Wolfgang Korsus
Dipl.Ing. NT , Astrophysicist
Klingenberg 40
25451 Quickborn
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Part 15 ……..I’M GOING FROM MYTH TO LOGOS a beautiful path….?
Feelings are a precious gift from our „CPU“! I am currently enjoying this state very much in my upper room……because my written material is already very close to a certain part of human history, which is called „Myth TO LOGOS“.
I think there should be a few explanations from my side, then the new posts will slide better into the memory of your ⇒ CPU
In myth, gods were usually seen as the causes of the creation of the world and natural phenomena. These stories were not meant metaphorically, but suggested that they were of course true. Please be a little more precise: people of this era behaved like small children, they took the myths for granted and did not even think of asking the „question of truth“, because the concept of truth naturally presupposes the concept of falsity. Only where there is a falsehood can there be a truth. Without the awareness that an idea or speech can be false, i.e. that it does not accurately reflect reality, there is no awareness of truth.
From these remarks it may have become clear to some of you that philosophical and scientific thinking have the same origin. They serve the self-orientation of humans in the world with the help of their reason. However, philosophy and science not only „have“ a claim to truth, but this is also „verifiable“. Unlike other sciences, philosophy does not have a limited subject area, such as biology with its focus on living nature, but asks about the world as a whole. This is, as it were, what philosophy and religion have in common. In this respect, they genuinely touch each other.
‼ Myth and logos are therefore both methods of explaining the world. ‼
After the Sumerians and Egyptians, we come to a part of cultural and intellectual history that is closer and more familiar to us. It is about the Greek gods: Zeus, Hera, the beautiful Aphrodite, Hermes, Apollo, all names we have encountered before.
The story of Odysseus, the battle for Troy, a myth from the depths of European history. We are slowly but surely coming around. It often gets a little uncomfortable. We don’t like to talk about ourselves, if at all, then only under the heading of „Me, myself and I“. The ego becomes a unit of optimization.
But back to the topic. The thesis will be that our culture, Western civilization, has its roots in Greek antiquity. We are talking about a time that Karl Jaspers described as the Axis period (800 to 200 BC) and as a secondary effect of the Axis period (up to 200 AD). According to Jaspers, a historical self-understanding emerged during this period.
‼ We became the people we are today. And not only in the West, but also in the Orient, India and China.‼
Confucius and Lao Tzu were active in the Middle Kingdom at this time, and Chinese philosophies were formed. The teachings of Zarathustra spread in Mesopotamia and those of Buddha in India.
Western culture was shaped by Homer’s epics and the Greek philosophers. The latter created the foundations of the European-Western world view. The birth of Jesus and the Roman philosophers should not be forgotten in this context. It was an epoch in which people’s thinking and actions changed massively.
I ask myself: What was so decisively new there?
We come from periods that span thousands of years. There was the Neolithic revolution, the transition from hunter-gatherers to sedentary farmers. Then the cities emerged, the first urban centers, the first advanced civilizations. But those who were of great importance for our part of the world, especially the Sumerians and Egyptians, disappeared again at some point.
Why? Apparently they overused the land. And then they moved on, were conquered, displaced or assimilated by other peoples.The fact is that both the Sumerian and all other subsequent civilizations put a lot of strain on the area of the Near East, i.e. the area of the Fertile Crescent. That is why it looks the way it does today. The land was deforested, agriculture was too intensive.What happened is what humans will do until the end, they live against NATURE!
Why? Because the cities demanded a massive consumption of resources. But these resources were finite and eventually gone. This is what happened: The hydraulic cultures in the Near East – apart from the Egyptian one, they did it better – had the problem that it simply didn’t rain enough as water consumption increased. Forests were cleared. Irrigation with river water from the mountains led to salinization of the soil through evaporation. This happened first in the upper reaches of the Euphrates and Tigris, and later in the lower reaches. The land became increasingly saline and less and less usable for agriculture. Harvests became increasingly meagre. People simply starved to death. What we see today of these cultures are the ruins in the deserts, the stranded wrecks of human progress at that time. That’s how I see it … and that’s how you can see it. We can research history and ask how cultures have passed and what can we learn from them? The Greeks are interesting in this context. Greek history begins with geography. The Greeks can’t be blamed for this at first. Their mainland is quite hilly and there are many small islands out at sea. But even on these islands, the population grew and cities became increasingly „better“. These urban centers were completely dependent on the surrounding countryside and therefore had to be supplied from this land, agriculture was optimized and expanded. The number of goats grew and slash-and-burn agriculture was promoted. Greece was threatened by what had already happened to the Sumerians. The people on the Euphrates and Tigris had simply moved away because they did not know what was happening to nature there. The Greeks, on the other hand, had a „hunch“ and did something about it. How could they know that? How were they so much smarter than the Sumerians?
