The Cradle of Western Thought

Hist 120 (Introduction to World Civilization) Brief Essay Number 2

ὁ δὲ ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ (An unexamined life if not worth living.) - Σωκράτης (Socrates)

Ahhhhh, the ancient Greeks. Where are we without them? Not that we are nothing, it is just that our modern civilization will going to be very different if they never existed, or if they did not have any remarkable contributions. Even if they are now gone for more than millennia, it is undeniable that their influence is literally everywhere. Skim at your English dictionary, and chances are around half of those words have a Greek etymology. The very letters that I am typing right now was got by the Romans from their Greek neighbors. The democratic system that is enjoyed by more than 160 countries around the world, originated from them (albeit very different from the ones that we have now). Look at your provincial capitol or any big government buildings, and I bet that you will see an Ionic, Doric, or Corinthian columns in their facades.

Their presence is not just limited from our vocabulary, alphabets, politics, and architecture. When it comes to theatre arts, we have Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Thespis to thank for. How can our mathematics advance without Euclid, Archimedes, and Pythagoras? How can we have history as a discipline if not through Herodotus and Thucydides? Or medicine without Hippocrates? What would our literature class would look like if we do not have The Iliad, Odyssey, and Theogony? Imagine not having Percy Jackson if not because of the public’s obsession with Greek mythologies. I could name more reasons how the ancient Greek civilization changed the way how we live as a society. But what exactly is their contribution that made them the greatest? It is their wisdom. It is not just about their developments in science and philosophy, but on how they thought us to use rational thought.

The historian Will Durant once said in his book The Story of Civilization, “The heroes of Greece were not saints, or artists, or millionaires, but sages; and her most honored sages were not theorists but men who had made their wisdom function actively in the world.” China and India may have been the cradle of Eastern wisdom, but it was in Greece that Western philosophy had its genesis. We have a lot of Greek thinkers that introduced us into new ideas. For example, Democritus explained how everything in the universe is fundamentally made out of the indestructible “atoms” (and he pretty much got it right, except from the part that it’s indestructible). Heraclitus said that the only thing constant in this world is change, hence you can’t cross on the same river twice. While Epicurus made us realize that death is not really that scary. Buy it was the Golden Trio: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle who have done most of the heavy lifting on shaping Greek thought.

Socrates taught us that the path to a good, virtuous life is through the pursuit of knowledge, and we do that by asking a lot of questions. Too bad that he was killed by the same society that he wants to become enlightened. His student, Plato, on the other hand, taught us to not be afraid of questioning everything, that we should not take anything that the society tells us at their face value. He made that pretty much clear on his Allegory of the Cave. Aristotle taught us that the only way to gain knowledge is through empirical evidence gained by observation.

These three not only shaped the ideas of Christian and Muslim medieval thinkers but also Christianity itself. Plato’s idea of eternal Forms and the existence of souls reached the Jews through Hellenization and heavily influenced the Christian notion of afterlife and spirituality. While Aristotle’s “unmoved mover” influenced cosmological arguments for God’s existence. Sure, they had a lot of ideas that were eventually proven to be wrong, but what matters is that they are the ones that shaped the Western civilization itself.

But I would argue that there is someone that I would say is the most important thinker in history, even far greater than the Greek Golden Trio: it’s Thales of Miletus. He was the one who pushed the first domino. Not only that he was the first Greek philosopher, he was the first scientist. He may have been dead wrong about the universe being fundamentally made of water, but he was the first person who tried to know the truth about the universe by using reason and evidence instead of just relying on religion and mythology. That was a huge deal. The idea of seeking for natural explanations instead of supernatural ones is the very essence of science itself. Without Thales, there will be no Greek philosophy, and consequently, no science and no modern society.

Oh, Greece. Even if you’re a relatively not-so-powerful country today, but at least you gave birth to Western civilization.

Sources

• Durant, Will. 1939. The Story of Civilization Volume II: The Life of Greece. New York: Simon & Schuster.

• Ehrman, Bart. 2020. Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife. New York: Simon & Schuster.

• Hodsdon, Ed. 2021. 9 Greek Philosophers Who Shaped The World. June 27. Accessed May 25, 2022. https://www.thecollector.com/ancient-greek-philosophers/.

Passed on May 25, 2022