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Lesson 1.2: A Stone, Floating in Midair
16 Plays3 months ago
Topics discussed:
- The Milesian Worldview
- The philosophy of Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes
- Ethical reflections on Anaximander's thought
- The Milesian revolt against Persian control
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Transcript
Ancient Creation Myths
00:00:02
Speaker
If we were to transport you back to 600 BCE and were to have you walk around or travel, collecting all the different accounts as to how it is that the world was created, what you'd generally be doing is collecting a lot of myths. For example, if you were to make your way over to Babylon, you can pick up the Enuma Elish And in it, you can learn about how in the beginning there was just sea, and it was all chaos. And the sea, which is personified by the goddess Tiamat,
00:00:47
Speaker
eventually intermingles with the sweet waters from underground. These sweet waters are also personified. In this case, they are the god Apsu,
00:01:02
Speaker
And even though the language speaks of intermingling, we know what that means, right? So out of their intermingling, more gods are created. These younger gods are a little too boisterous for the older gods, but more gods are created. Eventually, Marduk is created.
00:01:27
Speaker
And at some point, the older gods want to basically get rid of all the younger gods. They want it to be you know peace and quiet again. But Marduk defeats these older gods, rises up against them, and kills them. And eventually, out of the corpse of Tiamat, Marduk is able to create the world as we know it.
00:01:55
Speaker
If you travel over to the Levant region to go visit the Canaanites, you can hear the Jewish creation story, although they are not yet called Jews or their religion is not quite yet Judaism as we know it today.
00:02:11
Speaker
But once you hear their stories, you'll discover they actually have two creation stories. And if you want to learn about those stories, you can just go to the first two chapters of Genesis today and you can find them each there. This is not necessarily unique. Multiple creation stories are kind of a hallmark of various cultures.
00:02:35
Speaker
But in the first creation story, we have the Israelite God creating the light on day one. And a few days later, on day four, this God Yahweh creates the sun and the moon.
00:02:51
Speaker
Now that might sound a little bit out of order. This next part, though, does line up with our modern account of how things happened. On day five, animals came to be. And on day six, it was humans. And of course, day seven is for rest. And as you keep traveling, this is what you'll get more of, myth. You maybe work your way all the way to India. And in Hindu lore,
00:03:21
Speaker
Well, there's also various accounts. On one of them, one of my favorites, the Earth is balanced on some elephants and the elephants themselves rest atop a giant sea turtle. Mythology is the norm across all these various regions. And what these stories have in common, it seems to be the case that there's some kind of illusion as to how it is that the divine gave rise to the world.
00:03:53
Speaker
If you want to know what the world is like, why is the world the way it is? Well, the divine made it that way. It's the gods. And that's what you'll find in every culture that you can travel to in this time period.
Shift to Rational Thought in Greece
00:04:09
Speaker
All except one, the Greeks.
00:04:14
Speaker
by the middle of the 500s, a new view about how it is that the world originated and how it is that the world is comes around. There's this idea that the earth floats with sky on all sides. We begin our course proper today with the Milesians.
00:04:37
Speaker
This label of the Milesians is typically taken to include three philosophers in particular. Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, and they are all from Miletus, which is in modern-day Turkey. It's right on the west coast. If you were to find Athens on the map, just move west across the Aegean Sea over to Turkey, and Miletus would be right around there.
00:05:09
Speaker
And what I'm going to give you today is sort of the traditional take of the Milesians. If you get into some of the more technical literature on this topic, you might get some different views, but I don't want to give you anything too heterodox today. Let's just go with the traditional take, and here it is.
00:05:32
Speaker
According to the Milesian worldview, there is a first principle. There is, in other words, one thing from which all other things come to be. The label used for this one thing, this first principle, this source of everything, is archae. So whenever I say the word archae, just think to yourself, the first principle.
00:05:59
Speaker
One way to understand this idea is to think of the difference between being and becoming. Let's start with becoming. The world as we inhabit it, the world that we're in, that's the world of becoming because everything is always in a stage of flux. It's always changing into something else.
00:06:26
Speaker
We are becoming adults, and when we turn into adults, we're becoming elderly people. And at some point, we also enter the death process, so we are becoming dead. We're always changing and shifting, and things are always in some stage of fluidity, right? There's instability in the realm of becoming.
00:06:48
Speaker
But the general idea regarding this world of becoming, at least on the traditional take of the Milesian worldview, is that there must be something that gives rise to this world of becoming. There must be something that always is, and this is referred to as being. You can think of it as being with a capital B. This being is eternal. It doesn't change. It isn't finite, right?
00:07:16
Speaker
And out of this being, all things that are becoming come about. This being with a capital B then, that's the RK. That's the first principle. That's that from which everything else comes. There is a label for this idea in philosophy. It's called material monism. And the general definition of that is that there must be one source of being And out of this being, everything else comes. So that one source, that's why it's called monism. It really is fundamentally just one thing out of which all the material things in existence come about. What we can see from these Milesians is sometimes referred to as a primitive form of reductionism.
00:08:05
Speaker
Today, reductionism is sort of the norm in some of the sciences. I used to have a teacher in my undergraduate studies that would say, we can explain everything with just four forces, gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear forces, and weak nuclear forces.
00:08:30
Speaker
This is utterly reductionistic, right? He's trying to explain everything from the Big Bang up until this very moment in terms of just natural forces. Well, this is exactly what the Milesians are doing. Now, the you know fancy philosophical way of expressing this idea, you might call it the definition of reductionism, is that they are trying to reduce the number of explanatory elements.
