European Culture as the Root of Western Thought

1. European Culture as the Root of Western Thought Lecture Course at Huaqiao University March – June 2012 Horst J. Helle 2nd session of March 11 (Introduction by Dr. Li: March 08)

2. Max Weber 1864-1920

3. Max Weber – Background I • Max Weber was a German sociologist. He graduated from the law school of Berlin University, and his scholarly expertise was the history of law, particularly Roman Law. That was the legal system of the ancient Roman Empire that ruled civilized Europe and Northern Africa 2000 years ago. • In 1896 Max Weber wrote an article on the reasons for the collapse of the Roman Empire: Diesozialen Gründe des Untergangs der antiken Kultur, in: Die Wahrheit, Bd. 3, H. 63, Fr. Frommanns Verlag, Stuttgart 1896, S. 57–77, GASW 289–311

4. Max Weber – Background II • In 1904 he published a famous journal article in which he explained the origin of modern reational capitalism with a religious motivation • Die protestantische Ethik und der 'Geist' des Kapitalismus, in: Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 20 (1904), 1–54 und 21 (1905), 1–110, überarbeitet in GARS I 1–206. • This was intended as an alternative theory on capitalism, not to replace but to be added to the theory of Karl Marx on capitalism. • In 1920 he published a new introduction to that article in which he pointed to certain special characteristics of a European culture.

5. Max Weber’s question • What is peculiar about the West? Why did what happened in Europe have influence in other parts of the world? • Max Weber’s answers: Only the West had “Wissenschaft” in the sense of collecting data, systematic reflection on fundamental problems of life and the world, philosophical and theological knowledge based not simply on unquestioned acceptance but on skeptical questioning.

6. Mathemtatics and Experiment • There was astronomy in China, India, Babylonia, Egypt and other areas, but only in the West was astronomy based on a mathematical foundation created by the ancient Greeks. • There was geometry in India, but it lacked the method of rational proof, also originating from the Greeks. The fields of mechanics and physics too started there. There were well developed sciences in India but without the rational and controlled experiment. There were alchemists in China, but scientific chemistry came about only in the West.

7. Government, Law, Art • There were teachings about government and law in many cultures, but only in the West were they based on a rational construction of concepts and the systematic coherence of Aristotle’s teaching. • The legal system of ancient Rome and under its influence the legal system of the Catholic Church determines the continental European law in Germany, France and other countries till this day. • The uniqueness of Europe also applies to the arts. China and other cultures have highly developed music, but only in the West was there a theory of harmony based on mathematics.

8. Music, Architexture, Painting • The compositions of (for instance) Bach can be enjoyed emotionally, but they can also be studied theoretically. • Similar observations are – according to Max Weber – true in architecture and painting. • Is Max Weber right, or what may be mistakes in his description of the West? • By “the West” we mean Europe plus North and South America which were colonized from Europe and continued European culture.

9. Rational Construction of Concepts • A rational construction of concepts as well as high level mathematics, and scientific experiment are mentioned as peculiar to the West and as prerequisites for its development. • Mathematics started in Greece with Thales of Miletus (ca. 624–548 BC), and Pythagoras of Samos (ca. 570-490 BC) • At the time of Laozi and Confucius the ancient Greek philosophers look for unity and order in the world.

10. Mathematics, Unity, Order • Mathematics (from Greek μάθημαmáthēma "knowledge, study, learning") is the theoretical study of quantity, structure, space, and change. • Through the use of abstraction and logical reasoning, mathematics developed from counting, calculation, measurement, and the systematic study of the shapes and motions of physical objects. • Unity and order were concepts in the context of cosmology. Cosmology is the discipline that deals with the nature of the Universe as a whole.

11. Ancient Greek Philosophy • The early ancient Greek philosophers were never simply mathematicians or cosmologists. They combined many different types of knowledge into their systems of thought. • They were often described in later centuries as experts in something which in their real life they only did as part of their interest. • The problem of interpretation is to separate the constructions of later writers from the real activites of the famous men.

12. The Question of Being • Are the things we see, real or only imagined? • Are the objects we think about, real or only imagined? • What does it mean if something is (exists)? • It seems that the early Greek philosopher Thales was fascinated by the questions of Being. • Everything else, big or small, dark or light, is secondary: The main questions is: Is it? It seems that Thales was one of the first to concentrate on that. He was from Miletus, now in Turkey.

