So my undergraduate years in philosophy were rewarding. But one thing I grew uncomfortable with is the philosophical bias I gradually noted in the teachings I received. Indeed, the idea that undergirded all what was said about the rise of rationality in Ancient Greece was that philosophy had appeared in these ancient times dominated by mythology as a light whose vocation was to dispel the darkness maintained by groundless religious beliefs.
There is certainly something true in the idea that philosophy, understood as a rational quest for universal truths, appeared as a competing worldview, challenging the mythological understanding of the divine, of the cosmos and of man that was predominant. But seeing the development of rational thought merely as an “antireligious” phenomenon is somewhat misleading in that rational thought never ceased to deal with the “big questions” primarily asked by religion.
Like religion, ancient philosophy aimed at finding the causes of all what is. It aimed at disclosing the ultimate foundations of the world. But it did so by taking a different path, that of the logos (i.e. rational thought), leaving behind the more common path (at the time) of the mythos (i.e. mythical thought). Through the rational use of language, philosophers went on to conquer the truths the Greek religion and the poetical tradition had attempted to capture through a keen exploration and exploitation of mythological belief, imagination and literary invention.
In the process, traditional Greek mythology was challenged to the point of appearing rationally baseless to Greek philosophers, that is for sure. And thus, it is also true that the rise of philosophy is contemporary to a certain decline of religion, a process scholars call demythologization. That being said, this growing demythologization never meant that man was done with his religious quest once and for all. It rather reoriented it in such a way that, in that quest, systematic rationality and critical thinking had to be used as new searching tools.
This cultural phenomenon is in clear display in the works (or rather in what remains of these works, i.e. a myriad of small fragments) of the early Greek philosophers we call the Presocratics. These two or three first generations of philosophers who lived before Socrates (c. 470 – 399 BC) or were contemporaneous with him, are considered to be the “founding fathers” of this new type of inquiry and understanding that ended being called “philosophy”. And their appearance on the stage of History is truly a momentous event. In what way?
Their main contribution is that they shifted man’s attention from divine causes to natural causes, in this immemorial attempt to find an explanation to what is. Prior to them, supernatural causes were sufficient, so to speak, to explain everything nature contains. Whence a systematic recourse to the divine (e.g. to Zeus) to find an explanation for all the different natural phenomena (e.g. thunder). From the Presocratics on, this type of explanation no longer sufficed.
And so the Presocratics endeavoured to find natural and rational causes to cosmic phenomena (which included man, as a natural reality). In doing so, they promoted a change in method (from mythos to logos) but also a change in objects, since the causes they were looking for were not supernatural, but natural. It flowed from that that their main focus was on natural reality, conceived as intelligible in itself. They methodically studied natural realities with their reason alone, so as to find natural causes explaining the cosmological order.
That is the reason why the philosophical tradition started to call them “physicists” (from the Greek “physis”, nature). That being said, Presocratics also (to a lesser extent, one must say) inquired into the mystery of God and the mystery of Man. In doing so, they set the course of the philosophical tradition for the next two millennia. Indeed, all subsequent philosophy will unendingly ponder upon these three main subjects, God, nature and man, trying to grasp the mysterious connection between them.
Up and down the centuries, philosophy students have been initiated to these three main branches of philosophy: metaphysics or natural theology (as a rational approach to the problem of God), cosmology (as a rational approach to nature) and anthropology (as a rational approach to man). This last branch also includes a sub-disciple: the study of the inner man, that is, the study of the soul (“psychè”, in Greek). And this theoretical approach of man’s being was to be completed by a rigorous reflection on man’s action (ethics).
It follows from what we’ve just said that presocratic philosophy contains not only an obvious cosmological doctrine, but also, in germ, a theology and a spiritual anthropology. And this is true right from the beginning of Ancient Greek philosophy. In fact, the first and most ancient group of presocratic philosophers we call the Milesians (because they all lived in a city called Miletus) sketched out theories on the first principle and on man which will later be refined and integrated into more elaborate and comprehensive philosophical systems.
We’ll look at these first theological sketches in my next blog article.
Reviewed and updated at 5:18 pm, on 05-14-2020