NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND -- THIRTEEN

WE ARE MANY AND WE ARE ONE 

Our Common Heritage

Cultural Diversity!

 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

Originally published © June 22, 2016/August 16, 2021

Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as a heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors.

Abraham Lincoln (1809 – 1965), 16th President of the United States


When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

John F. Kennedy (1917 – 1963), 35th President of the United States



OUR HERITAGE & OUR TOOLS IN PERSPECTIVE

In the ancient past, we came out of Africa and hacked our way across the planet, led by tribal chieftains and shamans. We gave our leaders the power to “cut & control” our world, not knowing how close we were moving to Nowhere Land. All the matter was to move forward. We came to call this movement, “progress.”

To create we had to destroy, and so with each advance, we left devastation in our wake. Progress has led to horizons we never expected to reach. Thanks to the compelling attraction of new technology the future was ours to make and perfect.

We see the evidence of what technology has done to our lives without seeing what it has done to our minds. The talent to perform in sequential patterns gives rise to thinking sequential thoughts, as if life is simply a chronology, when being conscious animals it is essentially psychology.

Chronological thinking dominates our consciousness. We measure success on how much wealth we have, the number of distinctive possessions, how many friends on Facebook, not our joy at the moment doing what we are doing, being what we are.

We measure learning on how many years of formal education, the number and quality of academic degrees we’ve earned, the rank we have attained in our profession.

We set goals for ourselves on where we expect to be at age 30, 40, 50, and beyond, always waiting for the right time to make a splash. This finds us making elaborate plans, and checking off when we reach intermediate goals as proof that we’re on the right track.

· We medicate our unhappiness or boredom with drugs, and/or booze and cigarettes that invariably evolve into addictions, which we then attempt to redress in step programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous.

We control our diets not by eating more wisely, but by counting calories, reading the labels off boxes of food and bottles of beverages, or by joining some weight control step program.

In athletics, everything is controlled with chronology from the the layout of the playing field to the time of play to the quality of the play in terms of speed, execution, and excellence.

We punish people who have committed crimes against persons or society by sending them off to prison for several years, only to have as many as 90 percent eventually returning to prison. Incarceration is society’s embarrassing revolving door with prison becoming the equivalent of postgraduate school for the criminal mind.

We construct essentially impenetrable barriers to the mind with Socratic cause and effect analysis, and Aristotelian linear logic and dialectics, leading to the paralysis of analysis in problem-solving.

The problem we solve is the problems we create (cyclic thinking) in a crisis management mentality, thus avoiding the problems we cannot solve and prefer not to face.

We are information junkies obsessed with processing data, describing rather than dealing with problems, using deductive reasoning exclusively, which involves critical thinking in problem-solving. This limits the focus to be on what is already known and has already worked somewhere else, which is not necessarily apropos to the current situation.

As individuals, this finds us waiting for the right moment to go to college, change jobs, get married or divorced, have children, move to a new location, or make a life-changing decision. We are slaves to chronology taking comfort in the fact that we lack the right preparation, and adequate economic buffer or the proper support system to leave the crowd and live.

Indeed, we are a money-driven society following Wall Street’s Dow Jones Industrials daily checking the status of our investments, erotically energized when they go up, and crestfallen when they go down. We are always waiting for the right time to act, only to eventually run out of life still treading water.

What we do as individuals, companies do as corporations, and countries do as nations. Obsessions with chronology find everyone leading from behind always waiting for the right time to act, busy collecting more data to discern when to push off, only to have events or circumstances create the crisis that leaves no other alternative, other than extinction.

Psychological thinking is not rational or irrational, but instinctive. In that sense, it has something in common with unconscious animals of nature.

· Learning is measured by wisdom;



· Actions are set by not harming;

· Diet is controlled by eating when hungry and not eating beyond need;

· Physical exercise is a function of aptitude, interest, and fun, not punishing the body beyond its capacity or inclination;

· Quitting a bad habit is immediate, “cold turkey,” not one-step-at-a-time;

· Pursuing a career is a matter of interest and aptitude, not pleasing the other-directed crowd by doing what it expects;

· Friendship commences with being your own best friend and others who respect that bond with self.

· With creative thinking we build solutions, we don’t seek them. We pursue what is not known but can be found out, comfortable with its subjectivity while following the flow of our perceptions. Then we organize these ideas, provocative or not, around something untried but self-organized.

