A few years ago, my wife Sarah and I took a boat trip in the eastern Aegean. It was paradise: the two of us, charting a course between the Greek islands and the coast of Turkey, taking turns steering the ship, surrounded by all the brilliant blue of the sea.
As we hopped from port to port, the names of many of the places we passed were familiar to me, having encountered them in my work as a historian. Fifty or 65 kilometers south of our ship was Miletus, birthplace of some of the first known theorists of the physical world.
Thirty kilometers to the east, in Ephesus, was the home of Heraclitus, the first person whose reflections on the interrelatedness of things have reached us. On the other side of a nearby peninsula, just 115 kilometers away, was Lesbos, the island of Sappho and Alcaeus, the greatest lyric poets of the time. To the south, in Samos, was the birthplace of Pythagoras, one of the first theorists of the eternal soul.
Floating on the water, I began to wonder about the relationship between places and ideas—how places can open up the way we think and feel, and give access to minds, however distant and strange. Then I realized that philosophy has a geography. To be in the places that these thinkers knew, to visit their cities, navigate their seas and find their landscapes is to know something about them that cannot be found any other way; and despite that geography, and despite their age, the mentality of these early thinkers remains astonishing and surprisingly illuminating today.
But why here and why then? Several centuries earlier, the great Near Eastern civilizations of the Bronze Age, in Mesopotamia, Egypt, eastern Turkey, and Crete, had collapsed or nearly collapsed. There followed a wild, lawless period of wrens and sea pirates — the world, essentially, portrayed by Homer in “The Iliad.” But then, from about 650 BC, a renaissance occurred, as a constellation of independent port cities began to emerge in the eastern Aegean. They were primarily mercantile oligarchies, often deeply skeptical of the virtues of monarchy, more dependent on trade than agriculture, absorbing the ancient wisdom of earlier civilizations to the east, but not dominated by them.
Greek merchants could take whatever they wanted (mathematics, astronomy, sculpture, temples, alphabetic writing, making gold and silver jewelry), but they remained independent. Above all, the Greeks were not subject to vast instituted royal and priestly bureaucracies. A mental freedom ran through their cities. They were adventurous and expert sailors and shipbuilders, sending expeditions to the northern end of the Black Sea and the western end of the Mediterranean, carrying olive trees and vines to the south of France, bringing in cargoes of silver from the great mines of southern Spain, and plying the Mediterranean. with the brilliant stelae that celebrated his poetry. They were governed by entrepreneurial qualities: inventiveness, mental agility, newfound athleticism, a certain fluidity of thought, a desire to govern themselves, to generate their own legal systems and regulate their turbulent lives, and to find justice by accommodating differences.
These port cities were the homes of people generally considered to be the first philosophers, whose lives depended on the sea and the links it could provide. This version of Greece in the centuries between 700 and 500 was not land based. It existed essentially in the sea and, where it touched land, it appeared and manifested itself like the cities from which these philosophers came.
These mercantile qualities of fluidity and connectivity were precisely the guiding aspects of the new thinking. The philosophers’ emphasis was on exchange and, with Heraclitus in particular, on the virtues of tension. As with a bow, he wrote, the string pulls on the frame and would collapse if either the string or the frame failed; A just society must be based on a tension between its constituent parts. Everything flowed through everything else, multiplicity was goodness and singularity the basis of sterility or tyranny.
These early Greek forms of thought cross all boundaries between poet and thinker, mystic and scientist, in a stepped, cyclical, and undulating vision of the nature of reality. The thinkers did not provide a set of rationalist solutions or religious doctrines, but rather explored the boundary between those ways of seeing. Possibility and investigation, the effects of suggestion and implication, rather than thoughtless belief or empty assertion, were the seedbed of new ideas.
This port mentality holds lessons for us now. We may want fixed answers and rigid definitions, but vitality, and perhaps even health, lies in the ability to stay afloat, relaxed, connected, to ask questions and harbor doubt as the unlikely foundation of understanding.
The only understanding is in the fluidity of the mind.
Who would have imagined that a few days setting sail in the cool of a Greek morning, dropping anchor in sandy blue bays and swimming in the shade of olive trees on the coast with the sheep’s bells ringing beside us, could have begun to change my opinion about the fundamental nature of things? But that’s how it was.
And if someone asks me why I now think the way I think, I can answer: because I once went sailing to the sea where philosophy began.
By: INTELLIGENCE/Adam Nicolson
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6956038, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-10-26 23:00:08
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