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Lesson 1.3: The Exile and the Riddler
19 Plays3 months ago
Topics discussed:
- The Persian Invasions of Greece
- Xenophanes' theological views
- Xenophanes' distinction between knowledge and belief
- Epistemic self-awareness
- Heraclitus' relativism and his doctrine of flux
- Heraclitus' views on improving the soul
For more information, visit theluxuryofvirtue.com.
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Transcript
Rise of the Achaemenid Empire
00:00:02
Speaker
When we last left off this story, there was a new geopolitical predator on the scene. The Achaemenid Persian Empire was gobbling up large territories. And as you recall, when they conquered some territory that included some Greeks, eventually the Greeks revolted and other Greeks came to their aid. This includes the city-state of Athens,
00:00:36
Speaker
The revolt was eventually put down by the Persians, and all the Athenians managed to do was catch the attention of the King of Kings.
Greek Revolt and Persian Retaliation
00:00:47
Speaker
And so now the Persians are coming after the Athenians and other Greek city-states to teach them a lesson. You don't mess with the Persians. So we pick up this story around 500 BCE.
00:01:04
Speaker
And we see that as the Persians are getting ready to go on campaign to punish these Greek city states, the Athenians and the Spartans, two of the larger, more powerful Greek city states,
00:01:19
Speaker
They're engaged in bitter fighting with their neighbors, right? The Greeks almost perpetually are just fighting with each other. And this is perhaps the least convenient time to be fighting with each other as a big empire is heading your way. As per custom, the Persians sent out envoys to you know request voluntary submission.
00:01:47
Speaker
to say, give us some earth and water. The elites currently will still stay in charge of the region, but you'll just submit ultimately ah to the Persian king of kings. You just have to send tribute to, you know, and then everything will be more or less the same. You'll just be a part of the Persian empire. Most Greek city-states actually went along with it. They
Greek Resistance and Persian Invasion
00:02:10
Speaker
said, well, okay, that doesn't sound too bad.
00:02:13
Speaker
This is why they call the Persian king, the king of kings. Basically the political infrastructure of those places that they conquered stayed more or less the same for the most part, right? They just had to pay tribute to the king of kings and it was all ultimately under the control of the Persians. As you probably know about and maybe have come to expect,
00:02:39
Speaker
The Athenians and the Spartans did not submit to the Persians. Instead, they threw the envoys into a pit or a well and told them to, you know, get your earth and water there. Of course, this meant that the Persian invasion would go on as planned, and so it did.
00:03:04
Speaker
Now, if this were a class on military history, much could be said here about what happens in this first invasion of Greece by the Persians. I would just sum it up in the following way. The Persians had great success, although they were not completely successful. They didn't accomplish everything that they wanted to do.
00:03:27
Speaker
So here is the part where they had great success. In the Northern parts where you know Greeks inhabited, places like Macedon and Thrace, basically the Persians just conquered everything. Either they resubjugated some regions that were already under Persian control, but had revolted, or they conquered places that hadn't previously been under Persian control.
00:03:53
Speaker
So as far as the northern parts of the Greek world, they were subjugated to Persia now. It was in the south where there was only partial successes for the Persians. As far as the Aegean Sea, the Persians basically conquered a bunch of islands and they had complete control at that point of the Aegean Sea. However, what they couldn't exactly conquer was Athens itself.
00:04:23
Speaker
This is a very famous battle that takes place. It's called the Battle of Marathon. And essentially what happened is that the Persians were looking to disembark from their ships and start their march towards Athens.
00:04:39
Speaker
At that point, they see the Athenian army, they start to trot towards the Persian forces, and essentially the Persian forces are routed. They have to get back into their boats and they take off. What happens though is that the Persians begin to head towards Athens.
00:04:59
Speaker
If they can't disembark where they wanted to originally, maybe they'll just go straight to Athens. After all, the Athenian army is over there where they were planning to disembark over in Marathon. And so we'll just sail over to Athens and invade that way. right All their forces are elsewhere preoccupied and there's no way they can make it in time to protect the city. Well,
00:05:27
Speaker
Somehow the Athenian army marched the 26 miles back to Athens in order to defend the city. And to make a long story short, the Persians just had to leave.
00:05:41
Speaker
ever since then this 26-mile frantic march is commemorated in the Olympic Games. That's where we get our idea of a marathon from, from this surprising victory at the Battle of Marathon. I say surprising because it really did look like the Persians were going to mop up the Athenians like they have everyone else up until this point.
00:06:06
Speaker
So the fact that the Athenians were able to somehow repel the Persian advance is noteworthy. Of course, the Persians can simply regroup and launch another invasion. That's exactly what they do. By the time that the second invasion takes place, Darius has died and now we have a new king of kings. His name is Xerxes.
00:06:33
Speaker
As the Persians are preparing for this second invasion, the Greeks have to form an alliance in order to be able to combat this even bigger Persian force. This alliance is headed by Sparta. And this is where one of the most famous battles in Greek history takes place. Of course, I'm talking about the famous Battle of Thermopylae, which takes place in 480 BCE.
00:07:03
Speaker
Here we see an international coalition of armies headed by the Persian immortals, of course, working their way through the past at Thermopylae to make their way to, you know, rabbits, Greek cities.
00:07:21
Speaker
and they are held off, at least for a time, by the famous 300 Spartans, including a Spartan king and, of course, some other Greek allies. It's not just 300 people. Now, typically, this battle is romanticized as a courageous defense by the Greeks, probably from the Persian view of things,
00:07:48
Speaker
This is a resounding victory. i mean They got to kill some of the most elite forces from Sparta, along with a Spartan king.