In Greece, with Homer and the Greek natural philosophers, something took place that is referred to as the transition from myth to logos. A brief explanation:
A myth is a story, partly true, partly not true, but in any case a kind of compass of a culture. The myth provides the orientation, the direction of an entire culture. The ancient myth of the Greeks has to do with their gods and the great heroic stories of classical times.
Watch out …..In this „mythological“ view, there is at least one passage in which a HUMAN stands up to the gods. Do you remember? That’s right, it was Odysseus. He tried to outwit the others with cunning and trickery and the help of a goddess. This is how he always got out of the danger zones. In the end, there was always a happy return home. In very simple terms, this pattern of action could be applied to the entire culture of the ancient Greeks. In the myth, a human being, a hero or demigod, tries to emancipate himself from the gods.
Accordingly, the Greeks were the first culture to try to understand the world through their own powers. From this understanding, they have new means of dealing with this world differently. Therefore one more time ::: Odysseus is the first figure to appear in the Greek myths who attempts to emancipate himself from the gods. Man tries to understand the world with his own powers: The Greeks take the first step from myth to logos.
‼Finally
In place of mere endurance, of being at the mercy of others, there is a self-determined will to change. For the first time, man stands up to nature. The old Greek story of Prometheus, which I have already mentioned, fits into this pattern. He illegally passed on fire to humans and thus enabled them to go against the gods. This is now becoming the true spirit of the times in Ancient Greece. For the first time, people wanted more than just to say monotonously: „Yes, the gods will sort it out.“ This is tantamount to a transformation of reason, and it is happening. More radical questions are now being asked, but the gods no longer provide answers because it is becoming increasingly clear that the gods are just images of our projections. Our gods laugh, they break the marriage. They do everything we do. They are not actually guardians of virtue who tell us how we should live. Who then tells us how we should live, how we should deal with NATURE? The Greeks are the ones who get to the heart of these questions. They formulate them clearly, with damned precision and curiosity. ……The first to do so are the Greek „NATURAL PHILOSOPHES“. They search for the eternal reasons, for the unchanging background of nature. They see that nature changes, that new things happen. But what is the eternal, what is the unchanging? What can I really rely on without having to consult the gods?The doctrine of the four elements has its origins in Greek philosophy. But be careful, the doctrine of the four elements cannot be equated with the natural sciences of the 21st century ‼
Of course, the transition from myth to logos did not happen overnight. Thales of Miletus (624 BC-547 BC), who is considered the first philosopher of the Western tradition, still reveals strong mythological ties in his description of the element of water when he says that water is the original form of everything. Of course, he did not mean this literally in the sense that everything comes from water. But it was clear to him that water as an element is something significant. It comes in different forms, but is always just water. Life is obviously also created in the wet element. Perhaps even the whole earth floats in water. Hey, excuse me? Those were the ideas of Thales. Incidentally, he repeatedly pointed out – the evidence of the pre-Socratic natural philosophers is not so extensive – that much of what he talked about came from Babylon or Egypt. Even philosophy itself. According to Thales, scientific thinking, the scientific basis for logical thinking, came from Egypt. ⇨ ⇨ ⇨
Let’s not forget „him“, he was followed by Anaximenes. His primal element was air, Heraclitus of Ephesus named fire as the primal element and finally Empedocles completed the list of elements with earth. So, let’s take a deep breath and digest the natural philosophers, but there’s still time for a little something. According to Empedocles, these four elements fill the entire space without any gaps. There is no vacuum… …never heard of one!
The aforementioned elements are original, i.e. not created, so they have always been there and are imperishable, say the masters. Nor can they transform into each other – as Heraclitus did – and are therefore not traceable to a primordial substance. For Empedocles, therefore, there is no emergence from nothing and no absolute end. With his description, he introduced a concept of the structure of the entire physical world from a certain number of elements into natural philosophy for the first time. This already has a scientific character.
On the other hand, he links the four elements back to Greek „mythology“, especially as he assigns them to the deities Zeus, Hera, Hades and Nestis. For me, this is (was) not yet so logical in the sense of a rational scientific explanation. But at least one had the faint feeling that these elementary building blocks could explain how the world works.
