Copyright 1995, 1997, 1999 by Tad Beckman, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA 91711
The physical beginning of human life as we know it was approximately 50,000 years ago. This was homo sapiens sapiens, anatomically indistinguishable from humans as we know them today. By this time, human-like life was widely spread out through the world, though the actual times of arrival of humans in Australia and the Americas remains a matter of investigation and debate. It seems established that humans inhabited Australia by 40,000 BP ("before present") and no one doubts that they inhabited the Americas by 12,000 BP; however, the Americas may have been colonized as early as 30,000 BP. The time of greatest relevance to human development throughout the world is 11,000 - 12,000 BP when the great glaciers of the Pleistocene were melting back and the world climate was changing, transforming flora and fauna and altering hunter-gatherer lifeways that had been established for thousands of years.
Over the next several thousand years humans around the world departed from the nomadic traditions of big-game hunting, based on the classic mammals of the Pleistocene, and adapted to an archaic hunter-gatherer life, based on smaller game animals and increased utilization of plants and their seeds. This adaptation was accompanied by development of more sophisticated tools to meet diverse needs; and while people continued to move about, their movement was systematic and aimed at harvesting resources as they became available with seasonal changes. In a very small but promising region of the Middle East, the so-called "fertile crescent," around 8500 B.C., this process of adaptation took a dramatic path toward agriculture and animal husbandry. One of the immediate consequences of this path of development was a movement to sedentary life, domestication.
It is important to realize that agriculture and its impact on social development was very limited geographically. In northern North America the archaic period of hunting and gathering lasted at least until around 2000 B.C. and, even then, it was replaced primarily by sedentary hunting and gathering cultures, made possible by developing specific food resources into staple food supplies. Cultures that established themselves in particularly fortuitous ecological niches during this period flourished, experienced more rapid technological change, and developed complex social institutions. In California, the Yurok and the Chumash are good examples. On the other hand, in southern North America (today's Mexico) and in Central America, incipient agriculture also began, without any contact with Europe, as early as 5000 B.C. and was well established by 1000 B.C. Here too agriculture led to domestication and its consequences, ultimately, literacy and metal working.
I have taken this world-wide point of view, because it is interesting to locate Greek culture within such a framework. The first we know of a distinctive "Greek" culture, in fact, is well within the very same timeframe, approximately 2200 B.C. This was the beginning of the Mycenaean culture which became substantial within one millennium, that is, from 2200 to 1200 B.C. In 2200 B.C., agriculture and copper working had already expanded beyond Greece though literacy was still confined to Iraq and Egypt. By 1800 B.C., bronze working had expanded beyond Greece; and by 1200 B.C., literacy had come. In 1200 B.C., however, the Mycenaean culture abruptly collapsed and the period from 1200 - 800 B.C. is seen as a "dark age" in which literacy and institutions suffered. When Greek culture re-emerged, around 800 B.C., it had changed in significant ways.
Like so many older cultures, the Greeks did not refer to themselves as "Greeks." The Mycenaeans apparently called themselves "Achaeans;" and later people called themselves "Hellenes." The word 'Greek,' actually 'Graeci,' was the Roman name for them. The Mycenaean ancestors of the Greeks were already somewhat differentiated from late archaic cultures of the rest of the world in at least three respects. First, the Mycenaeans were writing in a language now called Linear B by the height of their culture. Second, they were making tools of bronze. Third, they were fully adapted to agriculture and animal husbandry. During the four hundred years of cultural stagnation, iron working took the forefront in their technology.
As the Hellenes emerged from the dark period, they had changed in some basic and important ways. While Mycenaea had been oriented toward mainland people to the east, the Hellenes were based along the coasts and oriented toward the Mediterranean to their west and south. The sea was as important to them as agriculture, if not more so. In the next centuries, Greeks moved across the Mediterranean to colonize the coasts of Italy, to the west, and Turkey, to the east. The Greek language in its Classical form was emerging. What was known of the Mycenaeans had been retained through an oral tradition and, at the very end of the period, had been developed into epoch poems. These were written down in The Illiad and The Odyssey by an individual (or individuals) known to us as Homer. Through these great epoch poems we can see portions of Greek history; but more importantly, they show us the development of Greek institutions and values. This was literature that guided Greeks for centuries to come.