13. Countries around the Mediterranean Sea

14. The Empire of Alexander the Great At 323 BC

15. Greek territory in Asia • Itisobviousfromthemapoftheempireof Alexander the Great (356 – 323 BC) that large parts of the territory were located in Asia. • Particularly Persia was part of it. • That should be considered as a reason to expect philosophical influences from those Asian areas on ancient Greek thinking.

16. The Roman Empire 44 BC - 476

17. Ancient Rome a Western Empire • The territory of the Roman Empire was located much further to the West and the North. • It included what is now France and Spain, also Southern Germany and England. • In Alexander‘s Empire, Greece was the Western motherland. • In the Roman Empire, Greece was am Eastern province. • In the Byzantine Empire (ca. 450 – 1450) Greece was central and the language was changed from Latin to Greek.

18. Thales of Miletus 624–548 BC • In his account of his predecessors' searches for “causes and principles” of the natural world and natural phenomena, Aristotle says that Thales of Miletus (a city in Ionia, on the west coast of what is now Turkey) was the first to engage in such inquiry. • Aristotle mentions that some more ancient persons placed great importance on water (Metaphysics 983b27–33), like Thales himself. Thales had students who followed him in his teaching and formed the school of the Milesians.

19. Thales of Miletus II • The tradition claims that Thales predicted a solar eclipse in 585 BC, introduced geometry into Greece from Egypt, and produced some engineering marvels. • Anaximander, a student of Thales, is reported to have invented the raised piece of a sundial whose shadow marks time, and to have been the first to draw a map of the inhabited world. • Regardless of whether these reports are correct (and in the case of Thales' prediction they almost certainly are not), they indicate something important about the Milesians: their interests in measuring and explaining celestial and terrestrial phenomena.

20. Thales of Miletus III • Aristotle's comments do not sound as if they were based on first-hand knowledge of Thales' views, and reports say that Thales did not write a book. • Yet Aristotle is confident that Thales belongs, even if honorifically, to that group of thinkers that he calls “inquirers into nature” and distinguishes him from earlier poetical “myth-makers.” • In Book I of the Metaphysics, Aristotle claims that the earliest of these, among whom he places the Milesians, explained things only in terms of their matter (Met. I.3 983b6–18).

21. Thales IV • Also Thales and his students were concerned with the more abstract inquiries into the causes and principles of substance and change. • They did not see the scientific and philosophical questions as belonging to separate disciplines, requiring distinct methods of inquiry. • There are assumptions and principles that we (along with Aristotle) see as constituting the philosophical foundations of their theories . It is legitimate to treat the Milesians as having philosophical views.

22. Thales V • Aristotle's general assertion about the first thinkers who gave accounts of nature (and his specific discussion of Thales' reliance on water as a first principle) brings out a difficulty in interpreting the early Presocratics. • According to Aristotle's general account, the Presocratics claimed that there was a single enduring material stuff that is both the origin of all things and their continuing nature. • Thus, on this view, when Thales says that the first principle is water, he should be understood as claiming both that the original state of things was water and that even now (despite appearances), everything is really water in some state or another.

23. Summary of 2nd session • We have dealt with three chapters: • A) Max Weber’s question: What is peculiar about Europe? • B) The geographic context of Ancient Greek culture • C) Thales of Miletus as pre-Socratic philosopher (unfinished). • http://www.horst-helle.de/FoundationsEur01.pptx

24. European Culture as the Root of Western Thought 3rd Session on Sunday, March 18, 2012: Mathematics, scientific experiment and rational construction of concepts

25. Agenda for Session No. 3 1) Finish the presentation of the position of Thales 2) Present basic ideas of Pythagoras of Samos 3) Introduce Parmenides and the Elea school 4) Heraclitus of Ephesus: “Everything flows” 5) Concept formation and ethical imperatives Source on Thales: Curd, Patricia, "Presocratic Philosophy", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).

26. Thales VI • The reports about Thales show him employing this explanation: Ultimately the description of why things are as they are is grounded in water as the basic stuff of the universe and the changes that it undergoes come about throughits own inherent nature. • In this, Thales marks a radicalchangefrom all otherprevioussortsofaccountsoftheworld (bothGreekand non-Greek). LiketheotherPre-Socratics, Thales seesnatureas a completeandself-orderingsystem, andseesnoreasontocall on divineinterventionfrom outside thenaturalworldtosupplementhisaccount—wateritselfmaybedivine, but itis not somethingthatintervenes in thenaturalworldfrom outside.