The Greeks were followed shortly afterwards by a totally materialistic school of thought that did without any myths. The atomists. Leukipp and Democritus say that there are indivisible particles – atomoi – and nothingness. That’s it for the time being. Nothing else exists. These atoms are put together. This is how the various properties of the world come about. The liquids, the solids, the gases and the transformation by fire – we don’t need any of that. It all just depends on the speed at which the particles collide. I say appreciatively that the atomists were already thinking very far ahead. In other words, a complete „de-divinization“ of the world is taking place here. The myth, a meaningful narrative or a narrative formally charged with meaning, becomes a description that is free of subjective qualities. In fact, in this period of Greek antiquity – let’s say around 400 BC, perhaps even a little earlier – a subject-object split takes place. On the one side is nature. On the other side are the subjects who somehow behave within it.
All of a sudden, distinctions are made between matter and structure, between the individual and the whole and the role of the individual in the whole. Read it again and it will sink in!
While Plato still idealistically glorifies everything, Aristotle says: „The world is at our disposal“. It should be used by us in its entirety to our advantage. We, humans, can do what we want with nature. And what we should want is, of course, the good! I doubt what I have just written and it is also quickly clear that this does not always work, which is why the Greek scholars found ethics on the philosophical side, i.e. a theory of morality. How could one define the good? However, many radical questions were raised that had never been formulated in this way before. Greek philosophy posed questions that mankind has been varying again and again ever since, and. …This is not good. But we know the Western answer.
‼ That is the world we live in. ‼
As human beings, we have the task and the opportunity to change the world around us. That is the real impetus for what we later call the Anthropocene.
„I see this cornucopia of the world in front of me, grab it and change it the way I want it to be“.
That’s what the Greeks did, quite consistently in fact. They colonized islands. They founded cities. They expanded these cities and turned them into very successful trading centers.
I can understand that they sat around like children, no, around the Mediterranean. Let’s now look at our alarm clock of time, which says we are a few centuries before the birth of the Christ Child …. and just take a look at what is happening in the Mediterranean region. We have Athens and the Greek colonies in southern France, Sicily and southern Italy. What are they doing there? They are trading with other peoples. We are already in the middle of a semi-globalized era. Above all, we can see that mankind is accessing the resource „environment“ with increasing intensity and determination. People do not live on bread alone, they also need to drink something, i.e. wine is grown. People want meat, vegetables and fruit. Ever larger areas in the surrounding countryside supply the cities. In the beginning, it’s wonderful to be well supplied. More and more suppliers compete with each other and demand increases. The economy raises its noble ? head! Suddenly, the simple bartering practiced until then – you give me, I give you – turns into an economy with a new „thing !??“ that grows for eternity.
„:MONEY““““‼ ‼ ‼ MONEY …….a beginning of superlatives
It was around 2700 years ago that the barter trade was slowly dying, when the people of Lydia in the west of modern-day Turkey (probably Greek at the time) came up with an idea: they struck lumps of gold flat and stamped them with their king’s stamp: this was a kind of insurance and said that the precious metal was genuine. These gold disks are considered to be the first coins in the world. The idea caught on, and a few centuries later people all over the Mediterranean were paying with coins. Buying and selling became so much easier.
It may not yet rule the world, but it has gained speed, which means it is becoming more widespread and increasingly important. Instead of the Anthropocene, we could also speak of the Capitalocene. This certainly applies to the last 30 years of our current culture. It started back then, when people began to think „economically“. Suddenly, the flow of trade and goods became extremely important. Even the ancient Greeks became increasingly dependent on what came from outside, on imports. If changes caused these trade flows to stop, a highly specialized and complex structure like a city would no longer be able to react adequately to them and supply itself. What does this remind us of?
‼ Act locally, think globally. ‼
Really? All these problems that we face today were already there back then. Many a person grabs their CPU and is surprised.
It is the archaeologists who recognize very clearly today during excavations that the Greeks put a lot of strain on their environment. It actually began in a simple way. I’ll give you a list: if you want to farm, the forest has to go. But if there are no trees left and there is heavy rainfall, slopes tend to slide down. Then we have the worst case scenario, because people are often involved. The fertile topsoil slides away. Only meagre food grows on the rest. The only thing that can still be kept on such soils are ……. goats. And they eat what’s left. Natural land users such as wild goats are not a problem under normal circumstances because their population is kept small by predators. But when goats are protected from their natural hunters, they multiply rapidly. After a while, all that remains is what I call goat country. We can observe this everywhere today, perhaps on vacation, on the Mediterranean. There were a few olive groves here and there. But essentially the entire Mediterranean region is barren, an agricultural diaspora.
