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The Origin of Philosophy: The Attributes of Mythic/Mythopoeic Thought
_________________________________________________________________

The pioneering work on this subject was The Intellectual Adventure of
Ancient Man, An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East
by Henri Frankfort, H.A. Frankfort, John A. Wilson, Thorkild Jacobsen,
and William A. Irwin (University of Chicago Press, 1946, 1977 -- also
once issued by Penguin as Before Philosophy). Related ideas can also
be found in Henri Frankfort's great Ancient Egyptian Religion (Harper
Torchbooks, Harper & Row, 1948, 1961)
_________________________________________________________________

How was Greek philosophy different from what came before? Or was it
different? Even though "philosophy" is a Greek word, from phileîn, "to
love," and sophía, "wisdom," perhaps it was just a continuation of how
people had always thought about things anyway. After all, it is not
uncommon now for items of Egyptian literature, like the Instruction of
Ptah.h.otep, to be listed as Egyptian "philosophy." So if Greek
philosophy is to be thought of as different, there must be ways of
specifying that difference. Similarly, if Greek philosophy is to be
compared with Indian and Chinese philosophy, there must be something
that they have in common, and that can be mutually contrasted with
pre-philosophical thought.

As it happens, Greek philosophy, and Indian and Chinese, were
different from what came before; and we can specify what the
differences were. Pre-philosophical thought can be characterized as
"mythopoeic," "mythopoetic," or "mythic" thought. "Mythopoeic" means
"making" (poieîn, from which the word "poet" is derived) "myth"
(mûthos). There is a large and growing literature about mythology, but
here all that is necessary are the points what will serve the purpose
of distinguishing philosophical thought from the thought of people in
earlier Middle Eastern civilizations (Egyptians, Babylonians, etc.)
about the nature of things. With the identification of the
characteristics of mythic forms of human thought, it becomes possible
to identify the unique innovations of philosophy. Note that
philosophic thought does not replace mythopoeic thought but
supplements it.

1. Myths are stories about persons, where persons may be gods,
heroes, or ordinary people.
+ Example: The Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh. King Gilgamesh
seeks to become immortal, after the death of his friend
Enkidu, but fails. This is still a poignant story, since
human beings still face loss and grief and death, just as did
Gilgamesh. Indeed, Enkidu's vision of death is still
chilling:

There is the house whose people sit in darkness; dust is their food
and clay their meat. They are clothed like birds with wings for
covering, they see no light, they sit in darkness. I entered the
house of dust and I saw the kings of the earth, their crowns put
away for ever... [N. K. Sanders, Penguin, 1964, p. 89]
+ Changed in Philosophy: Thales' proposed a theory of
earthquakes, that they are just when a wave in the cosmic
ocean rocks the earth, which floats like a plate on the
ocean. This explanation eliminated the actions or intentions
of the gods.
2. Myth allows for a multiplicity of explanations, where the
explanations are not logically exclusive (can contradict each
other) and are often humorous.
+ Example: The Egyptian sun god Rê (R', probably vocalized Rî')
appears in various forms. Rê Atum (R' Ytm) is a god in human
form, with a blue skin, who sails across the sky in a boat.
[INLINE] Rê-Horakhtî (R' H.r-'khtyy) combines Rê with the god
Horus, [INLINE] a hawk who flies across the sky -- one eye is
the sun, the other eye, injured when Horus was fighting his
uncle Seth, is the moon. And Rê-Khepere (R' Khpry) is Rê in
the form of a scarab beetle. The scarab lays its eggs in a
ball of dung, which it then pushes around before it. The
Egyptians thus saw the sun as analogous to the dung (!) being
pushed around by the beetle. Although it was later tempting
to systematize the different forms of Rê as embodied in the
sun at different times of day, there was never much of a
coherent theory that could be made of this. A similar problem
occurs in India with the juxtaposition of the great sectarian
Gods, Vis.n.u and Shiva, though there is an effective
systematization on the philosophical side of Hinduism.
+ Changed in Philosophy: The theories of the earliest Greeks
philosophers, especially those about whom we know the most,
like Anaximander and Heraclitus, are systematic and
internally coherent.
[INLINE]
3. Mythic traditions are conservative. Innovation is slow, and
radical departures from tradition rarely tolerated.
+ Example: The Egyptian king Akhenaton ('KHnytn), who
introduced a monotheistic cult of one God, the sun god Aton
(Ytn), and abolished the worship of all the other traditional
Egyptian gods. He was branded the "Criminal of Amarna" (the
city he built to the Aton). His name and memory, and those of
three subsequent kings (including Tutankhamon, whose tomb was
discovered in 1922), were erased from Egyptian history. Shown
at right are Akhenaton and Queen Nefertiti making offerings
to the disk and rays of the Aton. (Also evident is an example
of the strange artistic style used for Akhenaton that gives
him a feminized figure, in this case an even more exaggerated
one than for Nefertiti.)
+ Changed in Philosophy: Greek philosophy represented a burst
of creativity. While Thales' views about water reflected long
held mythic accounts (both Egyptian, Babylonian, and Biblical
creation stories begin with water), he was immediately
superseded by the multiple novel theories of Anaximander,
Anaximenes, Xenophanes, Pythagoras, and Heraclitus, all
within 80 years.
4. Myths are self-justifying. The inspiration of the gods was enough
to ensure their validity, and there was no other explanation for
the creativity of poets, seers, and prophets than inspiration by
the gods. Thus, myths are not argumentative. Indeed, they often
seem most unserious, humorous, or flippant (e.g. Rê-Khepere
above). It still seems to be a psychological truth that people who
think of new things are often persuaded of their truth just
because they thought of them. And now, oddly, we are without an
explanation for creativity.
+

THE NINE MUSES (daughters of Mnemosyne & Zeus)
name art symbol
Calliopê Epic (Heroic) Poetry Tablet & Stylus
Eratô Lyric (Love) Poetry Lyre
Euterpê Music (Lyric Poetry) Flute
Terpsichorê Dance (Choral Song) Lyre
Polyhymnia Song (Rhetoric) Veil
Melpomenê Tragedy Tragic Mask, Sword
Thalia Comedy (Pastoral Poetry) Comic Mask, Staff
Clio History Laurel Crown, Scroll
Urania Astronomy Globe
Example: Homer addresses an unnamed goddess (theá) or the
Muses (Moûsai -- which gives us words like "museum" and
"music") at the beginning of the Iliad (depending on our
version of the text -- it is not uncommon to avoid naming a
god that is to be invoked, as Socrates never does name Apollo
as "the god at Delphi" in the Apology). The Nine Muses in
Greek Mythology are uniquely charged with inspiring
creativity. Note that there are no Muses of plastic arts
(painting, sculpture, architecture), or of philosophy:  This
must mean that the myth of the Muses was finalized before the
advent of philosophy or of significant stone architecture.
Note, however, that "history," historía, original just meant
"learning by inquiry." This could easily include philosophy
and many other things.
+ Changed in Philosophy: Parmenides, after the invocation of an
unnamed goddess in his poem, The Way of Truth, offers
substantive arguments for his views.
5. Myths are morally ambivalent. The gods and heroes do not always do
what is right or admirable, and mythic stories do not often have
edifying moral lessons to teach.
+ Example: [INLINE] [INLINE] The Egyptian god Seth (St)
murdered and dismembered his brother Osiris (Wsyr), but is
later forgiven by Isis ('st), his sister and the wife of
Osiris, even though Seth had badly damaged Horus's eye in
their fight. The Egyptian king Sethi I, who built a great
temple to Osiris at Abydos, the cult center of Osiris, was
named after Seth (Styy) and so politely alters his name in
the temple inscriptions to commemorate Osiris (Wsyryy)
instead of Set. Thus, the Egyptians recognized the moral
awkwardness of putting the name of Osiris's murderer on his
temple, but this did not discredit the cult of Seth or the
king named after him.
+ Example: The Greek hero of the Iliad, Achilles, seems to be a
far less admirable character than the Trojan hero, Hector,
whom Achilles slays at the climax of the epic. Even the king
of the gods, Zeus, is unhappy that the better man will lose,
but it is the fate of Hector to die. Later, Roman readers of
the Iliad did not hesitate to imagine themselves descendants
of the Trojans -- as in Virgil's Aeneid, where the Prince
Aeneas, saved from Troy by his mother Aphrodite, travels to
Italy and, anticipating Romulus, founds the Roman nation.
There is also a school in Southern California, the arch-rival
of the University of California at Los Angeles, where the
student body is named after the warriors of Troy.
+ Changed in Philosophy: The Presocratic philosopher Xenophanes
criticizes the poets for ascribing shameful acts to the gods:

Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods everything that is a
shame and reproach among men, stealing and committing adultery and
deceiving each other. [from Sextus Empiricus, Against the
Mathematicians, translated by Kirk & Raven, The Presocratic
Philosophers, Cambridge, 1964, p. 168]
Heraclitus condemns blood sacrifice. The moralization of the
Greek gods is thoroughly effected by Socrates and Plato, who
cannot imagine the gods doing anything wrong or evil. A
similar moral critique is carried out in contemporary Persian
religion by the prophet Zoroaster (Zarathushtra); and
Judaism, over a period of time, undergoes a similar process,
as the Prophets represent God requiring just and holy
actions.

Given these characteristics, we can say that the Instruction of
Ptah.h.otep, and similar items of Egyptian literature, display no
break with mythpoeic modes of thought. Indeed, if Ptah.h.otep were to
count as philosophy, it is hard to see why parts of the Bible would
not also count. But the Bible is never proposed as the first example
of Jewish philosophy, probably because this would confuse the
distinction people would want to make between religion and philosophy.
On the other hand, works like the Mân.d.ûkya Upanis.ad and the Tao Te
Ching are clearly impersonal, systematic, and innovative; and,
although they are arguably religious, they are so in a way that is not
recognizably analogous to Judaism, Christianity, and Islâm, since a
personal God does not appear in them. Indeed, they are impersonal to a
higher degree than much of Greek philosophy. On the other hand, they
are not argumenative, so they have not reached quite the same point as
Parmenides in breaking with the fourth characteristic of mythic
thought.
_________________________________________________________________

History of Philosophy

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Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All
Rights Reserved
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The Origin of Philosophy:
Why the Greeks?
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If Greek philosophy was different from what came before, as previously
considered, the next question would be, "Why the Greeks?" What was
different about the Greeks that led to the origin of philosophy with
them? Years ago, the simple answer might have been that the Greeks
were "different," they just had some kind of special "genius" that
enabled them to think about things in new and different ways. That
kind of answer is unsatisfactory, not only because it doesn't really
explain anything, not only because it sounds disturbingly like some
kind of racism (the Greeks just must have been genetically different),
but because it cannot then in turn explain why philosophy only
occurred among some Greeks (e.g. Milesians, Athenians, etc.) and not
among others (e.g. Spartans).

An explanation that is actually going to explain something about the
origin of Greek philosophy must identify something that was different
about what was happening to, or what was being done by, the particular
Greeks who were responsible for that origin. Such an explanation may
suggest, but cannot be, a kind of Marxist economic determinism
argument, since it is unlikely that everything can be explained by
social or economic circumstances. There is certainly a random factor
in nature and in human affairs, and the possibility for a lone
individual genius to make a difference cannot be dismissed. On the
other hand, there are also certainly regularities, and the association
of certain kinds of activities with each other. If something unique
about Greeks cities like Miletus and Athens can be identified, that
may reveal unique regularities associated with Greek philosophy.

As it happens, there was something conspicuously different about the
culture, the society, and the livelihood of Greek cities like Miletus
and Athens in comparison to the dominant forms in traditional Middle
Eastern civilizations, like Egypt and Babylonia, and in other Greeks
cities, like Sparta, that were never venues of Greek philosophy. For
one thing, those Greeks cities were wealthy, like Egypt and Babylon
(and unlike Sparta), but they could not have been wealthy in the same
way that Egypt and Babylon were wealthy. The strength of the ancient
states rested mainly on agriculture. The Bible does not speak of the
"flesh pots" of Egypt, "when we did eat bread to the full" (Exodus
16:3), for nothing.

As in most traditional cultures, over 90% of Egyptians would have
lived on the land and engaged in basic agricultural labor (85% of
people in Tanzania, after decades of socialist government, still do).
In Egypt, with the annual flood of the Nile and the uniform warmth,
large and reliable harvests were the norm, as in other areas farmers
might apprehensively await the rain, endure frosts, etc. Greek cities
were not going
to be wealthy in the same way, since Greece could not possibly be as
agriculturally productive as Egypt or Mesopotamia. [INLINE] For one
thing there was the climate. The average annual rainfall in Athens is
only 15.9 inches, not much more than in Los Angeles. Indeed, like much
of California, Greece has a "Mediterranean" climate: hot dry summers,
and cool rainy winters [1]. Some areas get considerably more rain than
Athens, but that is because of local mountains, which gets us to the
next problem: the land itself. Greece is very mountainous. This does
not make for good agriculture either. Some areas contain famous
plains, e.g. Arcadia, Thessaly; but the agricultural value of the
plains is then compromised by the weather. Some years, Thessaly gets
less than 2 inches of rain. [INLINE] Large parts of California are
agriculturally productive despite the climate because of water from
nearby (the Sierra Nevada) or distant (the Rocky) mountains; but there
are few rivers in Greece, and most of the country is broken up into
islands and peninsulas that cannot receive the runoff of wetter
mountains, however near or far.

Cities like Miletus and Athens were thus wealthy off of something
else: Trade. To engage in trade, all anyone needed was enough to get
started, and Greek agriculture could provide a couple of starter
products. Olive trees are hardy and drought resistant and grow well
enough in either Greece or California (they are conspicuous right in
the center of Los Angeles Valley College). Olives themselves must be
soaked in brine to be edible, but more importantly they can be pressed
to obtain olive oil. The oil is not very perishable, and so could be
stored and shipped (in the up to six foot tall jars that the Greeks
made) quite easily, to be sold at distant locations for food, fuel
oil, hair grooming, or other purposes. Similarly, the Greek climate
(like California, again) is good for growing grapes. Grapes can be
pressed and fermented to produce wine, another product that is not
very perishable and can be similarly stored and shipped. Even apart
from any other products, these would get a city like Miletus started
in the exchange of products all over the Mediterranean.

We might think that trade as a way of life already could explain much.
It would involve and foster considerable independence, being far away
from all authority at home [2], and it would involve dealing with all
sorts of novel peoples, cultures, practices, and ideas. If we look for
a way of life to get people thinking, that might be it. How this
contrasts with ordinary life back in Egypt is explained for us by the
Egyptians themselves: A favorite text for scribal students to copy in
Ancient Egypt recounted how much better the life of a scribe was to
all other ways of life. This was the so-called "Satire of the Trades,"
and it actually begins,

I have seen many beatings --
Set your heart on books!
I watched those seized for labor --
There's nothing better than books! [3]

Here the "beatings," besides the ordinary encouragement of overseers,
to which scribes might not always be witness, can easily refer to the
business of collecting taxes in Egypt. Every year, when the Nile
flooded, the height of the river was read off the wall of a stairway,
later called the "Nilometer," cut down into the granite of Elephantine
Island at Aswan, at the natural southern boundary of Ancient Egypt.
The height of the river then could be converted into the area of the
country covered by the flood that year, and the area could be
converted into the estimated yield of virtually every bit of farmland.
Thus, at the harvest, the tax collectors showed up to seize, since
there was no money, the State's share of the harvest. Peasants who,
for one reason or another, did not have the crop to deliver, would
simply be knocked down and beaten, with the tax collectors' attendant
scribes calmly observing and recording the transaction.