As we shall show later, chronology has generated language, logic, and rules by which we live and work. It has formalized our institutions to reflect this sequential arrangement and formulated the learning syllabus in the same way. It is the way we work, the way we think, and the way we live. Spontaneity has been usurped from our consciousness for utility.

Chronology has been a boom to the great religions of the world sponsoring as Christian Judaic religion has, “the conquest of nature.”

Reference:

“Every living thing shall be meat for you. The fear of you and dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth. Into your hands, they are delivered. Have dominion over the earth and subdue it” (Genesis, Old Testament of the Bible).

Consequently, instead of living in union with nature as guests, man with the support of his religion has raped the environment to its present decline.

Science, which has only unmasked but a minimal numbered of laws of nature, has been celebrated by technology turning these discoveries into tools and those tools have been used to flaunt man’s chronological thinking to the point that we find this planet today: overpopulated, overheated, overworked, and overcrowded with man-made artifacts.

The majority of people do not understand what experts know. Scientists and technologists have operated in the backroom making tools that institutions could then produce, package and promulgate. Playing the role of expert has varied from the shaman, priest, cardinal, pope, publisher, engineer, philosopher, scientist, physicist, neuroscientist to entrepreneur.

For billions of years, the earth changed due to climate disturbances and meteor storms, adjusting and assimilating them with large swaths of indigenous plants and animals periodically disappearing. Then man appeared amid these cyclic disturbances to neutralize their impact and to redirect their effects. Philosopher Eric Hoffer writes:

“To feel wholly at home in this world is to partake of the nature of plants and animals. Man is an eternal stranger in this world. He became a stranger when he cut himself off from the rest of creation and became human. From this incurable uncertainty, our unfulfillable craving for roots, our passion to cover the world with man-made compounds, our need for God who appoints us as His viceroy in earth.”

Man, with his asymmetrical limbs accompanied with an equally asymmetrical brain, discovered that with his left brain he was capable of making tools and with his right-brain processing information. This made him gifted with possibilities that did not exist with other animals, the perfect formula for an out-of-control technician. Hoffer captures the sense of this:

“The God who created nature was above all a supreme technician. But once He had created nature and automated it, God lost interest in His creation. It bored Him, and in His boredom, God became an artist.

“The God who created man was above all an artist, and He created man in His own image – the image of the artist. All other animals are perfect technicians, each with its built-in tool kit, each an accomplished specialist. Man is a technically misbegotten creature, half-finished and ill-equipped, but in his mind and soul are all the ingredients of a creator, of an artist. And it was God’s mark as a supreme artist that He refused to automate man.”

With these tools, he was able to construct shelters and dwellings, and able to hunt as a group. He changed his diet from fruits and berries to meat as he discovered as a hunter he could support many more people for several more days with less effort. This newfound clout led to sharing and inspired the idea of a community.

Hunting required the ability to study the prey, and for hunters to plan, communicate and collaborate in support of each other to trap and best the prey, acting with speed in that execution. In the process, it was laying down the mental matrix of thought, reason, language (communication), and common interests (culture) in its most primitive form.

From the beginning, people who excelled in handling new technology acquired power. Fundamental schisms between those who could and those who couldn’t invariably develop. Disequilibrium in the sharing of the spoils has no doubt existed from the beginning, leading to conflict and even murder.

Power flows to sequential thinkers, to those gifted with the analytical skills to use the new tools to advantage. Tools generate an artificial environment with artisans who make the tools choosing what tools to make and how they should be used.

The real and synthetic environment, hastened by sequential thinking and the non-cyclic nature of hunting and gathering merged in growing complexity. Two potent forces were at work here: (1) sequential toolmaking led to sequential thought, and (2) sequential thought which led to making other artifacts of a non-hunting nature.

So, once farming was discovered as a way to provide sustenance, other than hunting and gathering, place and space became of value. The need to roam for prey through treacherous territory sometimes far removed from the colony, often with disappointing results, no longer was necessary. The human community was on the horizon (see In the Age of Mankind, Roger Lewin, 1988).

This predilection to roam to survive first proved native to man eons ago has survived to this day as hunting is a powerful recreational sport. It is as if man has never left his prehistoric roots. Everything that would evolve would have its roots here: the family, art, language, music, religion, and magic (see The Illustrated Golden Bough, Sir James George Frazer, 1996). Man found the key to survival in linear thinking, and these millions of years later, it is still his main syllabus.