Fire, deforestation, goats. That happened everywhere. In the end, the Greek cities were left empty-handed. Even though they knew what they were doing. Solon [The Solonian reforms in 594 BC fundamentally changed the Athenian political system. Solon freed the peasants from debt bondage and divided the citizenry into four wealth classes. This transformed Athens from an aristocracy to a timocracy]. In the new „Council of 400“, more citizens were to have a say in politics. In Athens in 590 BC, for example, he tried to stop hillside cultivation and deforestation. The idea was to create terraced olive groves. But his proposal did not succeed. Why? Because the local producers of agricultural products looked to their immediate advantage and simply carried on working until the slope was gone. The spatial limitations of Greek communities meant that there were no more usable resources in the surrounding area. The towns literally shrank and died. This is what happened to many of the colonies. Either they were conquered, which was the one variant we all know from the history books. Or, the second, much more unpleasant development: they failed on their own. A successful culture is unstable when it has reached maximum resource consumption. At this peak, every culture is unstable because it can no longer absorb the smallest fluctuations in the environment. In other words, you borrow from nature all the time until it gives you nothing more. Then it’s over! This conflict between man and nature was already taking place in Ancient Greece. Not yet at the level of modern science and technology, but at the level of: here is a human being, and he wants something from nature. There is already an inkling that know-how can be produced with the brain of this being, but the idea of know-why is still not very well developed. The success of a culture on the one hand versus nature on the other. The sphere of nature against the sphere of man.
The laws of nature versus the goals and purposes of humans. Incidentally, nature doesn’t care what we want. It knows no success. It is just there. Of course, the same thing that happened to the Greeks also happened to the Romans on a much larger scale afterwards.
The thousand-year-old Imperium Romanum clearly demonstrates this success on a – let’s say – semi-globalized scale. The Mare Nostrum – our Mediterranean – was the Romans‘. They conquered the countries around it one by one. All the major cultural developments in the Roman world took place around this sea. By the way, a small side note: the climate in the heyday of the Roman Empire was the best Europe ever had. It was pleasant, not so cold, balanced. My point is that the Romans did the same as the Greeks. They consumed resources. And they did it over a longer period of time and on a much larger scale. The Romans used their provinces, the conquered countries. They simply used more and more resources. In the beginning, they used those of southern Italy, according to the motto „fire, deforestation, wheat, goats“ – bang. And everything that wasn’t on the trees by three was either eaten as meat or grain. The capital city of Rome alone, a metropolis of millions, required unimaginable resources: Water, wood, grain, meat, all kinds of consumer goods. Everything was carted into this gluttonous juggernaut from the surrounding countryside and the provinces. As the Roman Empire expanded, the pulling power of its center increased. This empire could only survive as long as its borders were pushed further and further outwards and new resources could be tapped. This led to a complete transformation of the Mediterranean region.
What was used for shipbuilding, roads and houses in the large cities of the Mediterranean in the Roman Empire and before that in ancient Greece was the first European The Solonian reforms in 594 BC fundamentally changed the political system of Athens. Solon freed the peasants from debt bondage and divided the citizenry into four wealth classes. This transformed Athens from an aristocracy to a timocracy. In the new „Council of 400“, more citizens were to have a say in politics. The first „environmental catastrophe“ led to the deforestation of Sicily and Tunisia – formerly granaries. Nothing remained of the original landscapes. The Roman Forum was the center of political, economic, cultural and religious life in Rome. The heart of the Imperium Romanum. There used to be dense forests in the Mediterranean region. They are gone. An ecosystem of which there are hardly any traces left. It must have looked very different there once. But then came the success of civilization, first Greek, then Roman, and turned the entire Mediterranean region into something completely different, a barren landscape, heat that was almost unbearable in summer and little water. Without supplies from its provinces, the Roman Empire would never have achieved this cultural flourishing.
Ultimately, Western civilization was the result of a major misunderstanding: It was assumed that nature was an infinite resource. The ruins that we see today in Rome, Greece and the countries around the Mediterranean are the skeletons of human progress. The people of the civilizations that once existed there thought that they were incredibly successful, that they could and must continue to do so, both in terms of their military expansion and their trade. They consumed more water, more0
Not only everything that we encounter, indeed more than that, the world as a whole, is simply attempted to be explained.
The myth attempts to do this, no, undertakes this through stories, poems and legends.
