Heraclitus,Gods, and Comparisons

Reading Heraclitus in light of our conversations in class on comparing the different philosophers, I found a lot of stuff that corresponded with ideas from people we’ve read before, but also some odd new concepts that I didn’t really know what to do with.

His arche apparently is logos, or word, which continues the move towards abstraction that we’ve seen from the Milesians through Xenophanes to Pythagoras.  The idea of logos seems to correspond to Pythagoras’ concept of number as perfection; difference between humanities and sciences there! (jk)  Heraclitus does seem to add a level of nuance when he says that “although the logos is common, most people live as though they have their own private understanding” (B2).  This and other aphorisms show a level of reflection on human nature that we haven’t really seen before; Heraclitus discerns, correctly in my opinion, that everyone does have a personal driving force, but they don’t really try to make it accord with those of others.  Then there are people, as he says in B87, who will grab at whatever goal they hear of, moving on to the next when they get tired.

Heraclitus shares the thoughts of everyone we’ve read so far about the gods, in that he says they don’t live according to human life and understanding, and we shouldn’t presume to know them; “human nature has no insight, but divine nature has it” (B78).  He introduces a very odd idea, if I understand it correctly, in saying that “to god all things are beautiful and good and just, but humans have supposed some unjust and others unjust” (B102).  There are a number of ways to interpret this: perhaps he is arguing for a kind of voluntarism, where whatever the god thinks is right is right, or maybe he genuinely believes that nothing that happens is wrong.  I don’t believe we’ve encountered this idea before, and I’m interested to see what we make of it in class!

Pythagoras

Pythagoras is so different from the other philosophers we’ve read in class, I don’t really know how to analyze him!  We’ve talked about the arche, which for Pythagoras seems to have been numbers in some form. But does this mean mathematics, “the principles of all things that are” (58B4); numbers themselves, which are “naturally first among these” (58B4); the ten principles he lists, such as good, straight, and one; the tetractys, the perfect number; or something else?

Part of the difficulty, which the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry discusses, is that we can identify so little that Pythagoras actually said.  There are several different schools of Pythagorean thought, which denied the principles of the others.  In later times, many of his ideas were taken up and modified in order to give credibility to some philosopher (I think the Neo-Platonists did a lot of this).  And his original followers took him so seriously that they transformed him into some kind of god in their eyes.  After all, he did claim to have been given memory through all his soul’s incarnations by a god.

This seems to be one of the dangers of doing philosophy well, particularly in such a way that one gathers a school of influence.  Just like when Plato used Socrates’ voice to convey his own philosophy, Pythagoras seems to have been used to support many different ideas, with his own being somewhat lost in the confusion.  At least we can see his influence, which inspired many different philosophical trends for hundreds of years.

Xenophanes and Deity

What stood out to me from the Xenophanes reading was how he emphasized the subjectivity of human beliefs about gods; each people group claims to know the true gods, but their gods all look exactly like them.  Xenophanes speculates that “horses would draw figures of gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and each would render the bodies to be of the same frame that each of them have” (B15), and observes that “Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and dark, Thracians, that theirs are grey-eyed and red-haired” (B16).  Everyone imagines gods that look like they do–why would that be?  Perhaps because we want gods that can empathize with our experiences, or that we can empathize with.  Considering how hard we still find it to relate to people of different races, it would be even harder to worship gods who don’t look like us.

But we go even beyond assuming the gods look like us; we think they act like us too.  “Mortals suppose that the gods are born, have human clothing, and voice, and bodily form” (B14).  We attempt to rationalize all things to our experience, bringing the divine and unknowable down to something that looks just like us, even to our faults:  “both Homer and Hesiod have ascribed to the gods all deeds which among men are matters of reproach and blame: thieving, adultery, and deceiving one another.” (B11).  Humans are so limited within our own mindset that we can only conceive of gods as creatures as broken as ourselves; our attempt to create a standard of perfection falls apart as surely as our personal seeking for perfection does.

What about humanity is it, that we are so limited within our own point of view?  Empathy is emphasized so strongly, and yet we cannot conceive of a point of view outside our own. This reading, pagan as it is, made me think a lot about how my conception of God is broken by my own inability to see a viewpoint outside my own; thankfully, though, as Christians we are not left to our own discoveries, as B18 suggests; we have a revelation and a God that is goodness itself.

Sappho and First Principles

Today’s class discussion on first principles intrigued me, both as it relates to philosophy and as it relates to my own life.  Dr Schultz asked what our personal first principles were, and my initial instinct for my own was the first answer in the Westminster Shorter Catechism, “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever”, but I don’t actually know how I feel about that.  It depends on what I mean by first principle: if it’s my motivating force for the universe, then of course this isn’t the first principle.  The chief actor in this account is man, although the end goal is God.  God himself, I would argue as revealed in the Scriptures rather than arrived at from any inquiry of logic or rules of morality (as some medieval theologians imply), is the first principle in the sense of the first mover of the universe; Bonaventure’s Breviloquium is a great example of how God’s actions throughout human history are all motivated by his status as the first principle. But I digress.

On the other hand, if by first principle I mean the primary motivator for my own life, my telos as it were, then definitely “to glorify God and enjoy him forever” is my first principle. In this account, I exist as a unique entity with a role in the universe, which role should be completely subjected to the will and the honor of God and in so being brings him glory.  But I also am meant to take joy in God–his nature, his creation, and his revealed will.  This is what I try to live up to each day, although I always fail to some extent.