Similarly, the reference of the text to "those seized for labor" is
probably to the ancient system of the corvée, by which local peasants
could be pressed into labor for public works projects, like the
pyramids, especially during the season of the Flood, when work in the
fields would have been impossible anyway. The building of new cities
and palaces in the Delta initiated by Ramesses II (c. 1290-1224),
depended on drafts of the local population, many of whom were not
ethnic Egyptians, for labor. This is remembered in the Bible, of
course, as "slavery," from which the Israelites fled back into Asia.
The miseries of brickmaking do not seem to be remembered there with
fondness. Indeed, the scribes give us the picture:

I'll describe to you also the mason:
His loins give him pain;
Though he is out in the wind,
He works without a cloak;
His loincloth is a twisted rope
And a string in the rear.
His arms are spent from exertion,
Having mixed all kinds of dirt;
When he eats bread [with] his fingers,
[He has washed at the same time]. [p. 187]

The idea in the last lines seems to be that the "mason" (now obviously
not a stone mason), having been mixing dirt all day, cannot eat
without the dirt worked into his fingers getting into his bread. The
work is probably performed naked but for a rope thong because no one
would want to expose good cloth to the mud in which the workers
inevitably stand and stoop. Of another professional concerned with
earth, the potter, the scribes say, "He grubs in the mud more than a
pig" [p. 186]. While the peasant, well, "A peasant is not called a
man" [p. 190]. The life of a merchant or trader, on the other hand, is
not even mentioned.

If delivery from such labor in Ancient Egypt meant becoming a scribe,
it is now hard to imagine the life of a bureaucrat fostering very much
more in the way of independence of mind or creativity. Indeed, nothing
was valued more highly in Egypt than conformity, which is no less than
what we would expect.

However stark the contrast of this with a life of travel, business,
discovery, and independence, trade alone will not explain the
uniqueness of the Greek situation, for the Greeks were neither alone
nor the first in their commercial profession. They had learned the
basics, and much else (including their alphabet), from some of the
most ancient traders: the Phoenicians [4].

Ancient Phoenicia was rather smaller than the modern Lebanon; it was
just Mount Lebanon, whose steep slopes often come right down to the
Mediterranean. This put the Phoenicians in much the same situation
economically as the Greeks. Rainfall was certainly less of a problem,
but the Mountain [5], very steep and rocky, was otherwise most
unsuited for agriculture. But, like the Greeks, the Phoenicians also
had available a couple of basic local products to get started in
trade. Mount Lebanon, although difficult for agriculture, was
nevertheless forested: the Cedars of Lebanon. This was a valuable
resource when the surrounding semi-arid and desert areas were short of
trees. Especially when the Egyptians began their great building
projects, good lumber was essential. One cannot imagine 100 ton
granite obelisks, quarried at Aswan, being floated down the Nile in
boats made of bundled reeds. [INLINE] Evidence of how early the
Phoenicians were supplying wood to Egypt can still be seen in the Bent
Pyramid of Seneferu (c. 2610 BC) at Dahshur, where the dry climate has
preserved cedar beams (shown at right) that were used to shore up the
upper chamber against the cracking caused by errors in the
construction and siting of the pyramid [6].

Another product the Phoenicians eventually traded in was a purple dye
produced at Tyre from a local shellfish. Quite the opposite of lumber
in terms of bulk, "Tyrian Purple" became the most famous product of
Phoenicia; and it was so valuable that eventually a purple robe was
taken as symbolic of the office of Roman Emperor. "Putting on the
purple" came to mean becoming Roman Emperor.

Both the Greeks and the Phoenicians, in the course of their trade,
founded colonies all over the Mediterranean. The map below illustrates
this activity and its implied competition. Greek colonies came to ring
the Aegean and Black Seas, the southern coast of Italy, eastern
Sicily, Cyrenaica in Libya, and in places on the coast of Gaul (modern
France) and northeastern Spain. The largest modern cities derived from
Greek colonies are probably Marseille in France (Massilia), Naples in
Italy (Neapolis, the "New City" -- remembered in the name of
"Neapolitan" icecream), and Istanbul (originally Byzantion, later
Constantinopolis -- Constantinople). Phoenician colonies coexisted
with Greek cities in Cyprus and Sicily, but excluded Greeks on
Sardinia and Corsica, in the south of Spain, and especially along
North Africa. Phoenician colonial power was particularly concentrated
at Carthage (Kart Hadasht, the "New City"), eventually seen by Rome as
her greatest rival, and in the south of Spain, were Cadiz (Gades) was
a Phoenician city. The, by then, Carthaginian domain in Spain was much
expanded by Hamilcar Barca, the father of the great Hannibal (247-183
BC), in the time between the First (264-241) and Second (218-201)
Punic Wars with Rome. In the course of that expansion, the city later
known in Latin as Carthago Nova, "New Carthage" (Cartagena), was
founded.

[INLINE]

From Spain, the Phoenicians did something the Greeks did not -- to
venture out into the Atlantic. They probably went as far as Britain
(from which tin was obtained), and certainly went well down the coast
of Africa -- how far is unclear, since the Phoenicians kept their
doings as secret as possible. One story repeated by the Greek
historian Herodotus is that the Phoenicians sailed entirely around
Africa on commission from King Neko II of Egypt. The best evidence
that this was accomplished (there is no other) is the very idea that
it was possible: later Greek and Roman geographers thought that Africa
was connected to a Southern Continent and could not be
circumnavigated. Phoenician trading posts in Greece itself, reflected
even in Greek mythology with stories like the foundation of Thebes by
the Phoenician Cadmus, initiated Greek trading in the years after
about 800 BC.

But after all this, we may then ask, that if trade is to be associated
with the origin of philosophy, why did not philosophy start with the
Phoenicians? After a fashion, perhaps it did. The man credited with
being the first Greek philosopher, Thales of Miletus (c. 585), was
said to have been of Phoenician ancestry. However, he was living in a
Greek city; and even later philosophers who were certainly ethnic
Phoenicians, like Zeno of Citium, moved to Greek cities to learn and
practice philosophy.

The clue to what happened in the Greek cities may be found in
something else that seems to be a unique characteristic of Greek
history: By the time we know much about events, traditional kings in
Greeks cities are mostly gone. This had never happened before. When
ancient kings were overthrown, which happened often enough, they were
simply replaced by other kings. The Phoenician cities all had
traditional kings. But in Greece, the institution of kingship lost its
traction. At Athens, the office of árchôn [7] ("ruler" or "regent")
pushed aside the authority of the king (who eventually became another
elected árchôn). It was filled at first by hereditary nobles, then by
elected nobles with life tenure, then by elected nobles with ten year
tenure (starting in 753), then with elected nobles by annual tenure
(starting in 683), and then with the office opened (by Solon, c. 593)
to qualification by wealth, rather than by noble birth. After some
conflict and the rule of tyrants (especially Pisitratus), overthrown
in 510, Cleisthenes led Athens into essentially pure democracy.

Unlike the Phoenician cities, which had been engaged in commerce for
centuries, and where the kings were merchants themselves, the creation
of wealth by trade in the Greeks cities seems to have undermined
traditional authority. Whoever jumped into the game first would
become, perhaps for the first time in history, a nouveau riches class
that chaffed at hereditary privilege and had the means, by bribery and
hire, to marshal forces against it. Since wealth by trade could be
made away from home, it would be entirely outside the control of a
hometown ruler. Returning home with a new sense of power and
independence [8], a merchant could well have lost much of his awe and
respect for authority by birth. Seeing Greece of the Dark Ages (c.
1200-800 BC) as the kind of feudal society pictured in the Iliad, it
not hard to imagine the new world of merchants and commerce with the
same kind of dynamic that the Italian trading cities of the
Renaissance exhibited in starting the process that undermined European
Mediaeval aristocracy.