A MARK TWAIN INTERLUDE

The shaman used myth-making for social control, wrapping natural phenomena in the mystical, and then claiming only the shaman to have the key to unraveling nature’s mysteries.

American author and humorous Mark Twain (1835 – 1910) imitated this style in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). The Yankee in the story was struck on the head during a quarrel in a New England arms factory. The skilled mechanic awoke to find himself being prodded by the spear of an armored knight on horseback.

The knight was Sir Kay of King Arthur’s Round Table and the time was June, 528 C.E. in Merry Old England. The Yankee had remembered from school that there had been a total eclipse of the sun on June 21, 528. If he was in fact in England, and on this date, then the eclipse should take place, which meant that he was indeed a space traveler in time finding himself in the days of English chivalry.

The magician, Merlin, advised the knight to throw the prisoner into a dungeon to await being burned at the stake on the 21st of June.

The Yankee told his jailer that Merlin was full of humbug, sending a message to King Arthur that on the day of his death the sun would be destroyed. The eclipse came as he predicted just as the Yankee was about to be burned.

The sky grew gray, then murky shadows appeared, followed by total darkness at midday. Frightened and awed at once, King Arthur ordered the prisoner to be released. Once released, the sun returned in all its brightness. The crowd, shuddering in fear once darkness enveloped them, now jubilant with relief, shouted angrily at the great magician for misleading them.

Twain often used social satire to show how those in power exploited ignorance. Here he uses the faulty wisdom of Merlin the Magician in the climate of chivalry to imagine a life-threatening escape with knowledge of a natural phenomenon.

Incidentally, Mark Twain had his association with a natural phenomenon. He was born when Halley’s Comet appeared in 1835 and died when it reappeared again in 1910.

THE INVENTION OF WRITING

The written language appeared about 10,000 years ago, and it did not start with words but with counting. It began in what is called Iraq today using coins to designate various sums while bartering grain, meat, and other staples. The use of coins created the first alphabet. Quantitative thinking was associated with the inventory of grain, livestock, and supplies.

In Mesopotamia, rivers were rerouted to irrigate arid land thus the chaos of nature was transmuted into an artificial order by humans. Society and the environment were moving in the same direction of that instigated control. The movement from hunting and gathering to agriculture also changed the role of women.

During this earlier period, women had superior skills to men in cooking, weaving, making utensils and clothing, and tending to the children in an essentially matriarchal society.

With agriculture, men came into prominence as they planted and tilled the fields, reaped the harvest, bartered the surplus, bought and sold the land. Power and prosperity were tied to a place, while the tools of hunting now became the weapons of defense of that place and space. Thus was born a patriarchal society.

About the same time, the shaman gave way to the king as the new leader, negotiator, arbiter of disputes, and the mobilizer of forces to protect the community from outsiders. To solidify that power, the king would eventually claim divine guidance assuming the role of the god-king.

The concept of a leader as an authority figure apart from the led while being by nature equally human has had a long history. From the earliest days, the leader with the shaman as an adviser at his side created the impression that the people needed him, but that he could survive without them. To sustain this mystical and largely invented dominance, it was incumbent on the king to take on god-like qualities.

The irony is that from the beginning of human history the led have been measured with draconian exactitude, precision indices seldom if ever applied to the leader.

Ceremonial rites along with the domiciles of rulers, elaborate to the extreme for the times, were established on a high promontory looking down on the modest huts of the people below. Once these dwellings became castles, they were essentially off-limits to commoners, except when invited. This order, too, has not been interrupted in the thousands of years since divined.

The psychology of the shaman became that of the ruler who behind the trappings of authority manipulated symbols that kept the lid in place and the leader in power.

The nostalgia for this concept of monarchy in Europe, even though it is essentially a titular function today is on display with Philippe, King of the Belgians; Margrethe II, Queen of Denmark; Hans-Adam II, Prince of Liechtenstein; Henri, Grand Duke of Luxembourg, Albert II, Sovereign Prince of Monaco, Willem-Alexander, King of the Netherlands; Harald V, King of Norway; and Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom.

The citizens of these countries and principalities are willing to finance this elaborate anachronistic system of aristocracy with its atavistic leaders because it anchors them to a common reminiscent past.

First the shaman, then the king, and then the scribe, the latter surfacing after the invention of writing. It is thought that humans developed language about 35,000 B.C.E. as evidence by cave paintings from the period of the Cro-Magnon Man (50,000 – 30,000 B.C.E.). The writing related to daily life with simple pictures of animals and people (re: hunting expeditions). Written language did not emerge until its invention in southern Mesopotamia around 3500 B.C.E.

