Miss Buddha (90 page)

Pythagoras also held that humanity’s highest
purpose—and all else was incidental or secondary—was to purify the
soul by cultivating intellectual virtues, refraining from sensual
pleasures, and by practicing special religious rituals.

The Pythagoreans, having discovered the
mathematical laws of musical pitch (reducing the length of a
vibrating string by exactly half, raises the pitch of the string by
exactly an octave), inferred that the motions of the planets
produced a heavenly music, and based on this developed a musical
therapy to bring humanity in harmony with the celestial
spheres.

Pythagoras also held that
science
was
mathematics, there was no other science, and that all things
were made up of numbers and geometrical figures.

A brilliant man, he and his followers
contributed greatly to science, mathematics, musical theory, and
astronomy.

The Heraclitean School

Around 500 BCE, Heraclitus of Ephesus took
up the Ionian search for a primary substance, which he claimed to
be fire.

Noticing that heat produces
changes in matter, he anticipated the modern theory of energy.
Heraclitus also held the Buddhist view that all things are in a
state of continuous flux, that stability is an illusion, and that
only change and the law of change, what he termed
Logos
, are
real.

The Logos doctrine of
Heraclitus, which held the laws of nature to
be
the Divine Mind, later developed
into the pantheistic theology of Stoicism. (Pantheism is the view
that God and material substance are one, and that divinity,
therefore, is present in all things.)

The Eleatic School

In the
5
^th
century BCE, Parmenides founded a school of philosophy at
Elea, a Greek colony on the Italian peninsula that took the
opposite view of Heraclitus when it came to universal stability and
change.

Parmenides held that the universe, or the
state of being, is an indivisible, unchanging, spherical entity and
that the notion of change or diversity is self-contradictory. All
that exists, according to Parmenides, has no beginning and has no
end and is not subject to change over time. Nothing, he claimed,
can be truly asserted except that “being is.”

Zeno of Elea, a disciple of Parmenides,
tried to prove (though not all that successfully) this unity of
being by arguing that the notion change, diversity, and motion
leads to logical paradoxes. The paradoxes of Zeno later became
famous intellectual puzzles that philosophers and logicians since
then have tried to solve.

The problem of logical consistency, a major
concern of the Eleatics, was later to form the basis of the
sub-science of logic.

The Pluralists

The speculation about the
world around us begun by the Ionians was, again, taken up in the
5
^th
century BCE by Empedocles and Anaxagoras, who—putting their
heads together—postulated that rather than the Ionian’s single
primary substance, there were several.

Empedocles held that all things are composed
of four elements, each irreducible: air, water, earth, and fire
(which is another view shared by Buddhism), which are then combined
and separated by the two opposing forces of love and strife.

That, he maintained, is how the world
evolves from chaos to form and back to chaos again, in an eternal
cycle.

Empedocles regarded this eternal cycle as
the true object of religious worship and denigrated the popular
belief in personal deities.

However, Empedocles, though often asked to,
failed to explain how the familiar objects of experience could
develop from elements that so different from them.

Here, Anaxagoras weighed in with the
suggestion that all things are, in fact, composed of very small
particles, or “seeds,” which exist in infinite variety. To explain
how these particles combine to constitute the objects that make up
the familiar world, Anaxagoras postulated the existence of a world
mind that separates and combines these particles on an ongoing
basis.

It was his concept of elemental particles
that eventually led to the atomic theory of matter.

The Atomists

It was a natural, and not very large step
from pluralism to atomism—the theory that all matter is composed of
tiny, indivisible particles differing only in simple physical
properties such as size, shape, and weight.

As I mentioned above, this
step was taken in the 4
^th
century BCE by Leucippus and his more famous
associate Democritus, who is generally credited with the first
systematic formulation of an atomic theory of matter.

The fundamental postulate of Democritus
atomic theory is that matter is not infinitely divisible but is
composed of a sea of indivisible particles too small for the human
eye (or any other sense, for that matter) to detect.

Democritus’ view of nature was thoroughly
materialistic, explaining, as he did, all natural phenomena purely
by the number, shape, and size of atoms. This way he reduced the
sensory qualities of things—warmth, cold, taste, and odor—to
quantitative differences among atoms, to differences in amount or
size.

To Democritus, there was no spirit or soul.
Rather, he explained the higher forms of existence, such as plant
and animal life and even human thought, in these purely physical
terms as well and applied his atomic theory to not only psychology
and physiology, but to theory of knowledge, ethics, and politics as
well, and so presented the first comprehensive statement of
deterministic materialism—the theory that holds that all aspects of
existence are wholly determined by physical laws.

The ultimate materialist, in other
words.

The Sophists

Toward the end of the 5th century BCE, a
generation of itinerant teachers who came to be known as the
Sophists made a name for themselves throughout Greece—especially
for their role in the evolution of the Greek city-states from
agrarian monarchies into commercial democracies.

