Pushing the Reset Button

Strikes me that one symptom of a major change in culture—from a religious age to a secular—is that thinkers of the era find it necessary to start at the beginning again. This occurred to me while reading that absolutely delightful book, Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes. I’m not done yet, but the early chapters have all the charm of a precocious child explaining what the world is all about in plain English, as it were, sometimes pointing out the cumbersome nonsense that the adults have said, and how befuddled they’d become. That bright-child image is there, for me, despite the fact that Hobbes was 62-63 as he was penning those lines. He is a contemporary of Descartes who, a little earlier, had done the same sort of thing by discovering that he is because he thinks. If my reading of the stages of Greek civilization are more or less correct, then Aristotle made his monumental effort to explain all things known, starting with the basics, as it were, at the same stage of that culture that Hobbes and Descartes occupied in ours. Going the other way, from a secular age to the religious, has a quite different character—largely hidden from view by vast clouds of chaos that surround the decline and fall of the secular.

In Praise of Timelines

Speaking of orienting oneself in time, I’ve become quite fond of well-constructed timelines, certainly reading them—but above all in the value of “rolling your own.” Making a timeline makes you keenly aware of how things are related and in the linear fashion. And the very activity tends to force a look at the context in which a particular subject evolves.

I’ll give a brief example here of a Greek timeline of a mere 146 years. It embraces the best known core of Greek philosophical work—but seen in its own context.

469	Socrates is born
460	Thucydides is born.
446	Aristophanes (the playwright) is born.
431	Peloponnesian War breaks out, in effect Athens (and allies) against Sparta (and allies). It will lasts for 27 years. In the Greek context it is a kind of World War in two phases.
427	Plato is born.
399	Socrates dies.
395	Corinthian War (Sparta against coalition of Thebes, Athens, Corinth, and Argos) breaks out, the second half of the Peloponnesian.
387	Corinthian War ends when Persia enters on Sparta’s side and saves its hide.
386	Aristophanes dies.
404	Peloponnesian War ends, largely because the Sparta’s ally, Persia, provides decisive aid. Persia is the Big Power in that time and region.
400	Thucydides dies.
387	Plato founds the Academy at his prime, aged 40.
384	Aristotle is born.
360	Philip becomes king of Macedon, and the expansion of that realm begins.
356	Alexander (later the Great) is born; he is the son of Philip.
357	Outbreak of the Social War, a conflict between Athens and parts of its alliance—Chios, Rhodes, Kos, and Byzantion—provoked by Athens’ demanding ways.
355	Social War ends. Athens is forced to give the rebels their independence, in part due to Persian pressures.
343	Aristotle becomes Alexander’s tutor and does the job for three years.
347	Plato dies at 82.
338	Athens loses its independence as Macedon extends its sway and comes to control all of Greece.
336	Philip of Macedon is assassinated. Alexander becomes king at 20, but he is already a genuine veteran of the wars of Macedonian expansion.
322	Aristotle dies at 62.
334	Alexander invades Persia (turn-around is fair play) by crossing the Hellespont (read Dardanelles) and the conquest of Persia is on.
323	Alexander dies in Babylon (make that Iraq, where else?) and the Hellenistic age begins.

As I’ve noted in an earlier post, this sort of thing is oddly informative. Reading Thucydides is like reading a modern author. The view point, the realism, the whole approach is modern. So are the conflicts that give this period its defining framework. The first date is that of Socrates’ birth, representing a kind of maturation of another age and time. Aristotle dies toward the end, himself a perfectly modern sort of thinker. And the last figure to pass is the man who produced the environment of an earlier modernity—the Hellenistic age.

Since of late I’ve been concerned with mathematics, I would here note where Pythagoras fits into this timeline. He came before Socrates, born 570 BC and died 495. That should please mathematicians—who like to think themselves foundational.

Here Comes the Judge

Stop eatin’ that fudge
’Cause here comes the judge
        [Shorty Long, 1968]

Herewith an example of how memories are evoked. A while back a post on Siris (“American Aristocracy”) pleased Brigitte (link). She discovered that Aristotle had advocated choosing leaders by lot. Now it so happens that we’d discussed that method ourselves quite a while back. In the process we’d elaborated the idea into a practical shape, speculated on its possible consequences, and found this approach to politics pregnant with possibilities. Neither of us had ever read Aristotle’s Politics, hence we didn’t know that this idea had such an eminent provenance. Fine. But how do we get to the judge?

