Study Questions requirement
Length: 300-600 words each
Answer one study question from each unit in a short essay that will make sense to your peers. Clearly indicate which question you are answering.
Study Questions
EStudy Questions requirement
Length: 300-600 words each
Answer one study question from each unit in a short essay that will make sense to your peers. Clearly indicate which question you are answering.
Study Questions
Explain the significance of the distinction between psuche and thumos.
What is the metaphorical significance of the primal separation of earth and sky, as told in Hesiod’s story?
What is the metaphorical significance of the battle between the Olympians and the Titans?
Reading Assignment
Hesiod’s Theogony
Key Terms
Directed power
Myth
Olympians
Ontology
The gap between earth and sky
Titans
Greek Words
chaos
Gaia
logos
muthos
Ouranos
psuche
thumos
Page Navigation
Unit 1.1
Inspiration and Rational Thought
Psuche and thumos
Earth, Sky, and Mortals
The First Generation of Gods
The Second Generation of Gods
The Battle Between the Olympians and the Titans
Study Questions
Commentary
Inspiration and Rational Thought
The emergence of philosophy in the ancient world poses the problem as to how rational thought could gain enough independence from traditional religious beliefs and mythical stories to eventually take precedence over them in the minds of people. How did it happen that rational thought came to be regarded as authoritative above and beyond traditional authority? It doesn’t seem to make much sense to assume that one day someone said: “Hey, why are we relying on traditional beliefs instead of logic?” and then began appealing to rational thought rather than myth. The mythical tales establish and define what “reality” is to its adherents. Just as today, some religious believers favour the Biblical creation story over the scientific account of biological evolution, so wherever traditional stories hold sway they are not easy to dislodge.
HOW DID IT HAPPEN THAT RATIONAL THOUGHT CAME TO BE REGARDED AS AUTHORITATIVE ABOVE AND BEYOND TRADITIONAL AUTHORITY?
Myth, from the Greek word muthos, simply means “story.” It does not have the modern pejorative sense of something that’s simply false or fictional. Neither does myth merely tell a story about presumed factual events, as if it were a poor substitute for scientific explanations. Rather, mythreveals the world in a certain way. When a tradition is strong and vibrant, we come to “see” the world through its stories, and this then defines reality for us. The stronger a tradition is, the less people tend to view it with skepticism, and the more the myth is seen to be simply coextensive with the world. It’s not that the world is first seen as existing independently of us “out there,” and then the mythical story comes along and tells us “about” it; it’s that, for archaic peoples, the world is first experienced through the myths.
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Traditional authority depends on belief. With tradition, people see something they feel obligated to respect and revere, and the perceived weight of that tradition is then authoritative for them. But philosophy cannot rely on belief or authority like this. Philosophy has no authority that can simply be pronounced and obeyed. Whereas a priest can invoke divine authority for his pronouncements, a philosopher cannot. If philosophy has any authority, it has to come from something in reason itself that we find compelling, apart from the person or “office” of the philosopher who utters it. But what is that compelling character of reason? Why would anyone have ever found a logical argument to be more compelling than a statement of faith or belief?
FOR ARCHAIC PEOPLES, THE WORLD IS FIRST EXPERIENCED THROUGH THE MYTHS.
These are all open questions, and a variety of different answers to them have been proposed by various theorists. Some say that the transition from an oral to a literate culture created a sense of distance from the tradition (Havelock 1963). The stories of the ancient world were not merely recited—they were sung by the poets and rhapsodes whose vocation it was to keep the tradition alive in song, and thereby in the memories of the people. But when I encounter that tradition in a written text, I am no longer emotionally caught up in the power of the speaker’s physical presence. My emotions take a back seat, and I can examine the written text in a dispassionate way that would be more difficult with the spoken word. Imagine the difference between going to hear a really good speaker in person and reading a text of the same speech at home. When reading the text, one might begin to reflect on its content a bit more critically. That is why we speak of gaining a critical distance.
That difference may be even more pronounced when we’re talking about a transition from an oral culture to a literate one since the entire society is undergoing the upheaval. According to this thesis, the advent of writing in an oral culture brings about a greater sense of distance from the received tradition, and that distance can then allow a more critical attitude to develop. Not only does it facilitate criticism with respect to the tradition, but it also allows room for manipulation. When I am distanced from a tradition, not only can I critically reflect upon it, but I can make use of that tradition to manipulate the emotions of people who still believe in it. Just look at the televangelists of today who manipulate devout believers into giving up their money. In other words, literacy enables both the critical reflection characteristic of philosophy, as well as the manipulative use of rhetoric characteristic of sophistry—a tension between language as disclosure and language as deception that we will see Plato dramatically portray in his dialogues.
