The Influence of Ancient Greek Literature and Philosophy on Contemporary Thought

By Carlos Montemayor Romo de Vivar

Ladies and gentlemen: I feel very happy and honored to be here tonight, invited by the Hellenic Society Prometheas, which gives me the opportunity to speak to you about Greek philosophy and some of its characteristics. That is, the characteristics of one of the most important revolutions in our intellectual history. Unlike many revolutions that followed this remarkable event, the masterminds that produced this upheaval did not shed blood with weapons, or destroyed cities or temples. Rather, they were thinkers, writers whose only weapon was their language: ancient Greek. It is appropriate to remember these thinkers today, in the celebration of the Greek Letters Day, because a significant part of the influence that Greek literature still has, is largely based on the enlightened writings of these thinkers, who called themselves philosophers, because of their love of wisdom.

The cultural and intellectual life of mankind changed dramatically because of ancient Greek philosophy and literature. Maybe we will never see again such a drastic and marvelous change as the burst of creativity that produced such perennial works of art as Sophocles’ Antigone, Plato’s Republic or Aeschylo’s Persians. Today, more than two thousand years from this intellectual explosion, we must celebrate what happened then, because it shaped forever the way we think and talk to each other and to oneself. A crucial element that explains why this historic event shaped our intellectual lives so substantially is that education, not as a means but as a goal in itself, was a constant concern for these thinkers. This concern for educating and training our souls to be better is what makes us all, in some sense, ancient Greeks.

At the center of this intellectual revolution is a very important Greek question, that, since then, became the human quest for the sense of life. It is the question for the totality of being, which is implicit in Greek literature and art. This question fosters a variety of artistic and philosophical topics. Before the Greek philosophers, it was the task of the poets to address the issue concerning the totality of being, the search for truth and justice and the meaning of life.

Although many literary styles and artistic expressions were developed in that poetic world (comedy, tragedy, fables, epic poetry, etc.), the search for truth was always a religious affair. It was in the decisions and actions of divine creatures where writers found the meaning of life. Life has a religious meaning in the works of the poets and their act of creativity aims at capturing the secret deeds of gods and goddesses through metaphors and literary perfection.

It was very fortunate that the search for truth became a stylistic affair. The amount of beauty contained in the Iliad is incommensurable. However, according to the poet, all that beauty was a reproduction of divine deeds, captured in Greek and written with human hands. Thus, Homer begins the Iliad with the solicitation: Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.[1] Poetry reached a level of perfection in Greek literature, but the collective affair of education was determined by religious conceptions.

It was in the midst of this literary activity that a new style of literature emerged. The most important concern of such literature was education (Paideia) as a discipline for the search of truth. Thus, Thales of Miletus (born about 624 BC) was the first to formulate the question of the totality of being. He answers not with a quote from the poets or by invoking a God. Rather, he notices that water is everywhere in nature and claims that everything is composed of water. This is the origin of a new style of thinking and writing. It is the origin of philosophy and scientific thought.

Presocratic philosophers started writing in this new and refreshing style of expression and logic. Their ideas were deep and original. Two of them in particular, Parmenides and Democritus, presented ideas about nature that have never been considered before. Parmenides said that the world we live in is a world of appearance, and that there is a single real substance which is a whole unit, where nothing changes.

I would like to emphasize the importance of Parmenides in the development of Greek philosophy because probably no other Greek philosopher, before Plato, contributed more to the explicit formulation of the appearance-reality distinction than Parmenides. The importance of such distinction, not only in the history of philosophy, but in the intellectual history of mankind, cannot be exaggerated. For instance, it played and still plays a major role in theology, mathematics and physics. Parmenides’ approach to the contrast between reality and appearance is unique. I will briefly reflect on the fact that Parmenides’ text is a poem with a very special structure.

Parmenides’ poem, like French philosopher René Descartes’ Meditations, is not an erudite academic work, addressed to a group of notables. However, unlike Marx and Engels’ Manifesto, it is not an open invitation to the public to act or think in a particular way. Moreover, it is not merely a poem, since it contains very important metaphysical theses (theses about reality and appearance) as well as methodological recommendations for pursuing the truth. Thus, the question arises, how should we interpret Parmenides’ poem?

