A Critical History of Greek Philosophy by W. T. Stace (short story to read txt) 📖

essentially the attempt to get beyond this sort of symbolic and mystical thinking, to get at the naked truth, to grasp what lies behind the symbol as it is in itself. These inferior modes of thought are a help to those who are themselves below their level, but are a hindrance to those who seek to reach the highest level of truth.

It is often said that philosophy is a very difficult and abstruse subject. Its difficulty lies almost wholly in the struggle to think non-sensuously. Whenever we {13} come to anything in philosophy that seems beyond us, we shall generally find that the root of the trouble is that we are trying to think non-sensuous objects in a sensuous way, that is, we are trying to form mental pictures and images of them, for all mental pictures are composed of sensuous materials, and hence no such picture is adequate for a pure thought. It is impossible to exaggerate this difficulty. Even the greatest philosophers have succumbed to it. We shall constantly have to point out that when a great thinker, such as Parmenides or Plato, fails, and begins to flounder in difficulties, the reason usually is that, though for a time he has attained to pure thought, he has sunk back exhausted into sensuous thinking, and has attempted to form mental pictures of what is beyond the power of any such picture to represent, and so has fallen into contradictions. We must keep this constantly in mind in the study of philosophy.

In modern times philosophy is variously divided, as into metaphysics, which is the theory of reality, ethics, the theory of the good, and aesthetics, the theory of the beautiful. Modern divisions do not, however, altogether fit in with Greek philosophy, and it is better to let the natural divisions develop themselves as we go on, than to attempt to force our material into these moulds.

If, now, we look round the world and ask; in what countries and what ages the kind of thought we have described has attained a high degree of development, we shall find such a development only in ancient Greece and in modern Europe. There were great civilizations in Egypt, China, Assyria, and so on. They produced art and religion, but no philosophy to speak of. Even {14} ancient Rome added nothing to the world's philosophical knowledge. Its so-called philosophers, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus, Lucretius, produced no essentially new principle. They were merely disciples of Greek Schools, whose writings may be full of interest and of noble feeling, but whose essential thoughts contained nothing not already developed by the Greeks.

The case of India is more doubtful. Opinions may differ as to whether India ever had any philosophy. The Upanishads contain religio-philosophical thinking of a kind. And later we have the six so-called schools of philosophy. The reasons why this Indian thought is not usually included in histories of philosophy are as follows. Firstly, philosophy in India has never separated itself from religious and practical needs. The ideal of knowledge for its own sake is rarely to be found. Knowledge is desired merely as a means towards salvation. Philosophy and science, said Aristotle, have their roots in wonder,--the desire to know and understand for the sole sake of knowing and understanding. But the roots of Indian thought lie in the anxiety of the individual to escape from the ills and calamities of existence. This is not the scientific, but the practical spirit. It gives birth to religions, but not to philosophies. Of course it is a mistake to imagine that philosophy and religion are totally separate and have no community. They are in fact fundamentally akin. But they are also distinct. Perhaps the truest view is that they are identical in substance, but different in form. The substance of both is the absolute reality and the relation of all things, including men, to that reality. But whereas philosophy presents this subject-matter scientifically, in {15} the form of pure thought, religion gives it in the form of sensuous pictures, myths, images, and symbols.

And this gives us the second reason why Indian thought is more properly classed as religious than philosophical. It seldom or never rises from sensuous to pure thought. It is poetical rather than scientific. It is content with symbols and metaphors in place of rational explanations, and all this is a mark of the religious, rather than the philosophical, presentation of the truth. For example, the main thought of the Upanishads is that the entire universe is derived from a single, changeless, eternal, infinite, being, called Brahman or Paramatman. When we come to the crucial question how the universe arises out of this being, we find such passages as this:--"As the colours in the flame or the red-hot iron proceed therefrom a thousand-fold, so do all beings proceed from the Unchangeable, and return again to it." Or again, "As the web issues from the spider, as little sparks proceed from fire, so from the one soul proceed all living animals, all worlds, all the gods and all beings." There are thousands of such passages in the Upanishads. But obviously these neither explain nor attempt to explain anything. They are nothing but hollow metaphors. They are poetic rather than scientific. They may satisfy the imagination and the religious feelings, but not the rational understanding. Or when again Krishna, in the Bhagavat-Gita, describes himself as the moon among the lunar mansions, the sun among the stars, Meru among the high-peaked mountains, it is clear that we are merely piling sensuous image upon sensuous image without any further understanding of what the nature of the absolute being in its own self is. {16} The moon, the sun, Meru, are physical sense-objects. And this is totally sensuous thinking, whereas the aim of philosophy is to rise to pure thought. In such passages we are still on the level of symbolism, and philosophy only begins when symbolism has been surpassed. No doubt it is possible to take the line that man's thought is not capable of grasping the infinite as it is in itself, and can only fall back upon symbols. But that is another question, and at any rate, whether it is or is not possible to rise from sensuous to pure thought, philosophy is essentially the attempt to do so.