00:09:00
Speaker
In other words, instead of assuming that you know the world is created by different gods and gods can make more gods, it really is the case that just a handful of things are sufficient to explain reality as we see it. And in fact, in the case of the Mileigians, you don't even need a handful. Just one thing will suffice.
00:09:22
Speaker
Besides being reductionistic in spirit, there's also a sense of naturalism here. Naturalism is a position in philosophy where essentially the only explanations that are worthwhile, the only ones that truly make sense, the only ones that are actually explanations, are explanations in terms of natural things, things that we can observe the natural world.
00:09:47
Speaker
So in this way of thinking, if you define something in terms of the behavior of gods, which are supernatural, then you're not doing it right. Naturalism only accepts natural explanations as valid explanations.
00:10:04
Speaker
And so by making the RK, that first principle, something that we see in the natural world, the Milesians are implicitly taking on a naturalistic point of view. I have here a quote from the classicist Pierre Vernant that sort of gives you a feel for the attitude that these Milesians, these early philosophers, were taking. Quote, For them, these early philosophers, the powers that make up the universe and whose interplay must explain its current organization are no longer primeval beings or the traditional gods. Order cannot be the result of sexual unions and sacred childbirth.
00:10:54
Speaker
Nor can it arise as a result of the God's struggles for sovereign power. As you can see, the general idea here is that we're no longer going to accept myth as an explanation. It can't be the case that the world as we know it came about out of the corpse of a God.
00:11:16
Speaker
How does that explain anything? Are all gods shaped like a world? What was the god's body like that allowed it to give rise to the world as we know it? is There's something too mysterious about that. So that's where naturalism comes in. You want to explain things in terms of things that are actually understandable, things that you can see and touch, or at least that you can explore and look into and investigate in some way, even if you can't directly see them and touch them.
00:11:47
Speaker
These Milesians were, in a way, very epistemically ambitious. right What do I mean by that? Well, epistemology is a study of how it is that we acquire knowledge. What are the limits of knowledge? What is the right way to justify our knowledge? These are all epistemic questions.
00:12:07
Speaker
So if you are epistemically ambitious, what that essentially means is you are hungry for knowledge. You are hungry for understanding the world. The technical term that is usually used in this scenario, in this situation, is that the Milesians wanted a logos. Logos is a rational account of some subject.
00:12:34
Speaker
And this is juxtaposed with mythos. So the poets that we discussed last time, Homer, Hesiod, they give you a mythos, right a mythological story that perhaps it's you know satisfying in some way. There's some sense of security that it might give you.
00:12:55
Speaker
But that's not what the Milesians want. The Milesians, they want a rational account of how it is that things came to be. And so whenever you hear me say the word logos, that's what we mean by this. Now, again, this is all the traditional interpretation of what the Milesians were doing.
00:13:17
Speaker
They are so far back in history and we don't have their writings. We only have a couple of fragments from which we can reconstruct their writings. And so this is all slightly speculative. This will not be the case for all the philosophers that we cover.
00:13:38
Speaker
Of course, the closer that we get to our own day, the more confidence we have in that fact that we are reconstructing the philosopher in question's views with accuracy. But this far back, it's almost anyone's game, right? So the interpretation that we're working with is actually the Aristotelian interpretation. and Aristotle was one of the first people to write up a history of philosophy. And from these histories that Aristotle wrote, that's where we get much of our information about the Milesians. Now, word of caution here.
00:14:15
Speaker
Aristotle had his own views about how reality worked, how the cosmos worked. And it seems that he tended to format the views of, well, essentially all past philosophers according to his own lens of how it is that reality works. In other words, everyone sort of got force into his theoretical lens Maybe that's just the way that he was best able to understand the work of past philosophers. Maybe he was trying to fix them up a little bit. Sometimes we do that. In any case, most scholars think it's probable that he made some mistakes along the way. Maybe he distorted some views. Nonetheless, this is what we have to work with.
00:15:04
Speaker
even though it might be the case that Aristotle gave these early philosophers a structure that they themselves would maybe not recognize or or maybe even be opposed to. This is sort of the traditional take. right So if you ever get quizzed by one of these philosophy teachers with ah you know the sports jacket and the elbow patches, go with the traditional view. Don't try to get too heterodox on them. So that's why I'm going to teach you the traditional take.
Thales and the Primacy of Water
00:15:34
Speaker
We'll begin with Thales. Thales is traditionally held to be the first philosopher in the Western sphere. The date that is usually given to give us a starting point as to when the intellectual tradition of the West began is 585 BCE.
00:15:56
Speaker
From all accounts that we have of Thales, he seems to have been a thoroughly practical man. He was not only interested in philosophy, but he was a mathematician. He was a scientist, you can call him, ah mostly interested in astronomy. And he was an engineer. Apparently, he was able to divert a river.
00:16:20
Speaker
Now, all of this has to be taken with a grain of salt. In fact, some scholars today believe that whenever the ancient sources tell us that Thales could predict eclipses, that might be overstating things a little bit. Nonetheless, for the time, he was very formidable. What we're going to be looking at is his attempted rational explanation of the cosmos.
00:16:45
Speaker
He believed that the archae, this first principle, this primal element, if you want to call it that, he believed it's water. Water, in other words, is being with a capital B. It's that source from which all things come.
00:17:05
Speaker
before you scoff and think to yourself, that's absolutely crazy. We do have a reconstruction of what his argument for this position might have been. Again, it comes from Aristotle. And think about it this way. Wherever you see life, you see some kind of water, you see some kind of moisture, maybe is a better way to put it.
00:17:31
Speaker
The most obvious example of this is probably humans. Water is absolutely essential for our survival and for our creation too. right When we are in the womb, we are in some kind of liquid.