Remarkably, this question has been consistently answered in the same way by readers of Parmenides’ poem, which covers a period of time of almost 2500 years (assuming it was written around 475 BC). All the interpreters of the poem consider it as a crucial philosophical text. However, the fact that it is a philosophical text does not change its nature, namely, that it is a poem with metric and metaphors. Actually, another interesting aspect of the poem is that it involves religious characters and mystic experiences.

Therefore, the richness of form and content expressed in Parmenides’ poem requires the reader to acknowledge its uniqueness. Instead of delving into the hermeneutic or philological details of the poem, I would like to emphasize the difference between Parmenides’ poem and contemporary philosophical texts. The purpose of this comparison is to show how much the role of the philosopher has changed and what can we learn from such a change.

As mentioned, Parmenides’ poem is unique in very different ways. Although the poem describes a mystical journey in which divine creatures assist Parmenides, every Greek mythological character mentioned in the poem plays an important role, not in a tragedy or a battle, but in an argument. This striking fact contrasts radically with any other Greek literary work, including the work of other philosophers.

For instance, the writings of the poets, Homer and Hesiod, were of enormous importance to philosophers before and after Parmenides. However, philosophers before Parmenides, such as Thales and Heraclitus, were suspicious of the message that the poets were conveying, and reacted with texts concerned with the universe, the truth and physical reality. This was, without doubt, the beginning of scientific thought. Nevertheless, the writings of these philosophers present scenarios based on bold assumptions and statements. Although they were incredibly original, there was no argument from which consequences would follow, and their suggestive power is similar to the persuasive allure of the writings of the poets.

In the case of Thales, we encounter the daring claim that everything is water. Heraclitus, in a metaphorical fashion, presents a world that is in constant struggle and change: “You cannot step twice into the same rivers; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.” Nothing rests and everything is a battle in the world of Heraclitus. But, just like in the world of Homer, the forces that hold the universe together are simply portrayed. Whether gods or cosmic forces, the role of the philosopher, analogous to the task of the poet, is to depict whatever seems to be fundamental for the universe to exist and maintain its existence.

Parmenides follows this stylistic tradition. He is invited by a goddess to listen carefully to the truth. However, and this is what is crucial, the goddess invites Parmenides to follow her train of thought and to weigh the reasons behind it. The journey, although mystical in nature, is also an inquiry into things that hold necessarily and things that cannot be conceived. Although Parmenides uses metaphors, mythical characters and religious journeys, his purpose is to argue that there are certain conditions that must be satisfied for something to be real. Unlike any other thinker or writer before him, Parmenides is not portraying battles, primitive entities or gods. He is laying out conditions that must hold for the universe to exist. These conditions delineate the path of truth or aletheia, which departs radically from the path of doxa.

It is in this sense that the presence of the goddess is an ornament to Parmenides’ argumentation. She is a rhetorical device to present an argument concerning the impossibility of change, the essence of what is real, the necessity of the completeness of the universe and the unity of anything that exists. It is crucial to understand the difference between these claims and those of Parmenides’ predecessors. These claims are powerful intuitions about what is a unified entity and why, if the universe is real, then it has to be such an entity. They are general claims about reality that do not depend on the existence of particular substances or gods. Rather, they postulate necessary conditions that constraint reality, whatever it happens to be.

Following the steps of his teacher Parmenides, Zeno denied the existence of movement and change, formulating paradoxes that had enormous repercussions in the history of science and mathematics. Democritus, on the other hand, said that everything is material and consists of indivisible units. Atom, the Greek word for “without parts” appeared in the intellectual and scientific landscape, and since then, it became a crucial term in scientific theories. For the first time, knowledge was independent of the predominant religion. For the first time, mankind’s wisdom could be explored for its own sake because such wisdom depended exclusively on the permanent and necessary conditions of truth and reality. For the first time, knowledge was truly universal.

However, it was not until Plato that the issue of education became as important as the search for truth. For Plato, both are actually complementary of one another. To find the truth we need intellectual discipline. We can only see the truth, as Plato says, with the eyes of the soul. And only a good soul can see the truth. Therefore, using Plato’s allegory of the cave, the soul must be well trained and mature in order to leave the cave of appearances and see the ideas that shape everything within the cave. Education is crucial to find the truth, and the truth is not only good in itself, as a self fulfilling purpose, but also as a goal that liberates us from our slavish condition.