Also, we can say that for the first time in history these
transformations could have been accomplished by money:  Money, meaning
coined precious metals, was invented soon after 640 in the Kingdom of
Lydia. The Lydians were not Greeks, but the Lydian kings, after the
Phoenician manner, were businessmen; and they worked closely with the
adjacent Greek cities of Ionia. Money thus facilitated the rise of a
city like Thales's Miletus; and since coinage enhances the manner in
which wealth can be concentrated and transferred, we can also imagine
that it enhanced the process of social mobility and political
conflict.

What happened in Greek cities politically and socially was
extraordinary enough, but it is also our clue about the origin of
philosophy. Although we can only imagine the nature of the causal
connection, the correlation between philosophy and the cities of
commercial wealth and political transformation is obvious. Greek
philosophy began in Ionia (today on the west coast of Turkey), in the
wealthiest and most active cities of their time in Greece. For some
years Greek philosophy then seemed to circulate around the Greek
colonial periphery, from Ionia (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximines,
Heralcitus, Xenophanes), to Italy (Pythagoras, Parmenides, Zeno),
Sicily (Empedocles), and the northern Aegean (Democritus, Protagoras),
to Ionia again (Melissos). Then philosophy migrated from every
direction to Athens itself, at the center, the wealthiest commercial
power and the most famous democracy of the time [9]. Socrates,
although uninterested in wealth himself, nevertheless was a creature
of the marketplace, where there were always people to meet and where
he could, in effect, bargain over definitions rather than over prices.
Similarly, although Socrates avoided participation in democratic
politics, it is hard to imagine his idiosyncratic individualism, and
the uncompromising self-assertion of his defense speech, without
either wealth or birth to justify his privileges, occurring in any
other political context.

If a commercial democracy like Athens provided the social and
intellectual context that fostered the development of philosophy, we
might expect that philosophy would not occur in the kind of Greek city
that was neither commercial nor democratic. As it happens, the great
rival of Athens, Sparta, was just such a city. Sparta had a peculiar,
oligarchic constitution, with two kings and a small number of
enfranchised citizens. Most of the subjects of the Spartan state had
little or no political power, and many of them were helots, who were
essentially held as slaves and could be killed by a Spartan citizen at
any time for any reason -- annual war was formally declared on the
helots for just that purpose. The whole business of the Spartan
citizenry was war. Unlike Athens, Sparta had no nearby seaport. It was
not engaged in or interested in commerce. It had no resident alien
population like Athens -- there was no reason for foreigners of any
sort to come to Sparta. Spartan citizens were allowed to possess
little money, and Spartan men were expected, officially, to eat all
their meals at a common mess, where the food was legendarily bad --
all to toughen them up. Spartans had so little to say that the term
"Laconic," from Laconia, the environs of Sparta, is still used to mean
"of few words" -- as "Spartan" itself is still used to mean simple and
ascetic.

While this gave Sparta the best army in Greece, regarded by all as
next to invincible, and helped Sparta defeat Athens in the
Peloponnesian War (431-404), we do not find at Sparta any of the
accoutrements otherwise normally associated with Classical Greek
civilization: no historians, no playwrights, no great architecture,
and, especially, no philosophers. Socrates would have found few takers
for his conversation at Sparta -- and it is hard to imagine the city
tolerating his questions for anything like the thirty or more years
that Athens did. Next to nothing remains at the site of Sparta to
attract tourists, while Athens is one of the major tourist
destinations of the world. Indeed, we basically wouldn't even know
about Sparta were it not for the historians (e.g. Thucydides) and
philosophers (e.g. Plato and Aristotle) at Athens who write about her.
In the end, philosophy made the fortune of Athens, which essentially
became the University Town of the Roman Empire (only Alexandria came
close as a center of learning); but even Sparta's army eventually
failed her, as Spartan hegemony was destroyed at the battle of Leuctra
in 371 by the brilliant Theban general Epaminondas (who invented the
phalanx formation), killing a Spartan king, Cleombrotus, for the first
time since King Leonidas was killed by the Persians at Thermopylae in
480.

A story about Thales throws a curious light on the polarization
between commercial culture and its opposition. It was said that Thales
was not a practical person, sometimes didn't watch where he was
walking, fell into a well (according to Plato), was laughed at, and in
general was reproached for not taking money seriously like everyone
else. Finally, he was sufficiently irked by the derision and
criticisms that he decided to teach everyone a lesson. By studying the
stars (according to Aristotle), he determined that there was to be an
exceptionally large olive harvest that year. Borrowing some money, he
secured all the olive presses (used to get the oil, of course) in
Miletus, and when the harvest came in, he took advantage of his
monopoly to charge everyone dearly. After making this big financial
killing, Thales announced that he could do this anytime and so, if he
otherwise didn't do so and seemed impractical, it was because he
simply did not value the money in the first place.

This story curiously contains internal evidence of its own falsehood.
One cannot determine the nature of the harvest by studying the stars;
otherwise astrologers would make their fortunes on the commodities
markets, not by selling their analyses to the public [10]. So if
Thales did not monopolize the olive presses with the help of
astrology, and is unlikely to have done what this story relates, we
might ask if he was the kind of impractical person portrayed in the
story in the first place. It would not seem so from all the other
accounts we have about him. The tendency of this evidence goes in two
direction:
* First, Thales seems to engage in activities that would be
consistent with any other Milesian engaged in business. The story
about him going to Egypt, although later assimilated to fabulous
stories about Greeks learning the mysteries of the Egyptians (who
don't seem to have had any such mysteries, and would not have been
teaching them to Greeks anyway), is perfectly conformable to what
many Greeks actually were doing in Egypt, i.e. engaging in trade
or working for the King of Egypt as mercenary soldiers. Indeed,
the Greeks had another basic export besides olive oil and wine,
and that was warriors. Since the Greek cities fought among
themselves all the time, the occasional peace left many of them
seeking to continue the wars by other means. The Egyptian kings of
the XXVI Dynasty found plenty for them to do there. Indeed, the
kings relied so heavily on Greek mercenaries, and there were so
many Greek traders swarming over Egypt, that considerable tensions
arose. The Egyptians basically didn't like foreigners, and the
Greeks, although awed by Egypt, also found the Egyptians more than
a little strange and ridiculous. Their references to things
Egyptian were sometimes mocking: "Pyramid" (pyramís) may be from
pyramoûs, a wheat and honey cake; and "obelisk" (obelískos) means
a "little spit." King Ah.mose II (570-526) defused the tensions by
directing that Greek trading activities be concentrated at
Naucratis, which was then founded as a Greek colony, not far from
the Egyptian capital of Sais. This worked well. As a colony,
Naucratis was a little unusual, existing under the sovereignty of
Egypt, and also because several Greek cities joined in the
founding. Usually a colony had one "mother city" (metrópolis),
from which a charter and colonists were derived. As it happened,
Miletus was one of the founders of Naucratis. The degree of
involvement with Miletus in Egypt thus makes it more than probable
that Thales, engaged in the ordinary business of his fellow
citizens, would have found himself there, probably more than once.
This is then consistent with the story of Thales discovering how
to measure the height of the pyramids [11] -- and also with the
story of Thales learning navigational techniques from the
Phoenicians. Since the Phoenicians were secretive about their
affairs, especially to rivals, this reinforces the report,
mentioned already, that Thales was of Phoenician derivation.
* The second insight into Thales's activities comes from the account
of his work for King Alyattes of Lydia. A dreamer who goes around
falling into wells does not sound like someone to hire for
military engineering projects; but that is the account (from
Herodotus) that we have of Thales, who is supposed to have
actually diverted a river around behind the Lydian army so that it
could avoid too deep a ford. The war between the Medes and the
Lydians, during which Thales accompanied the Lydian king, also
provides us with the one solid date that we have for Thales's
life. That is because the climactic battle between the Medes and
Lydians, at which Thales would have been present, was stopped by a
total eclipse of the sun. The date of the eclipse can now be
calculated precisely: 28 May 585 BC. The path of the eclipse can
even be inspected using computer software on home computers. The
eclipse, indeed, was later said to have been predicted by Thales.
That is clearly impossible. To predict an eclipse, one must know
what an eclipse is -- the moon getting in the way of the sun --
and no Greek knew that for some time to come; and one must have
records of eclipses for some centuries to understand the
relationship of the moon's orbit to the ecliptic (the apparent
path of the sun in the sky) -- the Greeks had no such records
perhaps until the Pythagoreans. Although Thales could not have
predicted the eclipse, it could have been predicted at the time --
by the Babylonians. We know that the Babylonians had the
understanding and the records, not just because the priest
Bêrôssos transferred records back to 747 BC into his treatise on
astronomy (in the Hellenistic Period), but because original
astronomical and mathematical records and treatises survive,
especially from the libraries of the Kings of Assyria [12].
Consequently, if the story about Thales was not made up out of
whole cloth, the only explanation is that he heard, perhaps on his
travels, that there was going to be an eclipse. The Babylonian
priests were in the habit of publicly announcing astronomical
events, as the priests in Jerusalem also announced things like the
beginning of the month and occurrence of Passover; but, in the
absence of newspapers, radio, wire services, CNN, etc., these
announcements may only have travelled by word of mouth. If Thales
heard of the prediction, and then reported it back home, it may
not have been remembered that he merely reported, rather than
originated, the story.

