Sak

Distracting Abstractions

I recently experienced a thoroughly enjoyable thought process as I learned of the development of abstract thought in ancient Greece. While researching for a large project, I’d been making notes about early Greek thinkers from the 6th and 5th centuries BC. The source I’ve been working with is The Greek Philosophers: From Tales to Aristotle by W.K.C. Guthrie.

In the initial chapters, Guthrie introduces some of the early ways of thinking, and some of the first thinkers; the Ionians, Anaximander and Anaximenes, and the mathematical genius of Pythagoras and his subsequently weird little cult following. I wonder if things might have been different if he’d chased them off with a rake? Anyway, it isn’t until chapter three where I had a really good time. The discussion on Heraclitus was pretty much standard fare for what the other few physical philosophers were arguing about, albeit with his own interesting ideas; that the world was made up of some unique substance, and how that primary substance became the rest of reality that we experience. Then came this Parmenides guy.

What caught me, and subsequently threw me into a delightful philosophical giggle-fit, was directly related to how people thought back then. A word was essentially the thing that described it. It’s a very primitive way of thinking, but it completely rocked early thought when Parmenides pointed it out. The early Greeks never considered that a word might carry multiple meanings, even though they practiced it regularly every day. They might say, “I am cold,” or “She is hungry,” but according to how they thought, the verb “to be” meant “to exist.” Something that is, just was. Change meant that something had to become what it is not, which was against the definition of the word. According to language, then, something that was, couldn’t possibly become something else, because that would mean that it was no longer what it was and would disappear from existence. Parmenides then built his philosophy based on the idea that whatever the world was made of, was some sort of immovable, unchanging substance, and that everything that people think they see and hear is illusion.

This train of thought pretty much stopped cold any of the previous ideas simply because this guy introduced an abstraction into the mix and pointed out that previous thinkers were faulty simply because they were making assumptions about something that was fundamentally impossible according to their own words. He got them thinking of things without any external reference, which significantly changed the way thinking about things was done for a while, and was a real thorn in the side for up-and-coming thinkers in ancient Greece. They all had to contend with this issue in their work, because it was true. He was right, at least as far they knew. This authority (you could easily consider it a limitation, but not by their understanding) became something that molded other philosophers of that era; most notable was Plato.

The experience I had while working on this reminded me of something that a friend once told me about how early mathematicians discovered math. They had to start with nothing, working it all out in their own minds, from scratch. They searched with the only tools that they had at the time. And what’s notable about the Greeks is that they didn’t use scientific method and tools as we understand it today. So strange that these people were capable of building such detailed cities and fantastic architecture, and yet none of that skill was used to devise the tools necessary for accurate scientific observation. These early philosophers formed their ideas around, as Guthrie describes it:

temperament X experience X previous philosophies

The thinker working out their understanding of the world used only their feelings, their temperament, their observations of the external world, and the ideas of the other few who had come before them to build off of. And this all in a society dominated by religious tradition and mysticism.

Thinking of it under these terms gave me pause to enjoy it as a lesson still valuable to today.

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