Philosophical Evolution during Conflict
00:07:58
Speaker
That's a win. The Persians eventually make it to Athens. They burn it to the ground, essentially. In fact, it's only in a naval battle that the Greeks are able to have any kind of advantage over the Persians.
00:08:14
Speaker
And that's exactly what we see at the Battle of Salamis. That's the first time that the Greeks kind of turned around things against the Persians and finally beat them. And once more, again, maybe from the momentum after having won the Battle of Salamis, the Persians are eventually fought off by 479 BCE. They're gone.
00:08:42
Speaker
Once more, these Greek city-states managed to repel the Persians, managed to remain autonomous and free, perhaps against all odds.
00:08:56
Speaker
Less dramatic than the political crises of the time are the philosophical crises. As we learned last time, three Milesian philosophers had introduced a new worldview into Greek thought, this idea that there must be an archae, a first principle from which everything else derives, right? There is the world of becoming that is ultimately contingent upon being with a capital B.
00:09:30
Speaker
Now, the people that would wrestle with this idea next all lived throughout the time period where the Persians and the Greeks were at it with each other. In fact, Heraclitus and Sinophanes, the two philosophers we'll be covering today, were actually from the Ionian region of Greece.
00:09:56
Speaker
which is exactly where those city-states revolted against Persia, and where ultimately these insurrectionists had to be crushed. Heraclitus, for example, was from Ephesus, which is just north of Miletus. Recall that Miletus is where Thales and Eximander and Anaximenes are from, and so he's just a little bit north from there. And Xenophanes was from Colophon,
00:10:26
Speaker
And that city is just north of Ephesus. So you can imagine here, between last lesson and this one, we're covering a little vertical line of cities. Miletus is where the three phil philosophers from last time are from. And just north of that is Ephesus, where Heraclitus is from. And just north of that is Colophon, where Xenophanes is from.
00:10:55
Speaker
All of these, by the way, are just across the ah GNC from Athens. If you find Athens on a map and just move east, right, move to the right, and when you land on Turkey, you'll be right in the area where these cities are located.
00:11:13
Speaker
Both Heraclitus and Xenophanes were affected by the Persian incursion into the Greek world. Heraclitus was born and lived in Ephesus precisely when it was taken over by the Persians. And in fact, when these Ionian cities revolted against the Persians, the suppression of these insurrectionists was based at Ephesus,
00:11:42
Speaker
So the Persian stronghold was exactly where Heraclitus was located. That's sort of their base of operations for the Persians. Xenophonys was even more negatively affected probably by the Persian conquests.
00:11:58
Speaker
Xenophanes was a young man when the Persians first made it over to this part of the Greek world. It was in 546 BCE, some 50 years before the time period we're talking about, when Xenophanes was, as a youngster, essentially exiled from the city. Many people had to leave when the Persians took over. Xenophanes was one of them. He ultimately settled in Aaliyah, which is in southern Italy.
00:12:28
Speaker
Remember, during this time period, there were Greeks all over the place, and the Greeks in southern Italy are very influential indeed. We'll talk about some more of them later on in this course, including Pythagoras. And Sonophanes grew to be very influential there in southern Italy. He quite possibly influenced another philosopher named Parmenides, who will be very important in our story later on, basically because Many philosophers were directly responding to Parmenides, so we'll cover him in a few lessons. But Xenophanes clearly had his life uprooted by the Persian advance, and that's who we will begin with today.
00:13:34
Speaker
Xenophanes died in 478 BCE. I like to imagine that Xenophanes heard about the Greek victory over the Persians before he died, although obviously we have no idea.
00:13:49
Speaker
And here's some more wild speculation for you. Sometimes I feel like Xenophany's experiences as an exile directly led to his religious skepticism, having religious doubts. So let's begin with that part of Xenophany's thought. As we learned last time, the Milesians, right, Thales and Eximander and Eximenes,
00:14:16
Speaker
they engage in what might be called an implicit criticism of Homeric myth. They were essentially giving alternatives to thinking that the gods through to their sexual unions created the world as we know it, or that lightning is you know Zeus' his anger, things like that. Xenophanes was not at all subtle in his criticism of the traditional religious views of the time.
00:14:46
Speaker
The classicist Robin Waterfield says that Xenophanes launched a, quote, full frontal assault. Xenophanes did not mince words at all. He thought the Greeks had it all wrong. And in particular, Homer and Hesiod were giving us misinformation about what the gods are like. As is the case with many of the philosophers we'll be covering in this first unit,
00:15:14
Speaker
There is a traditional take, a traditional interpretation of what Xenophanes was saying, and there is more modern revisionist reinterpretations, right? So let's start with a traditional take just in case you ever have one of these professors with the sports jackets and the elbow patches on it asking you what Xenophanes is all about. You better answer in this way, okay?
00:15:41
Speaker
According to the traditional take, Xenophanes was something like the first monotheist in Greek tradition. He believed perhaps that there is one God, although this is not like the Christian God. According to Xenophanes, God had a body, but it was not a human body. It was not humanoid. That's another way to put it.
00:16:04
Speaker
It was actually a sphere. So God's body is a sphere. What he probably meant by this, by the way, is that God had no discernible qualities. that's That's sort of what he meant to say. Although when you have radically new ideas, when you're just blazing forward, theologically speaking, sometimes it's really difficult to express yourself with clarity.
00:16:31
Speaker
In any case, he believes that besides being non-humanoid and spherical in shape, God did indeed have a mind, and he could move the world with his mind, but because he doesn't have needs, he doesn't have desires, God doesn't move the world with his mind. He could, but he doesn't.
00:16:54
Speaker
God is all good. God is powerful. God is eternal. And clearly this is very unlike the Homeric gods of myth. Now the powerful and eternal part is like Zeus and Apollo.