In most cases, gods are the cause of all phenomena. The so-called „pre-Socratics“ – the early thinkers before the Socratic era such as Thales of Miletus (ca. 625 to 548 BC) Heraclitus of Ephesus (ca. 520 to 460 BC), Parmenides of Elea (ca. 515 to 455 BC) and many others – and then Socrates, Plato
Our visit to the advanced civilizations of the Sumerians and Egyptians has taken place, let us now turn to something else. It should belong to a part of cultural and intellectual history that is closer and more familiar to us…and who feels addressed?These are the Greek gods:
„father of the gods“ Zeus, Hera, the beautiful Aphrodite, Hermes, Apollo, all names we have encountered before. …..and of course the story of Odysseus is one of them. The battle for Troy, a real myth from the depths of European history. I think we are slowly but surely coming to „ourselves“.
When people talk about themselves or „plural“ about us, something unpleasant quickly comes up. Talking about oneself usually leads to the phrase „Me, me and me again???!!!“.
This, in turn, is a typical optimization unit. But back to the topic above. So our thesis will be:
‼ Our culture, Western civilization, has its roots in Greek antiquity. ‼
I am „thinking“ and a statement by „Karl Jaspers“ [a German-Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher] comes to mind.
We are talking about a time that Karl Jaspers called the Axis period (800 to 200 BC) and the secondary effect of the Axis period (up to 200 AD). During this time, Jaspers said, a historical self-understanding emerged. We became the people we are today. And this applies not only to the West, but also to the Orient, India and China.
First the Middle Kingdom, where Confucius and Lao Tzu were active at this time, and where Chinese philosophies were „formed“. The teachings of Zarathustra spread in Mesopotamia and those of Buddha in India. I’m not forgetting the Western cultural area, because it was shaped by Homer’s epics and the Greek philosophers.
They were also the ones who created the final foundations of the European-Western world view; also not to be forgotten in this context are the birth of Jesus and the famous Roman philosophers. If we come back to trade and thinking, we can say that the above is like an epoch in which people underwent massive changes. My question is, what was so decisively new there?
We humans come from periods of time that span thousands of years. I will try to name all
events briefly: There was the Neolithic revolution, i.e. the transition from hunter-gatherers to sedentary farmers. Then the cities emerged, the first „urban centers“, the first advanced civilizations. It makes me think a little and tells me that those who were of great importance for our part of the world, especially the Sumerians and Egyptians, disappeared again at some point. So I’ll just ask like in the children’s series „Sesame Street“: why, why, why?
Apparently they all „(overused)“ the land and then apparently moved on, or were conquered, displaced or assimilated by other peoples.
The fact is and points out: Both the Sumerian and all other subsequent cultures have severely strained, I prefer to say almost destroyed, the area of the Near East, i.e. the area of the Fertile Crescent…..typical human behavior
All I can say in simple terms is: that’s why it looks the way it does today. The previously mentioned land has been deforested, agriculture has been too intensive. (Exaggerated) There are also reasons for this….because the cities demanded a massive consumption of resources. Only these resources were „finite“ and eventually gone.It happened like this:
As I mentioned in the last post, there were the hydraulic cultures ……in the Near East-apart from the Egyptian, they did it better-but the latter had the problem that it simply rained too little with increasing water consumption, the measures followed: Forests were cleared. Irrigation with river water from the mountains also had its pitfalls; evaporation led to salinization of the soil.This was first noticed in the upper reaches of the Euphrates and Tigris, and later in the lower reaches. This led to increasing salinization of the land, making it less and less usable for agriculture. Harvests became leaner and leaner as plants almost died. People simply starved to death. What we still see today in decent media reports about cultures are the ruins in the deserts, the stranded wrecks of humanity’s progress at that time. I emphasize „mankind“…..who else is so stupid ???……My opinion !
Today, research into history is very successful and I ask, how was it possible that civilizations passed away so quickly? …. and what can we learn from this?
‼ Learning means doing things differently
Now comes the performance of the Greeks, very interesting…
Greek history can also sound very amusing to the ears, but first there is the geography. But that’s not the Greeks‘ fault, their mainland can be described as quite hilly, out at sea, with many small islands to the south of the mainland. It is hard to believe that even on „these“ islands the population is growing and urban development is improving. These urban centers are supplied by the surrounding land. In this way, agriculture was optimized and expanded…… actually an expansion. And as you can imagine, the number of goats grew, (first making cheese from the milk, then killing and eating the animals, slash-and-burn agriculture was pushed forward, the next human madness, but not for new trees but for food …….