Psuche and thumos
But there is another aspect of archaic Greek society that warrants discussion and will prove useful in clarifying some of the differences between various philosophical positions. It is a distinction to which the classicist R. B. Onians (1951) called attention, and which was later thematized by the late American philosopher Edward G. Ballard (1971), whose work will be referenced throughout this unit. The distinction is one that goes back to the archaic period in ancient Greece; namely, that there is a receptive part of human life or soul connected to inspiration, which the Greeks called psuche, and a rational/affective part that has to do with mental calculation as well as the emotions, which they called thumos. The modern dualism between mind and body would have been quite foreign to these early Greeks who actually located the two different parts of the soul in very specific areas of the body. Thumos, the conscious seat of feeling, desiring, and perception was located in the lungs, heart, and/or chest area; whereas psuche, the receptivity to inspiration from outside the self, tended to be located in the head and backbone. The thumos was thought to be temporarily extinguished in sleep, and extinguished permanently when the breath and heartbeat stopped in death. The psuche, on the other hand, was the divinely bestowed life principle that was active in dreams, and was thought to continue a shadowy existence in Hades after death.
For our purposes in this course, the important point is that psuche is to thumos as “inspiration is to routine discursive thought” and everyday feelings (Ballard 1971, 13). The language appropriate to thumos is prose, whereas the language appropriate to psuche is poetry. Rational agency is exercised as thumos, whereas participation in that which transcends the individual conscious ego happens through psuche. But the archaic Greeks did not clearly distinguish between thought and emotion, so it would be a mistake to simply identify thumos with thought and psuche with emotion. Thumos was discursive thought, but it was also the conscious seat of feeling and desire. Indeed, by the time of Plato several centuries later, the meaning of thumos had been transformed to signify the strong passions felt in the breast, and psuche had come to signify the entire soul or life. But this tension between the two sides of the human being were nonetheless carried all the way through to Plato’s time, and appear in his dialogues as the polarity between the rational order of logos and the ecstatic inspiration of muthos, or myth. Hence, to indicate this polarity, we will refer to the older senses ofthumos and psuche throughout the course.
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Philosophy does not begin, then, as a purely rational faculty of thought that makes a clean break with myth. Rather, philosophy occurs as a crossing of the border between these two, bringing thumos into relation with psuche. Ballard suggests that philosophy can be described as “inspiration submitted to rational and disciplined thought” (Ballard 1971, 21). Indeed, as we will see, this interpretation is entirely consistent with how many of the Greek philosophers saw themselves and their vocation. Parmenides begins his philosophical poem as an account revealed to him by a goddess, and Plato says in one of his letters that philosophy “does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge; but after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another, and thereafter sustains itself.”
Earth, Sky, and Mortals
A landscape of earth and sky Reinhard Kasulke, Wikimedia Commons
It is therefore appropriate that we begin our journey into Greek philosophy with a pre-philosophical, mythical creation story from an early text attributed to the poet Hesiod, purportedly a Greek shepherd who lived at or around the eighth century BCE. The story comes down to us as Hesiod’s Theogony, and the part that concerns us in particular (beginning on line 116) is the story of the primal separation of earth and sky that opens the gap within which mortals and other beings appear. We can draw an ontological paradigm from the Hesiodic story that will enable us to interpret the subsequent texts of Greek philosophy in a certain way (Ballard 1978, 11-27).
By reading the story metaphorically, rather than literally, we can draw from it something real about human life in the world. Insofar as the story provides us with a way of understanding “being” or reality, it has “ontological” implications above and beyond the literal features of the narrative. We will see that later Greek philosophers respond to these ontological implications and rearticulate them in the form of concepts rather than mythical images, and they will each do so in different ways. Insofar as these ontological implications taken from Hesiod’s story provide us with a guideline for interpreting what later philosophers say about “being” or the nature of reality, the story gives us an ontological paradigm. Throughout the course, we will repeatedly refer back to this paradigm as a reference point.
The Theogony tells the story of the original separation of the primal parents, Gaiaand Ouranos (earth and sky), opening the space within which all beings of creation emerge into existence. As in many ancient creation stories,[1] earth and sky were initially imagined as being tightly bound together without a space between them, and it is their separation that allows things to exist, thrive, and come to completion. As Ballard says,
No doubt the way in which the primal parents were separated had a great deal to do with the kind of open space for living made available to their progeny and with the kind of creatures their progeny became. And so it continues to be; the way in which we push aside our own generating forbears and inherited customs in order to gain some freedom and to make a culture for ourselves, determines the primary structure of our existence. (Ballard 1978, 12)
For the ancient Greeks, earth is associated with superabundant fertility, growth, raw material, change, and power. It is the source of creative forces but, without direction, it is destructive. In contrast, the sky and its regular movements are associated with order and measure. As the ordering principle, the sky gives direction, but without the creative fecundity of earth, it has nothing to direct, and so is empty and formal by itself. In fact, both elements conceived by themselves, in isolation, are abstractions—sky is never without earth and vice versa. It is perhaps to indicate this mutual belonging together of earth and sky as power and direction that Hesiod begins his account with the gap between them.