Plato starts his scientific and philosophical revolution by attacking the poets (he is the mathematical philosopher par excellence). He compares them with puppeteers that manipulate the chained souls of the prisoners of the cave. The souls of those prisoners have never been trained, they do not know the truth and they do not even know that they are enslaved. The puppeteers promise them gifts, offer them the paradise and threaten them with chimeras and horrible monsters. The imitation and reproduction of these phantoms produced by the poets tie the chains that keep all the prisoners inside the cave.

Plato tried to liberate humanity by comparing it to an enslaved crowd. His attack shook the very foundations of Greek culture and opened new routes of inquiry. In his dialogues, Socrates asked apparently simple questions that everyone quickly answered. When Socrates’ interlocutors realized they did not know the answers to such questions, they were ready to start training their soul, or their innermost self, because they knew that their knowledge was a product of reproduction, their ideas were the ideas of the poets and their science was religious superstition.

Socrates gave birth to souls. This is the function of the teacher and the philosopher. Plato’s teacher, Socrates, gave birth also to a discipline that starts by asking the right questions, impeding quick answers and inquiring into the genealogy of ideas. The importance of this analysis is that it is through it that we reach our freedom, because our soul can see the ideas that shape everything. However, in thinking about the problem of imitation, Plato faced an enormous difficulty.

There is only one idea of chair, but there are infinitely many actual and possible chairs. They all participate in the idea of chair but by reproduction we can fabricate as much as we want. However there is only one Socrates and we can never reproduce or imitate him. Where does this difference in being come from? Why do instruments have a different existential condition than Socrates or Alcibiades?

It is in this context that the issue of instrumentality, nature and life became crucial to the mightiest student of Plato, Aristotle. This is very relevant to understand why his book on nature (the Physics) is essentially concerned with instrumentality, a theme that connects all of Aristotle’s work. This is why it is important to acknowledge the cultural background Aristotle’s work presupposes by referring as much as possible to the original Greek meaning of the words he used.

For instance, the difference between Poiesis and Praxis, is central to Aristotle’s description of the Polis as a unified organization. The very word organization comes from the Greek word organon, which means instrument. As a mover of instruments the constitution of the Polis must determine different functions and activities and it is through education that its citizens learn such functions and activities. It is clear from the writings of the ancient Greek thinkers that education is equivalent to the walls and fortifications of the Polis. Education, for the Greeks, was a crucial strategy for protecting and improving the Polis.

However, education is not an easy affair. As Heraclitus declared: Πολυμαθια νοον ου διδασκει (DK B40), which is usually translated as “the learning of many things does not teach understanding.” Aristotle, conscious of this problem, indicated that although instrumentality is a crucial part of our training and education, virtue must always be present in such training. Acquiring information and being able to reproduce it is not sufficient for knowledge, as Heraclitus noticed. Nevertheless, education is part of our lives, not tangentially, but naturally. Aristotle opened his Metaphysics by saying that,

All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything, we prefer seeing to everything else. The reason is that this, most of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light many differences between things. (Aristotle, 2001, 689)

We should pursue the good life because it helps us acquiring discipline and finding the truth, which we want to know not because of envy or selfishness, but because it is in our nature to pursue and love the truth. Likewise, we shall pursue the truth because it helps us being better and improving our customs and attitudes to each other.

Every philosopher goes back to the Greek philosophers because they always speak to humanity universally, without specific codes. Avicena and Averroes, who preserved Greek thought and produced amazing comments on the work of Aristotle, emphasized the importance of combining philosophical and scientific education with religious education. This is reminiscent of the efforts of the three Hierarchs who combined the wisdom of classical Greek philosophy with the new message of the Christian religion. Likewise, scientists and artists throughout history find an endless source of inspiration in ancient Greek philosophy.

To conclude, in the writings of the Greek philosophers we find not only a new way of writing and thinking, but also an expression of the wonders of language. Language is like a tool because we use it to do things, but it is also like a living creature because, for example, we can talk to Plato and Aristotle through it, bringing them to life. The language in which these new ideas and theories that revolutionized human history were expressed, Greek, will be forever part of our common heritage, which includes scientific theories, the arts, literature and every field of human thought.