The Greeks and Greece were threatened by what had already happened to the Sumerians. The solution to their problems was as follows:Those on the Euphrates and Tigris had simply moved away because they didn’t know what was happening to nature there.
The Greeks, on the other hand, had a hunch and did something about it. Were they omniscient? ……or were they so much smarter than the Sumerians? In Greece, with Homer (traditionally regarded as the author of the Illiad and the Odyssey and thus the earliest poet of the West) and the Greek natural philosophers, something took place that was described as the transition from myth to logos. Myth? is simply a story, partly true, partly the opposite, but in any case a kind of compass for a culture. The myth simply provides the orientation, the direction of an entire culture. The ancient myth is the original myth of the Greeks, because it has to do with their gods and the great heroic stories of classical times. If I now proceed as follows, I make a mythological observation, behold, there is a „man“ who opposes the gods in at least one place. Do you remember? Exactly, that was Odysseus. He had two well-known types of test, in which he tried to outwit the others with cunning and trickery and ….. the help of a goddess. He always managed to get out of the danger zone. At the end of each adventure was a happy return home from some very familiar adventures.
And as is so typical, you can transfer this plot pattern to the entire culture of the ancient Greeks without blushing. In the myth, a human being, a hero or demigod, tries to emancipate himself from the gods. Accordingly, the Greeks were the first culture to try to understand the world through their own efforts. From this understanding, they have new ways of dealing with this world.
Now I’ve come across an interesting lead in the Greek myths, again it’s about Odysseus, a character who tried to emancipate himself from the gods. Typical of humans, they usually try to understand the world with their own powers…Conclusion :
…The Greeks make the step from myth to logos….
A scientific sentence may contribute to a better understanding :
⇒ Instead of mere endurance, of being at the mercy of others, there is a self-determined will to change.
The first time is and remains a first act and the first time man opposes nature. Watch out,…ever heard of it? A familiar pattern, because it fits the old Greek story I have already told you about, that of Prometheus.
What else had he done? Yes, he must have been found out, because he illegally passed on fire to people and thus enabled them to go against the gods. Amazingly, this is now becoming the spirit of the times in Ancient Greece. For the first time, people no longer wanted to hear the oft-used phrase: „Yes, the gods will sort it out.“ I call it a real transformation of reason! Radical questions are being asked ever more loudly. After all, have the gods ever given an answer? …. No, it is becoming increasingly clear to people in the Greek world at the time that the gods are actually just images of our projections: Because our gods laugh their guts out, they even break up marriages. I simply say: they are our mirror image, because they do everything we do. They are also not guardians of virtue, how we should live, how we should deal with „nature“? The Greeks are therefore the ones who get to the heart of precisely these questions. They take care to formulate them clearly, they are precise and even always curious.
A social minority are the first to do the following, naturally the Greek natural philosophers.
Natural philosophers are also just people who search for the eternal reasons, that is
for the unchanging background of nature. They see that nature changes and that new things happen. But the recurring question is, what is the eternal, what is the unchanging? Yes, what can I really rely on and when will the stupid questions about the gods finally stop?
Surprise !!!The doctrine of the „four elements“ in Greek philosophy finally begins. And so it begins. But be careful, don’t think of the wrong thing, the doctrine of the four elements is not the same as the natural sciences of the 21st century. The expected transition from myth to logos did not happen from one day to the next, of course. This Thales of Miletus (624 BC-547 BC), who is considered to be the first philosopher of the Western tradition, still reveals the damn strong mythological ties in his description of the element water, for example, when he says that the original form of everything is „water“. However, of course he did not mean this statement literally in the sense that everything comes from water. But it was clear to him that water as an element is something significant. It comes in different forms, but is always just water. The wet element apparently also gives rise to life, as you eager readers have already experienced. The ideas culminated in the statement of „Thales“: — Perhaps even the whole earth floats in water…..?
Stop ! I’m in the mood for a bit more…so back to the Greek natural philosophers…
…. onwards with Thales.
