Before And After Socrates

Prof. F. M. Cornford

• Publisher: Hauraki Publishing
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781786258847
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Egyptian Ancient History
• Index: History

'Socrates was one of that small number of adventurers who, from time to time, have enlarged the horizon of the human spirit.' In this book, F. M. Cornford explains why the life and work of Socrates stand out as marking a turning-point in the history of thought. He shows how Socrates revolutionized the concept of philosophy, converting it from the study of Nature to the study of the human soul, the meaning of right and wrong, and the ends for which we ought to live.This is, in fact, the story of the whole creative period of Greek philosophy—the Ionian science of Nature before Socrates, Socrates himself, and his chief followers, Plato and his pupil Aristotle. It tells of the different contributions each made, and shows how within three centuries the Greek tradition grew to maturity and the fullness of intellectual power.'Refreshing and stimulating...it is not only a masterly piece of condensation, nor only a delightful introduction to further reading; it is more, and it claims the attention of every serious student of the subject.'—Journal of Hellenic Studies'It can be confidently recommended to those who wish for a competent statement in a short compass of what the Greek philosophers believed and why.'—C. E. M. JOAD in New Statesman'Provides a clear insight into the development of Greek philosophy and a brilliant commentary on the Greek mind and its attitude to life. The first chapter forms one of the most attractive introductions to philosophy that it is possible to find.'—The Times Literary Supplement

Chapter I—IONIAN SCIENCE BEFORE SOCRATES

In this course of lectures it falls to me to speak of the whole creative period of Greek philosophy—of the Ionian science of Nature before Socrates, of Socrates himself, and of his chief followers, Plato and his pupil Aristotle. I cannot attempt even a bare outline of the history of thought in a period covering nearly three centuries, the sixth, fifth, and fourth, before our era. I shall only try to explain why the life and work of Socrates stand out as marking the central crisis or turning-point in that history. We speak of the pre-Socratics, then of Socrates, and finally of the Socratic philosophy elaborated by Plato and Aristotle. Why should the name of Socrates be used to describe the philosophy that came before him as well as the philosophy that came after?

Plato in one of his dialogues has made Socrates himself describe the revolution of thought he effected—how he turned philosophy from the study of external Nature to the study of man and of the purposes of human action in society. In the Phaedo, the conversation between Socrates and his friends on the day of his death reaches the question whether the soul is a thing of the sort that can begin and cease to exist. This question calls for a review of the explanations that had been given of the becoming and perishing of transitory things. Let me recall the substance of that famous passage.

Socrates begins by saying that in his youth he had been eager to learn how philosophers had accounted for the origin of the world and of living creatures. He soon gave up this science of Nature, because he could not be satisfied with the sort of explanations or reasons offered. Some, for instance, had found the origin of life in a process of fermentation set up by the action of heat and cold. Socrates felt that such explanations left him none the wiser, and he concluded that he had no natural talent for inquiries of this sort.

We can infer from the sequel why he was dissatisfied. In this earlier science a physical event was supposed to be ‘explained’ when it was (so to say) taken to pieces and described in terms of other physical events preceding or composing it. Such an explanation offers a more detailed picture of how the event came about; it does not, Socrates thought, tell us why it came about. The kind of reason Socrates wanted was the reason why.

Socrates then heard someone reading aloud a book by Anaxagoras, the philosophic friend of Pericles, which said that the world had been ordered by an Intelligence. This raised his hopes to a high pitch. An Intelligence ordering all things will surely, he thought, dispose them ‘for the best’. He expected to find that Anaxagoras would explain the world order as a work of design, not a result of blind mechanical necessity. The reason of that order would then be found, not in some previous state of things from which it had emerged, but in some end or purpose that it could be shown to serve. Reasons of that sort seemed to Socrates intelligible and satisfying. Why was he at that moment sitting in prison awaiting death? Not because the muscles in his body had contracted in a certain way to carry him there and place him in a sitting posture; but because his mind had thought it better to abide the sentence of the Athenian court. On reading Anaxagoras, however, Socrates found that the action of this Intelligence was limited to starting motion in space; and for the rest Anaxagoras fell back on mechanical causes of the usual type. In this system the world, after all, was not designed for any good purpose. Socrates himself could not do what Anaxagoras had left undone. He gave up all hope of an intelligible system of Nature, and turned away from the study of external things.