Well, we talked about the subject again yesterday, reviewing various parallels. This triggered memories of the three occasions on which I’d served on a jury, twice in Minnesota, once here in Wayne County. Public service by lot, you might say—the servants selected from a “qualified pool”—exists in miniature in the justice system. My own experiences have been altogether positive. I discovered that the people I served with were a genuinely random selection, a tiny but representative slice of society, and—in the jury room, considering another fellow human’s fate—remarkably serious, responsible, and adult in approach. We’re getting warmer, right?

Now it so happens that, my first time ever, long before I’d been selected for a jury, I was sitting with perhaps fifty other people in a huge room engaged in total passivity, the usual fate of the still unemployed juror. Reading, of course. A group approached me, two men, a woman; the men hung back, the woman did the talking; men always leave this sort of thing to ladies. The three were part of a film crew engaged by the Hennepin County justice system to make a film intended for the “briefing and education” of future juries. Scenes from an entire fictitious trial would be filmed and used for demonstration. Now this team was, as it were, choosing characters for different roles. I had a beard, the beard already grey. They wondered if I'd volunteer to play the judge… Before I could even react, the lady assured me that this would be done “right now, while you'd just be sitting around.” I laughed. I agreed. In consequence, about half an hour later, dressed in the robes of a judge now, in an unused jury room, I saw the judge’s tall podium and lectern from close up, saw the kinds of things that typically hide under the ledges there, and went through my paces. The team must have guessed that beyond looking like a judge, I was also a genuine ham. Some hours later it was all over.

Months passed. Then, one evening, Brigitte came home one afternoon after an outing. She was beaming from amusement. She packaged her story neatly so that I had to wait a bit for the punch line. Evidently she'd run across a casual acquaintance of ours and had fallen into a conversation. Along the line, not at first by any means, the lady friend said to her, “You know, Brigitte, I didn’t know that your husband is a judge. Why didn’t you ever tell me?” It appears that the lady had been on jury duty and, at the outset, she’d seen an introductory film where, my God, the husband of a friend of hers was up there in black explaining the law…

More months passed, and I was called to jury duty once again. This happened to be a most inconvenient time. I was surprised and irritated to be called again so soon after serving. And yes, I saw it too, that film. There I was. Of course we sat in darkness while the images were on the screen. And after the lights came up, I was a little disappointed that not a single person noticed that me, myself, and I, yes, I had been the judge on the screen. Then I remembered that after a certain age, younger people don’t see you any more. But, getting on in years, I hadn’t lost my initiative. I marched straight to the administrative offices and demanded that I should be released from jury duty for good cause. “And the cause is?” I was asked. I explained that for the last year and a half, every working day, I’d been serving this institution voluntarily. “Served how?” I was asked. I explained, again, that my handsome, bearded features were teaching prospective jurors what a judge looks like and how you must address him. This caused mild amusement for the staff, but I was told that service of that kind did not qualify as cause for a release. So I went back to the big room and sat down to read again. I’ve got a rich résumé…

Picking up a Chronometer

One of the most striking features of Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War is how modern that account sounds to our ears. That war—I think of it as akin to our own world war—took place 431-404 BC, and Thucidides wrote his history in the waning years of the fourth century BC. He died in 400 at age of 60. Now unless one’s college studies are still as fresh as a daisy—and assuming that one actually had a course on Greek history detailed enough to look at this period closely, the clash between Athens and Sparta is one thing, and philosophy quite another; the ordinary modern mind does not link the two. We have pictures of Socrates surrounded by disciples suspended in a kind of philosophical fairy land; and there is Aristotle filling thick volumes. The linkage between history and philosophy is a little vague in most minds except those of experts. To make some links, I thought I’d take a look.

The Peloponnesian war had been underway two years when a woman called Perictione gave birth to a little baby boy (427). She and her husband, Ariston, named him Plato—and you can be sure they discussed it and agreed, because this was a decidedly upper class family. Ariston traced his lines of descent back to two kings; and Perictione traced hers back to the famed lawyer and poet Solon. At this time the man who would later become little Plato’s teacher, a man called Socrates, had just turned 40. That war took quite a while to end; it lasted 27 years. Plato was a young man of 25 when it finally wound down. And Thucydides was 56. It was twenty years after this—and another war, the Corinthian, was still raging—when Aristotle first cried out as a baby after being born in 384 BC. Plato was then 45; baby Aristotle had become a man of 37 when Plato died at the ripe old age of 82 in 347 BC. And in that year a major future political and military figure, Alexander, later dubbed The Great, was just a boy of nine. Aristotle would soon be engaged to be his teacher.