00:17:48
Speaker
And when we are born, there is a whole lot of liquid going on. And while we grow, it is imperative that we drink liquid. So no matter what stage of your life you're in, there seems to be some kind of moisture involved. That's the case with humans. That's also the case with other animals and with plants. They all need water in one way or another to survive.
00:18:17
Speaker
And if you crack open, you know, a piece of fruit, you see moisture inside, some kind of moisture. It's not dry, typically, unless it's dead. It's somewhat moist. The same with humans and animals. If we get a cut, we see that there is moisture inside. And so this is perhaps where Thales got his idea that the arcade, the primal element is water.
00:18:48
Speaker
Now, there's a couple of ways we can look at this. If we are very uncharitable and look at this from a modern point of view, well, we can say that Thales is obviously wrong. Water is not the source of everything, but that's an unhelpful inclination to try to look at these early thinkers through a modern lens. Here's maybe a better emphasis We can think of Thales philosophy as an early declaration, maybe the earliest declaration that rationality can interrogate nature and try to discover how it works.
00:19:34
Speaker
Remember Hesiod basically made a blanket statement saying, this is an area that you just can't know about. You cannot discover fundamentally how it is that the world came to be. And Thales is saying, I think we can. Now, he may have been off the mark, but conceptually,
00:20:01
Speaker
he's making a gigantic step forward. He's saying, no, no, no, we do have the power to discover how the world works, and that is a massive step forward for Western thought. Now, it could have been that Thales' interrogation of nature, you know, fell flat, and that was it. An early attempt at understanding the world and no one listened. He died, and the idea goes away.
00:20:30
Speaker
That is, fortunately, not what happened. Anaximander is the person who picked up this idea and kept going
Anaximander's Indefinite Principle
00:20:42
Speaker
with it. He takes a torch, so to speak.
00:20:45
Speaker
Now, we are not exactly sure whether or not Anaximander was Thales' student directly. In a sense, he was a student, right? In the sense that he was very familiar with his work and he you know did a deep dive as to what it meant and where there might be some you know real nuggets of gold and where there might be some errors.
00:21:08
Speaker
So in a very traditional sense, he there is a very real master-student relationship where the work is taken very seriously. But did he actually know Thales? Did he actually, you know, have conversations with him? We're not entirely sure. The traditional view is, yeah, sure. Anaximander was a student of Thales. What is particularly remarkable about Anaximander is his approach to the master-student relationship. He essentially agreed with part of what Thales said.
00:21:45
Speaker
but disagreed, respectfully, we might imagine, with the other part. The part that he agreed with is that there is indeed an arche. There is a first principle, some source of all the world of becoming. What he didn't like about Thales' theory is the suggestion that this must be water. One possible reconstruction as to why it is that an eximander I did not believe that water could possibly fill the role of being of the RK. Is that water is definite, right? You can pick up some water, you can put it in a glass, you can look at it, and you can easily kind of see where it ends, where it begins. It's very much unambiguous.
00:22:37
Speaker
What Anaximander was likely thinking is that the world is so diverse, right? There's so many different things in existence. How is it that something so definite as water can change into all these different things? It just didn't seem so probable to him. And so what Anaximander posits as the archae instead of water is, well, he calls it ah pay run We typically translate that to something like the indefinite or the limitless. But what Anaximander is basically saying is that it's something that is substantially more ambiguous than water. It can't be something that we see at our regular level of experience. It has to be something less definite, something perhaps not perceptible.
00:23:34
Speaker
As I was preparing for teaching this lesson, I found a book that is basically a physicist who is looking at all the all this ancient literature and figuring out what the contributions are from a scientific point of view.
00:23:52
Speaker
Of course, most of the time, the scholars who study Anaximander, these are philosophers or classicists. It isn't so often that we have a physicist looking at these early philosophers' work and trying to figure out what is of scientific value in these early writings.
00:24:11
Speaker
the physicist that I have in mind here, his name is Carlo Rovelli. He is most well known for inquiring into something called quantum gravity, which is a way to unify the physics of very large things, right relativity theory, and the physics of very small things, quantum mechanics. So that's his claim to fame.
00:24:39
Speaker
But I found his explorations of Anaximander's work very illuminating because he gives us what he considers Anaximander's fundamental contribution. And that sort of makes a lot of sense to me. I think i think he's on to something. What he's saying about Anaximander when he switches the archae from being water to the Aperon, the indefinite,
00:25:07
Speaker
is that it must be the case that you know our everyday objects, those things that we are very familiar with in our day-to-day experiences, they are probably produced by something that is unfamiliar. you know If you try to explain the things that we see every day in terms of other things we see every day, and there is this question, how is it that water can turn into all these things?
00:25:33
Speaker
Maybe it makes more sense to say that the arcade is not like the other things that we see every day. The arcade must be, in some sense, invisible, indefinite, more ambiguous. So Anaximander would say, if you're trying to understand the world in terms of water or earth or whatever, you're not doing it right. You have to move to below the level of human experience.
00:26:03
Speaker
What this effectively means is that you have to move to the theoretical level. Sure, you have to observe the world, and that's an important step, but we also need theory. And his theory is you have to assume the existence of certain entities that are perhaps non-physical, and these are would give rise to the things that we see.
00:26:28
Speaker
Once you combine empirical observation, exploring nature itself, and theoretical insights, you now have made it so that the world is a field of inquiry. The world is something we can study, and we need both observation and theory. And that, according to Carlo Rovelli, is Anaximander's fundamental contribution.