Early writing was called “cuneiform,” and consisted of making specific marks in wet clay with a reed stick. Egyptian writing was already in us (before 3150 B.C.E.) and was known as hieroglyphics.

The Sumerians first invented writing as a means of long-distance communication which was necessitated by trade. With the rise of cities in Mesopotamia and the need for resources that were lacking in the region, long-distance trade developed, and with it, the need to be able to communicate across the expanses between cities or regions. Pictographs or animated symbols represented objects and served to aid in remembering such things as which parcels of grain had gone to which destination or how many sheep were needed for events like sacrifices in the temples.

Scribes then came into prominence. These were people who made it their business to master the manipulation of as many as 2,000 signs and symbols that were beyond the comprehension of others, including traders. So, with the coming of the Common Era (C.E.), they became identified with the leadership, distancing them from the people who in all likelihood could neither read nor write even in the late Middle Ages. Was this intentional?

The technology generates social change with writing was a powerful tool, and no doubt there was fear that with a wide distribution of writing social collapse might follow. Less than one percent of the people of Egypt and Mesopotamia were schooled in the use of early pictograms. That said there was always the need to establish control and maintain the order of the populace.

Mesopotamia was able to bring about this desirable outcome by establishing a society of laws. The law had to do with the rights and duties of the individual in the greater society, a new concept. Individuals were no longer obliged to live at the whim of the high priest or ruler, receiving certain protections under the law that led to stability and order.

With the law, people no longer lived as they desired. Some 4,000 years ago, Babylonian King Hammurabi (1810 – 1750 B.C.E.) was the sixth king of the First Babylonian Dynasty. He extended Babylon’s rule throughout Mesopotamia with military campaigns and formed a highly centralized government controlling all aspects of public life. His Legal Code of Hammurabi, one of the earliest surviving codes of law, included the claim to have been elected by the gods to reign over Babylon. King Hammurabi extended the blessings of justice to those who respected the law and curses to those who did not.

Law radically altered individual liberties and still colors the sense of freedom even in a democratic republic these thousands of years later. Stated another way, people in the modern world as citizens are unlikely to understand the concept of freedom under the law. Philosopher Isaiah Berlin explains this conundrum in Two Concepts of Freedom (1959):

“A man normally is said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with his activities. Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others. If a man is prevented by others from doing what he could otherwise do, then to that degree he is unfree.”

Berlin’s two concepts can appear a bit confusing. For example, negative freedom is freedom without obstacles, the equivalent of laissez-faire in economic terms, whereby in the name of freedom a person can do pretty much what he wants to do not impinged by regulations or statutes of limitation.

Positive freedom plays out quite differently. Citizens are willing to give up freedoms for security, protection, stability, peace, and certain access to prosperity.

In American politics, Democrats are likely to favor regulations or positive freedom, whereas Republicans traditionally oppose such restrictions, favoring negative freedom being allowed to take unlimited risks to realize greater profit and prosperity. The ancient world would have had trouble with this distinction.

With writing came trade and a new way of thinking. It spawned culture in Egypt with the discovery that the plant, papyrus, was a superior writing surface to wet clay. The Egyptian elite soon built an economic empire in the Mediterranean through trade catalyzed by this new writing form.

Centralized authority and control along with the technology of writing ensured stability but led to a considerable gap between the aristocratic elite and the powerless commoners.

Hieroglyphics progressed slowly to an alphabet in ancient Egypt. By 2700 B.C.E. Egyptian writing had a set of some 22 hieroglyphs to represent syllables that begin with a single consonant of their language, plus a vowel to be supplied by the native speaker. These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms to write grammatical inflections, and later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names.

Seemingly alphabetic, it was never a system and was never used to encode speech. The “alphabetic” system known as the Proto-Sinaitic script is thought to have been developed in central Egypt around 1700 B.C.E. by Semitic workers. Based on letter appearances and names, it is believed to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs. This was refined from the Proto-Canaanite alphabet into the Phoenician alphabet. These early alphabets were vowel-less and still exist in scripts such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Syrian.

The alphabet changed the course of history and the use of the brain immensely. As wonderful as the alphabet is, and the early Greeks seemed to be aware of this, it constrains thinking to alphabetic thinking. Within a thousand years, it would seem perfectly natural to see individual letters merge into words, and words into sentences, and sentences into straight lines with the eyes moving from left to right. We fail to realize that this influences our perception of reality, and imprisons our thinking in a prescribed and somewhat draconian system.