….er was a constant repeater, so some of his friends must have heard the phrase many times. I recall the word and the element „water“
First of all, it should be mentioned that the remnants of the „pre-Socratic natural philosophers“ are not so extensive – Thales got much of what he talks about from Babylon or Egypt. Also the philosophy itself. According to Thales, scientific thinking, the scientific basis for logical thinking, came from Egypt. He was followed by Anaximenes. His primal element was „air“. Heraclitus of Ephesus named „fire“ as the primordial element and finally Empedocles completed the list of elements with „earth“. According to Empedocles, the four elements fill the entire space without any gaps. I say: There is no such thing as a vacuum. The elements are therefore primordial, i.e. not created, have always been there and are imperishable. They cannot transform into each other, as Heraclitus did, and therefore cannot be traced back to an original substance. For Empedocles, therefore, there is no emergence from nothing and no absolute end. With his description, he introduced a concept of the structure of the entire physical world from a certain number of elements into natural philosophy for the first time…. somehow this already has a „scientific“ character. But one suspects correctly…..er links the four elements back to Greek mythology when he assigns them to the deities Zeus, Hera, Hades and Nestis. Let’s just say it wasn’t entirely logical. I don’t recognize the sin of a rational scientific explanation. But at least there was a feeling that these elementary building blocks could explain how the world works.
Not much time passed, as I always say, „later“ a totally materialistic current of thought followed among the Greeks, and it managed without any myths.
‼At last
Now start the atomists and listen, Leukipp and Democritus say there are „indivisible“ particles. That’s it. There’s nothing else. These atoms are put together.
The molecules send their regards!
This is how the various properties of the world come about. The liquids, the solids (matter), the gases and the transformation by fire-we don’t need any of that. It was firmly believed that everything depends only on the speed at which the particles collide. They wrote texts similar to those of atomists, i.e. they were already thinking very far ahead. (Atomism was the work of two thinkers from the 5th century BC: Leucippus and Democritus. The former – attested to by Aristotle, our main source – was the founder of the theory and already a somewhat vague figure in antiquity, who was eclipsed by his more famous successor Democritus to such an extent that the theory was generally believed to have been developed by the latter )Epicurus, who further developed and popularized atomism in the late 4th and early 3rd centuries BC (he followed the saying Here a complete „de-divinization“ of the world takes place. The myth, a meaningful narrative or a narrative formally charged with meaning, becomes a description that is free of subjective qualities. In fact, in this period of Greek antiquity – let’s say around 400 BC – there was perhaps even a subject-object split: on the one hand there was nature, but on the „other“ were the subjects who somehow behaved within it.
We are now suddenly making distinctions between matter and structure, also between the individual and the whole and now also the role of the individual in the whole. At the moment, everything is still idealistically glorified in Plato, as Aristotle loudly and repeatedly states: „The world is at our disposal“. It should be used by us in its entirety to our advantage. Man can do whatever he wants with nature. And what he has always done since man’s existence is terrible, thoughtless and destructive. However, at all times he wants for his life partner, the planet „Earth “
only the good, of course! …………………..
…short break in this blog, it’s on to the increasingly serious final report!
Hello dear readers, I happened to have a look at my blog results today and realized that my reports are well received on this „little planet“. I can say that the USA is in first place…. followed by Europe and…also China.
So now to the „stuff“ ➼ ➼ ➼
but that doesn’t always work, and it’s easy to see why. It’s hard to believe, but this is how the Greek „scholars“ on the philosophical side practically invented ethics, a theory of morality.Only a new way of thinking began: how could one actually define the good? This immediately raised many radical questions that had never been formulated in this way before. It should be noted that Greek philosophy posed questions that mankind has been varying again and again ever since. The Western answer results from this and we know it……..na los very simply!
‼ This is the world we live in.
We as humans have less the task than the opportunity to change the world, i.e. the world around us. After a lot of „thinking“, I came to the conclusion….that is probably the real impetus for what we later call the „Anthropocene“. It’s like a „cornucopia world“, grab it and change it the way you want it.I’m sure you’ll immediately think……Yes, the Greeks will have done that, and not just once but quite consistently on several occasions.
Let me list: They colonized islands. They founded cities. They expanded these cities and turned them into very successful trading centers. They sat like frogs around the Mediterranean.
In terms of time, we are now in a period a few centuries before ….so they always say, before the birth of the „Christ child“ and curious as we are, let’s first take a look at what is happening in the „Mediterranean“.
Let’s start with the capital of Greece, Athens. Now I’m talking about colonies for the first time, they are Greek: in southern France, Sicily and southern Italy. So I ask, what are they doing there? ……..Are they bored? No, they trade with other peoples. The sentence slips out of my mouth: We are already in the middle of a semi-globalized era. Above all, we can see that mankind is becoming ever more determined to exploit the „environmental resource“.