Lastly, Indian thought is usually excluded from the history of philosophy because, whatever its character, it lies outside the main stream of human development. It has been cut off by geographical and other barriers. Consequently, whatever its value in itself, it has exerted little influence upon philosophy in general.

The claim is sometimes put forward by Orientals themselves that Greek philosophy came from India, and if this were true, it would greatly affect the statement made in the last paragraph. But it is not true. It used to be believed that Greek philosophy came from "the East," but this meant Egypt. And even this theory is now abandoned. Greek culture, especially mathematics and astronomy, owed much to Egypt. But Greece did not owe its philosophy to that source. The view that it did was propagated by Alexandrian priests and others, whose sole motive was, that to represent the triumphs of Greek philosophy as borrowed from Egypt, flattered their national vanity. It was a great thing, wherever they found anything good, to say, "this must have come from us." A precisely similar motive lies behind the {17} Oriental claim that Greek philosophy came from India. There is not a scrap of evidence for it, and it rests entirely upon the supposed resemblance between the two. But this resemblance is in fact mythical. The whole character of Greek philosophy is European and unoriental to the back-bone. The doctrine of re-incarnation is usually appealed to. This characteristically Indian doctrine was held by the Pythagoreans, from whom it passed to Empedocles and Plato. The Pythagoreans got it from the Orphic sect, to whom quite possibly it came indirectly from India, although even this is by no means certain, and is in fact highly doubtful. But even if this be true, it proves nothing. Re-incarnation is of little importance in Greek philosophy. Even in Plato, who makes much of it, it is quite unessential to the fundamental ideas of his philosophy, and is only artificially connected with them. And the influence of this doctrine upon Plato's philosophy was thoroughly bad. It was largely responsible for leading him into the main error of his philosophy, which it required an Aristotle to correct. All this will be evident when we come to consider the systems of Plato and Aristotle.

The origin of Greek philosophy is not to be found in India, or Egypt, or in any country outside Greece. The Greeks themselves were solely responsible for it. It is not as if history traces back their thought only to a point at which it was already highly developed, and cannot explain its beginnings. We know its history from the time, so to speak, when it was in the cradle. In the next two chapters we shall see that the first Greek attempts at philosophising were so much the beginnings of a beginner, were so very crude and unformed, that it is {18} mere perversity to suppose that they could not make these simple efforts for themselves. From those crude beginnings we can trace the whole development in detail up to its culmination in Aristotle, and beyond. So there is no need to assume foreign influence at any point.

Greek philosophy begins in the sixth century before Christ. It begins when men for the first time attempted to give a scientific reply to the question, "what is the explanation of the world?" Before this era we have, of course, the mythologies, cosmogonies, and theologies of the poets. But they contain no attempt at a naturalistic explanation of things. They belong to the spheres of poetry and religion, not to philosophy.

It must not be supposed, when we speak of the philosophy of Greece, that we refer only to the mainland of what is now called Greece. Very early in history, Greeks of the mainland migrated to the islands of the Aegean, to Sicily, to the South of Italy, to the coast of Asia Minor, and elsewhere, and founded flourishing colonies. The Greece of philosophy includes all these places. It is to be thought of rather racially than territorially. It is the philosophy of the men of Greek race, wherever they happened to be situated. And in fact the first period of Greek philosophy deals exclusively with the thoughts of these colonial Greeks. It was not till just before the time of Socrates that philosophy was transplanted to the mainland.

Greek philosophy falls naturally into three periods. The first may be roughly described as pre-Socratic philosophy, though it does not include the Sophists who were both the contemporaries and the predecessors of Socrates. This period is the rise of Greek philosophy. {19} Secondly, the period from the Sophists to Aristotle, which includes Socrates and Plato, is the maturity of Greek philosophy, the actual zenith and culmination of which is undoubtedly the system of Aristotle. Lastly, the period of post-Aristotelian philosophy constitutes the decline and fall of the national thought. These are not merely arbitrary divisions. Each period has its own special characters, which will be described in the sequel.

A few words must be said of the sources of our knowledge of pre-Socratic philosophy. If we want to know what Plato and Aristotle thought about any matter, we have only to consult their works. But the works of the earlier philosophers have not come down to us, except in fragments, and several of them never committed their opinions to writing. Our knowledge of their doctrines is the result of the laborious sifting by scholars of such materials as are available. Luckily the material has been plentiful. It may be divided into three classes. First come the fragments of the original writings of the philosophers themselves. These are in