The overall impression of Thales then is more of a man of affairs,
sometimes very serious affairs (e.g. war), and not of an abstracted,
impractical dreamer who disdains money and doesn't watch where he's
walking. But if that was the case, why would the story about Thales
and the olive presses have been told in the first place? Because,
indeed, such disdain for money would be characteristic of later Greek
philosophy. Where Socrates was simply unconcerned with the ordinary
commercial life of Athens, while he flourished right in the middle of
it, philosophers like Plato and Aristotle had become actively hostile
to it and removed their own activities to closed schools outside the
walls of Athens. Only one great school of philosophy, Stoicism,
remained in the marketplace, taking its name from the characteristic
open-faced building, often called a "porch," a stoa, that was to be
found there, and in one of which Zeno of Citium established himself.
Plato distrusted commerce, detested democracy, and also came to
believe that teaching philosophy to just anyone was dangerous. A
tradition of ethical argument arose that questioned whether engaging
in trade was even moral, since merchants did not produce their
commodities and so did not contribute to their intrinsic value. Some
philosophers, indeed, perceived that the value of products also
depended on their location, so that trade was useful in moving things
to where they were needed or wanted; but then someone like Plato was
also distrustful of that service, since a lot of superfluous trade
goods could engender "unnecessary desires" and distract people from
their duties and more sober pursuits. But as late as the 5th century,
St. Augustine was still advising that trade was not a profession that
could be practiced without moral harm.

Comparing Athens and Sparta, a philosopher like Plato was unmistakably
a Spartan sympathizer. Yet even he realized there was a problem: the
Spartans not only were uninterested in thought and speech, but they
were violent and brutal. Plato realized that philosophy had no place
there, and he was concerned lest the rulers in his ideal Republic
exhibit those characteristics. So Plato never tried to sell his
thought at Sparta. He did entertain a hope, however, that if a tyrant
could be "converted" to philosophy, then his ideas would be
implemented. One of his efforts to do so involved the tyrant Dionysius
II of Syracuse (367-357 & 346-344). During one trip there, however, in
361, Plato so infuriated Dionysius, evidently, that he was sold into
slavery and had to be redeemed by his friends and family. Naturally,
he gave up on tyrants after that experience. So, although Plato had no
love for the democracy at Athens, he "voted with his feet," as they
say, in its favor.

The attitudes in Greek philosophy towards Athens and Sparta, as well
as sympathies and actions comparable to those of Plato, can also be
seen in the Twentieth Century. Henry Kissinger, President Nixon's
foreign policy adviser and later Secretary of State, is supposed to
have remarked once, privately, that the United States was liable to
lose the Cold War to the Soviet Union in the same way and for the same
reasons that Athens lost the Peloponnesian War to Sparta. While
America, presumably, was enervated by the political squabbling
characteristic of democracy and by the crass materialism of
capitalistic consumerism, the Soviet Union was lean, disciplined (i.e.
Spartan), morally upright (no pornography or gay rights demonstrations
there), unified, and remorselessly purposful [13]. At the same time,
it was not uncommon in the United States for leftist academics and
intellectuals to harbor much admiration for the Soviet Union, or later
for Communist China, Cuba, Vietnam, or Nicaragua, despite widespread
knowedge of the police state apparatus of those regimes, of the mass
murders, slave labor camps, torture, brainwashing, false confessions,
etc. -- Josef Stalin can be credited with as many as 50 million
civilian deaths, as opposed to "only" 20 million for Adolf Hitler.
Nevertheless, like Plato, most sympathizers voted with their feet to
stay in the United States.

Despite the Fall of Communism, much disdain for commercial democracy
remains. As Greek philosophy never came to appreciate the social,
political, and economic context in which it originated, grew, and
thrived, many modern intellectuals continue to despise the very kind
of society in which they are uniquely to be found -- uniquely in great
measure because the kind of society they evidently want would actually
not allow them to express their own opinions, or to subsize such
expression so lavishly, either at state expense (e.g. at state
universities) or by guilty philanthropists (e.g. Ted Turner). So,
although the Soviet Union is gone, like Sparta, and its vast
experiment in common ownership and economic planning failed utterly,
as well as being drenched in the blood of its victims, one would
hardly know this listening to contemporary leftists and Marxists. The
planning of a command economy still sounds like the wave of the future
to them.

Ironically, Marx himself may provide the best key to this phenomenon:
Intellectuals may like the idea of command and control for a society
and for an economy because they see themselves in control. Not
surprisingly, Plato thinks that the problem of politics is that the
wrong people are in charge, and the rulers in his ideal Republic are
people like him. Intellectuals have a "class interest" (which means a
self-interest -- for people who otherwise say they detest
"self-interest") in promoting this idea. Their see their own lofty
achievements as entitling them to the rule of others. In this way, the
crypto-socialist economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who still makes
public statements occasionally, fulminated against advertising as
producing, just as Plato would have said, "unnecessary desires." And,
since people can be so easily manipulated by advertising into buying
things that they don't need or that are bad for them, we clearly need
people like him in charge to protect us. This kind of arrogance will
soon probably produce the prohibition of tobacco, as it disastrously
produced Prohibition of alcohol in the 20's.

But one of the clearest lessons of the Twentieth Century is that this
self-serving fantasy of rule by Academia is the most bitter folly:
Absolute power, once unleashed, slips from the hands of timid
professors and is seized by ruthless monsters like Lenin, Hitler,
Stalin, Castro, etc.  The intellectuals get silenced, killed, or,
almost worse, become fawning mouthpieces for tyranny. Too many
intellectuals were already mouthpieces for tyranny, even when they
didn't need to be, as when the New York Times reporter, Walter
Duranty, received a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Stalinist
Russia, even while he was helping to suppress the truth about Stalin's
terror famine in the Ukraine -- the starving to death of millions of
peasants (perhaps 5 million) just because they had been too successful
on their private farms.

Thus, the question of the origin of Greek philosophy, to which Athens
itself, with its commercial democracy, is the answer, remains relevant
to the politics of the Twentieth and, evidently, the Twenty-First
Centuries. Indeed, it is a distressing and sobering new truth of
history, little suspected before our time, that a vast educated class
may, by its very nature, be hostile to freedom, democracy, and the
creation of wealth for everyone -- though China was similarly ill
served by the scholar Mandarins. The truth is not enough. As Thomas
Jefferson said, "All know the influence of interest on the mind of
man, and how unconsciously his judgment is warped by that influence."
Indeed, what we find today is that many academics deny there is truth,
revel in the irrationality and incoherence of their own assertions,
and nakedly assert that power is the end of all discourse. It should
be no surprise to then see the educated promoting ignorance and the
free promoting tyranny, all in the hope that power will fall to them.
They will, indeed, derive no benefit should their ambitions be
realized, but by then it will be too late for benefit to anyone else.
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History of Philosophy

Home Page

Copyright (c) 1998 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved
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Note 1
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[INLINE] [INLINE] Although widely distributed around the Mediterranean
basin, Mediterranean climates are actually rather rare in the world.
The most extensive area is the south coast of Australia. Otherwise,
there is only California, a small part of Chile in South American, and
[INLINE] the tip of South Africa right around Cape Town. None of these
places ended up with the other geographical and cultural attributes
that put Greece and the Mediterranean in such historically important
roles.