The “gap” or “open space” between earth and sky in Greek is the word chaos, which unlike the English word does not just refer to disorder. Rather, its meaning is defined by the Greek scholar F. M. Cornford as “the ‘yawning gap’, between the fiery heaven and the earth” (Cornford 1952, 194-195). But even though Hesiod’s story begins with this “yawning gap,” it cannot literally be an infinite expanse because its bounds or defining limits in terms of earth and sky are already implicit. Hence Greek scholars Kirk and Raven say that the “basic meaning” of chaos is “a gap, i.e. a bounded interval, not ‘void’ or anything like that,” claiming that its boundaries are implicit (Kirk and Raven 1957, 8 and 29fn). Cornford also says as much when he points out that
if cosmology begins with the coming into being of a yawning gap between heaven and earth, this surely implies that previously [. . .] ‘Heaven and Earth were once one form’, and the first thing that happened was that they were ‘separated apart from one another’. Hesiod can hardly have meant anything else. (Cornford 1952, 195)
The very idea of a “gap” is a space between things. The concept of a “gap” all by itself with nothing on either side of it makes no sense. We might be able to imagine infinite space, but that’s not the same thing as a “gap.”
Since it makes little sense to think of a gap that’s not between anything, why does Hesiod begin with chaos, the gap? Again, it may be helpful to break away from the literal meaning of the text and try to think about it metaphorically. What might beginning with a “gap” mean? Taken literally, the gap comes first in the story, followed by the earth, and then the sky. But what if we read this as an ontologicalpriority rather than as a chronological priority? In other words, rather than indicating a sequence of events in the distant past, the gap names that in terms of which earth and sky are first manifest to us. The gap indicates how we first experience earth and sky, and for this reason it is first in a preeminent sense. Our experience begins with being on the earth under the sky in the space between them. It doesn’t begin with earth by itself. Even less does it begin with the sky by itself. It’s the space between them that is important. We might take this as our clue as to what chaos means.
The First Generation of Gods
The first generation of gods spawned by the coupling of earth and sky were the so-called “chthonic” or the “earthly” deities, the Titans. In general, the Greeks did not conceive of their gods as supernatural powers presiding over things in the way that we might today. For instance, although we may think of Poseidon as “the god of the sea,” the Greeks didn’t say it this way. The phrase “of the” separates the god from the phenomenon he supposedly presides over, and it is a later non-Greek (perhaps Roman) way of thinking about divine beings. For the Greeks, Poseidon is not an imagined supernatural ruler of the sea. Rather, Poseidon is the power that is the sea. He is the “earth shaker” who embodies the sea in the overwhelming power of its appearance. If you have ever stood on the shore of the ocean and felt the mighty swell of the waves relentlessly rolling in, reminding you that this power was there long before you were born and will be there long after you are gone, you have experienced Poseidon. If you have experienced the silence of the forest, you have experienced Pan. If you have experienced the overwhelming power of love and desire for another person, you have experienced Eros. Greek religion was bound up with awe and wonder before the appearances, and the gods embodied these elemental powers. Because the wondrous appearances are multifarious, the polytheistic character of Greek religion reflects that multiplicity.
The Second Generation of Gods
Associated with earth, the Titans are the first generation of gods—the elemental powers of nature that can be self-destructive and therefore require the ordering principle of the sky. Thus in Hesiod’s story they are eventually subdued by the second generation of gods, the sky gods or Olympians. Undoubtedly there are many levels of meaning to this ancient myth, among them being the conquest of the agrarian people of the Greek peninsula, who worshiped earth deities, by the nomadic Doric tribes, whose religion “was centered upon the sky gods, strong beings skilled in the arts of war and the hunt” (Ballard 1978, 13). But if we pursue the metaphorical interpretation we are following here, the violent battle between the Olympians and the Titans can be seen as a further specification of the separation of the ordering sky principle from the power of the elemental earth.
The Battle Between the Olympians and the Titans
Greg Lundeen, Wikimedia Commons
Kronos, the father of the first-generation Titans, is the all-consuming passage of time who devours his progeny, burying the future in the bowels of the earth, and thereby closing off the possibility of history. As sheer power without direction, he is the chief of the Titans, and is said to hate his fatherOuranos, the sky. It is not said why he hates Ouranos, but he seems to embody the resistance of the elemental powers to the ordering and measuring direction of the sky. Gaia put a curse on Kronos, foretelling that one of his children would dethrone him. To prevent this from happening, Kronos devoured his children as soon as they were born.
Saturn Devouring His Son,Francisco Goya, 1819-1823. Saturn is the Roman name for Kronos. Wikimedia Commons
Time devours all—in the passage of mere time, nothing is preserved; there is no history. Hence Mnemosune, memory, had to guarantee the continuity of the world. Memory preserves the structure of the world in an oral culture by the retelling of the mythical stories. But as we know from the myth, Zeus was hidden away and escaped being devoured by his father Kronos. Later, he led the Olympians to subdue the earlier generation of earthly deities by violence, and thereby subjected the powers of nature to order and direction. Direction and power, sky and earth, the Olympians and the Titans, do not just exist indifferently side by side. There is a struggle between them, and one must overcome the other. As we will see, not only power and direction, but also this sense of struggle, strife, and war will persist throughout later Greek thought.