27. Thales VIa • This self-ordering system has important consequences. The idea that a complex context may have its own order has of course multiple applications: The planets around the sun, the parts of an engine, the books on your bookshelf • 費孝通 FeiXiaotong wrote that Hung Kung-sun who served the emperor was a man without principles, one who merely tried to follow the emperor's whims, did not keep his word, sold out his friends, and formed his own party to help maintain his high position in government.

28. Thales VIb • The German (Prussian) and European idea of duty in service to a principle may have roots in the notion of a self-ordering system. There it can be meaningful to be loyal to the inner order of a context (family, government) and not only to individual persons (father, emperor). • “From Han Yü on, Chinese scholars ceased to bother about whether the emperor was good or not. Their function as scholars they now saw was to uphold the emperor. As people who simply read the orders of the emperor, they became caricatures of the real scholar.” (Fei).

29. Thales VIc • These few hints from Fei Xiatong may indicate that science and scholarship take a different path in Europe, if the notion of a self-ordering system can demand loyalty to such a system, versus the (according to Fei partly) Chinese tradition to be loyal not to a principle but only to a person. • Of course “the ethical line which had been maintained by Confucius and his followers “ had been left by Han Yü, but that too was based on loyalty to a person, not a principle.

30. Thales: Summary • The great and lasting achievement of Thales and his students that may have made the European culture different from others is not only mathematics. It is in addition: • 1) Measuring and explaining phenomena in the sky and on earth. • 2) Inquiries into nature instead of more myths. • 3) Looking at substance or a stuff as common foundation of the world. • 4) Seeingnatureas a completeandself-orderingsystem.

31. Pythagoras (in the Capitol of Rome)

32. Pythagoras of Samos 570–490 • Pythagoras, one of the most famous ancient Greek philosophers, lived from ca. 570 to ca. 490 BC. He spent his early years on the island of Samos, off the coast of modern Turkey. At the age of forty, however, he emigrated to the city of Croton in southern Italy and most of his philosophical activity occurred there. • Pythagoras wrote nothing, nor were there any detailed accounts of his thought written by contemporaries. By the first centuries BC, moreover, it became fashionable to present Pythagoras in a largely unhistorical way as a semi-divine figure, who originated all that was true in the Greek philosophical tradition, including many of Plato's and Aristotle's mature ideas.

33. Pythagoras II • The early evidence shows, however, that, while Pythagoras was famous in his own day and even 150 years later in the time of Plato and Aristotle, it was not mathematics or science upon which his fame rested. Pythagoras was famous • 1) as an expert on the fate of the soul after death, who thought that the soul was immortal and went through a series of reincarnations; • 2) as an expert on religious ritual; • 3) as a wonder-worker who had a thigh of gold and who could be two places at the same time; • 4) as the founder of a strict way of life that emphasized dietary restrictions, religious ritual and rigorous self discipline.

34. Pythagoras III • Pythagoras presented a cosmos he saw structured according to moral principles and significant numerical relationships and may have been akin to conceptions of the cosmos found in Platonic myths. In such a cosmos, the planets were seen as instruments of divine vengeance (“the hounds of Persephone”), the sun and moon are the isles of the blessed where we may go if we live a good life, while thunder functioned to frighten the souls being punished in Tartarus (the underworld). • The heavenly bodies also appear to have moved in accordance with the mathematical ratios that govern the concordant musical intervals in order to produce a music of the heavens.

35. Pythagoras IV • The mathematics of the movements of the heavens was not worked out in detail. There is evidence that Pythagoras valued relationships between numbers such as those embodied in the so-called Pythagorean theorem, though it is not likely that he proved the theorem. • Pythagoras' cosmos was developed in a more scientific and mathematical direction by his successors in the Pythagorean tradition, Philolaus and Archytas. • Pythagoras succeeded in teaching a new more optimistic view of the fate of the soul after death and in founding a way of life that was attractive for its rigor and discipline and that drew to him numerous devoted followers.

36. Pythagoras V • Aristotle is explicit that the Pythagoreans recognized only the sensible world and hence did not derive it from immaterial principles. • Aristotle's careful distinctions between Plato and fifth-century Pythagoreanism, which make excellent sense in terms of the general development of Greek philosophy, are largely ignored in the later tradition in favor of the more sensational ascription of mature Platonism to Pythagoras.