With the alphabet, however, literate people now had a tool that could “cut & control” thought by asking complex questions and providing answers without getting lost in the process. This allowed those able to look at the world analytically in a step-by-step fashion to realize analytical knowledge that Greeks would call “Philosophia,” or the search for wisdom.

THE GREEK IN ALL OF US

Ancient Greek philosophy arose out of the 6th-century B.C.E. and continued through the Hellenistic period in which ancient Greece became part of the Roman Empire. It dealt with a wide variety of subjects from politics to metaphysics, biology, rhetoric, and aesthetics.

Greek philosophy has influenced Western culture since its inception. English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861 – 1947) noted that “European philosophical tradition consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” Clear and unbroken lines of influence lead from ancient Greek and Hellenistic philosophers to Early Islamic philosophy to the European Renaissance to the Age of the Enlightenment.

Philosophy, as we understand it, is a Greek creation with subsequent philosophical tradition influenced by Socrates as presented by Plato with philosophy before Socrates called “pre-Socratic philosophy” and philosophy after Alexander the Great (356 – 323 B.C.E.) referred to as “Hellenistic” philosophy.

Aristotle moved to Athens from Stageira in 367 B.C.E. and enrolled at Plato’s Academy, leaving Athens twenty years later to study botany and zoology. He became tutor to Alexander the Great, returning to Athens a decade later to establish his school, The Lyceum. At least twenty-nine of his treatises have survived on such subjects as logic, physics, optics, metaphysics, ethics, rhetoric, politics, poetry, botany, and zoology. He developed problems with his teacher, Plato, and refer to Plato’s “theory of forms” as empty words and poetic metaphors. Aristotle proved less a contemplative philosopher as was Plato, and more an empirical observer and practical experimenter.

THE SOPHISTS

The Sophists came into prominence as debaters. Protagoras (481 – 411 B.C.E.) was the earliest Sophist thinker, coining the expression, “Man is the measure of all things.” He was the first to see the advantage of rhetorical argument to win converts to your point of view whether that position was credible or not.

Protagoras cared little for the disciplined search for truth (dialectics), teaching in its place the art of persuasion (rhetoric). He concluded that a man’s knowledge of the phenomenal world, the world of the senses, was imperfect owing to that imperfection, and therefore opinion could be manipulated to one’s purposes.

A notorious Sophist boast was that “We can help you make the worst look better.” It was the dais of the politician and the early spin master. Sophists offended the purists for taking money for their instruction. Not surprisingly, they were in great demand by persons interested in political careers or enhancing their wealth and social standing in the community.




RAPHAEL SCHOOL OF ATHENS: PLATO AND ARISTOTLE IN CENTER BACKGROUND



Sophists insisted that not only are there sensory defects to vision and hearing but that they extend to what the mind processes as thinking as well as what the eye sees and the ear hears. People are afflicted with common defects, and therefore are unable to have a perfect sense of real objects in the real world.

In our continuing “cut & control” journey, we will see how magnifying glasses, microscopes, and telescopes were invented as instruments to compensate for our visionary deficiency. These instruments vastly increased our visual perception while, at the same time, hearing devices amplified and/or stored sound beyond the capacity of the human auditory apparatus to hear or remember what had been said.

Something of the mystery of life was lost with each invention, something of the imagination was dulled, and something of the subconscious was put on hold or disregarded completely. Evidence of this: art became more contrived, music more mechanistic, literature more cookbook. Remember, Ludwig Van Beethoven’s (1770 – 1827) greatest music was composed when he was stoned deaf.

Sophists had no sense that such tools would be developed in the future. They stated what they considered a limiting fact of human existence, steadfastly maintaining that human knowledge was, at best, opinion. The truth was therefore subjective and all belief systems were biased as well.

Protagoras created the Rhetorical School of Debate. It allowed students to win arguments on whatever side of the truth of the subject they preferred to argue.

PLATO

Plato (428 – 348 B.C.E.) was a philosopher and a poet and pathfinder who influenced his own time and Western thought to the present day. Founder of the Academy of Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world, he is pivotal to all such schools that would follow with his writings surviving, and incredibly intact some 2,400 years later.