00:17:11
Speaker
and all the other gods, but the good part, that's the one that really conflicts with all the myth that we know about. Typically, the gods are seen as basically having human desires and human flaws, but just magnified by their immense power. They say that you know power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,
00:17:37
Speaker
Well, that's the way that Homer depicts the gods for us. They seem to be able to do whatever they wanted, and so they would. And this includes things that, by our standards, by almost any standards, are extremely immoral. Take your pick, murder, rape. And so what's an often is a saying is, you have the story all wrong. Homer is wrong. There is one God, and he's good.
00:18:08
Speaker
Needless to say, his views were not taken up by many people. Nonetheless, at least on the traditional view of things, this is an important stepping stone towards later conceptions of the divine that we see in the Greek world. So we will likely be referring back to Xenophanes much later on in this course. Let me now give you a brief revisionist take Modern scholars now say that that picture of Xenophon is probably not exactly accurate. ah For starters, he probably wasn't a monotheist. Maybe a better way to understand him is as a monologist or believing in monolatry.
00:18:54
Speaker
So what is monolatry? Essentially, if you are monolatrous, you believe, you acknowledge, let's just say that there are many gods, sure, but you think one of them is better, and that's the one you devote your attention and piety to. So what Xenophanes likely believed is that There might be some other gods. Nonetheless, Homer's depiction of these gods is not accurate. And on top of that, there is one god above them all who is good and eternal and is a sphere, etc. Some of the evidence that scholars provide for this view is that we see in a couple of different fragments from Xenophanes
00:19:40
Speaker
Mention of gods and men. So here's sort of the context behind that. you know He'll say something like, everyone would agree with this, gods and men. If you really only believe in one God, why would you kind of drop that phrase in there from time to time? That doesn't seem to make much sense. And so what he probably believed is that there are gods, but there is one good eternal God over all of them. Even on this revisionist take, however,
00:20:11
Speaker
We know that Xenophanes is outright rejecting the traditional take on the gods, and he is very explicit about denouncing Homer in particular.
Xenophanes' Critique of Knowledge and Belief
00:20:27
Speaker
Moving on from Xenophanes' theological reflections, Here, we move into some of his other philosophical contributions, and it has to do once more with epistemology. As we discussed last time, epistemology is the study of our belief-forming practices. What counts as knowledge? How do we know what we know? What are the limits of knowledge? These are all questions that are covered by epistemic philosophers, and Xenophanes seems to have had some
00:20:59
Speaker
very novel ideas in this subfield of philosophy. If I could sum it up in one phrase, Xenophanes is basically setting up a very high bar for what counts as knowledge. So Xenophanes characterizes true knowledge as being divine. So in other words, he's saying there is a so superior epistemic state that humans cannot get to, right? Mortals cannot know things in certain domains.
00:21:32
Speaker
So this means that the best that humans can do is have beliefs, but we can't really call these beliefs knowledge. All right, so let's unpack this a little bit. What he's trying to say is that everyone so far has been understanding knowledge as having a lower case K, right? But knowledge really has an upper case K.
00:21:55
Speaker
True knowledge has a capital K and it is only known by the gods. The best humans can do is belief. Now, even when humans have the right beliefs, in other words, even when humans by accident have beliefs that match the beliefs of the gods or God, even in these cases, humans can't call it real knowledge, knowledge with a capital K.
00:22:22
Speaker
And that's because humans haven't had the requisite experiences, right? They don't have the cognitive processing. That's a very modern way of saying it. And I'm sure Xenophanes wouldn't have said anything like it. But humans just don't have the capabilities to reach knowledge. They might accidentally have accurate beliefs, but not in a justified way. Our puny human brains just can't get there.
00:22:51
Speaker
The way I like to understand this is that basically Xenophanes is breaking things down into certain domains. I think that if you were to ask Xenophanes, can you know, for example, that I have a glass of wine in front of me, I think Xenophanes can say, well, it's a belief, but you can just have a little bit higher confidence in that belief because it's pretty clear that there's a glass of wine in front of you.
00:23:19
Speaker
I think synophonies is mostly focusing on those big questions, right? There are things that the sort of experience that we would have to have to know those things is just not something that we can have as humans.
00:23:36
Speaker
Maybe some examples will help us understand this a little bit better. Let's use an example that we know Xenophanes actually did talk about. Apparently Xenophanes basically skewers or makes fun of Pythagoras.
00:23:53
Speaker
or some of the claims that Pythagoras made. Now, we haven't covered Pythagoras yet, but he is a bit of a mystic. Actually, I shouldn't say a bit of a mystic. He is definitely a mystic and somewhat of a cult leader.
00:24:08
Speaker
and he has all sorts of claims to having magical powers associated with them. So Pythagoras is definitely a controversial figure, and Xenophanes makes fun of Pythagoras for claiming that he can recognize the voice of a dead friend in the bark of a puppy, right? So Pythagoras believed in reincarnation, and he said, I think I recognize my friend in that dog's bark.
00:24:38
Speaker
And so what Sinophanes is saying is, there is literally no way you can know that. Just think of the things that you would have to know in order to justify that belief. A, you'd have to have evidence that the transmigration of souls is possible, right? Reincarnation. How would you know that with certainty? Well, you'd essentially have to have a God's eye view of reality.
00:25:06
Speaker
You can't just see things on this planet and prove that. You would have to see things beyond this planet to know that souls get reincarnated as other humans or other animals. So here's an opportunity saying, you can't say that you really know that transmigration of souls is real and true.
00:25:29
Speaker
That's something only a God can know, and I'm sure Synophonies is also implying here, Pythagoras is not a God. Here's another thing that you'd have to know in order to justify the claim that you can recognize your dead friend's voice in a puppy.
