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A Greek philosopher who lived more than two thousand years ago believed that philosophy had its origin in man’s sense of wonder. Man thought it was so astonishing to be alive that philosophical questions arose of their own accord.
We who live here are microscopic insects existing deep down in the rabbit’s fur. But philosophers are always trying to climb up the fine hairs of the fur in order to stare right into the magician’s eyes.
the only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder.
The aim of the early Greek philosophers was to find natural, rather than supernatural, explanations for natural processes.
We could say that the natural philosophers took the first step in the direction of scientific reasoning, thereby becoming the precursors of what was to become science.
A rationalist is someone who believes that human reason is the primary source of our knowledge of the world.
The Sophists had one characteristic in common with the natural philosophers: they were critical of the traditional mythology. But at the same time the Sophists rejected what they regarded as fruitless philosophical speculation. Their opinion was that although answers to philosophical questions may exist, man cannot know the truth about the riddles of nature and of the universe. In philosophy a view like this is called skepticism.
As you can imagine, the wandering Sophists created bitter wrangling in Athens by pointing out that there were no absolute norms for what was right or wrong.
By playing ignorant, Socrates forced the people he met to use their common sense. Socrates could feign ignorance – or pretend to be dumber than he was. We call this Socratic irony. This enabled him to continually expose the weaknesses in people’s thinking.
Socrates ‘called philosophy down from the sky and established her in the towns and introduced her into homes and forced her to investigate life, ethics, good and evil.’
A philosopher is therefore someone who recognizes that there is a lot he does not understand, and is troubled by it. In that sense, he is still wiser than all those who brag about their knowledge of things they know nothing about. ‘Wisest is she who knows she does not know,’ I said previously. Socrates himself said, ‘One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing.’
To Plato, the death of Socrates was a striking example of the conflict that can exist between society as it really is and the true or ideal society.
Plato’s point was that Democritus’ atoms never fashioned themselves into an ‘eledile’ or a ‘crocophant.’ This was what set his philosophical reflections going.
Plato’s point is that we can never have true knowledge of anything that is in a constant state of change. We can only have opinions about things that belong to the world of the senses, tangible things. We can only have true knowledge of things that can be understood with our reason.
You see the shadow of an animal. You think it may be a horse, but you are not quite sure. So you turn around and see the horse itself – which of course is infinitely more beautiful and sharper in outline than the blurred ‘horse-shadow.’ Plato believed similarly that all natural phenomena are merely shadows of the eternal forms or ideas.
The highest degree of reality, in Plato’s theory, was that which we think with our reason. It was equally apparent to Aristotle that the highest degree of reality is that which we perceive with our senses.
Aristotle pointed out that nothing exists in consciousness that has not first been experienced by the senses.
Aristotle did not deny that humans have innate reason. On the contrary, it is precisely reason, according to Aristotle, that is man’s most distinguishing characteristic. But our reason is completely empty until we have sensed something. So man has no innate ‘ideas.’
According to Aristotle, nonliving things can only change through external influence. Only living things have the potentiality for change.
Aristotle held that there are three forms of happiness. The first form of happiness is a life of pleasure and enjoyment. The second form of happiness is a life as a free and responsible citizen. The third form of happiness is a life as thinker and philosopher.
The term Hellenism refers to both the period of time and the Greek-dominated culture that prevailed in the three Hellenistic kingdoms of Macedonia, Syria, and Egypt.
As I have said, Hellenistic philosophy continued to work with the problems raised by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Common to them all was their desire to discover how mankind should best live and die. They were concerned with ethics. In the new civilization, this became the central philosophical project.
The Cynics emphasized that true happiness is not found in external advantages such as material luxury, political power, or good health. True happiness lies in not being dependent on such random and fleeting things. And because happiness does not consist in benefits of this kind, it is within everyone’s reach. Moreover, having once been attained, it can never be lost.
Epicurus emphasized that the pleasurable results of an action must always be weighed against its possible side effects. If you have ever binged on chocolate you know what I mean. If you haven’t, try this exercise: Take all your saved-up pocket money and buy two hundred crowns’ worth of chocolate. (We’ll assume you like chocolate.) It is essential to this exercise that you eat it all at one time. About half an hour later, when all that delicious chocolate is eaten, you will understand what Epicurus meant by side effects.
Epicurus summed up his liberating philosophy with what he called the four medicinal herbs: The gods are not to be feared. Death is nothing to worry about. Good is easy to attain. The fearful is easy to endure.
the most remarkable philosophic trend in the late Hellenistic period was first and foremost inspired by Plato’s philosophy. We therefore call it Neoplatonism.
A mystical experience is an experience of merging with God or the ‘cosmic spirit.’ Many religions emphasize the gulf between God and Creation, but the mystic experiences no such gulf. He or she has experienced being ‘one with God’ or ‘merging’ with Him.
Lastly, the Indo-Europeans had a cyclic view of history. This is the belief that history goes in circles, just like the seasons of the year. There is thus no beginning and no end to history, but there are different civilizations that rise and fall in an eternal interplay between birth and death.
To sum up: The children of Israel lived happily under King David. But later on when their situation deteriorated, their prophets began to proclaim that there would one day come a new king of the House of David. This ‘Messiah,’ or ‘Son of God,’ would ‘redeem’ the people, restore Israel to greatness, and found a ‘Kingdom of God.’