Accordingly, we find the Socrates depicted by Plato and Xenophon conversing, not about Nature, but about human life in society, the meaning of right and wrong, the ends for which we ought to live.

Plato has here described something of far deeper significance than a critical moment in the biography of Socrates. It was not only the man Socrates, but philosophy itself that turned, in his person, from the outer to the inner world. Up to that moment, the eyes of philosophy had been turned outwards to seek a reasonable explanation of the shifting spectacle of surrounding Nature. Now their vision is directed to another field—the order and purposes of human life—and, at the centre of that field, to the nature of the individual soul. Pre-Socratic philosophy begins (as I shall try to show) with the discovery of Nature; Socratic philosophy begins with the discovery of man’s soul.

The life of Socrates found its appropriate motto in the Delphic inscription, ‘Know thyself’. Why was it that, just at that time and place, man discovered in himself a problem of more pressing importance than the understanding of external Nature? We might have expected that philosophy should begin at home, with the understanding that man’s own soul and the meaning of his own life are more to him than the natural history of lifeless things. Why did man study Nature first, and forget the need to know himself till Socrates proclaimed that need as his chief concern? To find an answer to that question, we must now consider the early Ionian science of Nature, its character, and how it arose.

This science is called ‘Ionian’ because it was begun by Thales and his successors at Miletus, one of the Ionian colonies on the coast of Asia Minor. Thales lived at the beginning of the sixth century. The development of Ionian science culminated two centuries later in the Atomism of Democritus, a contemporary of Socrates and Plato.

All the histories of Greek philosophy, from Aristotle’s time to this day, begin with Thales of Miletus. It is generally agreed that with him something new, that we call Western science, appeared in the world—science as commonly defined: the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, not for any practical use it can be made to serve. Thales, travelling in the East, found that the Egyptians possessed some rough rules of land measurement. Every year the inundation of the Nile obliterated the landmarks, and the peasants’ fields had to be marked out afresh. The Egyptians had a method of calculating rectangular areas, and so solved their practical problem. The inquisitive Greek was not interested in marking out fields. He saw that the method could be detached from that particular purpose and generalised into a method of calculating areas of any shape. So the rules of land measurement were converted into the science of geometry. The problem—something to be done—gave place to the theorem—something to be contemplated. Reason found a fresh delight in knowing that the angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are always equal, and why they must be equal. The land surveyor still makes use of this truth in constructing maps; the philosopher is content to enjoy it because it is true.

In the same way the Greeks turned the art of astrology into the science of astronomy. For many centuries the Babylonian priests had recorded the movements of the planets, in order to predict human events, which the stars were believed to govern. The Greeks borrowed the results of observation, and Thales predicted an eclipse which occurred in Asia Minor in 585 B.C. But they ignored the whole fabric of astrological superstition which had hitherto provided the practical motive for observing the heavens. There is hardly a trace of astrology in Greek thought before the fusion of East and West following the conquests of Alexander.

The rise of science, then, meant that the intelligence became disinterested and now felt free to voyage on seas of thought strange to minds bent on immediate problems of action. Reason sought and found truth that was universal, but might, or might not, be useful for the exigencies of life. Looking back across some 2500 years, we see the cosmogonies of the Milesian School as the dawn or infancy of science. Here the histories of philosophy start, after a few remarks on the earlier age of mythology and superstition. But, for our purpose of appreciating the Socratic revolution of thought, it will be useful to look at this starting-point of philosophy from the other side—the farther side. If we could survey the whole development of mankind, these last twenty-five centuries of science from Thales to our own day would appear in a very different proportion and perspective. We should then see philosophy as the latest of man’s great achievements. Pre-Socratic speculation would no longer strike us as rudimentary and infantile, but as the crowning epoch in a development covering many more ages than history can record.

