The Fifth Of Early Greek Philosophy: The Beginnings of Ancient Greek Philosophy
Greece was the first country in Europe to enter the slave society. The Greek philosophy of the slavery period, that is, ancient Greek philosophy or Greek classical philosophy, was the earliest stage of the development of European philosophy, and its influence on later European philosophy and even world philosophy was very far-reaching. Engels once pointed out: "In the various forms of Greek philosophy, it is almost possible to find the embryo and germ of various later views. The ancient Roman state that was later established was a larger slave state, and its philosophy was a direct continuation of classical Greek philosophy, so it was collectively referred to as "ancient Greco-Roman philosophy".
The slave-owning class in the ancient Greek slave society was generally divided into two classes or groups: aristocratic slave owners and industrial and commercial slave owners. Noble slave owners were transformed from clan aristocrats at the end of the primitive commune. In the early days of the slave society, they enjoyed various hereditary privileges economically and politically, and in order to maintain their original economic and political privileges and the old patriarchal order, they needed to find theoretical basis philosophically. Idealism and metaphysics met their needs.
Industrial and commercial slave owners arose from the commoners who operated handicrafts and commerce, belonging to the emerging class of slave owners, but politically and economically excluded and restricted by aristocratic slave owners. They opposed the autocratic rule of the aristocratic slave owners, demanded social reform, and demanded the democratic politics of the slave owners, so they were called democratic slave owners. The democratic slave owners were originally weak, and in order to strengthen themselves, they demanded the development of industry and commerce, and the recognition and mastery of the laws of nature. Therefore, they dare to face up to objective reality and the development and change of things. This provided the social basis for the emergence of materialist and dialectical ideas. However, due to the limitations of the productive forces and the level of knowledge at that time, the materialist and dialectical ideas of ancient Greece and later Rome were simple and spontaneous.
Judging from the germination state of philosophy, the emergence of philosophical thought has its objective background, that is, the conditions of all aspects of social history, but at the same time it also has its own internal causes, which are the products of the development of human cognition itself.
The development of human cognition has gone through different stages, and philosophy can only be produced if it reaches a certain stage. Philosophy is the use of abstract concepts, reasoning, and arguments to illustrate the world, and it will only arise when human beings have developed to have a certain degree of abstract ability and reasoning ability. Before reaching this stage, human beings have long tried to explain and explain the things that are happening around them; but at that time, they mainly used the figurative way of thinking to explain the world, that is, mythology. Ancient Greek mythology has sprouted the problems of the origin of all things, the origin and evolution of the universe, and the soul that were discussed in later philosophy, and they all have a very vivid understanding of them.
Primitive man personified natural objects (sun, moon, water, fire, etc.) as gods of diversity, and then developed a tendency to choose one god from among the many gods, to think that it preceded other gods, and that it produced all gods. This is the precursor to the ideas of later philosophers seeking the origin of all things.
At that time, it was chosen as the most fundamental "god" and had an influence on later philosophical thought, about the following:
Humans have long believed that the ocean and water are the root of all things, but initially this idea was expressed in the form of myths. Hesiod says in the Genealogy that Okeano, the god of the sea, was the son of the god Uzanos and the earth mother Caia, the husband of Thetis (the goddess of the sea), and the father of Okeanid, the goddess of the three thousand seas, and the god of all rivers. Homer recorded in the Iliad that Oghiano was the god of the rivers that surrounded the earth, the source of all waters. Homer also saw Okeano as a great, orderly cosmic force, a god on which all living things grew. Plato explained Homer's thought as follows: "When Homer chants ' Oghiano is the father of the gods, and Thetis is the mother of the gods', it means that all things are the product of the flow of change. Plato associates this myth with Heraclitus's idea that everything is flowing.
Greek mythology also saw the night as the first force, the origin of all things. Homer, in the Iriad, said of The Sleep God, Jeopus, complaining about Zeus: "He will drive me from the aether into the distant sea without night, which is the conqueror of the gods and mankind; and when I fly into the night, zeus is furious, but he can no longer drive me away, for he is afraid that by doing so he will immediately provoke the night." The mythical night is what later natural philosophers call the state of chaos. They believe that the universe was originally a chaotic, part of which could not be discerned. To use mythology, this is the night. Aristotle, speaking of the motives of things, spoke of the relationship between the mythical "night" and the philosophical "chaos": "If we follow the theologians who believe that the world arises from the night, or follow the natural philosophers who say 'all things are mixed together', we will come to the same impossible result: how can there be motion if there is no real cause for existence." (Metaphysics) Although Aristotle spoke from the point of view of criticism, it can be seen from this that the beginning of the universe, as later natural philosophers called chaos, was originally evolved from the myth that the night was the origin of all things.
The god of time is called "Kronos". It turned out to be a chaotic night, no movement, and no time. Once there is time, everything is differentiated and becomes something to be known. Ancient time was originally combined with the production season of agriculture and animal husbandry, so the god of time is also the god of harvest. The early Greeks mythologically viewed "time" as the fundamental element of primordial chaos that differentiated into everything in motion. Although time appears as the personified god Kronos, kronos' function precisely expresses the early Greeks' simple understanding of the important role of "time" in the process of incarnation into all things. This was influential on the later Greek philosophical view of time.