A few decades after the death of Jesus, Christian congregations were already established in all the important Greek and Roman cities – in Athens, in Rome, in Alexandria, in Ephesos, and in Corinth. In the space of three to four hundred years, the entire Hellenistic world had become Christian.
From the point of view of cultural history, it is interesting to note that the Arabs also took over the ancient Hellenistic city of Alexandria. Thus much of the old Greek science was inherited by the Arabs. All through the Middle Ages, the Arabs were predominant in sciences such as mathematics, chemistry, astronomy, and medicine. Nowadays we still use Arabic figures. In a number of areas Arabic culture was superior to Christian culture.’
The ideal became what we call the Renaissance man, a man of universal genius embracing all aspects of life, art, and science.
‘Are there two different forces working on the moon?’ ‘Exactly. Once upon a time when the solar system began, the moon was hurled outward – outward from the earth, that is – with tremendous force. This force will remain in effect forever because it moves in a vacuum without resistance …’ ‘But it is also attracted to the earth because of earth’s gravitational force, isn’t it?’ ‘Exactly. Both forces are constant, and both work simultaneously. Therefore the moon will continue to orbit the earth.’
All the planets travel in elliptical orbits round the sun as the result of two unequal movements: first, the rectilinear movement they had when the solar system was formed, and second, the movement toward the sun due to gravitation.’
One of the Baroque period’s favorite sayings was the Latin expression “carpe diem” – “seize the day.” Another Latin expression that was widely quoted was “memento mori,” which means “Remember that you must die.”
‘Everything was thus governed by the same unbreakable laws – or by the same mechanisms. It is therefore possible in principle to calculate every natural change with mathematical precision. And thus Newton completed what we call the mechanistic world view.’
Later on, the French mathematician Laplace expressed an extreme mechanistic view with this idea: If an intelligence at a given time had known the position of all particles of matter, “nothing would be unknown, and both future and past would lie open before their eyes.” The idea here was that everything that happens is predetermined. “It’s written in the stars” that something will happen. This view is called determinism.’
One can say without exaggeration that Descartes was the father of modern philosophy.
‘“When I consider this carefully, I find not a single property which with certainty separates the waking state from the dream,” writes Descartes. And he goes on: “How can you be certain that your whole life is not a dream?”’
We say that Descartes is a dualist, which means that he effects a sharp division between the reality of thought and extended reality. For example, only man has a mind. Animals belong completely to extended reality. Their living and moving are accomplished mechanically. Descartes considered an animal to be a kind of complicated automaton.
But let us pursue Spinoza’s own reasoning. His most important book was his Ethics Geometrically Demonstrated.’
‘And a rationalist is someone who believes strongly in the importance of reason.’ ‘That’s right, a rationalist believes in reason as the primary source of knowledge, and he may also believe that man has certain innate ideas that exist in the mind prior to all experience.
‘Hume begins by establishing that man has two different types of perceptions, namely impressions and ideas. By “impressions” he means the immediate sensation of external reality. By “ideas” he means the recollection of such impressions.’
Hume emphasizes that all the elements we put together in our ideas must at some time have entered the mind in the form of “simple impressions.” A person who has never seen gold will never be able to visualize streets of gold.’
‘So the feeling of having an unalterable ego is a false perception. The perception of the ego is in reality a long chain of simple impressions that you have never experienced simultaneously. It is “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed one another with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement,” as Hume expressed it. The mind is “a kind of theater, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, slide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.” Hume pointed out that we have no
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‘Hume would say that you have experienced a stone falling to the ground many times. But you have never experienced that it will always fall. It is usual to say that the stone falls to the ground because of the law of gravitation. But we have never experienced such a law. We have only experienced that things fall.’
‘Berkeley was of course thinking of God. He said that “we can moreover claim that the existence of God is far more clearly perceived than the existence of man.”’ ‘Is it not even certain that we exist?’ ‘Yes, and no. Everything we see and feel is “an effect of God’s power,” said Berkeley. For God is “intimately present in our consciousness, causing to exist for us the profusion of ideas and perceptions that we are constantly subject to.” The whole world around us and our whole life exist in God. He is the one cause of everything that exists. We exist only in the mind of God.’ ‘I am amazed, to
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‘I see now how he could think both the rationalists and the empiricists were right up to a point. The rationalists had almost forgotten the importance of experience, and the empiricists had shut their eyes to the way our own mind influences the way we see the world.’
‘So now let’s sum up. According to Kant, there are two elements that contribute to man’s knowledge of the world. One is the external conditions that we cannot know of before we have perceived them through the senses. We can call this the material of knowledge. The other is the internal conditions in man himself – such as the perception of events as happening in time and space and as processes conforming to an unbreakable law of causality. We can call this the form of knowledge.’
‘He also called these three stages of knowledge thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. You could, for example, say that Descartes’s rationalism was a thesis – which was contradicted by Hume’s empirical antithesis. But the contradiction, or the tension between two modes of thought, was resolved in Kant’s synthesis. Kant agreed with the rationalists in some things and with the empiricists in others. But the story doesn’t end with Kant. Kant’s synthesis now becomes the point of departure for another chain of reflections, or “triad.” Because a synthesis will also be contradicted by a new antithesis.’