I have spoken of this epoch as the discovery of Nature—a phrase which calls for explanation. I mean the discovery that the whole of the surrounding world of which our senses give us any knowledge is natural, not partly natural and partly supernatural. Science begins when it is understood that the universe is a natural whole, with unchanging ways of its own—ways that may be ascertainable by human reason, but are beyond the control of human action. To reach that point of view was a great achievement. If we would measure its magnitude, we must take a backward glance at certain features of the pre-scientific age. These are: (1) the detachment of the self from the external object—the discovery of the object; (2) the preoccupation of intelligence with the practical needs of action in dealing with the object; (3) the belief in unseen, supernatural powers, behind or within the object to be dealt with.

(1) With regard to the first point—the detachment of the self from the object—if it is true that the individual still recapitulates in miniature the history of the race, we are here concerned with something that goes very far back in human development. It is only in the first weeks of life that the human baby is a solipsist, taking for granted that his environment is a part of himself. This infantile philosophy is soon disturbed by doubt. Something goes wrong: the food supply fails to appear in immediate response to hunger. The infant cries out in anger and distress. He has to exert himself to make the environment behave as he wants. The solipsistic dream is soon shattered. In a month or so, he will be aware that there are other things, outside himself, to be cajoled or circumvented. The baby (as nurses say) ‘begins to take notice’, or (as Virgil says) to ‘recognise his mother with a smile’. The rift has begun to open between the self and the external world.

This nascent belief in the independent existence of external objects is the foundation of the philosophy of common sense, forced on the infant by the breakdown of his naive solipsism. In the development of the race, the discovery that there are things outside the self must, as I said, lie very far back. But it is one thing to make this discovery, and quite another to reach the idea that these external objects have a nature of their own, foreign to man’s nature, and having neither sympathy nor hostility towards his passions and desires. A very long time must elapse before the line between the self and the object will be drawn where science draws it, and the object will be completely detached.

(2) The reason is that the intelligence remains, for all this long period, immersed in the interests of action, and has no leisure for disinterested speculation. That is the second feature of the pre-scientific age. In man, as in the higher animals, the primary use of intelligence was to devise means to compassing practical ends that cannot be immediately achieved. If you offer a banana to an ape, the ape will take it and begin to eat; there is no call for reflection. But if you hang the banana out of reach, action is held up. Intelligence must be summoned to the aid of thwarted desire. There is a pause before action can be resumed. When we have observed the action that follows we fill in that pause with a rudimentary train of reasoning. We imagine that the ape has reflected: ‘How can I get that banana? Here are some boxes. If I pile them up and climb on them, I shall be able to reach it’. What really happened in the ape’s mind we cannot know. But we do know that man has used intelligence to overcome unusual obstacles to action, and, by the invention of tools and implements of all sorts, has extended his natural powers by natural means, and is still extending them. Thus intelligence at all times serves the purposes of action; and we conjecture that at first it served those purposes exclusively.

The limitation of the intelligence to things that merit attention because they can be turned to some practical purpose is still characteristic of savages. Dr Malinowski{2} writes about the Melanesian:

The outer world interests him in so far as it yields things useful. Utility here of course must be understood in its broadest sense, including not only what man can consume as food, use for shelter and implement, but all that stimulates his activities in play, ritual, war, or artistic production.

All such significant things stand out for the savage as isolated, detached units against an undifferentiated background. When moving with savages through any natural milieu—sailing on the sea, walking on a beach or through the jungle, or glancing across the starlit sky—I was often impressed by their tendency to isolate the few objects important to them, and to treat the rest as mere background. In a forest a plant or tree would strike me, but on inquiry I would be informed—’Oh, that is just “bush”‘. An insect or bird which plays no part in the tradition or the larder would be dismissed ‘Mauna wala’—’merely a flying animal’. But if, on the contrary, the object happened to be useful in one way or another, it would be named; detailed reference to its uses and properties would be given, and the thing thus would be distinctly individualised Everywhere there is the tendency to isolate that which stands in some connection, traditional, ritual, useful to man, and to bundle all the rest into one indiscriminate heap.

(3) At first, then, the scope of thought was bounded by the imperious needs of action. External things were selected for notice in proportion as they entered into human activities. They were not interesting for what they are in themselves, but as things we can do something with, or that c...