Piercing the Veil of Ignorance

Thales held that all is water. Anaximenes took the view that there is nothing but air. Pythagoras contended that reality is made of numbers. Parmenides averred that all is one and nothing changes. Heraclitus insisted that everything is in flux, and you cannot step into the same river twice. Zeno offered proofs that nothing moves. Anaxagoras was of the opinion that everything contains a little bit of hair.

They seem to have had some pretty wacky ideas, those ancient Greeks, the founders of Western thought. Did they just say whatever came into their heads? One of the great merits of Anthony Gottlieb’s “The Dream of Reason,” a survey of Western philosophy from the ancient Greeks to the Renaissance, is that it explains just why they held these apparently strange views and why they are, by no means, as silly as they may sound to modern ears. The book invites comparison with Bertrand Russell’s monumental “History of Western Philosophy,” which was a bestseller when it came out in 1945, but Gottlieb’s book is less idiosyncratic and based on more recent scholarship. Perhaps it is too much to expect that in these days it might also become a bestseller, but it is certainly a book in the finest tradition of responsible popularization. Thales would be proud.

Thales and the rest are the so-called Presocratics, who flourished in the 6th century BC, some 200 years before Socrates came along. As Gottlieb reminds us, their signal achievement was to replace religious pseudo-explanations (‘It happens that way because that’s how the gods intend it’) with attempts at naturalistic explanation in terms of constituents and causes. Thus Thales observed that water can take solid, liquid and gaseous forms, that it was essential to life, that it afforded a simple explanation of natural phenomena-a wrong explanation, yes, but still a lot better than invoking the gods and magic of his forebears. Anaximenes noted the connection between air and the preservation of soul (you die if you stop breathing), and he had the idea that air might be compressed into substances of different types: wind, clouds, maybe Earth. Nature, he suspected, was a series of variations on a central theme. Pythagoras was impressed with the way nature is mathematically describable, especially in terms of geometry, so he allowed himself a touch of hyperbole. Parmenides argued that we cannot talk about what is not, so given that change is defined by some people in terms of negation-the house, for example, was not that color before and now it is-then change is not possible, nor is the idea of one thing not being another.

A funny argument, to be sure, but a real argument nonetheless, an attempt to reason logically about the world. Heraclitus, contrarily, was struck by the incessant changes in nature, even in the most permanent of things, noting that a river is really a succession of changing bodies of water. Zeno ingeniously argued that you cannot travel any distance until you first travel part of that distance, and that is true no matter how small the distance is; hence you cannot get started. Thus it is that Achilles must forever lag behind the tortoise in his famous paradox. And good old Anaxagoras was mightily impressed by the fact that hair grows out of your head even though there is no hairy stuff inside it, or in the food you eat that eventually leads to hair. How can hair come from non-hair? Answer: There is a microscopic amount of hair in every cell of your body, and indeed in the food you eat. Generalizing, every substance must contain a bit of every other substance, in order to explain how substances get transformed into other substances. This is an extravagant theory, no doubt, but it is a theory designed to solve a real explanatory problem. It is not just a wild assertion.

In all of these cases Gottlieb brings out the logic behind the apparent eccentricity. He shows that one of the pre-Socratics’ central insights was that the variety of the world might mask an underlying unity or simplicity. This reached its zenith in the remarkable suggestion, by Democritus (about 460-370 BC), that nature consists of “atoms in the void,” imperceptibly small particles of different shapes suspended in empty space, that join together to form the observable world. This seems to have been a pure hunch on the part of Democritus, but it forms the basis of the modern view of things, and it was not until the Renaissance that the idea received substantial support.

Gottlieb next turns to the Big Three of ancient thought: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle-and, in reading his account, one marvels afresh at their achievements. Though Gottlieb’s survey doesn’t offer any new or revelatory information, its clear and lively retelling of what is known about these sages invites readers to make an enjoyable reacquaintance with the past. We have the still-luminous Socrates, shabby, ugly, poor, executed, not one book to his name, but the avatar of moral and intellectual seriousness, persuading people that they know much less than they think they do. He didn’t claim to know what goodness is, but he was convinced of two striking things: If you knew what goodness was, you would be good, and if you were good, you would be happy-hence happiness rests on knowledge. He also knew (in his famous “Euthyphro” argument) that goodness cannot be defined as what the gods favor because there is no merit in a goodness that is the result of mere fiat. It must rather be true that the gods favor things because they are good. This shows that the divine will can never be the foundation or source of morality-a result still not grasped by numberless religious people today.