Over the next three hundred years, 800 to 500 B.C., Greek culture developed rapidly toward what came to be known as the Classical, or Golden, Age of Greece, the Fifth and Fourth Centuries. During this so-called archaic period, habits of economy and political organization took form. The Greeks preferred to live along the coasts and on many small islands; they lived off of a limited amount of agriculture and animal husbandry combined with fishing; and they lived in relatively small walled-in city states, which they called poli(pl. for polis). They had passed beyond the age of tribal war lords and into an age of landed aristocrats. It was these people (mostly men) who established social values and exercised political authority. As desirable land was saturated with city states, the Greeks colonized neighboring regions that could be reached by sea. Thus, by the Golden Age, the western coast of presentday Turkey and the southern coasts of presentday Italy were all colonized by Greeks and loosely bound into the Greek world.
Throughout the archaic period, written literature was virtually all poetry. This was the age of Hesiod, Archilochus, Alcaeus, Sappho, and Solon. And during this age the direction of poetry changed away from the heroic epochs toward lyrical and personal poetry. In a very important respect, what the Greeks found interesting was gradually shifting from the titanic and often mythic past toward the present age. All of this provided a substantial "text" on Greek economy, politics, social institutions, and ethics. And it was to this "text" that teachers of the early Golden Age, the so-called Sophists, made rhetorical reference when they instructed their young students. It was also in the questioning of this "text" that classic Greek philosophy was born.
The Golden Age is roughly bracketed by the Persian Wars, at the beginning (490 - 479 B.C.), and the death of Alexander the Great, at the end (323 B.C.). It was a period of considerable unity, focused as it was by their naval victory over the Persians and the leadership role of Athens in realizing this victory. Athens itself was becoming large and powerful; it was the largest of all the city states, around 250,000 people by 430 B.C. The discovery of extensive silver deposits nearby had conveyed great wealth upon Athenians, and people flocked to Athens from all over. This in turn placed Athens under significant stress as it diverged from the typical polis --- a model society that was supposed to be small, based on a self-sufficient economy of modest scale, and ruled by a forum of landed aristocrats, empowered by heredity. Faced with mounting tensions caused by rapid growth and alien influences, Athens also came into increasing tension with neighboring Sparta. By 431 B.C. the two were at war and the so-called Pelo- ponnesian Wars lasted until 404 B.C. Athens was never the same; indeed, Greece was never the same. The next quarter century launched the beginning of Hellenism, the spreading of Greek culture and authority throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East.
Athenian growing pains can well be seen as the context that created philosophy. Had Athens remained a small city state, after the Greek paradigm, philosophy might have had a very different origin. At any rate, as Athenian society became large and politically cumbersome, it became increasingly difficult to rely on a common reading of epics and poems and mythology as a self-consistent and informative social ethic. People began to challenge this traditional and aristocratic knowledge and began to challenge the very language in which traditional wisdom was captured. These specialists in argument (rhetoric) began to move into Athens from diverse parts of Greece and offered their services as teachers. They were called Sophists; and while Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle all attacked the Sophists on various grounds, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle all inherited the context of criticism and re-evaluation from the Sophists. Socrates participated in at least one of the late battles of the Persian Wars; Plato was a young man when Socrates died; and Aristotle, who studied with Plato for almost 25 years, died the year after Alexander the Great. Thus, these three philosophers spanned the Golden Age.
Proposedly, Western Civilization is based on these early starts into language, technology, and economy in Asia Minor and the Eastern Mediterranean. One should take this proposition with some reservation, however. While Alexander's Empire expanded Hellenism east and south, the world of the Mediterranean, by 300 A.D., was Roman. To the south it was Arab and to the east, Persian. While Hellenistic culture survived, it survived in its Roman and Arab forms. Memory of Greece was lost.
At first hand and to a modern reader, the plot of Oedipus Rex is simple, indeed, so simple as to become obscure. People, beginning with Jocasta and Laius and leading on to Oedipus himself, have responded to prophesies and have taken actions to avoid their fates, weaving a string of mistakes, almost comic in their complexity. It is Oedipus' destiny to unravel this string of mystery and discover his own true nature. Along the way, we are treated to razor-sharp ironies as Oedipus attempts to reason his way through the whole mess and speaks truths without knowing. Those who have eyes but are blind to reality become blinded; those who have no eyes are proved to be wise.