00:25:47
Speaker
You'd have to know that your dead friend actually got reincarnated somewhere near you and as his puppy. How would you know that? Only a god could know that. And so Pythagoras, being a man, cannot possibly know that for certain.
00:26:05
Speaker
And so this is what Zenophanes is trying to get at. Some knowledge claims like the ones that Pythagoras made cannot possibly be known with any degree of confidence by humans. If they can't be known, it's only by a God.
00:26:23
Speaker
Again, what Sinophony seems to be doing is he's setting a higher bar for knowledge. I kind of see the trajectory throughout the history of thought as the bar for what counts as knowledge continually getting adjusted, getting raised higher and higher.
00:26:41
Speaker
There's actually a wonderful book called Truth by Felipe Fernandez Armesto. And he kind of gives a a little account of how it is at the bar for what counts as truth keeps getting raised throughout time. We can imagine that in prehistoric times, truth was just what you felt. You say something is true because it feels true to you.
00:27:07
Speaker
Later on, the bar for truth gets raised a little bit. Truth becomes that which you can argue for. That's clearly what's happening with the Milesians from last lesson. They say that if you can't provide a rational account, a logos, for what you believe, then it doesn't really count. That's not how you should inquire. You need to be able to rationally defend what you're saying.
00:27:32
Speaker
And Xenophanes has an important role in this gradual raising of the bar for what counts as knowledge. He's saying you need to have the right experiences to justify some claims, like that you recognize your dead friend's voice in a puppy. And when you raise the bar this high, there are clearly some things, some domains, some questions that humans simply can't answer. It's just not possible from the perspective of a human.
00:28:01
Speaker
Speaking of the Milesians again, Xenophony seems to be endorsing and expressing some kind of epistemic humility. He actually even calls his own views beliefs, right? So when he denies that humans can attain knowledge, he's including himself in there. He's even saying, my beliefs, I have you know high confidence in them. I've been working on them for a long time.
00:28:26
Speaker
but they are still just beliefs. I am not a God, and therefore I cannot know for certainty that what I'm claiming is true. So if we can get kind of a main message here from his epistemic reflections, Zenophanes is saying that, you know, don't say things that are hard or impossible to verify unless you have the right kind of evidence. And for some things, the right kind of evidence is beyond human reach.
00:28:57
Speaker
So he has several things in common with the Milesians. He also argues against superstition, as you can kind of imagine. Pythagoras' claims are superstitious, but he also denounces you know what regular folks say about the gods. Some people say that the gods visit them, right? They say, oh, well, that man, I know he just looks like a man, but he was actually an angel.
00:29:23
Speaker
Well, Xenophanes did in fact say, no, the gods do not visit you and human guys. And even if they did, how would you know they were actually gods? How can you distinguish between hallucination and an actual visitation from a divine being? You as a human don't have access to the necessary experience for establishing without reasonable doubt that you were actually visited by a god.
00:29:52
Speaker
Similarly, Xenophanes claims that you will not learn the God's will through the natural phenomena. It's not the case that when you see a rainbow that's God looking down favorably upon you, there are natural causes for rainbows, so don't go looking for messages from the gods in the sky. The rationale is the same as the ones we've seen before.
00:30:17
Speaker
In order for you to know that a rainbow is God's way of telling you that you're you're doing a good job, well, you would have to know what God thinks and how he spends his time and how he communicates with humans. And there is no way that you as a human could know that, right? So these are synophonies, epistemic reflections, and there is a a clear ethical dimension here, right?
00:30:44
Speaker
The Milesians were talking about how it is that you should inquire, right how you should investigate the world, but Sinophonese is saying, here's how you should justify your claims. Don't say things that you can't justify with some experience that you've had. And some claims can only be justified by experiences that are beyond human reach.
00:31:10
Speaker
Maybe this is a good point to remind you about the rundown of ancient religion that we did in lesson in one. Now that you can see some of the philosophical positions that we'll be covering,
00:31:25
Speaker
You can see that they run very much against the grain of traditional ancestral religion. You can imagine that many of these philosophers were rubbing people the wrong way. They were saying things that they didn't want to hear. And it was really causing an uproar. Obviously, some people liked it. The field, the style of inquiry kind of caught on. And I'm sure some people didn't like it.
00:31:51
Speaker
And so that's why it's really good to know what the religion of the age is like when we're covering some of these early philosophical positions. Speaking of religion, Sinophanes does have some interesting thoughts about the topic.
00:32:11
Speaker
Remember, this is why I think that his experiences during his youth kind of made him doubt the traditional religions. Obviously, I have no way of establishing that, but it makes me think this because here's one interesting thought that Sinophanes had about the origin of religion.
00:32:32
Speaker
He notes that every culture describes their gods in a way that resembles the way that they look, right? So here are some actual ethnic groups that he mentions. He says the Ethiopians describe their gods as looking like Ethiopians. The Thracians like Thracians, right? So every culture has a description of their god that basically matches what they look like.
00:32:58
Speaker
and even says if horses could talk and had gods, their gods would look like horses. So he's basically pointing out a general psychological intuition that humans seem to have. Humans seem to dream up their gods so as to be very similar to them. We tend to anthropomorphize the gods, but more than that, we tend to make them just like us.
00:33:29
Speaker
And I don't mean just like us humans, just like us, our ethnic group. So Sinophonies points out that this is utterly self-congratulatory. I mean, there's a couple of things that are going on here that are interesting.
00:33:43
Speaker
but perhaps one of the most important ones is that he's saying that if you go with these ideas that Homer and Hesiod give you, that the gods are just like us, you're doing two things simultaneously. You're sort of denigrating the real gods, who are not at all like humans, and you're also artificially elevating the status of humans. You're saying, well, you know, the gods and the humans, they're not that far apart after all, are they?
