Ramkrishna Bhattacharya
"Why do you study ancient philosophy?"
I have faced this question so often that it is high time to give a reply in print.
The question may be answered rather tartly, following a famous mountaineer: 'Because it's there.'1 Such an answer, however, will not satisfy everybody.Yet the answer is perfectly valid. ’The first
philosophers’ (as George Thomson called the Presocratics) succeeded in making
the final break with mythology; by turning themselves into physiologoi, observers of nature ‘as it is
without alien addition’ (Engels 198) they laid the basis of the scientific
method. Benjamin Farrington noted that they were more than mere observers of
nature: ‘The novelty of their modes of thought is only negatively explained by
the rejection of mystical or supernatural intervention. It is its positive
content that is decisive.’ (41)
The comment is equally true of the ancient
Indian materialists. They too rejected any preternatural creator and asserted
that consciousness arises out of matter, not the other way round.
J. D. Bernal further points out why the Presocratics
are of importance even now:
‘Greek thought, for historical reasons, underlies that of later ages, and particularly the theories of modern science, social as well as natural. We cannot think rationally except along the lines the first philosophers laid down for us; most often we think in the very words they first invented.’ (22)
Bernal explains why ancient Greek
philosophy is particularly important for the Marxists:
To a Marxist these are by no means just far away and long ago events to be studied for their intrinsic interest alone. They are part of the struggle of today and tomorrow. Marx himself wrote his doctoral thesis on the atomic philosophy of Democritus and Epicurus; Engels, notably in The Origin of the Family, discusses the social origins of the Greeks. Just because reaction is still able to use ideological weapons forged in defence of privilege in Ancient Greece, there is all the more reason to examine how and why this was done and to show the contrasting ideology which is arising in the making of a classless society. (22)
 |
| JD Bernal |
For example, was idealism the only form of
philosophy cultivated in India through the ages? Was there no dissident voice
at any point of time? It is not enough to conjecture that there must have been
anti-idealists and anti-fideists in India. Concrete evidence would have to be
produced to establish any counter claim. One can always assert that any view
about the world is bound to produce its opposite: as early materialism was
followed by idealism, latter-day idealism begot materialism anew. Such an
assertion, however logical and convincing it may sound, needs empirical
evidence to support it. All the evidence may not be available on the surface;
they have to be unearthed.
This kind of attempt has its drawbacks too.
It may lead to another sort of glorification of the past. Farrington cautioned
long ago:
There is great danger, in discussing these old thinkers, that one may read into them the meaning of a later age. It must always be remembered that they were ignorant of all the accumulated knowledge of modern science and all the refinement of ideas that centuries of philosophical discussion had produced. In the world of thought, as in the world of nature, everything flows.2 The very words with which we translate the sayings of Heraclitus are charged with meanings unknown to him. It takes an effort of historical research and of historical imagination to put oneself back into the frame of mind of this great thinker when he supposed himself to have solved the riddle of the universe by saying that there was a tension in things, ‘like the bow and the lyre’. (41)
What is true of Heraclitus is also true of
Kanada, the founder of Vaiseshika atomism, and even of the Carvakas who were
the last school of materialists in India. Hence a balanced view regarding the
ancients, giving praise where it is due and keeping in mind the shortcomings
that inevitably accompanied their achievements, is to be studiously maintained.
The same approach would apply to the moderns as well. Notwithstanding the
inroads they have made and are making, posterity will also judge them in the
same way, acknowledging their credits but, at the same time, noting what they missed.
#
It may not be out of place here to remember
how Frederick Engels assessed the value of ancient philosophers. After dealing
with the new strides made in the fields of geology, physics, chemistry and
biology, Engels concluded:
Thus we have once again returned to the mode of outlook of the great founders of Greek philosophy, the view that the whole of nature, from the smallest element to the greatest, from grains of sand to suns, from Protista to man, has its existence in eternal coming into being and passing away, in ceaseless flux, in unresting motion and change. (30-31)
More significantly Engels added a proviso:
Only with the essential difference that what in the case of the Greeks was a brilliant intuition, is in our case the result of strictly scientific research in accordance with experience, and hence also it emerges in a much more definite and clear form. (31. Italics mine.)
 |
| Frederick Engels |
Writing in the 1870s Engels further argued
that the most important branches of science ‘have a scientific existence of
barely a century, and the comparative method in physiology, one of barely fifty
years, and that the basic form of almost all organic development, the cell, is
a discovery not yet forty years old’ (31).
#
Let us go back to the question that was
raised at the beginning of this essay. Engels provides an answer that concerns
empirical natural science vis-à-vis philosophy:
Empirical natural science has accumulated such a tremendous mass of positive material for knowledge that the necessity of classifying it in each separate field of investigation systematically and in accordance with its inner inter-connection has become absolutely imperative. It is becoming equally imperative to bring the individual spheres of knowledge into the correct connection with one another. In doing so, however, natural science enters the field of theory and here the methods of empiricism will not work, here only theoretical thinking can be of assistance. (42. Italics mine.)
To those who have an insufficient acquaintance
with Marxism, such a statement may appear to be somewhat unexpected. But Engels
did emphasize the importance of ‘theory’ without any reservation. What he says
next may appear equally startling to some:
But theoretical thinking is an innate quality only as regards natural capacity. This natural capacity must be developed, improved, and for its improvement there is as yet no other means than the study of previous philosophy. (42-43. Italics mine.)