However, nature does not and cannot simply disappear. After their defeat by the Olympians, the Titans are banished to the edge of the earth where they continue to exist and to make themselves known. Dionysus, who embodies the wild excesses of creative energy over and against the serene and orderly Apollo, is born among the Olympians. The earthly Titanic element becomes peripheral: neither completely absent nor occupying the centre. In the ancient Greek world, it’s as if the human being is always on the verge of sinking back into nature—hence the hybrid part-human part-animal satyrs and centaurs.
Pan and goat Rufus46, cc by-sa 3.0, Wikimedia Commons
Insofar as time no longer simply devours everything, history begins with the Olympians. No longer does the world have to be preserved through the sheer repetition of memorized stories. The Titan Helios is simply the sun, the elemental power of light. But the Olympian Apollo is no longer just light in its natural sense—he has become the illumination of knowledge and prophesy, the light that discloses the true forms of things and whose measured repose in the midst of violence is depicted in the sculpture of his calm figure standing with outstretched arm in the midst of battle.
Apollo and fragments of Pirithous at the Olympia Archaeological Museum Roccuz, cc-by-sa 2.5 Italy, Wikimedia Commons
With Apollo, light is taken up and transformed, no longer merely natural light. But the earthly element reappears when Dionysus, whose wild excess embodies the polar opposite of Apollonian order, is born among the Olympians.
As the nineteenth century German philosopher Hegel tells us:
the Muses are at first nymphs, i.e. springs, the rippling, murmuring, and burbling of brooks; everywhere the beginning arises from the natural mode, from powers of nature that are transformed into a god of spiritual content. (Hegel 1988, 337)
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Hylas and the Water Nymphs, Henrietta Rae (1859–1928) Wikimedia Commons
The Nymphs give way to the Muses—it is not just a bubbling brook, but the sound of nature that inspires the poet. Light is not just natural illumination whereby we can see objects, but has become the light of wisdom and knowledge. This kind of dialectical interplay between power and direction is what characterizes the Greek world. It also explains the Greek love of beauty: the ordering and directing of mute stone into the lifelike statue that almost seems on the verge of movement, the ordering and directing of random sound into musical harmony, the kaleidoscope of color into painting, and human vocalization into poetic song. The Greek world is this experience of the union-through-tension of two opposing yet inseparable principles: direction and power. This is the Greek understanding of “reality” or “being.” Ballard again provides a helpful gloss on this for us:
Let us say, for the present, that being is directed power. The phrase “directed power”(dynamis) is so used in a goodly portion of the pre-modern tradition in philosophy, and refers us now to our two primary archai. In an earlier writing [. . .] I associated the notion of directed power with the myth of our first (Greek) ancestors, Ouranos and Gaea, an association useful in that it suggested the original unity and later separation of direction (sky, Ouranos, whose regular movements directed and organized all things) and power (earth, Gaea, whose superabundant, even self-destructive, fertility required limitation and direction). Here Ouranos arches over Gaea, having been forced upward by their offspring, our ancestors, so as to open the way for their own crucial entry into awareness of being in time and in a world. Thus the offspring became “distanced” from earthly and natural necessities and were able to entertain alternatives to them and to make choices. The myth refers us to the moment of transcendence of organic and instinctual determinations, of entrance into human freedom where one becomes a directing power. Yet the paradox remains: This transcendence of earthly necessities is never more than partial; those offspring retain the marks of dual inheritance in their limited freedom, a freedom whose bounds are not fixed, and hence not clearly known, but sensed, rather in hybris. (Ballard 1983, 7)
Bacchanal—Dionysos and Aphrodite Wolfgang Sauber, cc by-sa 1.0, Wikimedia Commons
The separation of earth and sky, and the resulting battle between the gods and the giants, signifies the emergence into the human world of decision and action. Here is the space in which mortals are born. Of all the beings that exist, the human being is perhaps the one who is most able to separate power from direction, and through this separation can change the use of his/her powers. As a human being, I can stand apart from my possibilities and direct my powers toward some of them rather than toward others. I make choices and direct my powers accordingly. Through the separation of power from direction, I create space for myself and for my actions. This gap is the open space of Hesiod’s chaos within which beings are revealed, and within which I either prove myself or fail. The limits of this freedom are not fixed and so are not clearly known, but are rather sensed as the binding cords of fate and are manifest in the arrogance (hubris) of the one who oversteps these limits in ignorance (the fool) or proud disregard (the tragic hero).
This sense of limit and its importance will be more explicitly thematized by some of the philosophers we’ll be looking at later. But let us now turn to Thales, who is usually regarded as the first philosopher in ancient Greece, and who begins to think in terms of non-mythical causes and principles rather than images and stories.
Footnotes
[1] For instance, in ancient Sumer, earth and sky are called “the twins” in some texts. Earth and sky are initially undivided, but then are separated by the god Enlil, whose name means “air-god.” Enlil names the air that separates earth and sky. There were different mythological stories about what followed, but the separation of earth and sky was the primal event in all of them. In ancient Egypt, this myth reappears in a slightly different form: Geb, the earth-god, and Nut, the sky-goddess. Shu, who personifies the air, comes between the pair, raising Nut above Geb.