Over the previous century or so, Greek
industry and commerce had taken hold and created a class of nouveau
riche, economically powerful merchants who by now had begun to
wield political power. However, lacking the formal education of the
aristocrats (who had little else to do but study things), they
sought to prepare themselves (and their offspring) for politics and
commerce by paying these Sophists for instruction in public
speaking, legal argument, and general culture.

As with most areas of life, there’s bad with
the good, and although the “good” Sophists made valuable
contributions to Greek thought, the group as a whole (i.e., the
“bad” ones) acquired a reputation for deceit, insincerity, and
demagoguery, and this is where we get the word sophistry (meaning
false or insincere reasoning) from.

Protagoras, one of the leading Sophists and,
in my view, one of the more reputable (if not entirely “good”)
ones, sets the tone of the Sophist school with his famous aphorism,
that “man is the measure of all things.” With that he meant that
individuals have the right to judge all matters for themselves.

Indeed, Protagoras denied the existence of
objective knowledge, arguing instead that truth is wholly
subjective in that different things are true for different people
and in that there is no way to prove that one person’s beliefs are
objectively correct and another’s are incorrect.

Pragmatic to the core, Protagoras also
asserted that natural science and theology were of little or no
value to people because they have no impact on daily life, and he
concluded that ethical rules need be followed only when it is to
one’s practical advantage to do so.

Socrates

Most everyone has heard of Socrates,
possibly the greatest philosophical personality in western history.
He lived from 469 to 399 BCE, but left no written works and is, in
fact, only known through the writings of his students, especially
those of his most famous pupil, Plato.

Socrates taught by philosophical dialogue,
and held that the philosopher’s task was to provoke people into
thinking for themselves, rather than to teach them anything they
did not already know. This got him in hot water with the parents of
those he taught, and he was eventually found guilty of corrupting
the minds of youth, and for this he was sentenced to death.

Even though given a chance to save himself,
he refused, and preferred to down the famous hemlock.

Socrates did not develop a systematic
doctrine but, rather, a method of thinking and a way of life. He
stressed the need for analytical examination of one’s beliefs, the
need for clear definitions of basic concepts, and the need for a
rational and critical approach to ethical problems.

Also, unlike the perhaps a little too
pragmatic Sophists, Socrates refused to accept payment for his
teachings, maintaining that he had no positive knowledge to offer
except the awareness of the need for more personal knowledge.

Socrates also held—and eagerly pointed
out—that in matters of morality, it is best to seek out genuine
knowledge by exposing false pretensions. Ignorance, he claimed, is
the true source of evil, so it is therefore improper to act out of
ignorance or to accept moral instruction from those who have not
proven their own wisdom.

Instead of relying blindly on authority, he
maintained, we should unceasingly question our own beliefs and the
beliefs of others in order to seek out genuine wisdom. This, of
course, is what got him in trouble with the powers that be (whose
wisdom, naturally, was unchallengeable).

Socrates also held, and taught, that every
person has within his or her soul, full knowledge of ultimate
truth, and needs only to be spurred to conscious reflection to
become aware of it. In Plato’s dialogue Meno, for example, Socrates
guides an untutored slave to the formulation of the Pythagorean
theorem, and so demonstrates that such knowledge is innate in the
soul, rather than learned.

Socrates Cave

In the famous parable of the cave—which
tells of mankind fettered in a dark cave, their backs to the fire
that blazes between them and the opening—Socrates shows that the
dwellers of this den, gazing at the inner cave wall, see only
shadows cast by the fire, which they take to be real, living
things. That is, they see only the appearances of material things,
not their true nature. Yet, the shadows that they are accustomed to
observe appear to them more real than the forms that caused
them.

This is how Plato related this particular
exchange between Socrates and his student:

“And now,” Socrates said, “let me show in a
figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened. Behold!
human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open
toward the light and reaching all along the den; here they have
been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so
that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being
prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and
behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire
and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you
look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which
marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the
puppets.”

“I see,” said his student.

“And do you see,” Socrates said, “men
passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues
and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various
materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking
others silent.”

“You have shown me a strange image, and they
are strange prisoners.”

“Like ourselves,” replied Socrates, who then
asked: “And what do they see if not their own shadows, or the
shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall
of the cave?”

“True,” said his student, “how could they
see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move
their heads?”

“And of the objects which are being carried
in like manner they would only see the shadows?”

“Of course,” said his student.

“And if they were able to converse with one
another, would they not suppose that they were naming what was
actually before them?”

“Yes, of course.”

“And suppose further that the prison had an
echo which came from the other side, would they not be sure to
fancy when one of the passers-by spoke that the voice which they
heard came from the passing shadows?”

“Yes, no question,” replied the student.

“To them,” said Socrates, “the truth would
be literally nothing but the shadows of the images, and the sounds
of echoes.”

“Yes, that is certain.”

“And now look again, and see what will
naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of
their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled
suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look
towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will
distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which
in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive
someone saying to him that what he saw before was an illusion, but
that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is
turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision. What
will be his reply? And you may further imagine that his instructor
is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring him to name
them, will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows
which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now
shown to him?”