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Note 2
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The cirumstances of a life of trade curiously fit the four conditions
for success recommended by the actor/comedian Sinbad to Dan Aykroyd in
the Coneheads movie of 1993:
1. Look good.
2. Be your own boss.
3. Don't get stuck behind a desk.
4. Only take cash.

We don't know how good Greek traders would have looked, but everything
else certainly fits, and success did follow.

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Note 3
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Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Volume I: The Old and
Middle Kingdoms, University of California Press, 1973, p. 183.

Lichtheim argues rather awkwardly that the text is intended as a
"satire" because the "scribal profession" never would have harbored "a
contempt for manual labor so profound as to be unrelieved by humor."
Instead, the Egyptians are supposed to have uniformly taken "joy and
pride in the accomplishments of labor" and have taught "respect for
all labor" (p. 184). However, one does not have to have either
contempt or respect to recognize that manual labor in an ancient
society, with nothing in the way of modern medicine and when the
average life-span was only about 35 years, was hard, merciless, and
ravaging. A text that begins "I have seen many beatings" must be
expected to be offering a sober caution, if indeed there were "many
beatings," which, as it happens, is undeniable. Why there is any
paricular dignity in getting beaten by tax collectors, or why a
scribal writer would want to satirize it, is more than a little
mysertious. No, the concern for the dignity of labor here is modern
and editorial, if not Marxist, and the intention of the author of the
text is clearly the very serious recommendation of scribal life,
attended with reading, writing, and authority, over the hard labor and
social subordination of other professions.

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Note 4
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Although this is now disputed, the word "Phoenician," Phoinix, in
Greek, looks like a borrowing from Egyptian. Fnkhw in Egyptian meant
"Syrians," and the Phoenicians would have been the only Syrians
encountered by the Greeks for a long time. "Phoenicia" itself in
Phoenician had the same name then as now: Lebanon (Lbnn) -- rendered
by the Egyptians as Rmnn.

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Note 5
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From "mountain," the root GBL (jabal in Arabic), came the name of one
of the principal Phoenician cities, Gubla, rendered by the Greeks as
Byblos. This also became a Greek word for Egyptian papyrus, probably
traded by Byblos, and so, more commonly as biblos, the Greek word for
"book."

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Note 6
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The initial slope of the pyramid was not really too steep, at
54^o27'44", even though the pyramid was finished at 43^o22'. The angle
of the Great Pyramid of Khufu would soon be 51^o50'40"; and the
pyramid of Khafre would have an angle of 53^o10'. Instead the Bent
Pyramid suffered from problems with the developing technology:

It was this combination of a lack of good mortar, carelessly laid
blocks, and, most importantly, the unstable desert surface, that
caused the structural problems. [Mark Lehner, The Complete
Pyramids,Thames and Hudson, 1997, p. 102]

If the pyramid had been continued as planned, the weight of stone
above, due to the foundation and structural problems, would have
crushed the chambers within or caused a collapse of the sides. This
was solved by flattening off the slope, resulting in the famous "bent"
shape of the pyramid. Seneferu seems to have been displeased enough to
order a complete new pyramid built, which was subsequently finished as
the first true pyramid, the "Northern" pyramid at Dahshur.

The photo of the upper chamber of the Bent Pyramid is from I.E.S.
Edwards, The Pyramids of Egypt, Penguin Books, 1961, plate 9a.

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Note 7
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Fans of Star Trek may recognize the word "archon" from the classic
Star Trek episode "The Return of the Archons," #22 in the original
series, which aired February 9, 1967. The "archons" referred to were
the crew of the starship Archon, which had been captured and the crew
"absorbed" by the mind-controlling, totalitarian regime of a planet
ruled by a computer impersonating an ancient legislator named "Landru"
(rather like Sparta's Lycurgus). The episode ends with Captain Kirk in
one of his classic moments arguing the computer into a nervous
breakdown, freeing the planet.

Although the individualistic message of this episode, as of much of
the original Star Trek, is unmistakable, note later tendencies of the
series, as disussed in "The Fascist Ideology of Star Trek: Militarism,
Collectivism, & Atheism".

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Note 8
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Although very many ships were lost at sea in the pre-modern period,
taking crew, cargo, and profit with them, the returns on a successful
voyage could be astounding. An good example of how astounding we can
gather from the 4700% profit that Queen Elizabeth I made off of her
shares in the round-the-world voyage -- from 1577 to 1580, including a
famous stop in California in 1579 -- of Sir Francis Drake in the
Golden Hind [cf. T.O. Lloyd, The British Empire, 1558-1995, The Short
Oxford History of the Modern World, general editor J.M. Roberts,
Oxford, 1996, p. 9]. The profit seems to have come largely from a
single cargo of cloves.

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Note 9
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Some people like to think that the wealth of Athens derived from the
Laurion silver mines. But this is to make a fundamental mistake about
the nature of wealth. Money is worthless without something to buy.
Even gold, without commerce, may as well be used, as the Egyptians
did, to make or cover coffins. If goods are produced, then it doesn't
matter who has the gold or silver, it will run, like water, to the
producers. A prime example of that is the great flood of metal from
the silver mines of Mexico and Peru, starting in the 16th century,
which all went to Spain. Since Spain was not a commercial or
manufacturing power, it simply spent the money. That helped make it a
predominant power for over a century, but the money, when spent, then
went to the commercial states, like the Netherlands and England. The
Netherlands, small as it was, then demonstrated a new order of
economic strength by successfully revolting against Spain. All that
all of the silver had done to the Spanish economy was to produce a
raging inflation -- always the result of too much money chasing too
few goods. Athens suffered no such embarrassments. It could absorb its
own silver, and much, much more, like the "tribute" from the League of
Delos, because of the strength of its own economy.

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Note 10
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This is rather like when the "Psychic Friends Network," which
dispensed paranormal advice by phone, filed for bankruptcy early in
1998, the news stories asked "Didn't they see it coming?"

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Note 11
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The Greek historian of philosophy Diogenes Laertius, refers to a lost
work, that of Hieronymus of Rhodes, crediting Thales with "measuring
the pyramids by their shadow, having observed the time when our own
shadow is equal to our height" (G.S. Kirk & J.E. Raven, The
Presocratic Philosophers, Cambridge, 1964, p. 83). This would be a
little awkward, since one's own height would have to be ascertained
and the shadow measured by it. Since the gnomon -- a stick in the
ground -- was in use at the time to observe the path of the sun, using
one would be considerably easier and just as simple.

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Note 12
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The virtue of cuneiform writing, incised on clay tablets, which
otherwise would seem messy and cumbersome, is that it will not decay
or burn. When the Assyrian cities were burned and looted (c. 614-612),
the library tablets were simply baked into bricks, leaving to
posterity a vast body of Assyro-Babylonian literature and documents.
Egyptian papyrus, although far more convenient as a writing material,
decays and burns easily, leaving us with a pitiful fragment of
Egyptian literature. Suriviving papyri are largely from tombs in the
desert, preserved by the dry conditions; but Egyptian libraries were
not built in the desert. Much Egyptian literature, indeed, has not
surived on papryus at all but on the ostraca, the fragments of pots
and chips of stone, that were used by boys (no girls, by the way) in
scribal schools -- they were denied valuable papyrus for the humble
task of copying their lessons.