Study Questions
Explain the significance of the distinction between psuche and thumos.
What is the metaphorical significance of the primal separation of earth and sky, as told in Hesiod’s story?
What is the metaphorical significance of the battle between the Olympians and the Titans?
What is the metaphorical significance of the battle between the Olympians and the Titans?
Reading Assignment
Hesiod’s Theogony
Key Terms
Directed power
Myth
Olympians
Ontology
The gap between earth and sky
Titans
Greek Words
chaos
Gaia
logos
muthos
Ouranos
psuche
thumos
Page Navigation
Unit 1.1
Inspiration and Rational Thought
Psuche and thumos
Earth, Sky, and Mortals
The First Generation of Gods
The Second Generation of Gods
The Battle Between the Olympians and the Titans
Study Questions
Commentary
Inspiration and Rational Thought
The emergence of philosophy in the ancient world poses the problem as to how rational thought could gain enough independence from traditional religious beliefs and mythical stories to eventually take precedence over them in the minds of people. How did it happen that rational thought came to be regarded as authoritative above and beyond traditional authority? It doesn’t seem to make much sense to assume that one day someone said: “Hey, why are we relying on traditional beliefs instead of logic?” and then began appealing to rational thought rather than myth. The mythical tales establish and define what “reality” is to its adherents. Just as today, some religious believers favour the Biblical creation story over the scientific account of biological evolution, so wherever traditional stories hold sway they are not easy to dislodge.
HOW DID IT HAPPEN THAT RATIONAL THOUGHT CAME TO BE REGARDED AS AUTHORITATIVE ABOVE AND BEYOND TRADITIONAL AUTHORITY?
Myth, from the Greek word muthos, simply means “story.” It does not have the modern pejorative sense of something that’s simply false or fictional. Neither does myth merely tell a story about presumed factual events, as if it were a poor substitute for scientific explanations. Rather, mythreveals the world in a certain way. When a tradition is strong and vibrant, we come to “see” the world through its stories, and this then defines reality for us. The stronger a tradition is, the less people tend to view it with skepticism, and the more the myth is seen to be simply coextensive with the world. It’s not that the world is first seen as existing independently of us “out there,” and then the mythical story comes along and tells us “about” it; it’s that, for archaic peoples, the world is first experienced through the myths.
Traditional authority depends on belief. With tradition, people see something they feel obligated to respect and revere, and the perceived weight of that tradition is then authoritative for them. But philosophy cannot rely on belief or authority like this. Philosophy has no authority that can simply be pronounced and obeyed. Whereas a priest can invoke divine authority for his pronouncements, a philosopher cannot. If philosophy has any authority, it has to come from something in reason itself that we find compelling, apart from the person or “office” of the philosopher who utters it. But what is that compelling character of reason? Why would anyone have ever found a logical argument to be more compelling than a statement of faith or belief?
FOR ARCHAIC PEOPLES, THE WORLD IS FIRST EXPERIENCED THROUGH THE MYTHS.
These are all open questions, and a variety of different answers to them have been proposed by various theorists. Some say that the transition from an oral to a literate culture created a sense of distance from the tradition (Havelock 1963). The stories of the ancient world were not merely recited—they were sung by the poets and rhapsodes whose vocation it was to keep the tradition alive in song, and thereby in the memories of the people. But when I encounter that tradition in a written text, I am no longer emotionally caught up in the power of the speaker’s physical presence. My emotions take a back seat, and I can examine the written text in a dispassionate way that would be more difficult with the spoken word. Imagine the difference between going to hear a really good speaker in person and reading a text of the same speech at home. When reading the text, one might begin to reflect on its content a bit more critically. That is why we speak of gaining a critical distance.
That difference may be even more pronounced when we’re talking about a transition from an oral culture to a literate one since the entire society is undergoing the upheaval. According to this thesis, the advent of writing in an oral culture brings about a greater sense of distance from the received tradition, and that distance can then allow a more critical attitude to develop. Not only does it facilitate criticism with respect to the tradition, but it also allows room for manipulation. When I am distanced from a tradition, not only can I critically reflect upon it, but I can make use of that tradition to manipulate the emotions of people who still believe in it. Just look at the televangelists of today who manipulate devout believers into giving up their money. In other words, literacy enables both the critical reflection characteristic of philosophy, as well as the manipulative use of rhetoric characteristic of sophistry—a tension between language as disclosure and language as deception that we will see Plato dramatically portray in his dialogues.
Psuche and thumos
But there is another aspect of archaic Greek society that warrants discussion and will prove useful in clarifying some of the differences between various philosophical positions. It is a distinction to which the classicist R. B. Onians (1951) called attention, and which was later thematized by the late American philosopher Edward G. Ballard (1971), whose work will be referenced throughout this unit. The distinction is one that goes back to the archaic period in ancient Greece; namely, that there is a receptive part of human life or soul connected to inspiration, which the Greeks called psuche, and a rational/affective part that has to do with mental calculation as well as the emotions, which they called thumos. The modern dualism between mind and body would have been quite foreign to these early Greeks who actually located the two different parts of the soul in very specific areas of the body. Thumos, the conscious seat of feeling, desiring, and perception was located in the lungs, heart, and/or chest area; whereas psuche, the receptivity to inspiration from outside the self, tended to be located in the head and backbone. The thumos was thought to be temporarily extinguished in sleep, and extinguished permanently when the breath and heartbeat stopped in death. The psuche, on the other hand, was the divinely bestowed life principle that was active in dreams, and was thought to continue a shadowy existence in Hades after death.