00:26:54
Speaker
One of the reasons why I found Rovelli's work so illuminating is that had it not been for his book, I would have basically left it at that. I would have thought to myself, well, you know, those two things, updating his teacher's views and positing that maybe the explanation of the universe lies below the level of conscious experience,
00:27:19
Speaker
Well, you know, that's already of sufficient philosophical worth to you know merit a discussion, a good discussion on Anaximander's contributions. But Robelli goes further as he's reading the fragments that we have from Anaximander.
00:27:37
Speaker
Rebeli says he can find little nuggets, little seeds of views that will become very important later on in intellectual history. um These are concepts that will contribute to modern science at some point. They will be a part of what modern science becomes.
00:27:56
Speaker
And so let me give you a little list that I jotted down of what Rovelli said. According to physicist Carlo Rovelli, Anaximander was one of the first ones to posit that one state of events determines another state of events.
00:28:17
Speaker
In other words, the way things are now are directly what cause some later state of events to be the case. If you are familiar with the physics of the Enlightenment era or with the problem of free will,
00:28:34
Speaker
You might recognize that this sounds a little bit like the idea of determinism. Determinism is a view that the current state of affairs in conjunction with the laws of nature is what determines the next state of affairs, such that everything that happens happens by necessity. It's basically just a combination of the way things are right now and the laws of nature acting upon that state of affairs.
00:29:04
Speaker
This is not exactly what Anaximander is getting at. He's definitely saying part of it though, right? He's saying that what happens later has to do with the state of affairs as they are at this moment. The idea that's missing, the idea that will take a couple of generations to bring about is that there must be some fundamental laws of nature that are operating on the state of affairs.
00:29:32
Speaker
And once you get those two ideas together, then you have something like determinism.
00:29:38
Speaker
Another contribution from Anaximander is the idea that earth floats in space, like a stone floating in midair. This also is against what his teacher Thales said. According to Thales, the earth was flat.
00:30:00
Speaker
An aximander instead envisioned the world well again it's floating in mid-air and sky on all sides. The part that will sound very strange to us is that he envisioned the Earth looking a little bit like a cylinder.
00:30:16
Speaker
Maybe a better visual is a drama. Now, again, this might lead to some scoffing, some rolling of the eyes. And this is once more why Robelli's insights from the perspective of a physicist are so, so important. What Anaximander did, that conceptual shift is massive. Here is what Robelli says, more or less. The conceptual leap from a flat to a cylindrical earth is bigger than the one from a cylindrical to a spherical Earth.
00:30:51
Speaker
right So for the philosophers after this time period and all those interested in cosmogenesis and how the world came to be, um it's easier to move from this idea that the Earth is a drum floating in mid-air to the idea that the Earth is a sphere, which is more or less accurate. It's easier to make that jump than to go from a flat Earth presumably resting on top of something to something floating in midair, right? So Anaximander made that big leap for us. And after that, it's easy to kind of, you know, fix the details, but that conceptual breakthrough, that is another fundamental contribution of Anaximander's thought to our shared intellectual tradition.
00:31:42
Speaker
I have here a couple of other contributions that Rovelli attributes to Anaximander. Here's an interesting one. The celestial objects that we see, the stars and and the planets, they must move in circles and they must be carried by immense wheels. This is, of course, the idea of orbits, except it's expressed in a somewhat mechanical tone, a mechanical metaphor.
00:32:10
Speaker
And of course, we will later find out they're not circles, they are ellipses. Nonetheless, this is you know kind of astonishing that he was able to generate this theory given the you know very little astronomical data that was available at the time. And these next two that I mentioned, and these are the last two, they're kind of flabbergasting, right? So another thing that Anaximander said is that meteorological phenomena, right like rain,
00:32:39
Speaker
They have natural causes, like you know it's water that evaporated from the sea coming down on us. This is controversial to say, and I don't mean that you know we're not sure whether or not Anaximander actually said this. We're pretty sure he did say it. What is controversial about it is that this goes head on against some of the traditional religious beliefs of the time. After all, rain, well,
00:33:10
Speaker
That's the domain of the gods, right? Rain, thunder, that's Zeus.
00:33:16
Speaker
And so by giving an alternative account as to how it is that these natural phenomena occur, what you're essentially doing is you're putting the gods out of a job. And if they don't have a job, well, there's not much reason to believe in their existence.
00:33:34
Speaker
This, in other words, might be a little bit of implicit atheism or a little bit of implicit agnosticism, and both of these are essentially death sentences throughout much of the ancient period.
00:33:50
Speaker
We do have a play by Aristophanes called The Clouds where he alleges that Socrates defended a similar view. By the way, as far as we know, Socrates was not very interested in natural philosophy and and inquiring into science and that kind of thing. He was mostly interested in ethics. Nonetheless, Socrates, we do know, was eventually put to death for impiety.
00:34:15
Speaker
So if people in general believed that Socrates offended these kinds of views about how natural phenomena like rain are caused by things like water evaporating from the sea, and he eventually gets put to death, we can see that holding a view like this was, well, it really ran against the grain. Some people probably didn't like it very much.
00:34:44
Speaker
One final contribution from Anaximander that I'll mention here is he theorized as to how it is that animals came to be. He says that all animals originally came from the sea.
00:34:58
Speaker
from some primal humidity. So there is a little bit of his teacher's influence showing, right? It all comes from water, ultimately. And along with his explanation as to how it is that animals came to be, he gives a similar story about how it is that humans came to be.
00:35:18
Speaker
Now, before we start thinking this is an early form of evolutionary theory, we really shouldn't go that far. What Anaximander was really doing was giving an account of the first generation of animals and humans. He was not really accounting as to how they evolved over time, right? In fact, it seems like he thought that species don't change over time. They came to be in the way that they currently are, and they've always been like that, and they will always be like that. So we can't give him credit for some kind of proto-evolutionary theory. Nonetheless, you know he is trying to explain the world without recourse to gods and divine sexual unions and all that stuff.
