Chapter 59 Philosophy in the Age of Greek Tragedy—HELLAS Greece and the Fate of Philosophy

Philosophy in the Age of Greek Tragedy ONE HELLAS GREECE AND THE FATE OF PHILOSOPHY 1.1 Philosophy and national health Some people are against all philosophy, and their words are sometimes worth listening to, especially when they advise the German sick mind to reject metaphysics and replace it with purification through the body like Goethe (Gethe, 1749-1832), Or even more so when, like Wagner, he is sanctified through music.The good physician of a nation repudiates philosophy; whoever wishes to defend philosophy, therefore, must point out why a healthy nation needs and uses philosophy.If he could point this out, perhaps the sick would actually gain a lesson in why philosophy is precisely what is harmful to them.

It is true that there are convincing examples of how health can be achieved without philosophy at all, or with an extremely superficial, almost childlike use of it, and that is how the Romans in their heyday lived without philosophy.But where is the example of a sickly nation regaining its lost health through philosophy?If philosophy has ever shown itself to help, to save, to prevent, it is in the healthy, and in the sick it only makes him weaker and weaker.If a nation has been torn apart, and the bonds of its constituent elements loosened, philosophy has never reunited these individuals with the whole.

If a man wishes to stand on his own feet, to build around himself a self-sufficient fence, philosophy will always isolate him still more, and in this isolation he will be ruined.Philosophy is dangerous if it does not exist fully and fully, and only the physical fitness of a people (but not every people) can make philosophy fully complete. Let us now consider a most convincing example of what may be called health in a people. Hellas—Greece, as a truly healthy people, whose people practiced philosophy, and practiced it more than any other people; thus they defended philosophy once and for all.They did not stop in time, and even in their dying years they still behaved like ardent disciples of philosophy, though they had now regarded philosophy as nothing but a pious examination of Christian dogma and a sacred quarrel.By failing to stop in time, they greatly diminished their service to those wild and untamed offspring who, in the prime of their untamed youth, had to be entangled in that skillfully woven net .

The Greeks, on the other hand, knew the right time to begin, and demonstrated more clearly than any other people how one must begin philosophy.That is to say, not in times of misery, as some who deduce philosophy from depressed states of mind suppose, but in times of bliss, in mature adulthood, out of the triumphant elation of manliness come out.The fact that the Greeks engaged in philosophy at such a time just enlightens us to understand what philosophy is and what philosophy should be, and it also enlightens us to understand the Greeks themselves.If the Greeks were, as our moral philistines imagine today, no more than sober artisans and happy-go-lucky sensualists, or, as ignorant daydreams like to say, sunk in a fog of self, If they breathe deeply and feel deeply, then the source of philosophy will never be revealed in them; at most, there will be only a stream that loses sand in an instant or evaporates into mist on them, and there will never be any proud waves. A mighty river, and in our eyes, Greek philosophy is such a river.

1.2 The Greek Nation and the Typical Philosophical Mind It has not been tiresomely pointed out how well the Greeks were able to discover and learn from the foreign lands of the East, and indeed received much from them.However, if people put together the so-called teacher from the East and the possible student from Greece, for example, Zoroastrian (Zoraster, the founder of Zoroastrianism in ancient Persia) and Heraclitus (who believed that fire is the original principle of all things) Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher, juxtaposed the Hindu believers with the Eleatics (Eleatics who advocated an unchanging ontology), the Egyptians with Empedocles (Empedocles who believed in the immortality of the soul), or even the Anathes It is really a spectacle to put Xagoras (Anaxagoras, the dualist of the universe) among the Jews, and Pythagoras (Pythagoras, who emphasized the harmonious order of the universe) among the Chinese.As far as specific cases are concerned, such juxtaposition does not explain any problems.But so long as we are not tortured with the inference that it follows that philosophy was imported into Greece from without and did not grow naturally in Greece itself, or even that philosophy was external to the nature of the Greeks, we can only bring disaster to the Greeks and so on, then we can still bear the above general thinking.