In Greek mythology, the universe and natural phenomena were mostly attributed to the father-son, husband and wife, and brotherhood of the gods. One of the most representative is Hersiod's Genealogy of The Gods. It sorts out a genealogy of the vast and complex legends about the gods handed down from ancient times. This long poem is divided into three main parts:
(1) Cosmic spectrum, which describes the evolution of the universe;
(2) Genealogy of gods, which describes the genealogy of gods represented by Zeus and Krosno;
(3) Hero genealogy, which describes the genealogy of the demigod and half-human hero.
In terms of the evolution of the universe, it combines the origin of the world with the birth of the gods, and in fact has made a naïve speculation about the formation and evolution of the universe in the form of a fantasy myth, and even has the germ of some rational explanation of natural phenomena in general. For example, in the comedy poet Aristophanes' comedy Bird, myths and legends about the evolution of the universe, which are likely to represent the Orpheus sect, have been preserved: "At the beginning there was only chaos, night, black city, and vast underworld; at that time there was no earth (Gaia), no qi (El), and no heaven (Orthonus); from the arms of the black city, the black-winged night first gave birth to the wind egg, and after some time, in the realization of the seasons, the longing love (Eros) was born." She is like a whirlwind, with brilliant golden wings on her back; in the vast underworld, she communes with the darkness and lightless chaos that gives birth to us; first brings us into the light. In the beginning, there was no race of gods in the world, and after the intercourse of love and love gave birth to everything, and the meeting of all things gave birth to the heavens and the earth, the ocean, and the immortal gods. With regard to the interpretation of heaven and earth, myths and legends are also similar to those of early natural philosophers.
Homer recorded in the Iliad that the dome was a bowl-shaped solid hemisphere that covered the disc-shaped earth. The lowest parts of the space between heaven and earth, including clouds, are filled with gas or moisture; the higher parts are filled with ether. Below the ground level of the earth is the underground house Hades, and then below is the underworld Tartarlo. Homer's mythical account of the sky like a vault and the earth like a flat disk shows that the ancient Greeks' simple view of the structure of the heavens is similar to the relevant statements of many early Greek natural philosophers. Philosophers from the School of Miletus to the atomist Democritus mostly held this view of the Celestial Dome.
The ancient Greeks used the word "soul" for a double meaning: one is something handed down from mythology and is opposed to the body. It is a non-physical image of the flesh, it gives life to the flesh, and when it leaves the flesh, it exists pale and powerless in the underworld. This soul can be reincarnated and later developed into an immortal spiritual ontology in idealistic philosophy. Another meaning refers to breathing, which is the origin of life, referring to the subject or activity itself of the conscious activity such as human feelings, emotions, and intellect. Many later philosophers specialized in the soul in this sense, developing epistemological doctrines.
In the 6th century BC, Orpheus spread rapidly throughout the Greek world. It holds that the soul can only take on its true nature if it leaves the body. Only fallen gods or spirits are placed in the flesh and become souls. The soul, which resides in the human body, can regain its original high status through "purification" and secret worship, and return to the ranks of the gods to which it originally belonged. The souls of the "saints" of Orpheus are "purified" and are therefore immortal and immortal. What people call the birth of the body is actually the death of the soul, so the body is the grave of the soul. The soul is imprisoned in the body of a plant or an animal until it is finally freed from the cycle of birth by the purification of the human soul; as for the incurable souls, they can only be punished for eternal depravity in the quagmire of mortal things. Orpheus thought of this immortal, immortal, soul that rises above the body and can exist separately from the body, the idea of the reincarnation of the soul, has had a profound influence on subsequent religions and philosophies.
At the beginning of ancient Greek philosophy, myth was followed by natural philosophy. In the 6th century BC, some philosophers in the Ionian region began to raise the question of the origin of the world, to explore what the world really was, what it evolved from, and finally to what it returned to, these philosophers became known as the Ionian school. They oppose the mythical creation theories circulating in the past, believing that the origin of the world is some material elements, such as water, air, fire, etc.; they were the first to use nature itself to explain the generation of the world, and they were the earliest materialist philosophers in the West. Notable representatives include Thales of Miletus, Anaximander, Anaximini and Heraclitus of Affismus. Heraclitus not only believed that fire was the origin of all things, but that all things were always fluid, that the same thing existed and did not exist, and that the cause of movement was the contradiction and opposition within things. This is the earliest dialectical thought.
At the same time, in the Greek colonial belt, that is, in southern Italy, a philosophical school with another ideological tendency emerged, which held that the essence of all things was not a material element, but some abstract principle, which the Pythagorean school believed to be "number", and the Elia school represented by Parmenides believed that it was "existence", and that existence was unchanging, immortal, and that the movement changed only the phenomena of things. The abstract principle of immateriality they proposed had a great influence on the later idealistic philosophy.
Later natural philosophers, while acknowledging the changes in motion, tried to find the eternal and unchanging factors behind them. Empedocle believed that it was the four "elements" of water, fire, earth, and air; Anaxagoras believed that it was a "seed" containing different properties, and that all things were combined in different proportions; Democritus reduced the essence of all things to the smallest indivisible "atoms", which had no differences in properties, only differences in shape, arrangement, and state. Everything is made up of atoms. Although Anaxagoras proposed "Nuss" as the final cause of the movement of things, opening the back door for later idealistic philosophy, these natural philosophers were materialists, especially Democritus's atomism, which was the precursor to the modern theory of the structure of matter. Of course, the early natural philosophers of ancient Greece did not completely get rid of the influence of primitive religious superstitions, such as Thales's belief that everything was full of "spirits", which was the earliest idea of "living things" in the history of philosophy.
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