00:36:06
Speaker
The third philosopher that is counted as part of the Milesian school is Anaximenes.
Anaximenes and Air as Archae
00:36:15
Speaker
Anaximenes' big contribution was to reject the Apeiron as being the archae. To recap, Thales thought the archae was water. Anaximander thought it was the Apeiron, the limitless, the indefinite. Anaximenes says, well, it's not either of those things.
00:36:36
Speaker
It's probably error. Now, how did he come to this conclusion? Well, it's likely the case that he believed that the bridge between the Aparan from Anaximander, the indefinite, to the world of everyday objects was unbridgeable. He was basically thinking to himself, how is it that something that has no physical form, the de limitless,
00:37:03
Speaker
the apayron, how is it that that can give rise to the everyday objects of our you know conscious experience? He thought, the arcane must exist, but it can't be non-physical like that, the way Anaximander says.
00:37:22
Speaker
It has to be somewhat physical. And he also agrees with Anaximander that it's likely invisible. It's likely not the kind of thing that you regularly see. So what's physical but, you know, still kind of invisible? Air.
00:37:41
Speaker
air, you know, it's little puffs of air. There is something physical to them. You can feel them. That's for sure, right? You get a gust of wind and not only can you feel it, but it can lift things up a little bit, maybe a little sandstorm or, you know, a dust bunny, whatever.
00:37:59
Speaker
And so with air, there is at least conceivably, you know, there's some path for whatever it is that air is made out of to give rise to the other objects of the world, right? To earth, to water maybe, plants and animals, what have you.
00:38:20
Speaker
In this sense, this idea that the world is made out of little things that are physical but that we can't see, this might be an important step towards something called atomism. These atomists believe that there are indivisible atoms that are the substance out of which everything else is made.
00:38:43
Speaker
And Examinis is not yet an atomist, and we'll get to those views later, but maybe it's a step towards atomism.
00:38:54
Speaker
Just like with Anaximander and Thales before him, Anaximenes, you know, in the grand scheme of things, is wrong, sure. But again, the basic idea here is that this is, how did I put it earlier, right? To declaration that rationality can discover the way nature works.
00:39:48
Speaker
Let's move now into ethics.
Greek Ethics and Eudaimonia
00:39:51
Speaker
now It is the case that Thales, Aximander, Aximenes didn't actually write any explicitly ethical content. Or if they did, it just you know didn't survive and we don't have access to it.
00:40:05
Speaker
But as I thought about it more and more, there really is something normative in the you know philosophical legacy of the Milesians that we can discuss. So let's start by talking about this. Ethics in the ancient world is largely about how it is that we can flourish. We want to figure out what behaviors we can take to Well, in part, be happy, but also be successful to thrive, to reduce emotional distress, right to just have a good life. The way the Greeks used to put it is that we ought to develop virtues, another way of saying virtue is excellence, so that we can eventually flourish. And the word for flourishing, also sometimes translated as happiness, is the word eudaimonia.
00:40:59
Speaker
So let me unpack these ideas real quick. Flourishing in general is El Daimania. And those character traits that get you to a state of flourishing, those are called virtues. Virtue is also sometimes conceived of as excellence in some domain. And by the way, those things that don't get you towards flourishing, that don't get you towards El Daimania, well, those are vices. Those are bad for you.
00:41:28
Speaker
But one thing that we have to note is is that for the Greeks, you know excellence, right which gets you to flourishing, that doesn't come in a vacuum. And we actually have the work of some philosophers that really clarify what the ancients meant by the word you know good and excellent.
00:41:49
Speaker
right So an important philosopher in this domain is Alistair MacIntyre. Now he is actually a contemporary philosopher. That is, he's around right now. And he's done the historical work that is relevant here to understand how it is that the Greeks use the word agathos. So agathos is you know the ancestor word for our term good. And so let's let's think about it in in English for now.
00:42:20
Speaker
So when someone says, you know, hey, Bobby is a good person, the Greeks might have been confused a little bit by the way that you phrased that sentence. They might rightfully ask, what about being a person is he good at?
00:42:41
Speaker
or maybe a better way to put it is that they would say something like, you can't be good in general, or you can't be good at being a person. You have to be good at something. The way that the word good makes sense is if you couch it, that's sometimes the way that McIntyre puts it.
00:43:04
Speaker
into some specific skill or some area of expertise or some domain where it makes sense to say that someone is better or worse at something. In short, the word good always means good at something. So when you say, you know, Bobby is a good person, the Greek would say, well, what exactly is he good at? Because he can't just be good in general.
00:43:31
Speaker
Okay, if that's understood about the way the Greeks use the word good, now we can see that knowing what reality is like is really important if we want to be able to you know use the word good in a linguistically rational way. Maybe another way to put this is human excellence doesn't exist in a vacuum.
00:43:59
Speaker
You got to be good at something and you got to be able to measure that goodness. Now in the you know Bronze Age, you basically use the word good for you know people that are successful. If you are rich or you are very successful in battle, they would use the word good for you.
00:44:21
Speaker
As we transition into the Iron Age, the word good began to be applied in different contexts. You are good at making pottery. You are good at teaching rhetoric, right? Teaching persuasive speaking. But the punchline is this. If you want to figure out whether or not you're flourishing, you have to really understand the world itself.
00:44:46
Speaker
And it's because the only way to know objectively that you're flourishing is to have some measure as to how it is that you're improving in the world itself. So in other words, flourishing isn't just some subjective state of being. The Greeks thought that you had to actually see the success objectively. And if you're going to do that, you have to understand reality as it is.
