The Origins of Philosophy

From the Hellenistic age down to our own, Aristotle and Plato have been very widely studied in "the West." Aristotle studied under Plato; Plato and others sat adoringly at the feet of Socrates; Socrates learned among the last of the pre-Socratics; and the first pre-Socratics, as we all know, sprang, fully-formed and philosophizing away, from the brow of Zeus.

What?! There was no philosophy before the pre-Socratics? Yes, that's exactly what it says here, on p 10 of Wisdom of the West by Bertrand Russell, London, 1959:

"Philosophy and science, as we now know them, are Greek inventions[...]Philosophy and science begin with Thales of Miletus in the early sixth century BC."

Okay then. That's all cleared up. And what exactly is philosophy? Russell covers that too, same book, same page:

"Philosophy begins when someone asks a general question."

Got it!

Seriously, though: although I find Russell to be eminently sensible almost all of the time, what he is saying here is absurd. Even though, as far as I have been able to determine -- I don't know how far that is -- very few "Western" scholars seem to be saying anything different about how philosophy, or at least "Western" philosophy, began.

One of the few exceptions is Arthur Schopenhauer. In his Parerga und Paralipomena, part I, in the chapter "Fragmente zur Geschichte der Philosophie," in the section on the Pre-Socratics (Saemtliche Werke, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt aM, 4th printing, 1996, vol 4, pp 45-56), Schopenhauer points out how some of the positions of the pre-Socratics are anticipated in Egypt and in the Brahmanic philosophy of the Vedas. He even mentions (p 56) Apuleius' assertion that Pythagoras had traveled as far as India, and been personally schooled by Brahmans.

You might say that it's absurd to accept Apuleius' account, written well over half a millennium after Pythagoras' death, as anything more than an amusing anecdote. And you might be right about that. But is it more absurd than assuming that no Brahmanic, or Egyptian, or Phoenician, or Babylonian, or other philosophy found its way to Greece before the career of Thales was over?

I submit that what began with the Greek pre-Socratics is that the individual tidbits of wisdom began to be preserved in connection with the names of individual wise people. A very significant development, and even more so to authors concerned about receiving the proper credit for their work than it may be to the public at large.

But to arbitrarily advance several thousand large steps past that and flatly assert that before Thlaes, no-one, anywhere, had ever stopped and asked what it all means, is, I must say so in all directness, thoroughly absurd.

And I say so even though I have only found one Western philosopher, Schopenhauer, who also says so. I have found many "Eastern" scholars, and laypeople from all parts of the Earth, who agree with me on this point. It's not the only point in which I feel that Schopenhauer and I are a bit lonely. There's also the matter of Hegel. There are so very many perfectly intelligent scholars who admire Hegel so very much. And yet, when I read Hegel, I see what Schopenhauer describes: an empty-headed charlatan, a pseudo-intellectual par excellence, a sheer horse's ass who is shamelessly wasting everybody's time. A Sam Harris of the early 19th century.

There is yet another point where I find myself and many, many other laypeople on one side, and almost every single Western scholar on the other: the scholars almost all state quite flatly that it is quite certain that Jesus existed, and is not merely a fictional character in a myth, a character perhaps cobbled together from the biographies of John the Baptist and some other real people.

I do not take it at all lightly when the academic consensus is so overwhelmingly against me. It troubles me, it truly does. But no academic consensus will persuade me to stop thinking for myself.

Russell on the Origins of Philosophy

Bertrand Russell's Wisdom of the West is a very, very cool book. In part because Russell is a very, very cool writer, and also because editor Paul Foulkes, designer Edward Wright and artist John Piper provide it with lots and lots of groovy pictures, one or more on every single page. As Peter Sloterdijk clearly knows, wide-ranging surveys of philosophical topics can be greatly jazzed-up with groovy illustrations.

So, I love Russell's book. I'm going to criticize it a little bit, but there's not a single book I've read which I wouldn't criticize in some way, which I could not imagine being even better. This one and some ones by Saul Bellow and William Gaddis and William Gass come close. You know what? Gass' On Being Blue, you can count that as being perfect in my book, as one I wouldn't change in any way.

So, there's one single book I've read which I consider perfect.

Okay, there's Gravity's Rainbow and JR. Who am I, am I gonna improve one of those? No.

Okay, so there are lots of books I wouldn't know how to improve. Bernhard's Ja, Runciman's trilogy on the Crusades.

I'm getting dizzy and this is going nowhere. Back to Russell.

p. 10: "Philosophy begins when someone asks a general question, and so does science. The first people to evince this kind of curiosity were the Greeks. Philosophy and science, as we know them, are Greek inventions."

Sorry Bertie, but I simply can't accept that sweeping statement. The earliest people who, to our knowledge, wrote down the names of philosophers and associated certain names with certain ideas and insights and experiments, were Greeks. But the earliest Greek philosophers of whom we know, we don't have any of their writings, in some cases we don't actually know whether they could write, we know of them, the pre-Socratics, only through the descriptions of later writers. All the earliest writings about their work fill one volume, not much bigger than Wisdom of the West -- with no space taken up by illustrations, admittedly, but on the other hand much space taken up by translation from Greek into German. We don't even know Socrates through anything he wrote, if he ever wrote anything. And back to the pre-Socratics, we don't know whether there were once written descriptions of still earlier philosophers, or actual writings by earlier philosophers, we don't know whether such writings still actually exist, waiting patiently for archaeologists or archivists to dig them up or find them in palimpsest, and we for damn sure don't that Greeks were the first to philosophize. This whole topic is defined by mountainous heaps of we don't know surrounding our little pebbles of knowledge, and yet you think you know for certain that science and philosophy were Greek inventions, that they sprang full-formed from Greece like Athena from the brow of Zeus? There was nothing like it previously, nothing, in Egypt or Mesopotamia or among the Hittites or Chinese or Indians or in the Western Hemisphere or Africa or among the caves of Bronze-Age Europe or anywhere out on the steppes or in the Himalayas? We know this? Bertie. It simply won't do, old bean. It's so unlike you to claim something like this with no reason. One of the reasons I like you so much is that you hardly ever do something like this. We don't know.

PS, 8 October 2019: I should've looked into the matter a little more closely before I dissed Bertie like that. Amazing as it is, science and philosophy, as we know them, do seem to have been invented by Greek people around 700 or 600 BC. People certainly may have thought about such things earlier, but when it comes to writing these thought down and making concerted, systematic efforts to accomplish things by such avenues of thought, we have no evidence that earlier people did it. Sorry, Bertie.