A Crash Course in Ancient Western Philosophy (Or: What I Learned from the Old Graybeards)

This semester, I took my first philosophy class. It wasn't an intro class, in fact, it was a junior/senior level class, and I was by far the youngest one there, but there was no pre-requisite. The class was called "Ancient Philosophy."

Going into it, the class seemed like one that could be any number of things. I knew of philosophy in Ancient Egypt, China, and Greece/Rome. It turned out that the class ignored Buddha and Confucius in favor for the famous trilogy in Greece: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Let me impart upon you a young woman's view on the philosophies of these great thinkers--the "old graybeards," as a certain English instructor of mine affectionately calls them.

First, a bit about philosophy itself. A dictionary definition, while bland, is the best way to start:

Philosophy - n - plural -phies - the rational investigation of the truths and principles of being, knowledge, or conduct.


That is the most boring way to describe such a fascinating concept. Philosophy, in my own words, is thinking about the world. That's it. It's investigating, learning, exploring, discovering, arguing, and knowing life and all its intangible mysteries. It's not a science, mind you, it's much more complex and less concrete. It's all about questions, big and small, but all significant in their own way. Ancient philosophy, in particular, focuses more on small inquiries that carry a heavy weight, like, "what is virtue?" "why do we love?" and "what is happiness?"

Philosophy itself has been around as long as humans have had rational thought. The word philosophy is of Greek origin, however: "philosophia," meaning "love of wisdom" in Greek and simply "wisdom" in Latin. The roots of the word should tell you that yes, Greeks are the first recognized "philosophers," rather than great thinkers; philosophy in that sense is used to refer to western philosophy, and that is where we truly begin.


In Ancient Greece, there were men called "sophists," or wise men. They were mostly looked down upon by Greece's population for being dirty, poor, and tricky, for they taught rhetoric, or using language to win an argument. Technically, these men were philosophers by the definition, but this is called the pre-Socratic period, because, well, it was before Socrates (we'll talk about him in a minute). The term "philosopher" is usually acredited to Pythagoras, who is most famous for his Pythagorean Theorem, but was quite the thinker himself. It was said by one of Aristotle's disciples that Pythagoras replaced the word "sophist" with "philosopher," changing wise men to lovers of wisdom.

The pre-Socratic period was mostly questioning the norm with huge questions, but answers weren't usually agreed-upon. "Where do we come from?" "What started the Earth?" It was more scientific than later philosophy was, but that was a large jump at the time, when all the credit was given to the gods and not science. They gave more rational answers to questions previously explained away with mythology, but none of the answers were really that
rational.


Why is this period called the pre-Socratic period? Because it came before Socrates, that's why! Socrates is often called the father of western philosophy. He perfected the rhetoric practiced by the sophists, and is the namesake of the still-used Socratic method. Socrates was known for trapping people with words and making them realize that their arguments were flawed, contradictory to themselves, and that his points were better. However, Socrates was a man who lived a life of poverty through his own devices, and never recorded anything. So why is he famous? He lived on in his student, Plato. The bulk of Plato's works are merely dialogues between Socrates and other Greeks, and almost unfailingly, Socrates comes out on top.

Socrates, in Plato's dialogues, argued about the huge questions I mentioned before. One of the earliest dialogues, Meno, is between Socrates and Menon, where they discuss whether virtue can be learned. First, they must figure out what virtue is, and on the way, they come up with many side points; Socrates believed in the immortality of the soul, and thus said that learning isn't really learning anything knew, it's merely recollecting what your soul remembers from a past life. In the end of Meno, Socrates comes to the conclusion that they can't find out what virtue is, and until such a time, it must be acredited to divine intervention from gods or spirits.

Most of Plato's dialogues had a similar layout. In The Symposium, Socrates and several other Greek men speak about what love is--they all have different views, from that it is the child of Plenty and Poverty, to that it is our bodies naturally trying to find their other halves from the primal days when people were really two people put together. Socrates says that love is the yearning for procreation, whether through ideas or children, love of the soul and love of the body.

While Socrates believed in human issues on a personal scale, he also believed in solving humanity's problems. He believed that the only truly successful state could be ruled by an enlightened Philosopher King, and those too ignorant to be philosophers would have to be lied to, and the philosophers would be higher-class citizens. This idea was very popular among philosophers at the time, as you might imagine. While he claimed to know nothing, he also claimed to "believe" in a hell of a lot, thus contradicting one of his most famous lines.

One of Socrates' best feats is possibly his death. He was put on trial, accused of corrupting Greece's youth, disbelieving in the gods, and making up false entities. He argued and philosophized till the end, and refused to pay a fine instead of die. He said that dying did not bother him, because every great philosopher should want to know the unknown, and death is the ultimate unknown. He died by suicide, and it's still one of the most famous deaths in the world's history.


Plato had some feats of his own in his original writings. His most famous thesis is the Theory of Forms, which says that by knowing a concept, one can grasp anything related to that concept. In example, if you know what cake is, because you've eaten cake several times in your life, you know the qualities of cake and what it is to be a cake. You know a cake when you see a cake, because you are well-versed in what a cake is. If you see something that doesn't necessarily strike you as a cake right away, but you see it on a cake stand and someone cuts it in half to reveal layers of moist, delicious, pastry, then you see that it is a cake. And if you encounter something that you don't know as a cake, but someone proves to you that it is, in fact, a form of cake, you expand your concept of cakeness. It's an idea we take for granted now, but explaining it was nearly miraculous in Ancient Greece.

Another accomplishment of Plato's was his Academy--he thought that philosophy could only be effectively taught in a school system of teachers and students, all not just learning philosophy, but living it. He said that one could only truly be a philosopher if they learned orally through another philosopher, not just reading what they wrote. Students of the Academy learned how to use rhetoric and how to defend against it. Plato's motivations for this were mainly political, says Hadot, author of "What is Ancient Philosophy?" Plato agreed with Socrates that only philosophers could lead a state, and so he hoped the students of his school would go on to lead Greece.


One such student was (my favorite) the third in the series of great thinkers, Aristotle. Aristotle was radically different from his teacher and his before him--whereas Plato and Socrates tended to agree, Aristotle is most famous for his differences from the two. Aristotle actually created a system of philosophy that encompassed ethics, logic, politics, and metaphysics. He was much more scientific than his predecessors, and while most of that science we know now not to be true, at the time it was what was widely accepted. He invented scientific method, which all students still use today.

One principle belief of Aristotle's is his theory on happiness. He said that happiness is up to the individual. Everyone works toward ends, and their actions are always means to those ends. We don't do things without a positive reason behind it, though sometimes we find out that it wasn't actually desirable. But no one does anything for no good reason, in their mind. Even serial murderers have some motivation for what they do. One concept of this is called an "end of itself." Everything we do is a means to some end, and some ends are means for another end. In example, I go to school to learn things so that I can get eventually get a degree. That degree is the ends that justifies the mean of going to school. I don't want a degree just for the sake of having one, though; the degree is a means to get a job that I'm good at. The job is another end, but also a means to get money. Money isn't just desirable because it's money--I want money so that I can buy things that will give me a more comfortable life. I want to be comfortable so that I can be happy. Happiness is the ultimate end of my life. Aristotle outlined this for the first time, and honestly, he's the only one of these old graybeards that I can truly agree with on one thing.

So while modern philosophy is much more evolved and complex than these ancients, I still appreciate them because they're what started it all.