Along with his teacher, Socrates (470 – 399 B.C.E.), and his most famous student, Aristotle, Plato laid the foundation for Western philosophy and science, but he also was the founder of Western religion and spirituality with fundamental contributions to Christianity through his advocates.

First of these was St. Paul, who was schooled in Plato’s philosophy. His proselytizing Christian zeal can be characterized from that perspective. Then there was St. Augustine of Hippo, who was influenced by Plato’s Hellenistic philosophy and was perhaps the most important philosopher and theologian of Christian thought. This led German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche to view Christianity as “Platonism for the people.”

Dialogue and dialectics as forms of philosophy originated with Plato. This led to Western political philosophy. He uses these devices in The Republic and Laws (360 B.C.E.) among other dialectical treatments of dialogue.

On the other hand, the most decisive influences on Plato were Socrates, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Pythagoras. The irony is that were it not for his mentioning these specific influences chances are little would be known about them.

We know Pythagoras best for his theorem for a right triangle: The square of the hypotenuse (the side opposite the right angle) is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.




The equation can be written: a2 + b2 = c2.



Note: the Pythagorean Theorem is a fundamental relation in Euclidean geometry among the three sides of a right triangle.



“He is one of the most dazzling writers in the Western literary tradition and one of the most penetrating, wide-ranging, and influential authors in the history of philosophy. He was the first thinker or writer to whom the word “philosopher” should be applied. But he was so self-conscious about how philosophy should be conceived, and what its scope and ambitions properly are, that he transformed the intellectual currents with which he grappled to a rigorous and systematic examination of ethics, politics, metaphysics, and epistemology armed with his distinct method. Few other authors in the history of Western philosophy approximate him in depth and range: perhaps only Aristotle (who studied with him), and possibly Aquinas and Kant.”

A. C. Grayling describes Plato in “The History of Philosophy” (2017)

Plato rejected the Sophist’s relativism, believing truth was absolute. He considered the Sophists to be one of the primary enemies of virtue, and he was merciless in his attacks on them. He could see old values were losing their relevance, and no new values were surfacing to replace them. Plato saw moral relativism as dangerous to the state and the people, arguing that Sophism was hollow bravado that was being taken for wisdom.

In his time, against Sophistic resurgence, he developed a new strategy and new metaphysics predicated on two systems of knowledge, each with its theory of reality.

· Human perception, according to Plato, reveals surface reality whereas reason detects an absolute reality on the real laws of nature. The changing facts of existence we perceive (sense) but the principles of reality we conceive (think).

· Sensory objects exist in the perceptual world while the principles of reality exist in the world of thought. It was his theory that knowledge was mainly recollection. He preached a morality based on the immortality of the soul.

In contrast, Sophists claimed since there is no absolute truth there is no absolute morality as everything is relative. Sophist relativism has found supporters to the present day.

At the heart of Sophism, concepts and ideas were changeable elements. Therefore, moral values were relative: morality is in the mind of the times. What is considered good and valuable in one society might be scorned and ridiculed in another. More sophisticated was the idea that knowledge was equally relative and that what counted as knowledge was simply a particular point of view. This construction of knowledge and bias, Sophists insist, is a product of society’s mind of the time.

Sophists believed that man and his values were at the center of his interpretation of the universe. The emphasis Sophists placed on rhetoric came from the realization that the relationship between speech and what is conceived to be the truth is far from simple.

Speech is not a simple matter of presenting the facts, since the considerable reorganization of the facts is involved in the way they are selected and sequenced. It was this difference between rhetoric and reality that led Plato to contrast rhetoric with philosophy, and then to condemn it.

The Sophist point was that the elements of thinking remain much the same whether they are being used to support or attack a rationalist’s position. This was (and is) an arguable view but to consider that in 450 B.C.E. somebody should be playing with ideas in this “cut & control” way seems rather remarkable.

Plato stands tallest in Greek thought. He developed a unified theory involving most branches of learning such as politics, law, and the arts, as well as the nature of the world, all rising out of a tripartite soul.

In The Republic, and The Phaedrus, he describes the soul as divided into three parts, labeled appetitive (craving sensual pleasure), spirited (pride in work), and rational (doing the right thing). This he offered as a way of explaining our psychological complexity, and partly to justify philosophy as the highest of all pursuits, as it corresponds to the highest part of the soul, the rational part.

As often happens, leaders with ideas rise out of the most crushing periods of history. This was also true of Plato. He was largely influenced by Athens's crushing defeat by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War (432 – 404 B.C.E.), which ruined Athens.