00:34:11
Speaker
And all this does, says Xenophanes, is pave the way for bad behavior. After all, if the gods are doing some of the things that they're depicted as doing by Homer, why can't humans misbehave in the way that the gods do? Xenophanes, besides saying that this paves the way for bad behavior, he's saying that this is very unreflective.
00:34:39
Speaker
He's saying that we have this psychological intuition to think of our gods as being like us, but you shouldn't give in to that psychological temptation. You have to resist the urge of your psychological impulses. Be rational about what the gods are actually like. What are the odds that they are just like you? Why would they be just like you?
00:35:03
Speaker
If I'm making xenophonies out to sound a little cranky, Maybe he was. I'm not entirely sure that he was as happy-go-lucky as some of the other philosophers will eventually cover. him And here's some more evidence that he was probably a grouchy guy. He questions whether it's a good idea to celebrate athletes as much as we do.
00:35:28
Speaker
Of course, many people even today take sports very seriously. And just like today in the ancient world, people spent a lot of time and probably money watching sports and admiring athletes and being fans in general. And so Xenophanes, in some of the fragments that we have, says that he's not sure this is a good idea.
00:35:56
Speaker
Why don't we celebrate wise people the way we celebrate athletes? Why is it that those people that can play a sport really well are considered role models in society while the people that spend their days trying to solve intellectual problems don't get any praise? He also questions the values of the masses, saying that they pursue luxury more so than they pursue understanding.
00:36:25
Speaker
And in general, he just complains that the masses lack self-awareness, right? So those are some of the reasons why synophonies might've been, you know, a bit of a misanthrope, a little grouchy. But if we can see past his cranky nature, we might really learn some ethical lessons from him, some lessons about how it is that we should live.
00:36:50
Speaker
Xenophanes seems to have believed that epistemic self-awareness is key. In other words, we need to spend time thinking about what it is that we believe and why it is that we believe it. It can't be the case that you just accept beliefs unreflectively.
00:37:12
Speaker
we should all take time to go through our beliefs and figure out which of these beliefs do I actually have the requisite experience for justifying, right? In other words, out of the beliefs that I hold, which one of these is unjustified? Which one of these requires experiences for justification that I simply haven't had?
00:37:39
Speaker
One thought that comes to mind only because I had a conversation like this recently and is the belief in soulmates. If you believe in soulmates, how do you know that what you believe is actually true? For starters, you have to believe in souls. And so that means that you know what happens after we die and what happened before we were born.
00:38:08
Speaker
And how would you know that? And if you believe in soul mates, you also believe that these souls, and who knows how you know that they actually exist, but these souls are linked in some way. And that when these linked souls find each other, it's good for them.
00:38:26
Speaker
And on top of that, you also have to know that the two people that you're describing as soulmates are actually these linked souls that we're talking about. There's all these different things that you have to know. And what Sinophony's thought gets us to reflect on is that sometimes we might believe things without really having the requisite experience for being able to justify those beliefs.
00:38:55
Speaker
Xenophanes seems to have taken this very seriously. And besides you know the fragments that we have from him, we also know that he wrote satires and critiques of essentially any thinkers and poets and politicians that seem to say that they knew more than Xenophanes thought they knew.
00:39:23
Speaker
that seemed to be speaking from authority, even though Xenophanes suspected they had no real knowledge. In other words, Xenophanes was against epistemic pretensions, epistemic arrogance. Why are people saying they know things when I have good reason to believe that they don't have any way to justify those claims?
00:39:46
Speaker
Synophonies clearly thought that calling these people out required special attention and energy and we should do it. It's not good to let people just say they know things when there is no way they actually know those things. Having a low bar for what counts as knowledge is just bad for us and that's no way to live.
Heraclitus on Knowledge and Change
00:40:41
Speaker
Let's move on now to Heraclitus.
00:40:46
Speaker
We know very little about Heraclitus' life. As I mentioned before, we do know that he was around when the Persians took over his home city, Ephesus, as well as when the Persians crushed the Ionian revolt. But beyond that, we don't know much else.
00:41:07
Speaker
It is widely assumed that these Ionian city-states were still in communication with the other Greek city-states, and that is how Heraclitus came to know of Xenophanes' views. In fact, it is thought that Heraclitus' ideas are a result of his studying Xenophanes, and in fact, they are a response to Xenophanes.
00:41:35
Speaker
And Sonophanes of course claimed that knowledge is only held by the gods or the god. And of course it has a capital K, right? It is not the sort of thing that humans can attain. However, Herak Clyde is gonna go ahead and say, I accept your distinction between knowledge and belief, Sonophanes, but I think there is a way to know what you say is only for the gods.
00:42:04
Speaker
Heraclitus thinks that knowledge is possible, and in fact, he believes he has acquired it. He says that we live our lives as if we are asleep with no understanding, and he's urging us to, like him, wake up, realize there is a higher understanding, and realize you can get it. The Logos, Heraclitus says, is available to us all.
00:42:35
Speaker
Now, if this all sounds mysterious, Heraclitus thought is basically universally considered to be very enigmatic and perhaps even contradictory. And so as we're going through this, I'll try to kind of piece together what Heraclitus might have been thinking, although it should be said that for everyone who is interpreting Heraclitus, it is only an interpretation, right?
00:43:04
Speaker
But by the way, I will try to stick to an interpretation of Heraclitus that isn't too far away from what you know mainstream scholars think. Okay, let's start with the Logos. For Heraclitus, like for the Milesians, Logos meant account or maybe something like principle.
00:43:26
Speaker
So Harry Clyde is basically believed that the universe is telling us what it's like. It's giving us the logos. All we have to do is look for it. And once we realize what it is, we see that the logos makes the world intelligent and alive. The logos animates the world. And once we discover this logos, it asks us to live in accordance with it.
