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

rational. But how is sensation more rational than nutrition? Why should it not be the other way about? Nutrition passes through sensation into human reason. But why should not sensation pass through nutrition into human reason? Why should not the order be reversed? We cannot explain. And such an admission is absolutely fatal to any philosophy of evolution. The whole object of such a philosophy is to make it clear to us why the higher form is higher, and why the lower is lower: why, for example, nutrition must, as lower, come first, and sensation second, and not vice versa. If we can see no reason why the order should not be reversed, this simply means that our philosophy of evolution has failed in its main point. It means that we cannot see any real difference between lower and higher, and that therefore we have merely change without development, since it is indifferent whether A passes into B, or B into A. The only way in which Aristotle could have surmounted these difficulties would have been to prove that sensation is a development of reason which goes beyond nutrition. And he could only do this by showing that sensation logically arises out of nutrition. For a logical development is the same as a rational development. He ought to have logically deduced sensation from nutrition, and so with all the other forms. As it is, all that can be said is that Aristotle was the founder of a philosophy of evolution because he saw that evolution implies movement towards an end, and because he attempted to point out the different stages in the attainment of that end, {338} but that he failed rationally to develop the doctrine stage by stage.

As neither the principle of form in general was shown to be necessary, nor were the particular forms deduced from each other, we have to conclude that Aristotle like Plato, named a self-explanatory principle, reason or form, as ultimate principle of things, but failed to show in detail that it is self-explanatory. Yet, in spite these defects, the philosophy of Aristotle is one of the greatest philosophies that the world has ever seen, or is ever likely to see. If it does not solve all problems, it does render the world more intelligible to us than it was before.

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CHAPTER XIV

THE GENERAL CHARACTER OF POST-ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHY

The rest of the story of Greek philosophy is soon told, for it is the story of decay. The post-Aristotelian is the least instructive of the three periods of Greek thought, and I shall delineate only its main outlines.

The general characteristics of the decay of thought which set in after Aristotle are intimately connected with the political, social, and moral events of the time. Although the huge empire of Alexander had broken up at the conqueror's death, this fact had in no way helped the Greek States to throw off the yoke of their oppressors. With the single exception of Sparta, which stubbornly held out, they had become, for all intents and purposes, subject to the dominion of Macedonia. And the death of Alexander did not alter this fact. It was not merely that rude might had overwhelmed a beautiful and delicate civilization. That civilization itself was decaying. The Greeks had ceased to be a great and free people. Their vitality was ebbing. Had it not been one conqueror it would have been another. They were growing old. They had to give way before younger and sturdier races. It was not so many years now before Greece, passing from one alien yoke to another, was to become no more than a Roman province.

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Philosophy is not something that subsists independently of the growth and decay of the spirit of man. It goes hand in hand with political, social, religious, and artistic development. Political organization, art, religion, science, and philosophy, are but different forms in which the life of a people expresses itself. The innermost substance of the national life is found in the national philosophy, and the history of philosophy is the kernel of the history of nations. It was but natural, then, that from the time of Alexander onwards Greek philosophy should exhibit symptoms of decay.

The essential mark of the decay of Greek thought was the intense subjectivism which is a feature of all the post-Aristotelian schools. Not one of them is interested in the solution of the world-problem for its own sake. The pure scientific spirit, the desire for knowledge for its own sake, is gone. That curiosity, that wonder, of which Aristotle speaks as the inspiring spirit of philosophy, is dead. The motive power of philosophy is no longer the disinterested pursuit of truth, but only the desire of the individual to escape from the ills of life. Philosophy only interests men in so far as it affects their lives. It becomes anthropocentric and egocentric. Everything pivots on the individual subject, his destiny, his fate, the welfare of his soul. Religion has long since become corrupted and worthless, and philosophy is now expected to do the work of religion, and to be a haven of refuge from the storms of life. Hence it becomes essentially practical. Before everything else it is ethical. All other departments of thought are now subordinated to ethics. It is not as in the days of the strength and youth of the Greek spirit, when Xenophanes or {341} Anaxagoras looked out into the heavens, and naively wondered what the sun and the stars were, and how the world arose. Men's thought no longer turns outward toward the stars, but only inward upon themselves. It is not the riddle of the universe, but the riddle of human life, which makes them ponder.