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Note 13
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Kissinger should have known better than to have so underestimated the
strength of America, since he certainly would have known how Napoleon
had foolishly dismissed England as "a nation of shopkeepers" -- where
the shopkeepers built a navy that sank Napoleon's, and then carried
him to exile on St. Helena.

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Parmenides of Elea and the Way of Truth
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Parmenides (born c. 515) is one of the most important Presocratic
philosophers and represents a major turning point in the development
of Greek thought. We can credit Parmenides with two major innovations:
1. Dialectic. To the Greeks, this simply meant logical argumentation.
This represents a break with a characteristic of mythpoeic thought
that had persisted through the first Greek philosophers, namely
the fourth characteristic, that myth is self-justifying. As handed
down to us, earlier philosophers, like Anaximander and Heracltius,
simply assert what is true. They do not, to our knowledge, offer
arguments. Where they begin to notice their own disagreements,
there is not much they can say about each other except that they
are right and the others are wrong. Heraclitus is supposed to have
said:

Much learning [polymathy] does not teach intelligence [or "mind,"
noûs], or it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, Xenophanes
and Hecataeus. [Diogenes Laertius]
Although Parmenides's poem, the Way of Truth, begins with the
invocation of an unnamed goddess, in standard mythic form, the
goddess provides arguments, rendering her own authority
superfluous.
The meaning of the word "dialectic" (from which is derived
"dialogue") now has drifted far from its original sense, because
of special technical meanings attributed to it by philosophers
like Kant, Hegel, and Marx. Also, the etymology of the word is
commonly misunderstood, as when people say that a "dialogue"
involves two people because di- means "two." Well di- can mean two
(from dis, "double"), but it does not in "dialectic" or "dialogue"
since the element is dia- rather than di-. Dia is a Greek
preposition that means "through." "Discourse," from Latin
(discursus), would be the most appropriate translation of the
Greek meaning.
Metaphysics. The meaning of the word "metaphysics" is also commonly
misconstrued. On television or in New Age literature (one thinks
of Shirley MacLaine and her books like Out on a Limb -- made into
a TV movie in 1987), one is liable to hear that the word
"metaphysics" means "beyond" (meta) the "physical" (physics). Thus
"metaphysics" would be about spiritual things, God, the soul,
ghosts, etc. Unfortunately, the Greek preposition meta does not
mean "beyond"; it means "after." This might be thought to amount
to the same thing, but it doesn't, because of the actual origin of
the word. Metaphysics was originally the title of a book, by
Aristotle. It got that name by accident.
When Aristotle died (in 322), none of his mature thought had been
published. All that remained of his teachings at his school, the
Lyceum, were his lecture notes, sometimes even his students'
lecture notes. Before long, his family and students decided that
something should be done about that, and the material was
gradually organized, divided, and published. The appropriate names
for many of the books were obvious (On the Heavens, On the Soul,
The Parts of Animals, etc.). After the Physics (physika, "natural
things," from physis, "nature") was published, however, it was not
obvious what to call the next book, since it had material about
God and a number of other things in it. Rather than picking one
topic, the book simply began to be called the "After the Physics"
(Meta ta Physika). The name stuck. So the word "metaphysics"
really doesn't mean anything etymologically. It would basically
mean whatever was in Aristotle's Metaphysics.
What was basic in the Metaphysics was something for which a word
did not exist in Greek philosophy. A modern word has been coined
from Greek, however:  "Ontology", for the philosophical discipline
that is the first and principle part of metaphysics. "Ontology"
(ontologia) means "talking" (-logia) about "being" (ôn / onto-).
This is literally what Parmenides did, as will be seen below -- to
talk about Being. More generally, "ontology" is the theory about
what is real. It is often said to be the study of "Being qua
Being," or of what Aristotle called the ontôs ónta, the "beingly
beings," or most real things. This is why the popular meaning of
"metaphysics" is incorrect. Any theory that is an answer to the
question, "What is real?" is an ontological, and so metaphysical,
theory. That is true whether one answers "spirits" or even
"matter." Materialism is just as much metaphysics as its denial.
Indeed, in a Physics class, little attention is going to paid to
the question, "What is real?"
Talking about Being, Parmenides founds abstract metaphysics. There
are other disciplines that later (as in Aristotle) fall into
metaphysics:  especially cosmology, the theory of the structure
and history of the universe, natural theology, theories about God
based on reason rather than revelation, and rational psychology,
the rational metaphysics of the soul.

These two innovations of Parmenides are presented in the form of an
epic poem, the Way of Truth. Fragments of it survive in quotations by
later writers, some of them much later: Proclus lived in the 5th
century AD, Simplicius in the 6th. So, a thousand years after
Parmenides, Simplicius supplies us with extensive quotations, because
he himself had difficulty finding complete texts of Parmenides. Those
are now lost, but Simplicius remains.
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Fragments of the Way of Truth
by Parmenides of Elea

translation based on G.S. Kirk & J.E. Raven (1957) and Scott Austin (1986)
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[Fragment 1, from Sextus Empiricus and Simplicius]

The steeds that carried me took me as far as my heart
could desire, when once they had brought me and set me on the
renowned way of the goddess, who leads the man who knows through
every town.

Parmenides may be the first Greek philosopher to offer a careful
argument, derived from and based on reason, for his views.
Nevertheless, he wrote a traditional poetic invocation of a Muse-like
goddess for his philosophical poem. Thus we look back to the
inspiration that the poets, and perhaps the first philosophers,
claimed as the authority for their statements, even as we look forward
to the appeal to logic made by all later philosophers. The goddess
remains unnamed, as happens in Homer, quite commonly in ancient
religion, and even in the case of Socrates in the Apology.

....And the axle [of the chariot], blazing in the socket, was
making the holes in the naves sing -- for it was urged round by
well-turned wheels at each end -- while the daughters of the Sun,
hasting to convey me into the light, threw back the veils from off
their faces and left the abode of night. There are the gates of the
ways of Night and Day, fitted above with a lintel and below with a
threshold of stone. They themselves, high in the air, are closed by
mighty doors, and avenging Justice controls the double bolts. Her
did the maidens entreat with gentle words and cunningly persuade to
unfasten without demur the bolted bar from the gates. Then, when
the doors were thrown back, they disclosed a wide opening, when
their brazen posts, fitted with rivets and nails, swung in turn on
their hinges. Straight through them, on the broad way, did the
maidens guide the horses and the car. And the goddess greeted me
kindly, and took my right hand in hers, and spoke to me these
words:

"Welcome, O youth, who comes to my abode in the car that bears you,
tended by immortal charioteers. It is no ill chance, but right and
justice, that has sent you forth to travel on this way. Far indeed
does it lie from the beaten track of men. Now it is that you should
learn all things, both the unshaken heart of well rounded truth and
the opinion of mortals in which is no true belief at all. Yet none
the less shall you learn these things also -- how the things that
seem, as they all pass through everything, must gain the semblance
of being.

[Fragments 2 & 3, from Proclus]

"Come now and I will tell you -- and do hearken and carry
my word away -- the only ways of enquiry that can be thought of
[that exist for thinking]: the one way, that it is and cannot not
be, is the path of Persuasion, for it attends upon Truth;

This is the way in which we only talk about Being. Notice that the
entire rest of the poem is a quotation from the goddess.

"the other, that it is not and cannot be, that I tell you is a path
altogether unthinkable.

The way in which we only talk about Not Being. This turns out not to
be a real way of inquiry, because to think about something implies
that it is, in some way, while Not Being is not, by definition, in any
way. Hence such a way is "unthinkable." This is the essence of
Parmenides' argument.

"For you could not know that which is not (that is impossible) nor
utter it; for the same thing can be thought as can be [the same
thing exists for thinking as for being].

[Fragment 6, from Simplicius]

"That which can be spoken and thought must be;
for it is possible for it, but not for nothing, to be; that is what
I bid you ponder. This [i.e. Not Being] is the first way of enquiry
from which I hold you back, and then from that way also on which
mortals wander knowing nothing, two-headed;

The way in which we talk about both Being and Not Being, i.e. the way
in which we talk about the visible world, where one and the same thing
may exist at one time and not exist at another. This need of ours to
talk that way about this world invalidates it for Parmenides.