Nevertheless, tragedy was a passion for the Athenian (greater than baseball for an American), and this must make us wonder what it was that connected the Greek with tragedy in this powerful way. In order to experience Oedipus as a tragedy, we must find the roots of it that penetrated Athenian minds and souls. Tragedy as "theater" was NOT invested in surprise or mystery. Everyone knew the Oedipus story. The theatrical experience of tragedy was an experience of participation --- locating the issues in oneself and watching the whole run its course through oneself, participating in the catharsis, personally.
What WERE the issues that struck this close to Athenians? As a start, at least, I shall suggest the following four: the world order, lineage, knowledge, and deliberate action. Each of these needs amplification.
What is the world order? What is reality? To the Greeks, it was still a natural world in which human life was an integral part; the Greeks did not have the Christian concept of a "special creation," separating human life from the rest of reality. Thus, the Greeks still saw their destiny as integral with the processes of nature and that nature possesses an order. There is nothing surprising in the Greek mind for crops to be failing and animals dying in a situation where the natural order of things has been disrupted. Nor is there anything surprising about prophets being able to read facts about reality through disection of birds. The entire Oedipus story is about a dramatic situation in which the world order has been upset; and human lives are wrecked in this situation, almost like sailors in stormy seas.
Why should lineage matter? Well, to begin, lineage is a fundamental aspect of both the natural order and the human social order within it. One must know one's lineage and everything in the human world hangs on that. Certainly this was a major issue for the Greek male since the right to participate in ruling the polis was a matter of heredity in land holding. Yet, who actually knows who his father was? At the very core of strength lies a seed of insecurity. In Oedipus' situation, the fact that he thinks he knows his father but is wrong leads him into unthinkable disasters. Lineage is not only confused for Oedipus himself, but his actions lead him to destroy lineage. His children are fatherless because their "father" is really their brother. Equally, he has killed the father and taken the mother on which his own lineage rests.
Then, there is the whole question of knowledge and how we can know anything. The blind see and the seeing are really blind. Knowledge is not what it appears to be. Oedipus drives himself into progressively worse states of affairs by continuing to trust in his own worldly brilliance (that same brilliance which, as a young man, solved the riddle of the Sphinx) and continues to ignore the fact that there are dark secrets around him. The central dynamic force of this play revolves around the human's perennial ignorance of what matters in the world most. In some respects, Oedipus is the paradigm "sophomore," or "wise fool." His worldly brilliance has caused him to lose sight of the world order in its deeper, and more complex, sense. [NOTE: He has demonstrated this brilliance in his answer to the riddle posed by the Sphinx, the terrible beast that is killing young Thebans who pass. The ironic answer to the riddle (What walks with four legs in the morning, two legs in the midday, and three legs in the evening?) is "man."] He impulsively reasons in a cosmopolitan world, showing little imagination for the underlying realities.
And finally, the play demonstrates human action. The Athenian came to see Oedipus act as ruler --- exercise intelligence, deliberation, and rationality --- even in the dire situation where his own rational virtues will collide with his fate and reality.
What, then, is tragic about this? First of all, in the Greek's mind, Oedipus is a great person --- a king's son, a brilliant young man, and a tested ruler. And by the end of the action, he is an outcast, utterly destroyed. Second, while it may seem that this disaster is a simple act of fate, its tragic content lies in the ways that Oedipus himself enters into the dynamic energy of destruction. For the Greek, tragedy lay in a peculiar recognition of the complexity of life. To say that all Greek tragedy follows a simple model of hubris, or over-weening pride, is to miss the greater point, pride-in-what? It is primarily the way great characters take pride in human constructs --- in rationality, in social institutions, in law --- that leads them to the downfall of fate. For fate, when it doesn't receive due consideration, has a way of bending around from behind and destroying people. Perhaps Nietzsche was right; Greek tragedy was a special way through which the Greek reminded himself about the world's dark features and managed to keep in check the sophomoric optimism that accompanies human creations.
In the play Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus finally goes to his death. It is a sorry sight. Oedipus is accompanied by his daughter Antigone; he is blind and tattered and old. He has been exiled from his homeland, Thebes, by its king, his own eldest son, Polynices. Set adrift in the world, he has made his way toward Athens and, now, finds himself at that city's northern outskirts, the town of Colonus.