This subjectivism has as its necessary consequences, one-sidedness, absence of originality, and finally complete scepticism. Since men are no longer interested in the wider problems of the universe, but only in the comparatively petty problems of human life, their outlook becomes exclusively ethical, narrow, and one-sided. He who cannot forget his own self, cannot merge and lose himself in the universe, but looks at all things only as they affect himself, does not give birth to great and universal thoughts. He becomes self-centred, and makes the universe revolve round him. Hence we no longer have now great, universal, all-embracing systems, like those of Plato and Aristotle. Metaphysics, physics, logic, are not studied for their own sakes, but only as preparations for ethics. Narrowness, however, is always compensated by intensity, which in the end becomes fanaticism. Hence the intense earnestness and almost miraculous heights of fanatical asceticism, to which the Stoics attained. And an unbalanced and one-sided philosophy leads to extremes. Such a philosophy, obsessed by a single idea, unrestrained by any consideration for other and equally important factors of truth, regardless of all other claims, pushes its idea pig-headedly to its logical extreme. Such a procedure results in paradoxes and extravagances. Hence the Stoics, if they made duty their watchword, must needs conceive it in {342} the most extreme opposition to all natural impulses, with a sternness unheard of in any previous ethical doctrine save that of the Cynics. Hence the Sceptics, if they lighted on the thought that knowledge is difficult of attainment, must needs rush to the extreme conclusion that any knowledge is utterly impossible. Hence the Neo-Platonists must needs cap all these tendencies by making out a drunken frenzy of the soul to be the true organ of philosophy, and by introducing into speculation all the fantastic paraphernalia of sorcery, demons, and demi-gods. Absence of sanity and balance, then, are characteristics of the last period of Greek philosophy. The serenity and calm of Plato and Aristotle are gone, and in their place we have turgidity and extravagance.

Lack of originality is a second consequence of the subjectivism of the age. Since metaphysics, physics, and logic are not cultivated, except in a purely practical interest, they do not flourish. Instead of advancing in these arenas of thought, the philosophies of the age go backwards. Older systems, long discredited, are revived, and their dead bones triumphantly paraded abroad. The Stoics return to Heracleitus for their physics, Epicurus resurrects the atomism of Democritus. Even in ethics, on which they concentrate all their thought, these post-Aristotelian systems have nothing essentially new to say. Stoicism borrows its principal ideas from the Cynics, Epicureanism from the Cyrenaics. The post-Aristotelians rearrange old thoughts in a new order. They take up the ideas of the past and exaggerate this or that aspect of them. They twist and turn them in all directions, and squeeze them dry for a drop of new life. {343} But in the end nothing new eventuates. Greek thought is finished, and there is nothing new to be got out of it, torture it how they will. From the first Stoic to the last Neo-Platonist, there is no essentially new principle added to philosophy, unless we count as such the sad and jaded ideas which the Neo-Platonists introduced from the East.

Lastly, subjectivism ends naturally in scepticism, the denial of all knowledge, the rejection of all philosophy. We have already seen, in the Sophists, the phenomenon of subjectivism leading to scepticism. The Sophists made the individual subject the measure of truth and morals, and in the end this meant the denial of truth and morality altogether. So it is now. The subjectivism of the Stoics and Epicureans is followed by the scepticism of Pyrrho and his successors. With them, as with the Sophists, nothing is true or good in itself, but only opinion makes it so.

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CHAPTER XV

THE STOICS

Zeno of Cyprus, the founder of the Stoic School, a Greek of Phoenician descent, was born about 342 B.C., and died in 270. He is said to have followed philosophy; because he lost all his property in a ship-wreck--a motive characteristic of the age. He came to Athens, and learned philosophy under Crates the Cynic, Stilpo the Megaric, and Polemo the Academic. About 300 B.C. he founded his school at the Stoa Poecile (many-coloured portico) whence the name Stoic. He died by his own hand. He was followed by Cleanthes, and then by Chrysippus, as leaders of the school. Chrysippus was a man of immense productivity and laborious scholarship. He composed over seven hundred books, but all are lost. Though not the founder, he was the chief pillar of Stoicism. The school attracted many adherents, and flourished for many centuries, not only in Greece, but later in Rome, where the most thoughtful writers, such as Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus, counted themselves among its followers.

We know little for certain as to what share particular Stoics, Zeno, Cleanthes, or Chrysippus, had in the formation of the doctrines of the school. But after Chrysippus the main lines of the doctrine were complete. {345} We shall deal, therefore, with Stoicism as a whole, and not with the special teaching of particular Stoics. The system is divided into three parts, Logic, Physics, and Ethics, of which the first two are entirely subservient to the last. Stoicism is essentially a system of ethics which, however, is guided by a logic as theory of method, and rests upon physics as foundation.

Logic.

We may pass over the formal logic of the Stoics, which is, in all essentials, the logic of Aristotle. To this, however, they added a theory, peculiar to themselves, of the origin of knowledge and the criterion of truth. All knowledge, they said, enters the mind through the senses. The mind is a tabula rasa, upon which sense-impressions are inscribed. It may have a certain activity of its own, but this activity is confined exclusively to materials supplied by the physical organs of sense. This theory stands, of course, in sheer opposition to the idealism of Plato, for whom the mind alone was the source of knowledge, the senses being the sources of all illusion and error. The Stoics denied the metaphysical reality of concepts. Concepts are merely ideas in