Ancient Greek Philosophy: Origin, Problems, and Influence

Posted on Nov 2, 2024 in Philosophy and ethics

Philosophy as a Creation of the Hellenic Genius

Philosophy is the missing ingredient in other Eastern civilizations, such as the Chaldean, Mesopotamian, and Egyptian, which reached high levels of civilization (beliefs, religious, artistic, and technical knowledge and skills, political institutions, military organizations). The lack of philosophy has had an impact on all fronts. Should we wonder if other cultures independently developed something similar? The answer is ambiguous, for while some consider it a “new” contribution to Western culture, others do not.

The Impossibility of an Oriental Origin of Philosophy

From the position that considers philosophy a creation “ex novo” of Western thought, three theses are provided to substantiate this claim:

  1. In the classical period, none of the Greek philosophers and historians made the slightest mention of an alleged Eastern origin of philosophy.
  2. Oriental peoples with whom the Greeks came into contact had a form of wisdom consisting of religious, theological, and cosmo-gónicos myths, but not a philosophical science based only on reason (logos).
  3. No evidence exists of any use by the Greeks of Oriental writings or translations of them.

The Homeric Poems and the Gnomic Poets

Before philosophy was born, poets had an influence on education and spiritual formation of man among the Greeks (paideia). The Iliad and Odyssey, Hesiod, and the gnomic poets of the 7th-6th centuries BC, were the voices heard and followed. The Greek models and values found in the Homeric poems are characterized by:

  1. Imaginary and fantastic descriptions that never displayed the monstrous and the grotesque. This means that the Homeric imagination aspires to harmony, proportion, and limit, all of which philosophy elevates to the level of ontological principles (principles of being).
  2. The art of motivation is a real constant in Homer. Homer strives to look for causes and reasons (albeit at a mythical-fantasy level). This search for causes and reasons will be elevated to the supreme principle of philosophy.
  3. The Homeric epic tries to present reality in its entirety: gods and men, heaven and earth, war and peace, good and evil, etc., all the values that govern the lives of men.
  • Hesiod and his “Theogony” explain the birth of the gods. And since many gods correspond with parts of the universe and cosmic phenomena, theogony becomes cosmogony, that is, a poetic and mythical explanation of the genesis of the universe.
  • In “The Works and Days,” Hesiod celebrates justice (dike) as a supreme value. Justice will become an ontological concept, as well as ethical and political, especially in Plato.
  • Other lyric poets introduced a fundamental concept: the concept of limit. The limit means, at least in Plato, as determined, which lacks nothing. It points to the idea of measure that will express the behavior of the individual and the state.
  • The Delphi Temple of Apollo displays the phrase: “Know thyself.” Celebrated by the Egyptians, it became the motto of Socrates and reached the Neoplatonists.

Public Religion and the Orphic Mysteries

The Greek religion distinguishes between public religion, whose model is the representation of gods and worship that Homer gives us, and the religion of mysteries. For Homer and Hesiod, everything that happens is explained in terms of the interventions of the gods. Moreover, the lives of men are imagined as being linked to the gods. The gods are personified natural forces through human forms. It has been said that the public religion of the Greeks is a form of naturalism. All it asks of man is to do in honor of the gods that which is according to nature (physis).

Orphism and the poet Orpheus introduce a new system of beliefs and a new interpretation of human existence. The core of Orphic beliefs can be summarized as follows:

  1. Man holds a divine principle, a daemon (soul), which falls into a body due to an original fault.
  2. This daemon predates not only the body but also does not die with the body and is intended to reincarnate into successive bodies, through a series of rebirths, to expiate that original guilt.
  3. The Orphic life, with its rituals and practices, is the only one that is able to end the cycle of reincarnation, thus freeing the soul from his body.
  4. For those who have been purified (for those initiated into the Orphic mysteries), there is a reward in the hereafter (for the uninitiated, there are penalties).

A key factor in Greek religion, which decisively influenced the birth of philosophy, is that the Greeks had no sacred books regarded as a result of divine revelation. Therefore, they did not possess a fixed and unchangeable dogma. This lack of dogma gave wide latitude to philosophical inquiry, which found no obstacles such as those that would have been present in Eastern communities.