I don’t think the second account fits with any of the Milesians, but it might with Sappho.  She seems to find not only joy, but even purpose in her romances; take the lines:

” Some an army of horsemen, some an army on foot
and some say a fleet of ships is the loveliest sight
on this dark earth; but I say it is what-
ever you desire.”

The way she interprets this principle in relation to Helen of Troy implies that the “loveliest sight” is the thing that motivates one’s actions.  Lines in many of her poems also talk about the joy relates to one’s beloved, or conversely the pain of not seeing them.  The line also “Aphrodite asking . . . what in my wild heart I most wished to happen to me” also makes it seem like love is the most important principle of action.  Both delight and purpose are predicated on love, according to Sappho.

Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes

The way these philosophers’ work shared a lot of ideas with ‘modern’ science intrigued me a lot.  We tend to look back at the ancient world as though they had absolutely no clue how the world worked before the microscope was invented; ideas like the four elements seem rather ludicrous to us.  But just as the ancients divided everything based on what they could see into four types of things which probably all were really one thing, like Thales with water, we divide everything into 118 elements, made out of protons, neutrons, and electrons.  Just because we have a more precise understanding of the world, doesn’t mean there isn’t an infinity of facts beyond that, which we haven’t discovered yet.

Anaximander says something to the same effect as the laws of entropy and conservation of mass, positing that there is a necessity of justice which makes things return to their original state.  He argues that the earth is curved, although like a column rather than a ball; he has an argument for why the earth stays in place, based on its distance from everything, which looks a lot like ideas about gravity.  He even has an idea of evolution, claiming humans grew out of different animals, fish to be exact.  Anaximenes, likewise, says that hot and cold are created by things being diffused or condensed!  All these ideas, which we see as popularized by great scientists of the Enlightenment and afterwards, Anaximander was thinking about in the 500s BC.

It’s really humbling to discover that the ideas modern society claims as its own invention are, in different shapes, the same ideas people have been having for thousands of years.  We like to see ourselves as the culmination of all these years of human work and civilization, masters of everything the human race has discovered up to this point; but really, we’re still asking the same questions, just with more helpful machines.

Greek Poets

Today’s reading, an introduction to the philosophers by way of Hesiod and Homer, actually had a lot more to do with philosophy than I originally thought it would.  I chose Iliad XX and Odyssey XI, in addition to the Theogony selection.  Iliad XX is an account of the gods and warriors lining up for battle, and has a lot to say about the relationship of gods and men; Odyssey XI is Odysseus’ account of his journey to the underworld.

In class, we talked about what philosophy is and does, concluding that (among many other things) it tells us about human nature, our state both in life and after death; it seeks to answer the ‘big questions’, like “Is there a God?” and “Is God good?”; it addresses the nature and purpose of the universe–all things with which the ancient Greeks, both philosophers and poets, were eminently concerned.  Hesiod narrates the creation of the universe as the coming into being of various gods and goddesses, like Earth, Chaos, Eros, or Oceanus.  Nature is anthropomorphized into gods who procreate and bring the entire universe into being.  The introduction of the narrative emphasizes most the birth of the Muses, patron goddesses of the arts; by doing this, Hesiod implies that the highest function of man is to create art, through the patronage and blessing of the deities.

Homer in both books is skeptical at best towards the gods; in the Iliad, they are arbitrary and have absolutely no moral foundation, lining up to battle with each other on behalf of man, whereas in the Odyssey they at least seem to have some principles, in that their opposition to and vindictiveness towards humans is inspired by offenses, like Odysseus’ killing Polyphemus which makes Poseidon hate him.  Either way, Homer’s answer to the question of whether God/the gods are good is discouraging.  The best we can hope for is the detached observation Zeus does during the battle at Troy, since the other option is gods actively fighting against us.

I’m really interested to see the class discussion on these texts; it’s interesting that the precursors to philosophy still engaged the same questions, they just did it through the medium of story instead of rational inquiry.  Personally, I think both have different roles; story prompts us to question, to wonder whether this is how the real world works, but inquiry has less room for interpretation or partial assent.

Welcome

Hi everyone!  I’m Kaylie Page, a student in PHI 3310: Classical Philosophy at Baylor University.  I will be using this blog to write my responses to the readings and class discussions for the Spring semester of 2016.

I’m in this course because I want to be a theologian.  As several wise people have told me, philosophy is a very important thing to study in order to do theology well; philosophers make the best tools for thinking.  As such, they have a huge amount of impact on the way we see the world, and their ideas trickle down into society and persist for generations in some cases.  I want to think well and have influential ideas, so I intend to learn from the best!  In addition, the ancient philosophers like Plato and Aristotle and their influences were greatly revered by early and medieval theologians, and even many more contemporary writers (even though we no longer use Aristotelian metaphysics, unfortunately), which makes the philosophers very useful for my theological studies.  I’m even playing with the idea of writing my senior thesis (I’m a sophomore now) on how early Church writers used the thoughts of the philosophers and what kind of an impact, helpful or detrimental, those incorporations had on the Church and the development of theology.

Less in relation to my theological aspirations, I’m from Dayton, Ohio, I have nine younger siblings, and I lived all over the place growing up, since my dad was in the Air Force.  I am a member of Redeemer Presbyterian Church here in Waco, and I’m involved with Reformed University Fellowship on campus.  I love reading, for fun mostly fantasy novels with intricate plots, and for edification and school both recent and ancient theology.  I’m in the Cranes Scholars program, which has given me a lot of cause for thought in the past year about the relationship between the soul/mind/ratio and the body.  I’m coming down pretty solidly in favor of the body being a necessary and valuable part of our relationship to life and God, so I may have some issues with Plato 🙂

I’m excited to spend this semester with y’all!