It would be folly to assume that the Greeks had only one indigenous culture.Rather, they absorbed all the living cultures of other peoples.And the reason why they have gone so far is precisely because they are good at starting and ending where other peoples go.They are masters of learning.We should be like them, to live, not to learn, to learn from our neighbors, to use everything we have learned as a support, to use them to climb higher, and to climb higher than our neighbors. It is of little use to trace the beginnings of philosophy, for everywhere the beginnings are crude, primitive, empty, ugly.Only the higher stages of anything are appreciable.Anyone who prefers to study Egyptian and Persian philosophy rather than Greek philosophy because they are perhaps "more primitive," and certainly older, is just as reckless and unwise as those who are ashamed of the beauty and depth of Greek philosophy. Myths don't rest assured until one day they can trace Greek mythology back to its very beginnings, namely physical details like sun, lightning, storm, fog.They also think that our Aryan belief in the one firmament is purer than the Greek polytheism.Everywhere the road to the beginning leads to barbarism.

Whoever has dealings with the Greeks should always keep in mind that an unbridled thirst for knowledge leads as much to barbarism as a hatred of knowledge.The Greeks, on the other hand, had an ideal need and concern for all values ​​in life, which restrained their insatiable thirst for knowledge—they wanted to experience immediately what they learned.The Greeks also practiced philosophy as cultured men, and for cultural purposes they were able to get rid of any arrogance, not to recreate the elements of philosophy and science, but to work at once to enrich, enhance, sublate, and purify them. Introduced elements, they thus become creators in a higher sense and in a purer range.That is, they created the "typical philosophical mind" of which all subsequent generations have produced nothing substantial.

1.3 The Inevitability of Greek Culture and Philosophy Face ancient Greek masters Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Enpei Empedocles, Democritus, Socrates, such an astonishingly idealized philosophical group, every nation would be ashamed of itself.All these people are a whole, a group of elephants hewn out of a huge stone.A strict necessity runs through their minds and their characters.They didn't have any routines, because neither philosophy nor academia was a profession at the time.They were all in utter solitude when they alone lived only for knowledge.They all possessed that uniquely virtuous power of the ancients, by which they prevailed over all posterity, which impelled them to discover their own forms, and to shape them further through transfiguration to the subtlest and most possible. .They do not come across any ready-made model that can come to their aid and alleviate their difficulties.Therefore, they together constitute what Schopenhauer (Nineteenth Century German Philosopher Schopenhauer) called the "Republic of Genius" as opposed to the so-called "Republic of Scholars": one giant calls out to another giant across the gap of time, Ignoring the wanton clamor of the midgets crawling beneath their feet, the sublime spiritual dialogue continued.

I am going to say a little, of course, of what our modern hard of hearing may be able to understand about this sublime spiritual dialogue.It seems to me that in this dialogue these ancient philosophers, from Thales to Socrates, have touched, albeit in the most generalized form, everything that constitutes the quintessentially Greek spirit that we are about to examine.In their dialogues, as in their personalities, they manifested the great features of Greek creativity, and the whole history of Greece is a dim imprint of these features, a vague imitation of them.If we interpret the whole life of the Greek nation rightly, we shall at last find the reflection of the same image, the splendor which shone from the highest genius of the Greek nation.The earliest philosophic experience on Greek soil, the approbation of the "seven sages," has given the image of the Greeks a memorable and clear outline.Other nations produce saints, and Greece produces philosophers.

Some people are right. To define a nation, it is better to look at the way it recognizes and respects these great figures than what great figures it has.In other times, in other places, philosophers were occasional, solitary wanderers in the most hostile environment, who either stalked or stole and fought.Only among the Greeks are philosophers not accidental.They appeared in the sixth and fifth centuries BC, surrounded by the great dangers and temptations of worldliness, as if with solemn steps out of the cave of Trophonius, into the prosperity, greed, luxury and indulgence of the Greek colonies.We may surmise that they then came as Warners, and that they embraced the very same purpose for which tragedy was then born, and which the Orphic Mystery in the grotesque hieroglyphs of its ritual the same purpose implied.The judgments of these philosophers concerning life and existence have much more content than any judgments of modern times, because they are faced with a full life, and they are not like us, the emotions of thinkers are pursued by the freedom of life. Confused by the split between the desire for beauty, beauty, greatness, and the urge to seek truth (which asks only: what is life worth?).

What philosophers are expected to accomplish in an authentic culture of uniform style cannot be guessed from our situation and experience, since we do not have such a culture.Only a culture like that of Greece can answer this question of the philosopher's task, only it can justify philosophy as I have said, because only it understands and can prove why and how the philosopher is not an accidental , random, erratic wanderer.There is an iron necessity that holds the philosopher to true culture. But what if this culture is not readily available?The philosopher, then, is an uncertain and frightening comet.With luck, he might shine like a star in our solar system.Only in the Greeks is he not a comet; so—the Greeks can justify the philosopher.