00:45:16
Speaker
So if you're gonna be flourishing or thriving in the world, guess what? You need to know how to actually form accurate beliefs. Sometimes the word or a phrase that is used in epistemic philosophy is that you need good belief-forming practices, right? The way that you form beliefs has to be actually reliable. Otherwise, you're just forming a bunch of false beliefs that don't help you understand the world any better. And so when you think you're thriving, you're actually not thriving. Now, it's actually pretty easy to think of examples of people that simply misunderstand the world and they think they're, you know, killing it, but they're really not. And so this is exactly the sort of ethical reflections that the Milesians get us to think about.
00:46:12
Speaker
very stressed over and over and over again. Move away from myth. Move away from superstition. Understand the world as it is. Really try to give a rational account as to how it works. And once you have this clear-headed perception of reality, that's when you can truly measure whether or not you're thriving.
00:46:36
Speaker
So let me give you a quick example of how it is you know that knowing what reality is actually like and thriving are connected. Let's take the example of ah we're just learning any skill, basically. But let's talk about mechanics. There is presumably quite a few different ways to become a mechanic. Probably the most reliable way is through the testimony of experts.
00:47:01
Speaker
Basically, you can take a class with someone that's actually a mechanic. You can watch, you know, videos. You can apprentice with someone who is a mechanic. You can read their books, right? There's plenty of mechanical engineering journals and all that.
00:47:18
Speaker
And that's a pretty guaranteed a way to become a decent mechanic. And obviously, the better of a guide that you have, the better mechanic you're working with, the better mechanic you will become. So that would be a reliable way to understand mechanics through an expert.
00:47:39
Speaker
Now, let's juxtapose someone who is learning from an expert with someone who is basically just figuring out for themselves how to be a mechanic. It's not the case that they're necessarily going to fail, but you can expect the progress and general level of expertise to be higher with the person who has an expert guiding them than with the person who is you know basically just blindly moving along through the trial and error.
00:48:09
Speaker
In this example, here is a good belief-forming practice rely on experts. People that have, you know, they're tried and true. They can demonstrate their skill. They do so regularly. Maybe they get paid for it. And that's a good way to learn about some particular domain.
00:48:32
Speaker
Another way, of course, is you know through trial and error, well, that will be substantially slower, and perhaps you might not ever gain all the information that an expert has. Just to really you know kind of drive this message home, let's think of someone who actually doesn't do either of these. They have very bad belief-forming practices. Maybe they think that everything gets solved with WD-40.
00:49:00
Speaker
And whenever something goes wrong with his or her car, they just kind of spray WD-40 wherever it is that they think that the problem is. Now, this might actually work, maybe, presumably, in some cases. I don't know. But it's definitely not going to work in all cases and maybe not in many cases, right? It just might be one case where where it actually works.
00:49:26
Speaker
And this example, well, that person has very bad belief forming practices. They're not really open to learning new things. They're actually pretty stuck on just the not very reliable method of spraying WD-40 on everything.
00:49:47
Speaker
So having a good way to form accurate beliefs, to update your beliefs, that is essential for learning a skill. And of course, living well is, at least on one way of looking at things, just a skill that we have to learn.
00:50:05
Speaker
So if understanding reality as it is, is our connection to ethics, let's focus here on the work of Anaximander.
Anaximander's Critical Inquiry
00:50:16
Speaker
Anaximander was the middle person that we covered, the the second person in the chain of master student of Miletus.
00:50:26
Speaker
And the reason why I think it's important is because of the following. He was the first one to revolutionize the student-teacher relationship, right? So before NXT Mander, we can imagine that the and master-student relationship was one where students, sort of as a rule, accept what the master says without really challenging it.
00:50:54
Speaker
ah We know, for example, that Mencius did this with Confucius. Presumably Paul did this with what he heard that Jesus said, you know. Jesus it was the master and Paul just kind of said, okay, well, that's what he said. Maybe he elaborated on things, but he didn't really change anything. But Anaximander did something entirely different. He accepted some of what Thales said and rejected another part of it and put his own views in the fray, right? So the way things had always been done, this sort of regurgitation of the views of the master, we might refer to that as the banking model of education. Basically, the master deposits some information into the student's head, and their job is to you know recreate it for the next generation.
00:51:53
Speaker
This is implicitly re rejected by Anaximander. Now, as far as we know, Anaximander never wrote a treatise on how it is that student-teacher relationships ought to work.
00:52:07
Speaker
But by challenging part of his teacher's views, Anaximander was implicitly teaching us how it is that we should, that's where the normative comes comes in, how it is that we should inquire into reality. We have to think critically about what our teachers say, accept what seems to survive rational critique,
00:52:34
Speaker
And the rest, well, we have to say goodbye to it. And we have to find some kind of ah alternative hypothesis that fits in with what with the part that we accepted. Again, if we go look for some examples, some easily come to mind, whenever we look at you know the history of design in some particular domain, we usually see a gradual upgrading and improvement upon initial models. I'm thinking here, it could be anything, but we were talking about cars earlier, but you can even think about it as video games, right?
00:53:12
Speaker
When we look at the history of video game design, we see that early on the games were fairly simple. ah They had to be intuitive, not much of a storyline, but of course still challenging, right? And it would be progressively more challenging. And later video game designers essentially took what worked about the early generations of video games and then expanded on it.
00:53:38
Speaker
And so more complex storylines came in. And of course, as the technology improved, better graphics were incorporated. But every step along the way, you see the good aspects of the video games were kept. And what they thought needed a little bit of tweaking and improvement, well, they tried to tweak and improve.