"for helplessness guides the wandering thought in their breasts;
they are carried along, deaf and blind at once, altogether dazed --
hordes devoid of judgment, who are persuaded that to be and to be
not are the same, yet not the same, and for whom the path of all
things is backward turning.

The traditional critique of Parmenides, starting with Plato, is that
he was confusing the "existential" use of "is," as in "This thing is"
(meaning "This thing exists"), with the "predicative" use of "is," as
in "This thing is blue." Thus, it is said, Parmenides' rejection of
"it is not" discourse is based on a confusion, applying principles
that may be appropriate to the exisential use of "is" to "is" that has
a different meaning -- many lanuages have "nominal sentences" where a
verb is not even used for predication. However, Parmenides never uses
any predications with "it is not." When Parmenides accuses the "hordes
devoid of judgment" of believing that "to be and to be not are the
same, yet not the same," there is no indication or necessity that he
is talking about predication. Instead, he is reasonably and
consistently to be interpreted as accusing people of believing that
"to exist and not to exist are the same, yet not the same," for this
is actually how we do speak of the objects of experience, which are
said to exist at one time and not to exist at another. We also talk
about "fictional objects," like Sherlock Holmes or Obi-wan Kenobi,
which exist in some way but not really in "reality." And there are
mathematical objects, which seem rather basic to "reality" but are not
things we find lying around in ordinary experience, or cannot exist in
ordinary experience, e.g. geometrical points. This is now called the
problem of "non-existent objects," famously explored by the Austrian
philosopher Alexius Meinong (1853-1921). There are various ways to
solve it, but it is not based on the kind of confusion of which
Parmenides is commonly accused.

[Fragment 7, from Plato]

"For never shall this be proved, that things that are not are; but
do hold back your thought from this way of enquiry, nor let custom,
born of much experience, force you to let wander along this road
your aimless eye, your echoing ear or your tongue; but do judge by
reason (lógos) the strife encompassed proof that I have spoken.

[Fragment 8, from Simplicius]

"One way only is left to be spoken of, that it is;
and on this way are full many signs that what is is uncreated and
imperishable; for it is entire, immovable and without end. It was
not in the past, nor shall it be, since it is now, all at once,
One,

The "One" became the common name for Being as it was described by
Parmenides.

"continuous; for what creation will you seek for it? How and whence
did it grow? Nor shall I allow you to say or to think, "from that
which is not"; for it is not be said or thought that it is not. And
what need would have driven it on to grow, starting from nothing,
at a later time rather than an earlier?

This is called an argument from "sufficient reason," because in an
empty eternity there would be no reason why Being would come into
being at one time rather than another. This argument is now especially
associated with the German philosopher Leibniz.

"Thus it must either completely be or be not. Nor will the force of
true belief allow that, beside what is, there could also arise
anything from what is not. Because of this Justice

What is the force of logic? Parmenides, who is here appealing to logic
for perhaps the first time in history, nevertheless thinks of its
sanction as one of divine justice enforced by a goddess.

"does not loosen her fetters to allow it to come into being or
perish, but holds it fast; and the decision on these matters rests
here: it is or it is not (éstin ê ouk éstin).

A key phrase in Parmenides. What the principle would rule out is the
idea of degrees of existence such as is found in the Neoplatonists or
Descartes.

"But it has surely been decided, as it must be, to leave alone the
one way as unthinkable and nameless (for it is no true way), and
that the other is real and true. How could what is thereafter
perish? and how could it come into being? For if it comes to be, it
is not, and likewise if it is going to be. So coming into being is
extinguished and perishing unimaginable.

It is often thought, reasonably enough (e.g. by Hegel) that "becoming"
splits the difference between Being and Not Being, since something
that is becoming already participates in what it is to be. Parmenides,
however, rejects this utterly, since whatever something is supposed to
be becoming, it isn't that thing yet, an especially harsh difficulty
when we are talking about non-existence becoming existence.

"Nor is it divisible, since it is all alike; nor is there more here
and less there, which would prevent it from cleaving together, but
it is all full (émpleon)

Being is a plenum (the Latin translation of the Greek word), i.e. it
is full of Being, since any emptiness or any lack of density could
only be due to the disallowed Not Being.

"of what is. So it is all continuous; for what is clings close to
what is. But, motionless within the limits of mighty bonds, it is
without beginning or end, since coming into being and perishing
have been driven far away, cast out by true belief. Abiding the
same in the same place it rests by itself, and so abides firm where
it is;

It cannot go anywhere, since only Not Being could be there before
Being arrived, and only Not Being could be left after Being had gone
elsewhere.

"for strong Necessity holds it firm within the bonds of the limit
that keeps it back on every side, because it is not lawful that
what is should be unlimited; for it is not lacking -- what is not
would lack everything. But since there is a furthest limit, it is
bounded on every side, like the bulk of a well rounded sphere, from
the center equally balanced in every direction;

Being is not infinite, and this seems to be the only point that does
not really follow from Parmenides's argument -- he can only say it is
not "lawful." He is just more comfortable with a limited One, like a
big beach ball. A follower of Parmenides, Melissos of Samos, more
consistently argued that Being was infinite.

"for it cannot be somewhat more here or somewhat less there. For
neither is there that which is not, which might stop it from
meeting its like, nor can what is be more here and less there than
what is, since it is all inviolable; for being equal to itself on
every side, it rests uniformly within its limits."

The Way of Truth poem is then followed by the Way of Seeming, in which
Parmenides describes the world as though there really was dualism.
This concession, however, posed no radical challenge to the received
tradition of Greek philosophy.

The argument about Not Being was the challenge that Parmenides left to
subsequent philosophy. What is to be made of it? It seems to rule out
the reality of the "real" world. [INLINE] In the subsequent history of
philosophy, roughly three things were done to make sense of the
theory:  (1) the One was interpreted to be matter. This was the
approach of the "Atomists," like Democritus, and of Empedocles, who
proposed that there were four elements. This interpretation came first
and the most easily "saved" the world of perception. (2) the One was
generally later interpreted to be God -- a theistic interpretation.
Because of this Parmenides tended to be associated with the earlier
philosopher Xenophanes, who seems to have been a monotheist. The
Neoplatonists simply called God "the One," and in mediaeval theology,
when the question arose why God was uncreated and indestructible,
arguments much like those of Parmenides could be used. As an
interpretation of Parmenides, however, this doesn't look very good,
since the One is without life or personality -- it is inert. And
finally, (3) Plato replaced the One with his theory of Forms, which
are like the One in being eternal and unchanging, but unlike the One
in being many. Although Parmenides would have had a real problem with
this, Plato of all subsequent Western philosophers took the most
seriously Parmenides' rejection of the existence of the world of
appearances. Although unpopular in the West, however, this
world-denying view is quite common in Indian philosophy.
_________________________________________________________________

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Note on Parmenides
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It is noteworthy that the name "Parmenides" has two parts, "Parmen"
and "-ides." "-Ides" is a suffix which is a patronymic, that is, it
marks the name of a son's father. "Parmenides" thus means "son of
Parmen." This is common in many languages, but is especially famous in
Russian. "Son of Parmen" in Russian would be "Parmenevich." Other
languages, however, do the same thing. "Son of Parmen" in Persian
would be "Parmenzâdeh." There are now many Persian surnames with the
"-zâdeh" suffix. Even English and Spanish have patronymics, though
now, as in Persian, they have simply become surnames. Thus, "son of
John" was "Johnson," now a very common surname (including two
Presidents of the United States). In Spanish, patronymics are marked
by "-ez" (Portuguese "-es"). "Velasquez" (or "Vasquez") is "son of
Velasco," a name of Basque origin. So English and Spanish patryonymic
equivalents of "Parmenides" would be "Parmenson" and "Parmenez,"
respectively.

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