For our purposes in this course, the important point is that psuche is to thumos as “inspiration is to routine discursive thought” and everyday feelings (Ballard 1971, 13). The language appropriate to thumos is prose, whereas the language appropriate to psuche is poetry. Rational agency is exercised as thumos, whereas participation in that which transcends the individual conscious ego happens through psuche. But the archaic Greeks did not clearly distinguish between thought and emotion, so it would be a mistake to simply identify thumos with thought and psuche with emotion. Thumos was discursive thought, but it was also the conscious seat of feeling and desire. Indeed, by the time of Plato several centuries later, the meaning of thumos had been transformed to signify the strong passions felt in the breast, and psuche had come to signify the entire soul or life. But this tension between the two sides of the human being were nonetheless carried all the way through to Plato’s time, and appear in his dialogues as the polarity between the rational order of logos and the ecstatic inspiration of muthos, or myth. Hence, to indicate this polarity, we will refer to the older senses ofthumos and psuche throughout the course.
Philosophy does not begin, then, as a purely rational faculty of thought that makes a clean break with myth. Rather, philosophy occurs as a crossing of the border between these two, bringing thumos into relation with psuche. Ballard suggests that philosophy can be described as “inspiration submitted to rational and disciplined thought” (Ballard 1971, 21). Indeed, as we will see, this interpretation is entirely consistent with how many of the Greek philosophers saw themselves and their vocation. Parmenides begins his philosophical poem as an account revealed to him by a goddess, and Plato says in one of his letters that philosophy “does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge; but after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another, and thereafter sustains itself.”
Earth, Sky, and Mortals
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A landscape of earth and sky Reinhard Kasulke, Wikimedia Commons
It is therefore appropriate that we begin our journey into Greek philosophy with a pre-philosophical, mythical creation story from an early text attributed to the poet Hesiod, purportedly a Greek shepherd who lived at or around the eighth century BCE. The story comes down to us as Hesiod’s Theogony, and the part that concerns us in particular (beginning on line 116) is the story of the primal separation of earth and sky that opens the gap within which mortals and other beings appear. We can draw an ontological paradigm from the Hesiodic story that will enable us to interpret the subsequent texts of Greek philosophy in a certain way (Ballard 1978, 11-27).
By reading the story metaphorically, rather than literally, we can draw from it something real about human life in the world. Insofar as the story provides us with a way of understanding “being” or reality, it has “ontological” implications above and beyond the literal features of the narrative. We will see that later Greek philosophers respond to these ontological implications and rearticulate them in the form of concepts rather than mythical images, and they will each do so in different ways. Insofar as these ontological implications taken from Hesiod’s story provide us with a guideline for interpreting what later philosophers say about “being” or the nature of reality, the story gives us an ontological paradigm. Throughout the course, we will repeatedly refer back to this paradigm as a reference point.
The Theogony tells the story of the original separation of the primal parents, Gaiaand Ouranos (earth and sky), opening the space within which all beings of creation emerge into existence. As in many ancient creation stories,[1] earth and sky were initially imagined as being tightly bound together without a space between them, and it is their separation that allows things to exist, thrive, and come to completion. As Ballard says,
No doubt the way in which the primal parents were separated had a great deal to do with the kind of open space for living made available to their progeny and with the kind of creatures their progeny became. And so it continues to be; the way in which we push aside our own generating forbears and inherited customs in order to gain some freedom and to make a culture for ourselves, determines the primary structure of our existence. (Ballard 1978, 12)
For the ancient Greeks, earth is associated with superabundant fertility, growth, raw material, change, and power. It is the source of creative forces but, without direction, it is destructive. In contrast, the sky and its regular movements are associated with order and measure. As the ordering principle, the sky gives direction, but without the creative fecundity of earth, it has nothing to direct, and so is empty and formal by itself. In fact, both elements conceived by themselves, in isolation, are abstractions—sky is never without earth and vice versa. It is perhaps to indicate this mutual belonging together of earth and sky as power and direction that Hesiod begins his account with the gap between them.
The “gap” or “open space” between earth and sky in Greek is the word chaos, which unlike the English word does not just refer to disorder. Rather, its meaning is defined by the Greek scholar F. M. Cornford as “the ‘yawning gap’, between the fiery heaven and the earth” (Cornford 1952, 194-195). But even though Hesiod’s story begins with this “yawning gap,” it cannot literally be an infinite expanse because its bounds or defining limits in terms of earth and sky are already implicit. Hence Greek scholars Kirk and Raven say that the “basic meaning” of chaos is “a gap, i.e. a bounded interval, not ‘void’ or anything like that,” claiming that its boundaries are implicit (Kirk and Raven 1957, 8 and 29fn). Cornford also says as much when he points out that
if cosmology begins with the coming into being of a yawning gap between heaven and earth, this surely implies that previously [. . .] ‘Heaven and Earth were once one form’, and the first thing that happened was that they were ‘separated apart from one another’. Hesiod can hardly have meant anything else. (Cornford 1952, 195)
The very idea of a “gap” is a space between things. The concept of a “gap” all by itself with nothing on either side of it makes no sense. We might be able to imagine infinite space, but that’s not the same thing as a “gap.”