How can ‘previous philosophy’ be of any use
in the study of modern science? Engels the dialectician explains the matter
lucidly:
In every epoch, and therefore also in ours, theoretical thought is a historical product, which at different times assumes very different forms and, therewith, very different contents. The science of thought is therefore, like every other, a historical science, the science of the historical development of human thought. And this is of importance for the practical application of thought in empirical fields. … Formal logic itself has been the arena of violent controversy from the time of Aristotle to the present day. And dialectics has so far been fairly closely investigated by only two thinkers, Aristotle and Hegel. (43. Italics mine.)
Why is dialectics so important in the
present-day world? Engels puts his finger on what has come to be known as the
philosophy of science:
But it is precisely dialectics that constitute the most important form of thinking for present-day natural science, for it alone offers the analogue for, and thereby the methods of, explaining the evolutionary processes occurring in nature, inter-connection in general, and transitions from one field of investigation to another. (43)
At this point Engels deplores the lack of
acquaintance of modern natural scientists with the history of philosophy. It
has caused great harm to the advancement of knowledge. Moreover, what is now
claimed to be something new may, historically speaking, not be true: in very
many cases old wisdom has reappeared in a new garb. But modern scientists were
not aware of it. Engels mentions a specific case:
Since physics and chemistry once more operate almost exclusively with molecules and atoms, the atomic philosophy of ancient Greece has of necessity come to the fore again. But how superficially it is treated even by the best of natural scientists! Thus Kekulé tells us … that Democritus, instead of Leucippus, originated it, and he maintains that Dalton was the first to assume the existence of qualitatively different elementary atoms, and was the first to ascribe to them different weights characteristic of different elements. Yet anyone can read in Diogenes Laertius … that already Epicurus had ascribed to atoms differences not only of magnitude and form, but also of weight, that is, he was already acquainted in his own way with atomic weight and atomic volume. (44. Italics in the original.)
George Thomson writes on the atomic theory
of the Greeks in considerable detail (302-14). But he makes an important
reservation regarding the ‘atomist cosmology’:
The resemblance of the atomic theory of Demokritos and Epicurus to the atomic theory of modern physics is superficially so striking that we are tempted to regard the work of those philosophers as scientific. This is a mistake. Ancient atomism is not science but ideology. It is, no less than Parmenidean monism and Platonic idealism, an exercise of pure reason ‘reflecting the structure of the society in which it was generated. (312. Italics mine.)
J. D. Bernal, himself a practicing
scientist, however, looks at the matter in a different way. He concurs with
Thomson’s formulation that ‘the truth of the matter is, not that these ancient
Greeks anticipated the results of modern science, but that modern scientists
have succeeded in reaffirming certain fundamental but forgotten truths and
establishing them securely on the basis of experimental proof’ (Thomson 162).
Nevertheless Bernal insists:
But this is only part of the story. Those truths would never have been reaffirmed, never indeed examined but for the form in which their first statement was made, a form clear enough to be grasped, tested, rejected, and improved upon. The Greeks were supreme as model builders. Even if the models came from clan organization they are the linear ancestors of our modern scientific concepts. The atom of today is not a rediscovery, it is the original Democritan atom, hard, massy, impenetrable, that was recovered by Gassendi and passed through Newton to Rutherford. (31. Italics mine.)
This indeed is a strong reassertion of
Engels’s emphasis on the importance of theoretical thought, which is no less
important than empirical research. Why is it so? The following observation made
by Engels is therefore worth pondering:
The fact that our subjective thought and the objective world are subject to the same laws, and hence, too, that in the final analysis they cannot contradict each other in their results, but must coincide, governs absolutely our whole theoretical thought. It is the unconscious and unconditional premise for theoretical thought. (266)
This is why ancient philosophy has much to
teach us even today, for much of it was grounded in sound theoretical thought.
Notes
1George Mallory (1886-1924) said this in
reply to the question, ‘Why did you want to climb Mount Everest?’ Reported in
an article published in the New York Times, 18.3.1923.
2 The fragment, ‘Everything flows’ (panta
rhei), it is now more or less certain, is not one of Heraclitus’ sayings nor
has it survived as a quotation from his works (all lost). Simplicius
(c.496-560), a neoplatonist, first refers to it. Plato (Cratylus 401d and
402a), however, uses a different verb: ‘Everything moves’ (panta chorei).
The image of flux even then is Heraclitean
and it is tempting to compare it with the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence
(kshanabhanga).
The image of ‘the bow and the lyre’ mentioned
at the end of the passage quoted above, however, is an authentic Heraclitean
saying (Fragment 51 (Diels)). See Barnes, 65-66 and Freeman, 28.
Works Cited
Barnes, Jonathan. The Presocratic Philosophers.
London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986.
Bernal, J.D. ‘The Birth of Reason,’
Mainstream (USA), 10:6, 1957, 22-31. (A review of the US edition of George
Thomson’s The First Philosophers published by International Publishers, New
York).
Engels, Frederick. Dialectics of Nature.
Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1982 (Strictly speaking, not a ‘book’, but the
edited version of four folders consisting of unfinished drafts. Published
posthumously from the USSR in 1925).
Farrington, Benjamin. Greek Science: Its
Meaning for Us. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966.
Freeman, Kathleen. Ancilla to the
Pre-Socratic Philosophers. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962.
Thomson, George. The First Philosophers
(Studies in Ancient Greek Society, vol. 2). London: Lawrence & Wishart,
1955.
Acknowledgements: Siddhartha Datta and
Sunish Kumar Deb
This
essay first appeared in Psyche and Society, Volume 11, No.1, May 2013. The original title of the essay was ‘Why
Do You Study Ancient Philosophy?’
0 comments:
Post a Comment