00:54:03
Speaker
Something similar can be said of cars. I recently watched that Ford V Ferrari movie where essentially Ford tried to make a racing car that could actually beat the cars that Ferrari was putting out.
00:54:18
Speaker
And in this story, you know, you get some people who are, let's call them conservatives, who say, no, we've been doing this way all this time. There's no need to change right now. And what people like Anaximander are telling us is that there's always room for improvement. You can always do a tweak here and there on any part of the thing that you're working on that has room for improvement, right?
00:54:44
Speaker
But the key is that you have to look for those things. You can't just accept everything you see unquestioningly. You have to look for the flaws, look for the aspects that are good, keep the good stuff, and improve upon those parts that are flawed. You can really see that Anaximander is telling us that we ought to do something, that this is good for us. It is good to update our beliefs and have a more accurate map of reality.
00:55:16
Speaker
So let's put some labels on you know these ideas from Anaximander. He ushered in basically a way of inquiring into the world that doubts our current state of knowledge, right? So he's trying to tell us that we should have maybe epistemic humility is a good way to put it. You know, we are humble. We don't believe that what we believe right now is true without doubt and there's no way to improve on it and there's no need to improve on it. It would be more humble to say, you know, there's probably some places where we can improve on this, right? So maybe another way to put it is he wanted us to have a realistic epistemic outlook.
00:56:02
Speaker
you know the world map that we have right now, the map of reality that we're working with, it would be really unreasonable to assume that we got every single little detail correct, right? So be realistic and look for the parts that need some improvement.
00:56:23
Speaker
Another element that Anaximander teaches us Let's call it epistemic ambition, right? You have to believe in the possibility of improving upon what you know. That's a state of mind. That's not something that, you know, is a technical skill. You have to believe that it is possible for rationality to actually discover the truth behind things, the fact of the matter.
00:56:50
Speaker
And so this is the way I like to think about you know some of Anaximander's unwritten ethical pronouncements. right He wanted us to have a realistic epistemic outlook. right Don't presume that your map of reality is perfectly accurate, but also be epistemically ambitious. Believe that you have what it takes to continue to inquire into the world, to look for theories to understand the world, and improve upon your existing map of reality. and
00:57:25
Speaker
There is plenty of lessons that we can learn from this, and you know I'm going to go ahead and say that all of us at some point are either you know intellectually stubborn, close-minded, we are intellectually conceited, or we have some kind of unearned confidence about what it is that we know.
00:57:47
Speaker
And this you know can take many forms, you know and I'll be honest with you, I'm guilty of it myself. It's not like I'm a perfectly you know virtuous individual, far from it. That's part of the reason why looking at early Greek ethics is so interesting to me. it's just you know There's always room for improvement. And so I'll give you perhaps some examples that um might resonate with you. I sometimes see that when people that don't have a wide understanding, people that only look at one or two things and they kind of stick to that, they tend to be overly confident in their you know proclamations and their beliefs. Now, this is not something that you know I'm discussing from personal anecdotes. There is actual empirical evidence from psychologists
00:58:41
Speaker
that those who stick to basically one thing, they're worse off when they try to make predictions about reality, right? It's those that are very diverse who have the better chance of making accurate predictions about future events. You can check out a book called Superforecasters. That's all about this. But the basic message that I'm trying to send right now is that Whenever we make claims about things that we know, we should always try to keep in mind how many sources we have to back that claim up. I mean, let me give you sort of a ridiculous example here, but if you've read exactly one book in your entire life, it doesn't seem like you should be incredibly confident when you are making you know declarations about your beliefs.
00:59:37
Speaker
If you've read a thousand books and you have a very good memory about you know what it is that you learned in each one, then that's when it seems it can be a little more confident. I think this and what we get in our day and age is pretty much the exact opposite, right? The people that read exactly one thing or get their information from exactly one source, they are super confident.
01:00:05
Speaker
and the people who get their ideas from lots of different places and they try to keep up to date and get various sources of information, they're usually be a little more cautious and almost less confident. Well, what Anaximander is trying to tell us is that the right approach is to be realistic about what it is that we know. right And if it's a case that we just don't have a lot of information to back up what we believe, we just got to be honest with ourselves. right Always keep in mind that having inaccurate beliefs cannot possibly be good for thriving according to Anaximander, or at least what I feel that we can learn from Anaximander.
01:00:52
Speaker
Let me touch on another thing that Anaximander and his fellow Milesians discuss in their work. It seems that across the board, they were pushing for a rejection of superstition.
01:01:08
Speaker
Now, this is clearly ethical in nature. There's an ethical dimension to this. And we know this because during the enlightenment period, lots of different thinkers saw it as their ethical duty to get rid of the superstitions of the masses, right? They just didn't find it helpful to believe in witches and demonic possession.
01:01:33
Speaker
and you know that thunder is God being angry. They thought it was counterproductive to believe these things and that these kind of beliefs led to needless fear in your life.
01:01:47
Speaker
One person that comes to mind here is Benjamin Franklin. You might have heard about the experiments that he was running with kites and lightning, very dangerous experiments, I might add. Well, part of the reason why he was doing this is exactly something that Anaximander touched on earlier in the lesson, right? These meteorological events, things like lightning, these have natural causes.
01:02:15
Speaker
This isn't God being angry, right? This can be explained just through natural phenomena. And so if this is the kind of thing that the Milesians were pushing, this also clearly has an ethical dimension. They wanted us to be free from the unnecessary burden of superstition.
01:02:39
Speaker
Now, I know at a certain level, all of us agree with this, right? If you went to, I mean, I'm kind of going with the mechanic example here for the rest of this lesson, but if you went to a mechanic and, you know, your car wasn't running and then they checked it out and afterwards they came out and said, well, you know, what's going on is that your engine, it's haunted. And so what we have to do is, you know, do a little cleansing ritual and then your car will work again.