The Socio-Political Conditions that Favor the Emergence of Philosophy

  1. The advent of Western logos maintains a deep connection with a series of social and political changes occurring at that time, namely: the development of commercial activity. The founding of several colonies, such as Miletus, and trade along the Mediterranean coast favored the development of trade, which brought the Greeks into contact with people, customs, practices, and heterogeneous beliefs different from theirs, against which it was necessary to develop new forms of relationships that enable the understanding among people of different traditions and, thus, tended to overcome the idiosyncrasies and peculiarities of each culture and using elements or attributes and objectives common to all human beings, for example, the intellect and reason.
  2. The emergence of new social classes. The old aristocracy, the noble warrior, defender of tradition, was gradually displaced by the new economic class, trade and craft, whose activities and interests were completely different, and consequently, traditional culture and mythic, defending old privileges, began to be replaced by principles and laws of a rational and positive nature, according to new situations.
  3. The development of new political forms. The geographical conditions of Greece, on the one hand, an extremely trimmed coastline with numerous bays, capes, and islands and, secondly, in the inland, deep valleys, isolated by mountain ranges, contributed to the isolation and separation between different counties and, thus, is favored the disappearance of the idea of empire, emerging in its place a new concept of politics, the polis, the city-state, where relationships between people settled for ties and geographical proximity political game, and consequently, the charismatic and totalitarian power of the kings began to be replaced by the rational authority of the new rulers and the former subjects became citizens. They had two new tools: the Isonomia and Isegoria. The first involved the primacy of law over any citizen. All were subjects of the Law. Isegoria supposed to give the floor to the value of coexistence and political debate.

The Essential Features of Ancient Philosophy

Tradition says that the term “philo-sophia” was created by Pythagoras. The term meant that only the gods have sophia (wisdom), which is a true and complete possession of truth, while man can only aspire to a trend toward wisdom, a love of knowledge that can never be fully satisfied. The term “philosophy” from Plato is “love of wisdom.” Philosophy took the following three features, which refer to: a) its content, b) the method, and c) its objective.

Content

  1. Philosophy aims to explain the totality of things, i.e., all of reality, as opposed to the special sciences that are content to define their scope of explanation. The search to explain the whole will be in the discovery of the first principle (arche).

Method

  1. Philosophy aspires to be a purely rational explanation of that totality that arises as an object. Philosophy must go beyond the fact, to find the cause or causes, precisely by reason. The logos must disclose (aletheia) the truth of all things.

Objective

  1. The purpose of philosophy lies in the pure desire to know and to contemplate the truth. Greek philosophy expresses the image of disinterested knowledge. Aristotle recorded that the cultivation of philosophy did not appear until the basic needs were covered.

The Fundamental Problems of Ancient Philosophy

At first, the whole of reality was seen as physis (nature) and as cosmos, which meant that the philosophical problem was cosmological. How did the cosmos originate? Subsequently, the Sophists amend these issues, stop the cosmological problems of interest, and the interest is transferred to the anthropological field. The ethical and political questions are born. Plato and Aristotle (4th-3rd centuries BC) further enrich these subjects: epistemological, metaphysical or ontological, and ethical-political areas. The diversity of subjects and their different treatments by these authors make them a starting point for philosophical inquiry.

Post-Aristotelian philosophy coincides with Hellenism, which organizes knowledge into three main sections with special attention to ethics, logic, physics, and ethics. The central issue is the salvation of man. How to find happiness in a changing world? The philosophies of Epicurus (3rd century BC), Stoicism (Zeno of Citium 335-263 BC), and skepticism (Pyrrho of Elis 365-275 BC) will forget the great metaphysical constructions of Plato and Aristotle, for now, it tries to find consolation for a life that needs happiness, and this cannot be found in the “world of ideas” or ideals of the contemplative sage.

The last Greek philosophy, which runs parallel to Christianity, eventually responds to mystical-religious concerns, in line with the mentality of the new age (Neoplatonism and Plotinus 204-269). The central issue at this stage is the salvation of man from the spiritual realm. Greek philosophy began in the 6th century BC and continued until 529 AD when the Emperor Justinian closed the pagan schools.