The first wave
of philosophers looked out on a strange world, filled with wonders and
mysterious occurrences. Phoebus drove
his sun chariot across the sky each day.
The great god Zeus, hidden behind the clouds, hurled his thunderbolts in
rage. Boreas came roaring out of the far North to bring us cold in winter. Poseidon sent tsunamis, hurricanes and
tropical storms. Hephaestus worked at
his smithy deep within the earth. Volcanoes were his smokestacks. The world of
thought, too, was a maze of myths and legends, structured by stirring
narratives of gods and heroes. All the different peoples had their own
Hercules, their own stories about how the animals were tamed, how boats were
invented, how they acquired the bow and arrow, and so on with the special tools
and abilities of each tribe of people. Not all these stories were logically
compatible with each other.
The first
philosophers sought to comprehend the universe in a way that transcended
individual and tribal idiosyncrasies because they were puzzled by the variety
of explanations given for the same things.
Different peoples had different stories.
They were the first to look for the causes of things in the natural
order. One early Greek philosopher,
wandering in the hills of Lebanon, noticed shells sticking out of the sandy
rock hundreds of feet above the level of the sea. No doubt there was a story about this. Perhaps the great sea god, Poseidon, choked
on some oysters and when Triton hit him on the back, all the shells flew up and
landed on the hills. But the curious
Greek dug into the hill and found that the shells not only littered the
hillside, but continued to appear as he dug.
The penny dropped. These hills were once under water, and this meant
that supposedly eternal, unalterable mountains can rise, and perhaps even
fall. Philosophers started by taking
up an increasingly critical stance toward all inherited beliefs. They began to debunk myths and legends as
superstitions. The conception of the world began to change, but few would know
of it for a long time.
The first wave
of philosophers turned away from myths and legends about the operations of gods
and goddesses. They acquired a taste for logical consistency and wanted to
understand the universe in a rational fashion, designing rationality itself,
and what counts as good reasoning, as they went along. The reason we now think about magic, the
occult and the paranormal the way we do, is because philosophy first assigned
normality to the world as we understand it by reference to natural processes
and universal laws. First, the poets explained the world by stories of gods,
and tried to justify gods' ways to human beings, poetic theogony and theodicy. The first wave of philosophers began to break
from anthropocentric forms of reference and sought standards of objectivity and
sound reasoning around which a body of truth could form, more secure than what
could be found in the confused opinions and beliefs of the individuals, tribes,
and cultures that surrounded them.
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