Since it makes little sense to think of a gap that’s not between anything, why does Hesiod begin with chaos, the gap? Again, it may be helpful to break away from the literal meaning of the text and try to think about it metaphorically. What might beginning with a “gap” mean? Taken literally, the gap comes first in the story, followed by the earth, and then the sky. But what if we read this as an ontologicalpriority rather than as a chronological priority? In other words, rather than indicating a sequence of events in the distant past, the gap names that in terms of which earth and sky are first manifest to us. The gap indicates how we first experience earth and sky, and for this reason it is first in a preeminent sense. Our experience begins with being on the earth under the sky in the space between them. It doesn’t begin with earth by itself. Even less does it begin with the sky by itself. It’s the space between them that is important. We might take this as our clue as to what chaos means.
The First Generation of Gods
The first generation of gods spawned by the coupling of earth and sky were the so-called “chthonic” or the “earthly” deities, the Titans. In general, the Greeks did not conceive of their gods as supernatural powers presiding over things in the way that we might today. For instance, although we may think of Poseidon as “the god of the sea,” the Greeks didn’t say it this way. The phrase “of the” separates the god from the phenomenon he supposedly presides over, and it is a later non-Greek (perhaps Roman) way of thinking about divine beings. For the Greeks, Poseidon is not an imagined supernatural ruler of the sea. Rather, Poseidon is the power that is the sea. He is the “earth shaker” who embodies the sea in the overwhelming power of its appearance. If you have ever stood on the shore of the ocean and felt the mighty swell of the waves relentlessly rolling in, reminding you that this power was there long before you were born and will be there long after you are gone, you have experienced Poseidon. If you have experienced the silence of the forest, you have experienced Pan. If you have experienced the overwhelming power of love and desire for another person, you have experienced Eros. Greek religion was bound up with awe and wonder before the appearances, and the gods embodied these elemental powers. Because the wondrous appearances are multifarious, the polytheistic character of Greek religion reflects that multiplicity.
The Second Generation of Gods
Associated with earth, the Titans are the first generation of gods—the elemental powers of nature that can be self-destructive and therefore require the ordering principle of the sky. Thus in Hesiod’s story they are eventually subdued by the second generation of gods, the sky gods or Olympians. Undoubtedly there are many levels of meaning to this ancient myth, among them being the conquest of the agrarian people of the Greek peninsula, who worshiped earth deities, by the nomadic Doric tribes, whose religion “was centered upon the sky gods, strong beings skilled in the arts of war and the hunt” (Ballard 1978, 13). But if we pursue the metaphorical interpretation we are following here, the violent battle between the Olympians and the Titans can be seen as a further specification of the separation of the ordering sky principle from the power of the elemental earth.
The Battle Between the Olympians and the Titans
Greg Lundeen, Wikimedia Commons
Kronos, the father of the first-generation Titans, is the all-consuming passage of time who devours his progeny, burying the future in the bowels of the earth, and thereby closing off the possibility of history. As sheer power without direction, he is the chief of the Titans, and is said to hate his fatherOuranos, the sky. It is not said why he hates Ouranos, but he seems to embody the resistance of the elemental powers to the ordering and measuring direction of the sky. Gaia put a curse on Kronos, foretelling that one of his children would dethrone him. To prevent this from happening, Kronos devoured his children as soon as they were born.
Saturn Devouring His Son,Francisco Goya, 1819-1823. Saturn is the Roman name for Kronos. Wikimedia Commons
Time devours all—in the passage of mere time, nothing is preserved; there is no history. Hence Mnemosune, memory, had to guarantee the continuity of the world. Memory preserves the structure of the world in an oral culture by the retelling of the mythical stories. But as we know from the myth, Zeus was hidden away and escaped being devoured by his father Kronos. Later, he led the Olympians to subdue the earlier generation of earthly deities by violence, and thereby subjected the powers of nature to order and direction. Direction and power, sky and earth, the Olympians and the Titans, do not just exist indifferently side by side. There is a struggle between them, and one must overcome the other. As we will see, not only power and direction, but also this sense of struggle, strife, and war will persist throughout later Greek thought.
However, nature does not and cannot simply disappear. After their defeat by the Olympians, the Titans are banished to the edge of the earth where they continue to exist and to make themselves known. Dionysus, who embodies the wild excesses of creative energy over and against the serene and orderly Apollo, is born among the Olympians. The earthly Titanic element becomes peripheral: neither completely absent nor occupying the centre. In the ancient Greek world, it’s as if the human being is always on the verge of sinking back into nature—hence the hybrid part-human part-animal satyrs and centaurs.