The action in this play is quite different from that in Oedipus Rex. While all of Oedipus' energies formerly went toward uncovering the truth of what had befallen him and the House of Thebes, in this play his energies go toward resolution and reconciliation. The young Oedipus (like his father Laius before him) had acted against prophesy and had fled what he thought to be his home in order to prevent prophesy from being realized, only to fall directly into its web. The aged Oedipus, now instructed by prophesies that his daughter Ismene brings to him, is seeking a life in union with the prophetic. Indeed, when Oedipus confronts his son Polynices, the curse that he delivers is no mere curse-in-anger but smacks of prophesy itself. Oedipus has found union with the whole tragic scope of life, and he no longer fights against it.
In the end, Oedipus' grave will follow a Greek tradition in which a secret grave becomes the center of a cult and the grave of a native, outside of native land, becomes a curse to the armies of that land. Thus, Oedipus dies in anticipation that, at some time in the future, Thebes will war on Athens but that Oedipus' secret grave will protect Athens from their assault. At last, Oedipus finds some resolution and restored coherence in his life. Meanwhile, the play is an opportunity for Sophocles to exhibit what is good and right in Athens through the figure of their king, Theseus, whose treatment of Oedipus is humane and responsible.
In Antigone we see similar themes. Creon acts as the political leader of Thebes. But are Creon's actions wise? He sees himself defending the city and reminds us that, without the city, the Greek has no society of men --- no friendship, no enterprise, no wealth, etc. But, in his passion for political leadership, Creon oversteps the authentic realm of the polis and intrudes into the natural order of things. The situation is destined to tug powerfully at the Athenian audience because both the polis and the natural order are recognized as essential and are herein brought into direct conflict with each other.
Antigone is also revealing of Athenian gender relations. Antigone herself is trapped into the tragic action since, first, the obligation of giving last rites belongs to the female family members and, second, her own family has been so devastated that she alone is left to perform the rites. But this also suggests that the burdens of the natural order are more resident in the female Greeks; and Creon's speech to Haemon, in his critical remarks about Antigone and women in general, makes it clear that the rational political world of Greek males has disdain for the irrational naturalistic world of the Greek females. This too is an element of tension for the Athenian audience.
On line 825, Creon says, "What? The city is the king's --- that's the law!" But this is precisely the question, and it's a question that continues to endure today. As humans create political society within a natural world, they must decide upon the relation between their crafted civil rights and laws and the natural rights and laws in which political society is embedded. The state must live in harmony with nature; no state can long survive that tries to guide its citizens along an unnatural path. The basis of rule is justice and wisdom, but these are not simple fabrications of men. Justice and wisdom lie at the foundation of human life, when women and men, both, make contributions. The human cannot dictate justice alone, least of all a king. At best, perhaps, the human can serve these principles.
Again, if the tragic theme is over-weening pride, or hubris, it is a rational human pride that narrowly conceives the world and ignores the true sources of knowledge. Death, like birth, is a mystery; it is something that we live within and not something that we orchestrate as a part of the lives we fabricate. Therefore, we cannot use birth and death for our own devices but, rather, encounter them within their mysterious realities.
"We shall have gained much for the science of aesthetics, once we perceive not merely by logical inference, but with the immediate certainty of vision, that the continuous development of art is bound up with the Apollinian and Dionysian duality --- just as procreation depends on the duality of the sexes, involving perpetual strife with only periodically intervening reconciliations. . . Through Apollo and Dionysus, the two art deities of the Greeks, we come to recognize that in the Greek world there existed a tremendous opposition, in origin and aims, between the Apollinian art of sculpture, and the nonimagistic, Dionysian art of music."
"The beautiful illusion of the dream worlds, in the creation of which every man is truly an artist, is the prerequisite of all plastic art, and, as we shall see, of an important part of poetry also. . . This joyous necessity of the dream experience has been embodied by the Greeks in their Apollo . . . the god of all plastic energies." Through Apollo, Nietzsche said, the Greeks embraced the very "principle of individuation," celebrating individual creative genius. But Dionysus celebrates the unconscious processes of natural fertility and the collective withdrawal from individuation into intoxication and sensuality. "Either under the influence of the narcotic draught, of which the songs of all primitive men and peoples speak, or with the potent coming of spring that penetrates all nature with joy, these Dionysian emotions awake, and as they grow in intensity everything subjective vanishes into complete self-forgetfulness. . . Under the charm of Dionysus not only is the union between man and man reaffirmed, but nature which has become alienated, hostile, or subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her lost son, man."
