Cosmologists, from Thales to Anaxagoras, were Sophists); then a teacher of wisdom; then a paid teacher of wisdom. Moreover, among the Sophists there is a difference between the early Sophists, who were inspired by a distinct desire to spread culture, and the later Sophists, who were mercenary teachers, and had on that account degenerated into mere quibblers. In general, the ground of the contemporary hostility to the Sophists was the hatred of the conservative and reactionary party, to which belonged Aristophanes the satirist, Æschylus “the father of tragedy,” and the exponent of institutional morals, and Xenophon, who stood for a completereturn to a patriarchal state. This party was very bitter against the exponents of the new and radical spirit springing up in Greece. All the philosophers of the new learning, including Socrates, suffered at the hands of those who would conserve the old traditions. In particular, the accusations against the Sophists of this period were: they were cavilers; they taught for pay; they represented the universalizing of education against the old aristocracy; they menaced institutions.