Plato obviously loved Socrates, but he also had a passion for Pythagoras, and he couldn’t get Parmenides out of his system. The result was an ambitious theory of reality in which virtue and mathematics were conjoined and an unchanging world of Forms postulated to constitute the highest level of being. The task of the Platonic philosopher was to study mathematics until the immortal Forms hove into view, and at that point the Form of Goodness (along with its sister Beauty) would so impress itself on the intellect that Socratic virtue-as-knowledge would be guaranteed. The world of sensory perception is but a veil of ignorance, hardly worth studying at all; we must turn our minds to the abstract world of unchanging reality. Thus Plato combines mysticism, mathematics and morality into a single vision of human knowledge-spiritual purification by dint of cognitive intimacy with the abstract Forms.

Aristotle would have none of that, though he was Plato’s star pupil at the Academy. What Aristotle liked was the sober business of physics, biology and logic (whether the Monty Python line “Old Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle” is true is a matter of scholarly debate). He did not disdain the palpable world of falling objects, purposive organisms, processing planets; he wanted to describe, classify and explain the perceptible phenomena of nature. Close attention was his method, along with a robust empiricism. Aristotle basically invented modern science and his fundamental approach is still with us: clear questions, verifiable answers, systematic theory. The creation of symbolic logic, the “syllogism,” was just one of his many achievements. It is true that he became so influential that for a thousand years people studied Aristotle’s books rather than the natural world, and of course he got a great many things wrong (it is not actually true that the planets are animals that move around purposively). But he cannot be blamed for the dogmatic devotion of his followers, and he would have been happy to revise his opinions in the light of discovered fact.

Greek thought did not end with Aristotle, though it never again reached his heights (Roman conquest being the most concrete reason why). What followed was an assortment of schools more committed to a therapeutic vision of the aims of philosophy, as opposed to the austere objectivism of Aristotle. Thus we have the Epicureans, the Stoics and the Skeptics. Each of these drew from the past, but they put a self-help spin on earlier doctrines. The Epicureans were atomists, but they also advocated pleasure as the aim of life; not simple sensory pleasure (the boozing, gorging and fornicating of popular myth), but the pleasure born of virtue and the pursuit of knowledge. The Stoics taught that unhappiness is caused by caring about the wrong things, especially wealth and material possessions (shades of Socrates here), so the aim of a philosophical education is the acquisition of spiritual riches. The Skeptics thought that dogmatism was the root of all evil (Socrates again), so that the way to the good life was to question every received opinion. Ignorance is bliss, or at least release, once it is recognized as such.

Gottlieb next reminds us that when Christianity took hold, philosophy came to be seen as the handmaiden of religion, with the Bible as the touchstone of acceptability. Naturally, this led to the decline of the disinterested search for knowledge, though some good work was done within the prevailing constraints (Aquinas had a thing or two to say). The recrudescence of knowledge in the 17th century was prompted in part by the rediscovery of the Greeks, and Descartes can easily be seen as a combination of Democritean atomism and Socratic skepticism. First doubt everything; then remove the doubts; then get on with natural science. The Renaissance was clearly an original upsurge of intellectual energy, transforming Western thought forever, but its roots lay in the struggles of the early Greeks to understand how the world works in a rigorous non-supernatural way. For this reason, if for no other, everyone should have some acquaintance with the history of Greek thought.

‘The Dream of Reason” is an ideal way to make this acquaintance. It is clear, well-explained, amply researched, smoothly written, dryly witty in places and infused with respect for the achievements of the past. One looks forward to the planned second volume, which continues the story into the modern era and might tell us how much we’ve remained faithful to our distant ancestors.