Regarding the chorus of satyrs, Nietzsche wrote: ". . . the satyr, the fictitious natural being (mythically the companions of Dionysus), bears the same relation to the man of culture that Dionysian music bears to civilization. . . The Greek man of culture felt himself nullified in the presence of the satyric chorus; and this is the most immediate effect of the Dionysian tragedy, that the state and society and, quite generally, the gulfs between man and man give way to an overwhelming feeling of unity leading back to the very heart of nature. The metaphysical comfort --- that life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearances, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable --- this comfort appears in incarnate clarity in the chorus of satyrs, a chorus of natural beings who live ineradicably, as it were, behind all civilization and remain eternally the same, despite the changes of generations and the history of nations."
In seeking to discover the origins of philosophy in the developing Greek world, we have to begin by asking what it is that we will call "philosophy." The word itself is a Greek word --- 'sophia' meaning wisdom and 'philo' meaning the familial sort of love. The question, of course, is how do we show our love of wisdom and what is it that we look back upon to identify the beginning of this activity of wisdom loving. The Sophists argued that traditional Greek wisdom was flawed in significant ways and taught students how to become cunning in their use of words. As we will see, later, the Sophists taught rhetoric. But Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle all held, in their different ways, that wisdom and cunning are not the same. So even if tradition cannot be relied upon indefinitely, we should not be too hasty in throwing it away. Perhaps the philosophical puzzle is to find new and more sophisticated ways (our word comes from the Sophists!) of understanding what wisdom this tradition tried to express. At any rate, what these men struggled with was the problem of re-defining civic life in a society that had lost its traditional basis by growing away from its roots too fast --- an amazingly timely undertaking for us as well as for them.
In saying this, however, we are getting well ahead of the story. The rise of philosophy (evidently in the sense of wisdom loving) is dated more than a century before the birth of Socrates, in 470 BC, and is distant from Athens --- then a relatively small polis. To understand the geography of early Greek philosophy, one should look at the map and take note of the fact that the Greek world of this period centered around water rather than land. Important Greek poli were arranged around the rim of the Aegean Sea, which included what we now call Turkey as well as contemporary Greece. Indeed, the poli located along the eastern side of this rim were more likely to be exposed to diverse ideas and, hence, to question traditions. This was for the obvious reason that travel between North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe passed reasonably close. In contrast, Greece itself, along the western side of the rim, was relatively isolated. The earliest philosophers were three men --- Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes --- who lived in Miletos (on the western coast of presentday Turkey) from about 600 to 540 B.C. Aristotle himself recognized the origin of philosophy in the thinking of these men; but why, we must ask, was their thinking different from whatever had preceded them?
When we look backward in time, what we see is literature, beginning as oral narratives and continuing through written works, mostly poetry and song. A portion of this literature distinguishes itself as presenting visions of the world, human life, and proper behavior. We call these myths (their systematic arrangement, mythology). We also see ritual practices which we associate with religion as we know it. Religion was usually sustained by myths; and if religion was sufficiently powerful and institutionalized, it sanctioned the particular mythic tradition on which it was based. In this historical setting, the beginning of philosophy is suggested as the separation of "rational discourse" from merely traditional storytelling. In this sense, wisdom is viewed as "discriminating" the believable from the fantastic. But, while this distinction may seem quite natural to us, it is clearly problematic because it openly begs the question On what basis should we believe one thing over another? In this respect, we could easily assume that philosophy was merely another religion, giving sanction to its own selection of mythic materials. This, however, was not the case; and herein lies the tension between philosophy and religion that lasts through our own age. The early philosophers did not personally sanction myths nor did they suggest ritual behaviors. Instead, they claimed that certain ideas were sanctioned by something else, objective and universal rather than subjective and individual. For the Milesians, the sanctioning authority was clearly whatever we could observe in the world around us. It is easy to imagine that they were led in this direction of thinking by exposure to Babylonian science (mathematics and astronomy) brought northward through Turkey by various travelers. This seems to be borne out by the report that Thales predicted the solar eclipse of 585 BC.
We know none of these thinkers through actual writings that have survived into the present; sometimes it is not even clear that original writings were ever available. Early philosophers were either quoted by contemporary authors or their original works were read by later authors who quoted them or summarized their thinking. We rarely know the titles or authorship of these primary works; the works that we know more clearly are primarily dated in the first several centuries AD --- up to five centuries after the fact! Even when we know the title of an important source prior to this period, the work itself is lost. It is impossible to check for accuracy. To further complicate the situation, philosophers were often sited in the framework of someone's developing thought, hence, with either a critical or supportive purpose in mind and making the accuracy of the material suspect. Having said all of this, we have to proceed as well as we can on the fragmentary record as it stands. This record was put into its contemporary form by Hermann Diels, in Berlin, in 1879.
