The mainstream view in the West has always been that they inherited the ancient Greek civilization, and almost all the knowledge systems originated from ancient Greece, so that many people of all ethnic groups in the world now call ancient Greece and hold ancient Greece on the altar. But the problem is that the ancient Greek civilization texts suddenly appeared after thousands of years of disappearance, and it was a large-scale appearance of pictures and texts, including Aristotle's millions of words of writings that could be handed down for ten dead, which made people wonder and doubt.
Because the ancient Greek classics circulation process is too magical, lack of a considerable and verifiable link, unlike the Chinese civilization, the inheritance is endless, and the evidence of inheritance in each era is sufficient, so many scholars now believe that the glorious achievements of the so-called ancient Greek civilization are actually exaggerated or directly fictionalized by Europeans, and even after the exchange of Eastern and Western civilizations, Western scholars copied the achievements of the ancient Chinese and crowned them as the achievements of ancient Greece.
There is no doubt that this statement has a certain degree of subversion, but it is indeed possible to compare it carefully, and it is not believed to look at the related deeds of the Warring States Huishi and the ancient Greek Zeno, as well as Hegel. Hegel, in particular, many Chinese look up to him and elevate him to the altar of philosophy, but in fact he is an out-and-out plagiarist.
Huishi Huizi, a philosopher of political thought in the middle of the Warring States period of the Song Dynasty, the founding ancestor of the Famous School of Scholars, allusion to the five cars of Xuefu is said to be him, the main organizer and supporter of the Six Kingdoms united against Qin, advocating the united forces of the State of Wei, the State of Qi, and the State of Chu against the State of Qin. The so-called masters, a school centered on the debate of nominal issues, are essentially good at debate, the Book of Han. Yiwen Zhi is listed as one of the "Nine Streams", and the "name" in the later generations of criminal masters contains the meaning of debate, and today's lawyers can probably be attributed to famous families. In terms of political achievements, Huishi's reputation is not great, and little is known today, but because he was friends with Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi wrote some of his ideas into the book "Zhuangzi", so that he became famous in the field of ideological philosophy.
The book "Zhuangzi" records many of Huishi's remarks, and this article mainly talks about these two sentences: "One foot of the scepter, half of the day, inexhaustible" and "The shadow of the bird, not moved." The previous sentence explores the concept of limits, and now it is found that the smallest unit of matter is the quark, according to Huishi theory, the quark can continue to be divided, the object can be divided indefinitely, and the latter sentence explores the problem of absolute stillness, the bird flies in the sky, the shadow projected to the ground occupies a certain space at a certain moment, and is absolutely stationary, from which the conclusion that the shadow of the bird does not move.
Surprisingly, there was a philosopher named Zeno in ancient Greece, and among the remarks he handed down was exactly the above two philosophical discussions of Huishi, which are almost exactly the same, and Western scholars call it "Zeno's paradox".
Zeno believes: "A person goes from point A to point B, first walk 1/2 of the distance, then walk 1/2 of the total distance, and then walk the remaining 1/2..." And so on, and can never reach the end. Zeno told a story that if the turtle was 100 meters ahead of Achilles, then the running star Achilles would never be able to catch up with the turtle, because after catching up 100 meters, the turtle had run 10 meters, when Achilles caught up with 10 meters, the turtle ran another 1 meter, when Achilles caught up with 1 meter, the turtle had run another 0.1 meters, and when Achilles caught up with 0.1 meters, the turtle ran another 0.01 meters. Therefore, as long as the turtle keeps trying to climb forward, Achilles will never catch up with the turtle, which is the story of "Achilles can't run the turtle". Obviously, compared with Huishi's "one foot of sludge, half of the day, inexhaustible", the two are essentially no different.
Zeno also presented a paradox of "flying arrows do not move", asking students "Does an arrow that is fired move or not?" The answer must have been moving, and he asked again, "Does this arrow have its place in every instant?" The student replied yes, and he asked again, "In this instant, does it occupy the same space as its volume?" The student replied yes, "So, in this instant, is the arrow moving, or is it not moving?" The student replied that he was motionless, and he asked again, "This moment is not moving, but what about the other moments?" The student could only answer that he was motionless, so finally he asked, "So, the arrow that goes out is not moving?" Comparing Huishi's "Shadow of the Bird, Not Yet Moved", are the two almost exactly the same?
In the ancient Greek texts, Zeno's deeds are very rare, but the above two are his most famous philosophical discussions, which are recorded in Aristotle's "Physics" and re-known after a large number of aristotle's works. There is an ancient Greek proverb that "one cannot step into the same river twice", and if Zeno and Huishi have one similarity, it can be said that it is a coincidence, but there are two places that are almost exactly the same as Huishi's. Maybe it's a coincidence.
Whether the ancient Greek civilization was so brilliant, or whether the ancient Greek classics were forged by later generations, is a huge proposition, and it is difficult to say clearly, but some of the practices of the great German philosopher Hegel have made people see the other side of the so-called glory of ancient Greek civilization.