00:43:56
Speaker
The Logos, in other words, is teaching us something about how to live. I told you this was going to be enigmatic, right? So let's look at Heraclitus' teachings to see if we can try to get at what kind of knowledge he is encouraging us to seek. One of the most famous fragments from Heraclitus has to do with a river.
00:44:21
Speaker
Various ancient philosophers report Heraclitus' views, for example, Plato and Plutarch, say that Heraclitus said something like this, you can't step in the same river twice. We also have fragments that report Heraclitus saying, into the same rivers we step and do not step. We are and are not.
00:44:49
Speaker
Okay, well, this is clearly gonna need someone packing, especially because the second fragment that we just heard, we step and do not step, we are and are not, that's that's a contradiction, right? Aristotle sort of pedantically complains about it. I won't get into that. What I will say is that many of Heraclitus's sayings are of this nature. I jotted down a couple of others.
00:45:17
Speaker
Couples are holes and not holes. What agrees, disagrees. The concordant is discordant. From all things one and from one, all things. You can see here that he's equating opposites and that is you know very counterintuitive. It seems that they are not equivalent. They are, in fact, opposites. How can they be the same thing?
00:45:47
Speaker
Here are a couple of other fragments. Everything changes and nothing stands still. Everything flows. Opposition brings concord. Out of discord comes the fairest harmony. A standard way of interpreting what Heraclitus is saying is to attribute to him some kind of relativism.
00:46:13
Speaker
Now, there are many, many flavors of relativism, as we'll discuss when we talk about the sophists. So we have to be careful here, but here's one way of understanding Heraclitus. He's basically saying that, in a sense, we actually can't step into the same river twice, but in another sense, we can. Here's maybe one way to think about it.
00:46:40
Speaker
If you think of river as some specific collection of water molecules, then you really can't step into the same river or twice because well, if you step into it at time one, it's one particular collection of molecules and you step out of it and you jump back into it at some later time and well, guess what? The water is moved. So it's not the exact same collection of molecules.
00:47:08
Speaker
All right, so that's a way that you can't step into the same river twice, but in another sense, you absolutely can step into the same river twice if you think of river as some identifiable body of water that you put a label on. Let's just talk about the Sacramento River. If you go there every summer, for example, well, there's a sense in which you do go to the same river every year.
00:47:36
Speaker
But river here is not understood as a specific collection of water molecules. It's actually some body of water that you've given a name, a label. And so you are going to the same labeled body of water each year, but not the specific set of molecules each year. The river as a specific bunch of water is gone as soon as you step in it, basically.
00:48:03
Speaker
but the name that refers to that body of water remains the same. What Heraclitus seems to be saying is that everything is like this. Everything is relative in some way, some way of framing the issue, some perspective. Here's an example that has to do with perspectives. Heraclitus said that acids would rather have refuse than gold.
00:48:30
Speaker
So what he's saying here is that some animals like asses and donkeys and even pigs, if you were to give them gold, they would be utterly unimpressed. But if you were to let them go dig into some trash can, they would love it. Of course, humans would much rather have the gold. And if you were to ah award them in quotation marks some time in a trash can, they would probably not be very thankful.
00:49:01
Speaker
Another example of how everything is relative. Sea water is good for fish. And of course it is deadly for humans. Everything has to be seen from a particular point of view.
00:49:16
Speaker
The way that some scholars are seeing this is that the relativism is actually only the surface level teaching of Heraclitus, and there is a deeper doctrine, right? This is the doctrine of flux. Everything flows, everything changes.
00:49:35
Speaker
One way to understand this is as Heraclitus rejecting the Milesian worldview. The Milesians say there must be one thing from which all other things derive, right? There must be that being from which the world of becoming comes about.
00:49:52
Speaker
But Heraclitus seems to be denying that there's an archae in this way. He's denying what we called in the last lesson material monism. It's not the case that everything comes from one fundamental principle. Instead, Heraclitus seems to want us to try to hold one specific thing and all things in our mind at the same time. In other words, he wants us to see the interrelatedness of everything. So here I'm going to cheat a little bit and I'm going to invoke some Buddhist teachings to help us to make sense of what Herakkalas is trying to say. Because to me, what Herakkalas is saying here is a lot like the Buddhist notion of emptiness.
00:50:42
Speaker
Now, I did not know a lot about Buddhism before I began to prepare for this course, but as we will see later, Buddhism plays an important role in our story here. Eventually, we will have someone that they call it the Greek Buddha. And so I might as well sprinkle in a little of Buddhism now, because I really think that this is at least close to what Heraclitus was trying to say.
00:51:08
Speaker
So according to the Buddhist notion of emptiness, there is nothing at all that exists independently in and of itself, we might say. Everything is interdependent. Another way of saying this is that everything is ultimately empty of essence. There is no such thing as, for example, chair-ness. When you look at a chair and you think to yourself, well, there um there's a chair there,
00:51:39
Speaker
you have to train yourself to realize that the only reason why you conceive of this thing as a chair is because of human needs and human wants. Basically humans needed something to sit on whenever they're resting. And so they invented the concept of a chair. There is no such thing as chair-ness that chairs have. We invented it and we just basically put it on as a label on all these different things that we call chairs.
00:52:07
Speaker
but chairs would not exist independent of human beings. At the same time, however, the only way you recognize chairs is by having this concept of chairness.
00:52:19
Speaker
And that's how it is the case that out of this one concept of chairness, you get to recognize all chairs. And it's because of all the chairs that you saw as a baby that someone was eventually able to teach you that's a chair, right? So out of one, you can understand all the other ones. And out of all of the other ones, you get the one. You catch that? Let me do another example and maybe it'll help.
