Ancient & modern
LAST week in The Spectator, Anthony Gottlieb defended modern philosophers from attacks by dim journalists. At least ancient philosophers could have defended themselves by arguing that they were trying to be useful.
The earliest philosophers, known as the pre-Socratics, debated what the world was made of and how it came to be as it was. They established the cardinal rules of philosophical debate — that the world was rationally constructed and could therefore be understood by the use of reason and argument from hypotheses, and that supernatural explanations for the phenomena under discussion were not allowed. Socrates (469-399 Bc) realigned the whole nature of the debate with his insistence that the purpose of philosophy was to instil human wisdom — wisdom, in other words, about the best way to lead one's life. For Socrates, the questions to which one should seek an answer were, for example, 'What is happiness?' and 'What is goodness?', not 'What is the sun made of?' From now on, philosophy would concern itself centrally with the question of what the good life was and how its adherents could pursue it.
But the physical questions would not go away, for the simple reason that the ancients thought 'holistically' about philosophy. That is, they thought there was a crucial connection between the way the world was constructed and the best way to live (pre-Socratic thinkers, in fact, had begun this train of thought, in a small way).
Thus, for example, Stoic thinkers argued that all reality was material, including God, and that God was mixed with the matter of the universe, most meaningfully, as far as we are concerned, in our souls, the part of us that shares in the divine pneuma or spirit. Since reason, logos, was the highest faculty to which man could aspire, God must be rational, and so the universe, infused as it is with God, must be rational too. Consequently, the purpose of life must be to exercise the reasoning faculty so as to align our soul as closely as possible with the divine.
This raised all sorts of problems, e.g. how the irrational could exist in such a universe, but also had important consequences in encouraging the view (as Cicero said) that 'the world is a common home of gods and men', all sharing in the divine pneuma. From such a belief, concepts such as world-citizenship and the law of nations developed. Time to restore the ancient link between cosmology and ethics?
Peter Jones
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