A BOWL OF REVERENCE WITH A PINCH OF CONTEMPT

Giving up modern ignorance of culture in general for hopeless, let us concentrate only on the last vestiges of the higher learning and appreciation of the humanities. Among these vestiges, the sum total of the attitudes toward the Ancient Greek civilization and toward the pre-Socratics in particular can be best described as “a bowl of reverence with a pinch of contempt,” as I have done it in the title for this entry. Having talked about Nietzsche’s superlative opinion of the pre-Socratics earlier, I am now turning my attention to the view of an eminent philosopher of an admittedly lesser caliber than Nietzsche, yet whom I also happen to hold in very high esteem: Bertrand Russell. The source of his opinion is, once again, his already much-quoted History of Western Philosophy.

The passage below is taken from the Heraclitus chapter, which is in the midst of the pre-Socratic sequence, and thus its relevance to my PreSocratica section is technically established. Aside from such technicalities, it goes without saying that the foundations of the Greek culture in broad terms have been laid not so much by Plato and Aristotle, the hybrid types, as by the Pleiades of the pre-Socratic philosophers, the pure types, in Nietzsche’s terms, which now explains why Russell engages in a general reflection on the Greek culture in the middle of his pre-Socratic section. The passage is necessarily quoted in excerpts; for the full text my reader ought to visit the original, which is found in the first two pages of Russell’s chapter on Heraclitus.

Two opposite attitudes towards the Greeks are common at the present day. One, practically universal from the Renaissance until very recently, views them with almost superstitious reverence, as the inventors of all that is best, and as men of superhuman genius, whom the moderns cannot hope to equal… (If truth be told, the moderns cannot hope to equal any genius of the past, ever since money has become the measure of all things, and original thinking has been pushed to the back of the bus by our modern ‘civilization.’) The other attitude, inspired by the triumphs of science and by an optimistic belief in progress, considers the authority of the ancients an incubus, maintaining that most of their contributions to thought are now best forgotten. (We are currently living in the most interesting times, wretched, but interesting, when the optimistic belief in progress has been sorely undermined by the reality of human greed, which has been writing its own laws of lawlessness into the book of life.)

Russell predictably displays a measure of objectivity by refusing to subscribe to either view, and next he’ll be discussing what, in his mind, constitutes the greatest achievements of Greek thought.

As to the nature and structure of the world, various hypotheses are possible… To learn to see the universe according to each of these systems is an imaginative delight, and an antidote to dogmatism. Furthermore, even if none of the hypotheses can be demonstrated, there is genuine knowledge in the discovery of what is involved in making each of them consistent with itself, and with known facts. Now, almost all hypotheses that have dominated modern philosophy were first thought of by Greeks, whose imaginative inventiveness in abstract matters cannot be too highly praised, and what I will have to say about the Greeks will be said mainly from this point of view; I shall regard them as giving birth to theories, which have proved capable of surviving and developing throughout more than two thousand years. (Generating such ideas is, perhaps, the highest mark of creative genius, and in this sense the Greeks, particularly the pre-Socratics, deserve the highest praise and even veneration, in the same vein as nations venerate their saints and heroes.)

The Greeks contributed something else, which proved of more permanent value to abstract thought: they discovered mathematics and the art of deductive reasoning. Geometry in particular, is a Greek invention, without which modern science would have been impossible. But, in connection with mathematics, the one-sidedness of the Greek genius appears: it reasoned deductively from what appeared self-evident, and not inductively from what had been observed. Its amazing successes in employing this method misled not only the ancient world, but the greater part of the modern world as well. It has only been slowly that scientific method, which seeks to reach principles inductively from observation of particular facts, has replaced the Hellenic belief in deduction from luminous axioms derived from the mind of the philosopher. (I believe in the superiority of the deductive, “creative” method over the less reliable inductive method, but it is of course advisable to employ a combination of both, in order to achieve a more comprehensive range of results. It is interesting in this regard that this is exactly what the scientists among the Greeks strove to accomplish, as they undoubtedly observed particular facts, but distrusted their physical senses in favor of intuition, that is, they deliberately refrained from inductive conclusions in favor of deductive hypotheses. In other words, I am convinced that their preference for deduction was not due to a deficiency in induction, but that it was due to their deliberate and conscientious choice.-- Nota bene!) For this reason, apart from others, it is a mistake to treat the Greeks with superstitious reverence. (I am also against any kind of superstition, but other than that, it should follow from my previous comment that my own reverence for the Greeks remains undiminished by the deduction contra induction dispute.)

There is, however, a more general argument against reverence, whether for the Greeks or for anyone else. In studying a philosopher, the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt… (Russell is clearly talking about reverence or contempt a priori, in other words, a prejudice, which will inevitably stand in our way, as we prepare ourselves to study a particular author, and I am in complete agreement with him in such literal understanding of reverence and contempt!) but first, a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories… (I understand Russell’s point here in general terms, but as the reader may still remember, I also hold that it is absolutely not necessary to believe in a thinker’s theory, in order to appreciate him as a powerful positive stimulant of our own thought, and thus have a reverence of sorts for him, that is, a reverence of a lower order than religious reverence), and only then a revival of the critical attitude, that should resemble as far as possible the state of mind of a person abandoning opinions which he has hitherto held. Contempt interferes with the first part of this process, and reverence interferes with the second part. Two things are to be remembered: that a man whose opinions and theories are worth studying ought to be presumed to have had some intelligence, but that no man is likely to have arrived at a complete and final truth on any subject whatsoever. (This is precisely the point of my previous comment, and of a host of similar comments throughout this and other sections!) When an intelligent man expresses a view that seems to us obviously absurd, we should not attempt to prove that it is somehow true, but we should try to understand how it ever came to seem true. This exercise of historical and psychological imagination at once enlarges the scope of our thinking, and helps us realize how foolish many of our cherished prejudices will seem to an age which has a different temper of mind. (I am obviously in agreement with Russell’s last remark. His point is very well taken, although it ought to stand on its own, outside the context of this particular discussion.)

Which also brings our present entry to an end.