00:52:48
Speaker
I have a nephew that when he was a baby, he would basically call every single toy a doll, right? No matter what kind of toy it was, a little toy truck, a ball, whatever, he would call it all a doll. In effect, he was overusing the category of doll. He was over applying it.
00:53:08
Speaker
But it takes time to figure out what a doll is. Eventually, of course, he figured out that dolls are only those things that are, you know, they kind of have a humanoid shape and they are toys and only those things are dolls. All other toys have other categories. There's the ball, there's the car, whatever. The general idea here is that out of that one category of doll,
00:53:32
Speaker
Once he actually learned what it means, he was able to recognize all the other dolls. So out of one comes all. but he was only able to be taught what a doll is by first looking at a whole lot of dolls, right? And also non-dolls and someone telling him, okay, well, you see these right here, these dolls, that's what counts as a doll and only that. So out of many, you get the one category of doll. So if this is what Heraclitus was trying to get us to understand, first of all, you can see that that's very challenging.
00:54:11
Speaker
right it was It's a challenge to explain, it's a challenge to comprehend, and it's very likely why he used such enigmatic language to try to get you there, which takes some effort.
00:54:24
Speaker
But he's also trying to, in a way, teach you something that's supposed to set you free. It's supposed to be a man's cipatory is the word for it. He's trying to offer you an insight into how to see the world that will affect how you behave in the world.
00:54:42
Speaker
He thinks that once you have access to this insight, once you see the interrelatedness of everything, including, by the way, our language, I've been talking about language categories this whole time, only then do you have access to the divine mind, right? So, Naphinis kept saying that only a God could know some things. Well, here's what Heraclitus is saying now. You do have access to this kind of knowledge. It just takes a heck of a lot of effort.
00:55:12
Speaker
But when you realize that everything is in flux, that everything is always changing, that nothing is permanent, you now have a g glimpse into the divine mind.
00:55:26
Speaker
Another interesting aspect of the thought of Heraclitus is his emphasis on fire. Now, if you believe what Aristotle said, Aristotle basically thought of Heraclitus as being in the same kind of school of thought as the Milesians. According to Aristotle, Heraclitus believed that the Arche was fire, right? So Thales thought it was water, and Alexander thought it was the Aparon, the limitless.
00:55:57
Speaker
and Eximenes thought it was air. And Heraclitus is in this tradition, he says it's fire. Now, a scholar is debate over this. It seems like this is probably not what Heraclitus was all about. And we also know that Aristotle sometimes misrepresents the views of some older philosophers. He tries to impose a structure on them that they likely didn't have. Nonetheless, fire seems to be important for Heraclitus.
00:56:26
Speaker
He believed that our souls were actually fundamentally fiery. And so that's gonna bring us into his ethics.
00:56:36
Speaker
Heraclitus is sort of key in many ways here because he was the first one to give an ethical dimension to the soul. What does that mean? Well, he thought that the soul was fire and fire was clearly important in his way of looking at things. In fact, again, Aristotle actually thought that Heraclitus thought that fire was the arche. And so it's easy to see how Heraclitus thought that the soul, which is adam made out of fire, is very, very important.
00:57:10
Speaker
And so he gave it powers attributed to it capacities that hadn't previously been attributed to the soul. Okay, so now we need ah a little bit of a background here. The word for soul in Greek is sukkah. And this term sukkah has meant to many things throughout time.
00:57:35
Speaker
before Heraclitus during the days of Homer, this idea of a soul, of a sukkah, is actually kind of a life force. It has nothing to do with your personality or your desires. Nowadays, if you believe in a soul, you think that that's sort of like who you are fundamentally as a person. Your character traits, your desires, all of that is in your soul.
00:57:59
Speaker
And it chooses, right? Well, for Homer, that's not at all what a soul was. Basically, when you die, you do risk your soul. But when you die, your soul just kind of leaves, and that's your life force that's leaving you. And sure, it still exists, but it exists, and this is what Homer would say, as a shade.
00:58:20
Speaker
right So it's not really fundamentally who you are. Once you die, you are gone, but your life force kind of goes to Hades and hangs out there as a shade. Most relevant here is that for Homer, the soul is not the core of your personality. It's not where your psychological impulses come from. It's not you know the center of cognition. It's not what you think with, and it's not responsible for your feelings or your desires or what have you.
00:58:49
Speaker
But then Heraclitus comes around and he was the first philosopher to consider the soul as actually being the center of your cognition. In other words, Heraclitus was the first guy to say, the soul is what you think with. That alone is a massive step, but that's not all. Heraclitus believed that the soul bears ethical value. In other words, your soul could be in better or worse states.
00:59:20
Speaker
Ideally, he says, your soul is dry, right? He did think that the soul is made out of fire, so a dry soul is a good soul. And of course, that means a wet soul is a bad soul. Now, we'll get into what that really means in a second, but let me just tell you why this is so important. Why do we need a good soul, according to Heraclitus?
00:59:44
Speaker
And it's because of this, your capacity to understand the world, the way it works, this doctrine of flux that we talked about earlier. um That all hinges on the state of your soul. You need a soul that is free from defects so that you can actually reason well and understand reality.
01:00:08
Speaker
And for this reason, Heraclitus implores you that you take care of your soul.
01:00:17
Speaker
How should we care for the soul? Well, it looks like Heraclitus was a fan of some kind of asceticism. That's basically when you deny your bodily urges, you try to not indulge too much. It's a life of moderation, in other words.
01:00:36
Speaker
And he explicitly says that you shouldn't drink. Now, it's not clear that he's saying that you shouldn't drink much or not drink at all. I'm going to interpret him as saying, don't drink at all. Even a little bit of drink moistens the soul. It introduces some moisture.