01:03:06
Speaker
That is profoundly superstitious, this idea that some kind of demon or ghost can haunt your car. And I'm guessing that you would get a new mechanic instantly. You would just leave. Well, that's a very obvious example of a superstition not being very helpful.
01:03:25
Speaker
But the truth is many of us live our lives with superstitions rattling around in our heads that we never really you know are proactive about trying to dispel. So maybe one thing that we can do is you know go through our day and if we ever act upon something that seems like a superstition,
01:03:46
Speaker
maybe we can really inquire and reflect on whether we have any good reasons for believing that. Might be the case that you you know you took on a belief as a superstition, but it turns out it might actually be accurate and you find out the real reason why it works, and then then it's okay you to keep that belief. Maybe you're just updating why it is that you believe what you believe.
01:04:12
Speaker
But many of us have you know things that we unreflectively adopted into our belief system. We just kind of you know accept them because we were told that and was true when we were kids and we never really questioned that. Well, maybe one thing that Anaximander and his fellow my allegiance might you know implore of us is that we should go through our beliefs and we should try to root out the superstitions.
01:04:41
Speaker
And that's the general lesson that we learn from the Milesians. We learned about what inquiry should look like, ideally speaking. right Always have an open mind, accept what has good evidence backing it up. It's backed up by a reason. And try to update those parts of your belief system that really you know have room for improvement.
01:05:07
Speaker
And again, although the Milesians did not explicitly say this, what I think we can learn from this is that having good belief-forming practices can only help us thrive. There is no way that having inaccurate beliefs is good for flourishing. So by carefully updating our beliefs whenever we can, we are taking important steps towards living the good life.
01:05:53
Speaker
Now, let me close with a little bit of historical context that involves the city of Miletus.
Miletus and Persian Influence
01:05:59
Speaker
Miletus, you'll recall, is the city where Thales and Eximander and Eximenes are from. And the events that happen in this region of present-day Turkey will be relevant to the events that happen later on in this course.
01:06:17
Speaker
Now, during the lifetime of the Milesians, we are really seeing the recovery after the first Greek Dark Age, right? There was a period of instability, but by the 500s, you see the interregional system that was around before 1200 kind of coming back.
01:06:36
Speaker
There are different players at the lead, at the helm, but in general, there is a return to the degree of civilizational complexity that we see before the collapse.
01:06:50
Speaker
The Greek city-states are, of course, just mostly fighting each other. That's sort of the history of the Greek city-states in a nutshell. But over in Asia Minor, a new empire is taking form. Now, again, this is during the lifetime of the Milesians. And in fact, some of the Milesians will be affected by this. This new empire that is ascending in geopolitical status and power is the Achaemenid Persian Empire, and it is led by a man named Khurrash. Khurrash is the king of kings, as the Persians called him, but his name in the history books in English is usually should translated as Cyrus, and we have come to know him now as Cyrus the Great.
01:07:48
Speaker
The way that Miletus enters the story is that Miletus loses its political autonomy first to the Lydians. The Lydians are a regional power and they're famous for having invented coin currency, right? They're the first ones to invent coinage. But soon after the Lydians take control of Miletus, Cyristic rates came in at Persian Empire, conquered Lydia.
01:08:19
Speaker
And so now Miletus comes under the control of the Persians.
01:08:27
Speaker
At this moment in time, the Persian Empire seems like an unstoppable force. The Egyptians that have gone through centuries now of instability, they also get conquered by Cyrus. And Cyrus seems to be an extremely cunning and intelligent ruler.
01:08:49
Speaker
It's not just military force that he employs against those that he conquers, but also very wise diplomacy. He was very strategic about everything that he does. Nonetheless, despite his, we might say, ah benevolent rulership, it's not quite always benevolent, but despite being an overall decent ruler, the Milesians, these Greeks,
01:09:18
Speaker
You know, they're just too freedom-loving, right? So they eventually revolt against Persian rule. And during this revolt, which happens in 499 BCE, e they call out for help from other Greek city-states. Among the Greek city-states that respond to the call of the Milesians for help is Athens.
01:09:43
Speaker
So the Athenians and some other Greek cities send reinforcements to the Milesians. It doesn't really make a difference. The revolt is ultimately put down and the allies, the Athenians and the other Greek allies go back home.
01:10:03
Speaker
Of course, the Persian king of kings is well he's not going to just let that go by unpunished. By this time period, Cyrus the Great had died and the king of the Persians who was a man named Darius.
01:10:24
Speaker
And Darius thought that if these Greek city-states thought they could just interfere in Persian politics and then you know go away unpunished, well, they had another thing coming. So from then on, Darius knew that at some point he would have to go and punish the Greek city-states that helped out the Milesians and show them the power of Persia.
01:10:52
Speaker
We get some stories from Herodotus, one of the first historians in the Greek intellectual world, that although they're probably not true, they're kind of nice to ah think they're true. Apparently Darius, every night from then on, would have his servant before dinner repeat to him, master, remember the Athenians.
01:11:20
Speaker
What Herodotus is trying to tell us is that the king of kings had so much going on, right, that he had to deal with, but he didn't want to forget that he had to punish those who dared defy Persia.
01:11:35
Speaker
Again, this is probably not true, but what is the case is that Darius was going to keep his pledge. He was going to eventually invade Greece.
01:11:48
Speaker
So in effect, all the Athenians did by helping out the Milesians is get the attention of the biggest geopolitical predator of the time. Remember, the Milesian revolt was put down, Persia was firmly in control in that region, and now they had Athens and their crosshairs.