A tribute to the importance of early Milesian thinking lies in the fact that Xenophanes and Pythagoras, two of the most important philosophers of the period, were born in Colophon and Samos, respectively, both close to Miletos. Xenophanes and Pythagoras were both born around 570 BC; and both immigrated to the west (as far as southern Italy) as a consequence of the Persian invasion of western Turkey and the political regimes that followed (545-530 BC). Both thinkers carried away strong elements of the Milesians; though Xenophanes concentrated on their cosmologies and Pythagoras concentrated on mathematics. As we will see, Plato was strongly influenced by Pythagoras, who taught the soul's immortality and its preservation via transmigration between animal and human forms. Pythagoras supposedly remembered everything from his ten-to-twenty previous lives. Also of importance to Plato, later, Pythagoras taught that numbers are supremely important, indeed, the basis of all things. It is easy to view the community surrounding Pythagoras as a religious cult caught up in the mysticism of numbers and geometrical figures. An example of this is the number 10 which is the sum of the first four numbers (1, 2, 3, and 4) which, if represented by dots, make up a perfect equilateral triangle with four dots on each side, surrounding a single central dot, the number one being a unique number, as they understood it, neither odd nor even.
Born somewhat later (around 540 BC) in Ephesos (also very near to Miletos), Heraclitus presents us with a very different and important direction in philosophical thinking. What we know about Heraclitus comes from authors of the third century AD --- a biography written by Diogenes Laertius (ca. 200-250 AD) and fragments of original writings by Heraclitus himself, preserved by Clement of Alexander and Hippolytus of Rome, around 200 AD. There are 125 fragments in all. While it is clear that these men had the original work(s) of Heraclitus in hand, what is entirely unclear is whether the fragments were abstracted from a longer and more literary piece or whether they were aphorisms as such. Furthermore, if they were aphorisms, their original order and intent has been lost. Since various authors have attempted to place the fragments in an ordering that made sense to them, reference to them by number is a little precarious.
Both the biography and the fragments give us a picture of Heraclitus. He was born into an aristocratic family, was well educated, and remained aristocratic himself, perhaps to the degree of exhibiting a haughty, better-than-thou persona to the world. He seems to have remained in Ephesos, to have been misanthropic, and to have died around 480 BC. He was a critic of both Xenophanes and Pythagoras. His tendency toward relatively brief and densely meaningful proclamations earned him the reputation of being "the obscure one" among his contemporaries. Even in his time, however, these proclamations were seen as well worthy of interpretation and understanding.
What distinguishes Heraclitus from his predecessors is the focus of his attention. Heraclitus witnesses human experience; he is primarily interested in the question what it is to be a human being, especially a wise human being. In this respect, he departs dramatically from the Milesian possession with cosmology. World view is important; but more important yet is what world view does to us in shaping our lives.
Like the Milesians before him, Heraclitus is an empiricist; he believes in the authority of what we can actually see and hear with our own senses. In fact, he says that sight is preeminent. Nevertheless, he also believes that what we can know through the senses is foolish if not brought into the understanding. Wisdom is the point, not merely knowing many individual things. "Those who hear without the power to understand are like deaf men." "God," "Logos," and "Truth" are all expressions that Heraclitus uses with reference to the wisdom-ideal, meaning the ultimate reality, power, and understanding of the world. The human can only seek toward these but can never comprehend them completely.
The truth about the world and life that most distinguishes the teachings of Heraclitus is the unity (oneness) of oppositions. Everything that exists changes continually as it is shaped and re-shaped by opposites. "You could not step twice in the same rivers; for the other and yet other waters are ever flowing on." But there is also a sense in which the oppositions are always united in something. "In the same rivers we step and we do not step; we are and we are not." The essential nature of a thing is change as orchestrated by the opposites that participate in it. Birth and death unite in man, and both are present throughout --- equally, hunger and satiety, disease and health, weakness and strength, sorrow and joyfulness, etc. The attempt to idealize man as all the positives --- satisfied, healthy, strong, joyful, in short "alive" --- is foolish because these cannot exist without the play of their opposites. Heraclitus illustrates his concept by reference to the fact that the bow is a lethal weapon only when the string and the wood are bent in opposition. The lyre develops harmonious chords only when the strings are drawn tight.