01:00:56
Speaker
into your center of cognition. And that's bad, right? It's fiery, it's supposed to be dry. So alcohol reduces the quality of the state of your soul, which in turn makes it so that you are less able to understand reality as it really is.
01:01:16
Speaker
And what's really interesting about this idea from Heraclitus is that he thinks it's a kind of you know vice versa kind of thing. He thinks the soul and the state that it's in can affect your behavior and he thinks that your behavior can affect the state your soul is in, right? So we just talked about the second one. We we talked about how when you drink, that affects the quality or the state of your soul for the worse. But now let's move in the other direction.
01:01:43
Speaker
He's basically telling you if you take the right actions, if you behave well and try to understand reality, you will improve the state of your soul. Understanding, in other words, improves how healthy your soul is.
01:01:59
Speaker
And so we kind of see a dichotomy here. He says, you have to stay away from physical pleasure. You have to stay from you know arousing the passions too much. And you have to stay away from alcohol and that will improve your soul. And what should you do instead? You should reason, you should think, you should try to understand reality, you should reflect. And so those are the things that will improve the state of your soul.
01:02:24
Speaker
So if you want to be more like Heraclitus, check out these ideas. I think when we kind of see how it is in practice that Heraclitus wants us to be, we might be a little more pro-Heraclitus. I mean, let's start with the obvious one, drugs and alcohol. Heraclitus doesn't want you to live your life constantly in a stupor, always drunk, always high. He said that's clearly bad for you.
01:02:52
Speaker
And we might even add, maybe your family doesn't want to see you like that either. Maybe you're no good to your family if you're always like that. Your family and friends can't possibly benefit from your good traits if you're always under the influence. But of course, it goes beyond drugs and alcohol. What about the media that you consume?
01:03:13
Speaker
Is the type of news that you watch or the videos that you click on social media, are those improving your understanding or are they making you more narrow-minded? Are you seeing how everything is interrelated or are you only seeing things in one way? If this media that you're consuming is making you more narrow-minded, Heraclitus would say, well, you're going in the wrong direction. You are negatively affecting the state of your soul.
01:03:42
Speaker
And if you want to be a good person, you have to do the reverse. You have to expand your understanding, see how everything is interrelated. How about this? The effort that we put into understanding the world, almost any domain you can think of, there's people who kind of phone it in, right? They're very passive in what they're doing. They are, well, for lack of a better word, they half-ass everything.
01:04:09
Speaker
But Heracleid is saying that the Logos is always there for you to perceive. So whether you're at school or at work or what have you, Do not just phone it in. Don't just go through the motions. Actually try to understand the interrelatedness of everything. Because again, once you see that and you get a proper understanding, then you will improve the state of your soul so that you can further understand what's going on, right? So it's a virtuous cycle. The better you behave, the more you see the interrelatedness of everything,
01:04:46
Speaker
which makes you behave even better in turn, and so you become a better and better person. And of course, if you go the other direction, it's a vicious cycle. The worse you behave, the less you're likely to understand reality, which will make you behave even worse.
01:05:04
Speaker
Clearly here then it seems that understanding is very important for Heraclitus, and we have fragments where he denounces the masses for their lack of it, right? He says they don't even try to understand reality. And this is why, like Xenophanes, he really does seem like a grouchy misanthrope, you know? And I said this earlier about Xenophanes, that he seems kind of like a grouch, but we actually have reports from other ancient philosophers that Heraclitus did seem to be kind of a grouchy guy. And he seemed to be prone to some kind of depression or melancholy. They would call him the weeping philosopher. And perhaps this is because you know he thought people weren't trying to understand the world. They were just letting life pass them by without really trying to grasp it.
01:05:57
Speaker
But rather than living your life passively, you have to inquire into the nature of things, says Heraclitus. And in fact, you have to try to experience it for yourself. In order to truly understand, you have to experience his teachings, right? In other words, the explanation that I just gave is not enough. You have to try to see the flux for yourself, the interrelatedness of everything, the interdependence of everything.
01:06:26
Speaker
And only through personal effort can that be attained. And I really do love this part of Heraclitus' thought. It's not that you can just think and inquire and you'll get there, but you actually have to have a good soul too. You have to be healthy with regards to your cognition. You have to watch what you eat. You have to watch what you consume, not only in terms of food, but also in terms of the ideas that get into your head.
01:06:55
Speaker
And so once you do all of the above, once you reflect and purify your soul and really think hard about how it is that the universe works, only then will you see that the world is not really a collection of you know distinct, separate, static things. It's not really just a chair and a doll and a table. Everything is a dynamic, interconnected whole. Everything is in flux, right? That's the way he would put it.
01:07:26
Speaker
Things only seem fixed because of convention, because of the labels we put on them. But when you let go of those conventions, you can see the interrelatedness of everything. When you finally achieve that insight, you will become, how would he put it, congruent with reality. You will understand reality from a God's point of view.
01:07:55
Speaker
And this will allow you to be good. It's easy to imagine us behaving better when we realize that there is not much of a difference between me and the next person, right? We're all in this together. And so clearly, being witness to the interrelatedness of everything will probably have some practical, ethical, pro-social benefits.
01:08:20
Speaker
Now, even though Heraclitus does not seem to mention the words, you know, will or free will that we will see in later philosophers in this course, there's a sense in which Heraclitus really is saying to us that we make our own destinies. He's saying to us, you got a choice.
01:08:42
Speaker
Most people go through their lives not really reflecting on this, not really trying to understand reality as it is, but you really do have a choice. You can choose to stay asleep, just let the world pass you by, not worry about the quality of your soul. Just go through the motions or you can wake up.