37. Pythagoras VI • The picture of Pythagoras that emerges from the evidence is thus not of a mathematician, who offered rigorous proofs, or of a scientist, who carried out experiments to discover the nature of the natural world, but rather a theorist of religion who also sees special significance in and assigns special prominence to mathematical relationships that were in general circulation. • This is the context in which to understand Aristoxenus' remark that “Pythagoras most of all seems to have honored and advanced the study concerned with numbers, having taken it away from the use of merchants and likening all things to numbers.”

38. Pythagoras VII • Pythagoras is known for the honor he gives to the number and for removing it from the practical realm of trade and instead pointing to correspondences between the behavior of numbers and the behavior of things. • That included the emphasis on quantities and ratios rather than only qualities. • Source: Huffman, Carl, "Pythagoras", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

40. Parmenides 515-460/455 BC • Parmenides of Elea (Παρμενίδης ὁ Ἐλεάτης;) was born in Elea, a Greek city on the southern coast of Italy. He was the founder of the Eleatic school. • That school interpreted the two ways of gaining insight - observation and rational thinking - in this way: Only reason can show us what is real, but what we see and hear is unreliable and deceptive.

41. Parmenides 02 The opposing position was taken by the follower of Heraclitus: What we see seems to be stable, but reason tells us that it changes and develops all the time. • The single known work of Parmenides is a poem, On Nature, which has survived only in fragmentary form. In this poem, Parmenides describes two views of reality. In "the way of truth" (a part of the poem), he explains how reality (coined as "what-is") is seen by him.

42. Parmenides 03 • Parmenides claimed that the truth cannot be known through sensory perception. Only Logos will result in the understanding of the truth of the world. This is because the perception of things or appearances is decep-tive. Genesis-and-destruction is illusory, because the underlying material of which a thing is made will still exist after its destruc-tion. What exists must always exist. And we arrive at the knowledge of this underlying, static, and eternal reality through reasoning, not through sense-perception.

43. Parmenides 04 • The nature of reality led Parminedes to conclude “that reality [is], and must be, a unity in the strictest sense and that any change in it [is] impossible” and therefore that “the world as perceived by the senses is unreal” (Guthrie 1965, 4-5). • Finding reason and sensation to yield wildly contradictory views of reality, he presumed reason must be preferred and sensory evidence thereby rejected as altogether deceptive. Parmenides' strict monism, took particular aim at the monistic material principles of Milesiancosmology.

44. Parmenides 05 • [Parmenides] argues that once one has said that something is, it is no longer possible to say that it was or will be, or to attribute to it an origin or a dissolution in time, or any alteration or motion whatsoever. • But this was just what Thales and the other Milesians had done. They supposed that the world had not always existed in its present cosmic state. • They derived it from one substance, which they asserted to have changed or moved in various ways—becoming hotter or colder, drier or wetter, rarer or denser—in order to produce the present world-order. (Guthrie 1965, 15-16)

45. Commentary on Parmenides • We see here very early philosophical concept on the ideas of unity and being. • Reality is defined as not accessible to the senses. • In addition, real is what does not change: Anything sensual and developing is unreal. • In general: In the European tradition the philosopher is faced with alternative views, is under obligation to form his own judgement.

46. Heraclitus of Ephesus 535-475 BC • The theory of change is rooted not in Darwin but in Heraclitus and his school. • According to Platon, Sacrates has said: “It was Heraclitus who said: Everything flows on, nothing stays in place.” • Heraclitus also said: You can never climb into the same river twice. • The theory of change has a continuity in philosophy from Heraclitus all the way to Hegel and Marx.

47. Heraclitus 02 • Heraclitus, who discovered in what is shared or common to all (to xynon) the essential principle of order in the universe, recognized within the city the unifying role of the nomos. • That is the structure of civic law and moral custom which protects the demos, as the city wall protects all the inhabitants of the city [Fragment 100].

48. Heraclitus 03 • The only political attitude which we can safely extrapolate from the fragments is a lucid, almost Hobbesian appreciation of the fact that civilized life and communal survival depend upon loyalty to the law. • That is the nomos, the law in which all citizens have a share [Fragment 91b], but which may be realized in the leadership of a single outstanding man.

49. European Culture as the Root of Western Thought Lecture Course at Huaqiao University March – June 2012 Horst J. Helle 4th session of March 25 www.horst-helle.de/FoundationsEur01.pptx

50. Agenda for Session No. 4 • 1) Repeat the basic ideas of the Pre-Socratics • 2) Add some statements about Heraclitus • 3) Present the significance of the Platonic Socrates • 4) Present some aspects of the philosophy of Plato.