In human society, Heraclitus sees no virtue in peace only. Society, like men, can develop its essence only through strife, through oppositions. Men must be tested in war. Justice lies in laws that have to be tested in application. Truth lies in this unity of oppositions, not in one universal order. As we will see, Plato fought hard to sustain a position quite opposite to that of Heraclitus.
A contemporary of Heraclitus, born in about 540 BC also, is Parmenides. But Parmenides was born in Elea, a very different world, on the far (western) side of Italy. What remains of Parmenides' writing is a poetic piece "On Nature" which may have been written as late as 475 BC. This piece contains three parts --- an introduction, "The Way of Objectivity," and "The Way of Subjectivity." The introduction colorfully describes Parmenides himself being conveyed by divine chariot to "the gates of the paths of Night and Day" --- hence, to the very boundary of everyday experience. He is met there by the goddess Dike (the goddess of justice and right) who informs him about objective truth (aletheia) and the subjective ruminations of men (doxa). This achieves two ends. First, the divine images suggest that this is revelation --- that is, profound and unquestionable knowledge. Second, the image of passing through the gate suggests that we are passing beyond the limits of human perception to knowledge that lies beyond experience.
Parmenides goes well beyond those who preceded him and addresses "being" itself. Those who preceded him were empiricists; that is, they asked questions that we can ask from the position of experiencing the world. With his divine guides, Parmenides declares truths about that which is, being. In particular, Parmenides tells us that whatever is, in other words, has "being," is complete, permanent, and unchanging. Whatever is not, in other words, the antithesis of being, cannot even be thought. That which is could not have become what it is because it could only have come out of that which is not and that cannot even be thought. Hence, being is immortal, unchanging, and complete as it is. We will see this concept of being emerge again in Plato. The contrast between Heraclitus and Parmenides is essential to an understanding of all later philosophical thought.
Heraclitus and Parmenides both stress the logos, that is, the search for truths that stand beyond as opposed to mere knowledge of experience. Where they differ is that Heraclitus stops at understanding the principles at play in the experienced world of flux; Parmenides reaches beyond into the permanent realm of beings on which all experience is based. Knowledge as certainty can only be based on being. In the second part of "On Nature," Parmenides suggests the fate of "knowledge" when entirely contained in worldly experience. The text here is considerably more obscure and its intent is open to debate. One point of view suggests that he is merely pointing out the difference in modes of knowing; the other suggests that he is condemning experiential, worldly "knowing" as false opinion. Parmenides' position is problematic, nevertheless, since it opens (perhaps never to be closed) the whole question of how we can know being if not through experience itself. For the poem, the answer is clearly divine revelation; we will see, later, Plato's solution.
Somewhat younger, Empedocles was born in Acragas (Sicily) in approximately 500 BC. Empedocles also authored a poem called "On Nature" as well as one called "Purifications." Unfortunately, the two works seem to contradict each other in significant ways and little is known about their relationship.
Empedocles is important in the fact that he accepts the ultimate, imperishable status of being, a la Parmenides, but asserts, more like Heraclitus, that we can attain knowledge about being through sense experience. Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the Atomists, Leucippus and Democritus, all begin development of the basic point of view of physical science -- that careful study of the experienced world will reveal knowledge of the imperishable beings that underlie it. It is Empedocles who suggests that there are only four ultimate beings -- earth, air, fire, and water -- and that everything we experience is made up of these beings in diverse mixtures. The binding energies of the beings are Love and Strife. He even went so far as to suggest a theory of perception, based on the idea that "like perceives like." When the like mixture of elements occurs in the perceiving organ, the object is correctly perceived.
Finley, M. I. The Ancient Greeks (Penguin, 1963); "Notes" by Bernard Knox in Fagles, Robert (trans). Sophocles: The Three Theban Plays (Penguin, 1982); Barnes, Jonathan. Early Greek Philosophy (Penguin, 1987); Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy (Vintage, 1967); Ricken, Frido. Philosophy of the Ancients (University of Notre Dame Press, 1991); Robinson, T. M. Heraclitus: Fragments University of Toronto Press, 1987); and Gallop, David. Parmenides of Elea: Fragments (University of Toronto Press, 1984).