Plato had a biased against democracy because he believed the demagoguery of its leadership had driven Athens into that war and defeat, only to come out of it imprisoned in the horrifying excesses of the subsequent dictatorship. It led him to propose an ideal form of government, which was the utopian idea of the “Philosopher King.” This ruler would have absolute power to act selflessly in the interest of the state and people because he and his entourage would have no possessions or temptations to do otherwise.

He felt that any philosophical system had to also explain the natural world. As the archetypal theoretician, he believed the structure of matter could be worked out from logical principles with no need for the observation of nature. His famous student Aristotle (384 – 322 B.C.E.) would think differently.

ARISTOTLE

Aristotle studied at Plato’s Athenian Academy for twenty years. After the death of Plato, he began to consider the problem Plato had left unresolved: how the mind that is superior and from the world acquires an understanding of matter. In Plato’s view, the purpose of philosophy was to train the intellect to see beyond appearances and to grasp the higher world of what he called “Forms.”

Counterbalancing Plato’s idealism, Aristotle favored close observation of the natural phenomenon. He saw careful classification of these observations as the key to making sense of the subject of matter.

The son of a doctor, Aristotle was probably brought up to pursue a medical career, which was reflected in his use of biology as a paradigm for making sense of the world. As a result, his philosophy is much more empirically oriented than Plato’s. For example, Aristotle rejected Plato’s idea that we can only make sense of the world by appealing to invisible entities beyond it. His influence on subsequent generations would be immense.

When Aristotle moved away from Athens into Asia Minor (Macedonia), he also moved away from Plato's influence, especially his views on the observation of nature. His techniques shaped the way to marshal thoughts and weigh the evidence before deciding anything. He formulated the approved rules for how to think and how not to make mistakes.

Problems were submitted to a sequential rational process. How to arrive at an understanding was to process contradictory, inaccurate, and incomplete definitions until a consistent definition or pattern emerged. Deductive or a priori reasoning, that is, from general observations (self-evident principles) to particular assessment of those observations became the standard of thinking.

Aristotle’s new method was called “syllogism.” It was a logical formula used to test the validity of reasoning, consisting of a major premise, a minor premise, and a self-evident conclusion. From these two premises, the conclusion necessarily followed and was therefore inevitably true if the premises were granted to be true.

The syllogism was used to simplify complex reasoning into its simpler logical parts. The power of this system was that it allowed the thinker to establish the truth about nature even if these truths could not be tested personally or directly. In other words, it meant the establishment of truth by presumption or presupposition through experience. To wit: all that shines in the dark is fire; stars shine in the dark; therefore, stars are fire.

This method allowed the observer to see if his mode of thought was consistent. The discipline became known as “logic.” With it, Aristotle offered the tremendous tool of a world-altering power. It taught a standardized method for “cutting & controlling” the world to have it make sense by observing it in an orderly way and analyzing it with some confidence. This definition of nature would rule investigations into the mysteries of the natural world for the next 1500 years.

Aristotle also constructed a system to explain the heavens. The earth was the center of the universe. This construct would rule all thought regarding the relationship of the earth to the sun and other planets until the time of the Polish astronomer Nicolas Copernicus (1473 – 1543), the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642), German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571 – 1630), and the English mathematician Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727). Aristotle opened the door for increased specialization, widening the gulf between those with knowledge and those without it once again.

Our thinking is a product of the Aristotelian system of logic. Another way of looking at this is that logic cuts at the root of freethinking before it would become anarchic and chaotic.

Religion, mainly in the form of Roman Catholic dominance would reify into church doctrine and dogma Aristotle’s sense of the universe and the relationship of the earth to the sun. Much anguish and even bloodshed would follow before the works of these astronomers would penetrate church ignorance.

Alas, it would take centuries for the human mind to be given a second chance. Now, the world is totally in reverse of such limitations with a surge in theories and disciplines from quantum mechanics to chaos theory, from the Big Bang and Dark Matter to string theory. We have a new perspective on time, space, matter, and energy. No longer do we see the universe as a tidy place, or nailed down to preconceived notions.

Indeed, the universe cannot fit into an easy reference to God or any theology. Yet, Nowhere Man hides in the shadows as science is now tempted to play the role of high church when it comes to global warming and creationism. It seems we never move too far from a penchant for absolutes.

NEXT -- NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND – PART FOURTEEN – THE AGE OF FAITH