Pan and goat Rufus46, cc by-sa 3.0, Wikimedia Commons
Insofar as time no longer simply devours everything, history begins with the Olympians. No longer does the world have to be preserved through the sheer repetition of memorized stories. The Titan Helios is simply the sun, the elemental power of light. But the Olympian Apollo is no longer just light in its natural sense—he has become the illumination of knowledge and prophesy, the light that discloses the true forms of things and whose measured repose in the midst of violence is depicted in the sculpture of his calm figure standing with outstretched arm in the midst of battle.
Apollo and fragments of Pirithous at the Olympia Archaeological Museum Roccuz, cc-by-sa 2.5 Italy, Wikimedia Commons
With Apollo, light is taken up and transformed, no longer merely natural light. But the earthly element reappears when Dionysus, whose wild excess embodies the polar opposite of Apollonian order, is born among the Olympians.
As the nineteenth century German philosopher Hegel tells us:
the Muses are at first nymphs, i.e. springs, the rippling, murmuring, and burbling of brooks; everywhere the beginning arises from the natural mode, from powers of nature that are transformed into a god of spiritual content. (Hegel 1988, 337)
Hylas and the Water Nymphs, Henrietta Rae (1859–1928) Wikimedia Commons
The Nymphs give way to the Muses—it is not just a bubbling brook, but the sound of nature that inspires the poet. Light is not just natural illumination whereby we can see objects, but has become the light of wisdom and knowledge. This kind of dialectical interplay between power and direction is what characterizes the Greek world. It also explains the Greek love of beauty: the ordering and directing of mute stone into the lifelike statue that almost seems on the verge of movement, the ordering and directing of random sound into musical harmony, the kaleidoscope of color into painting, and human vocalization into poetic song. The Greek world is this experience of the union-through-tension of two opposing yet inseparable principles: direction and power. This is the Greek understanding of “reality” or “being.” Ballard again provides a helpful gloss on this for us:
Let us say, for the present, that being is directed power. The phrase “directed power”(dynamis) is so used in a goodly portion of the pre-modern tradition in philosophy, and refers us now to our two primary archai. In an earlier writing [. . .] I associated the notion of directed power with the myth of our first (Greek) ancestors, Ouranos and Gaea, an association useful in that it suggested the original unity and later separation of direction (sky, Ouranos, whose regular movements directed and organized all things) and power (earth, Gaea, whose superabundant, even self-destructive, fertility required limitation and direction). Here Ouranos arches over Gaea, having been forced upward by their offspring, our ancestors, so as to open the way for their own crucial entry into awareness of being in time and in a world. Thus the offspring became “distanced” from earthly and natural necessities and were able to entertain alternatives to them and to make choices. The myth refers us to the moment of transcendence of organic and instinctual determinations, of entrance into human freedom where one becomes a directing power. Yet the paradox remains: This transcendence of earthly necessities is never more than partial; those offspring retain the marks of dual inheritance in their limited freedom, a freedom whose bounds are not fixed, and hence not clearly known, but sensed, rather in hybris. (Ballard 1983, 7)
Bacchanal—Dionysos and Aphrodite Wolfgang Sauber, cc by-sa 1.0, Wikimedia Commons
The separation of earth and sky, and the resulting battle between the gods and the giants, signifies the emergence into the human world of decision and action. Here is the space in which mortals are born. Of all the beings that exist, the human being is perhaps the one who is most able to separate power from direction, and through this separation can change the use of his/her powers. As a human being, I can stand apart from my possibilities and direct my powers toward some of them rather than toward others. I make choices and direct my powers accordingly. Through the separation of power from direction, I create space for myself and for my actions. This gap is the open space of Hesiod’s chaos within which beings are revealed, and within which I either prove myself or fail. The limits of this freedom are not fixed and so are not clearly known, but are rather sensed as the binding cords of fate and are manifest in the arrogance (hubris) of the one who oversteps these limits in ignorance (the fool) or proud disregard (the tragic hero).
This sense of limit and its importance will be more explicitly thematized by some of the philosophers we’ll be looking at later. But let us now turn to Thales, who is usually regarded as the first philosopher in ancient Greece, and who begins to think in terms of non-mythical causes and principles rather than images and stories.
Footnotes
[1] For instance, in ancient Sumer, earth and sky are called “the twins” in some texts. Earth and sky are initially undivided, but then are separated by the god Enlil, whose name means “air-god.” Enlil names the air that separates earth and sky. There were different mythological stories about what followed, but the separation of earth and sky was the primal event in all of them. In ancient Egypt, this myth reappears in a slightly different form: Geb, the earth-god, and Nut, the sky-goddess. Shu, who personifies the air, comes between the pair, raising Nut above Geb.
Study Questions
Explain the significance of the distinction between psuche and thumos.
What is the metaphorical significance of the primal separation of earth and sky, as told in Hesiod’s story?
What is the metaphorical significance of the battle between the Olympians and the Titans?
ORDER A SIMILAR PAPER ON; ESSAYSHARKS.US
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