In the history of Western philosophy, Hegel was a philosophical giant who created an all-encompassing system of dialectical logic, and many Chinese today admire him. Where, then, is the source of Hegel's dialectical logic? He attributed it to ancient Greek dialectics, which he considered to be the homeland of dialectical logic, and attributed the right to invent dialectics to Zeno, who said above.
But Hegelian dialectic has an "absolute spirit" that dominates everything, including "nothing" and "being", and then the contradiction unfolds, through the "positive and negative combination", from "the alienation of the absolute spirit" to the "return of the absolute spirit", that is, the final return to the absolute spiritual essence, but it is highly similar to the Tao Te Ching. In Hegel's dialectical treatise Little Logic, some scholars have sorted out some of its high similarities with the Tao Te Ching, as shown in the figure below.
"Small Logic" is a philosophical work with the least idealism and the most materialism in Hegel, but from the content point of view, it is almost a castrated version of the core ideas of Lao Tzu's "Tao Te Ching", interpreting Lao Tzu's "Tao" as "absolute spirit", directly using the concepts of "being" and "nothing" no less than a hundred times, and discussing "the unity of opposites or not", etc. Presumably any Chinese is very familiar to look at. The scholar Zhu Xuanzhi pointed out: "The valuable part of Hessian philosophy is his 'exposition' of Laozi's thought, and its error is Hegel's own 'play'. Therefore, although it cannot be said that Hegel copied the Tao Te Ching in its entirety, because he had a certain play on the basis of Lao Tzu's thought, it is certain that he copied the core ideas of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching.
The problem is that Hegel does not mention Lao Tzu at all in the Little Logic, and although he mentions Lao Tzu many times in his other works, most of them are still critical and negative, and spare no effort to reduce Taoism to witchcraft. At the same time, Hegel said that the source of Western dialectical logic is in ancient Greece, and dialectics originated from the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno and so on, so why does Hegel not copy Zeno's, Not copy Socrates, and not copy Hercule's in "Little Logic"? It's hard to understand.
Ironically, in the 1820s, Hegel accused his close friend Wendy Schman of plagiarizing his own Chinese studies, claiming that Wendy Schman had stolen his interpretations of Chinese philosophy.
So why is Hegel at odds with deeds? The German philosopher R. Alberfit, in "The Acceptance of Lao Tzu by German Philosophy", said: "Hegel, the founder of Eurocentrism, made non-European cultures serve its own system in a Eurocentric way, and made the non-European intellectual tradition no longer dignified." That is to say, Hegel was the founder of Eurocentrism, so ideas outside Europe can only serve Western thought "in obscurity" and cannot obtain the honor they deserve, hegel said that dialectics originated from Zeno and so on in ancient Greece, rather than the actual Lao Tzu, which is the embodiment of this idea.
Through Hegel's deeds, it is not difficult to see that the influence of ancient Greek civilization on Europe may not be as great as imagined, or even far less than China's influence on Europe, but only out of the needs of Eurocentrism, in order to find a brilliant ancestor for its own civilization, so it exaggerated ancient Greek civilization. Otherwise, before chinese philosophy was introduced to Europe, why didn't European scholars, including Germany, expound any amazing theories based on ancient Greek philosophy, but after the introduction of Chinese philosophy, why Did European philosophy immediately have dazzling achievements?
Because the inheritance process of ancient Greek classics is too magical, there are some terrible possibilities, that is, after Europeans came into contact with Chinese culture, they transformed some of the Achievements of Chinese Culture and disguised them as the achievements of ancient Greek civilization, so that many ancient Greek achievements were extremely similar to those of China, so there were two similar views of Zeno and Huishi; even for the needs of Eurocentrism, some European scholars targeted and forged some ancient Greek achievements to prove that their academic origins were in ancient Greece. As for the part that is different from Chinese culture, it may not be the original of ancient Greece, it may be ancient Egypt, ancient India, Arab civilization, it is said that about the 8th and 9th centuries when the Arabs translated and preserved a large number of ancient Greek classics, and later spread to the West, and then many ancient Greek classics have been known one after another, but the Arabs have not rejected the ancient Greek civilization at all, almost no deletion of reservations, like a warehouse that is not selfish and specialized, for Europe to retain the fire of civilization, had to make people feel magical.
In summary, the ancient Greek civilization should have existed, but it was not as brilliant as the Westerners said, when the Eurocentrists exaggerated its role and weakened the contribution of non-European thought, and the similar achievements of the ancient Greek civilization to China cannot be arbitrarily said to be the forgery of the Europeans, but at least very doubtful.
In fact, during the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, China had tens of millions of people, and thousands of years of accumulation broke out at that time, and only then did a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend, while how many people did ancient Greece have, and how many years of continuous accumulation of civilization? If ancient Greece was as brilliant as the Europeans said, and the masters produced amazing works, then the proportion of masters in the total population is estimated to be reachable by no country today.