Sometimes it is worth consciously pondering that all these famous people were once babies and had to have their nappies changed.

I link these people chronologically here by way of underlining that the philosophical works we place at the core of Western civilization emerged in a political, technological, and militarily advanced stage of Greek civilization, as documented in Thucydides' work. And this age had a tendency, a direction—thus toward the expansive, the materialistic. It was a culturally modern time, the transition between what is called the classical period in Greece and the Hellenistic—the latter an overflow of Greek culture to a much wider region, the consequence of Alexander’s conquests. The classical period followed a deeply religious age from which very few “great names” survive. Why? Because we only value figures who’re like us. If we were drawing parallels to our own stage of culture, we’d be looking at a period extending roughly from the late nineteenth century to the end of World War II, call that classical, and the period of global Americanization that followed and is our own time now; call it Hellenistic. What I’m after is the feel of things, and this, I think, properly captures that feel.

Why did I do this? I tried to answer a question. And it was this: How could it come about that a person brought up in a Catholic tradition and exposed to philosophy by the Jesuits, thus to a philosophy firmly centered on Thomism, would have developed a great distaste for the Aristotelian view of reality? The fault is largely mine, of course. It is true, of course, that Thomas Aquinas was a staunch, loyal, persistent Aristotelian, but he Christianized that philosophy by brilliant innovations. My fault—because what stuck to me was the Aristotelian foundation. Something in me clashed with it—and therefore I never did manage to advance to the brilliant innovations. I had problems with the base.

It has always seemed to me that Aristotle’s natural leanings were materialistic—and I was born into an age where—almost undetectable although it is—the spiritual focus is once more increasing; and it is this new, faint something that attracts me. Thus, in later times, I felt much more drawn to Aristotle’s predecessors, thus the Platonic, and what emerged later from it, the neo-platonic and mystical schools that developed from it across the board as the Graeco-Roman world slowly decayed. And this foray into chronology took place by way of getting a better feel for the times, the tempora. And, I would submit, the times then match the times now. And that explains my drawing back from the Aristotelian, however modified. I’m more poet than thinker; the content is less important to me than the smell.

Notice the interesting “materialization” of philosophy in this chronology. Socrates, a deeply spiritual figure, is the teacher of Plato, a metaphysician who taught by dialogue; he is the teacher of Aristotle, the logician and physicist, who, most significantly, rejects Plato’s eternal forms; and Aristotle is the teacher of a warrior and conqueror whose world was decidedly the here and now.
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I try always to promote this great edition of The Peloponnesian War: The Landmark Thucydides.

The Soul Aloft

As Harriet followed Miss Lydgate across the lawn, she was visited by an enormous nostalgia. If only one could come back to this quiet place, where only intellectual achievement counted; if one could work here steadily and obscurely at some close-knit piece of reasoning, undistracted and uncorrupted by agents, contracts, publishers, blurb-writers, interviewers, fan-mail, autograph-hunters, notoriety-hunters, and competitors; abolishing personal contacts, personal spites, personal jealousies; getting one’s teeth into something dull and durable; maturing into solidity like the Shrewsbury beeches—then, one might be able to forget the wreck and chaos of the past, or see it, at any rate, in a truer proportion. Because, in a sense, it was not important. The fact that one had loved and sinned and suffered and escaped death was of far less ultimate moment than a single footnote in a dim academic journal establishing the priority of a manuscript or restoring a lost iota subscript. It was the hand-to-had struggle with the insistent personalities of other people, all pushing for a place in the limelight, that made the accidents of one’s own personal adventure bulk so large in the scheme of things. [Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night]

Harriet Vane, the heroine of this novel, is herself a writer of detective novels. This brief quotation records her thought as she returns to her old college and the ambiance of the place comes to surround her in a conversation with an old teacher. I marked this passage a long time ago. Oddly enough it came to mind when I read recently this passage in Plato’s Phaedo. The voice is that Socrates:

     And were we not saying long ago that the soul when using the body as an instrument of perception, that is to say, when using the sense of sight or hearing or some other sense (for the meaning of perceiving through the body is perceiving through the senses)—were we not saying that the soul too is dragged by the body into the region of the changeable, and wanders and is confused; the world spins round her, and she is like a drunkard, when she touches change?
     Very true.
     But when returning into herself she reflects, then she passes into the other world, the region of purity, and eternity, and immortality, and unchangeableness, which are her kindred, and with them she ever lives, when she is by herself and is not let or hindered; then she ceases from her erring ways, and being in communion with the unchanging is unchanging. And this state of the soul is called wisdom.