Man does not live by bread alone, something must also be drunk. Wine is cultivated. People want meat, vegetables and fruit. Ever larger areas in the surrounding countryside supply the cities. In the beginning, it’s wonderful to be well supplied. More and more suppliers appear, compete with each other. Demand increases. The economy raises its head! Suddenly, the simple barter – you give me, I give you – becomes an economy with a new dimension: money. It does not yet rule the world, but it is becoming more and more important. Instead of the Anthropocene, we could also speak of the Capitalocene. This certainly applies to the last 30 years of our current culture. It started back then, when people began to think economically. All of a sudden, trade and commodity flows became important. Even the ancient Greeks became increasingly dependent on what came from outside, on imports. If changes caused these trade flows to stop, a highly specialized and complex structure such as a city would no longer be able to react adequately and supply itself. What does this remind us of? Act locally, think globally. Really? All these problems that we face today were already present back then. Today, archaeologists can clearly see from excavations that the Greeks put a lot of strain on their environment. It started in a simple way: If you want to farm, the forest has to go. But if there are no trees left and there is heavy rainfall, slopes tend to slide. The fertile topsoil slides away. Only barren food grows on the rest. The only thing that can still be kept on such soils are goats. And they eat what is left. Natural land users such as wild goats are not a problem under normal circumstances because their population is kept small by predators. But when goats are protected from their natural hunters, they multiply. After a while, all that remains is goat country. We can observe this everywhere on the Mediterranean today. A few olive groves here and there. But essentially the entire Mediterranean region is barren, an agricultural diaspora. Fire, deforestation, goats. That happened everywhere. In the end, the Greek cities were left empty-handed. Even though they knew what they were doing. Solon, for example, tried to stop hillside cultivation and deforestation in Athens in 590 BC. The idea was to create terraced olive groves. However, his proposal was not successful. Why? Because the local producers of agricultural products looked to their immediate advantage and simply carried on working until the slope was gone. The spatial limitations of Greek communities meant that there were no longer any usable resources in the surrounding area. The towns literally shrank and died. The same happened to many of the colonies. Either they were conquered, which was the one variant we all know from the history books. Or, the second, much more unpleasant development: they failed on their own. A successful culture is unstable when it has reached maximum resource consumption. At this peak, every culture is unstable because it can no longer absorb the smallest fluctuations in the environment. In other words, you borrow from nature all the time until it gives you nothing more. Then it’s the end! This conflict between man and nature was already taking place in Ancient Greece. Not yet at the level of modern science and technology, but at the level of: here is a human being, and he wants something from nature. There is already an inkling that know-how can be produced with the brain of this being, but the idea of know-why is still not very well developed. The success of a culture on the one hand versus nature on the other. The sphere of nature against the sphere of man. The laws of nature versus the goals and purposes of humans. Incidentally, nature doesn’t care what we want. It knows no success. It is just there. The same thing that happened to the Greeks subsequently happened to the Romans on a much larger scale. The thousand-year-old Imperium Romanum clearly demonstrates this success on a – let’s say – semi-globalized scale. The Mare Nostrum-our Mediterranean-was the Romans‘. They had conquered the countries around it one by one. All the major cultural developments in the Roman world took place around this sea. By the way, a small side note: the climate in the heyday of the Roman Empire was the best Europe ever had. It was pleasant, not so cold, balanced. My point is that the Romans did the same as the Greeks. They consumed resources. And they did it over a longer period of time and on a much larger scale. The Romans used their provinces, the conquered countries. They simply used more and more resources. In the beginning, they used the resources of southern Italy, according to the motto „fire, deforestation, wheat, goats“. And everything that wasn’t on the trees by three was either eaten as meat or grain. The capital Rome alone, a metropolis of millions, required unimaginable resources: Water, wood, grain, meat, all kinds of consumer goods. Everything was carted into this gluttonous juggernaut from the surrounding countryside and the provinces. As the Roman Empire expanded, the pulling power of its center increased. This empire could only survive as long as its borders were pushed further and further outwards and new resources could be tapped. This led to a complete transformation of the Mediterranean region. What was used for shipbuilding, roads and houses in the large cities of the Mediterranean region in the Roman Empire and before that in ancient Greece was the first European environmental disaster and led to the deforestation of Sicily and Tunisia – formerly granaries. Nothing of the original landscapes remained. The Roman Forum was the center of political, economic, cultural and religious life in Rome. The heart of the Imperium Romanum. There used to be dense forests in the Mediterranean region. They are gone. An ecosystem of which there are hardly any traces left. It must have looked very different there once. But then came the success of civilization, first Greek, then Roman, and turned the entire Mediterranean region into something completely different, a barren landscape, heat that was almost unbearable in summer and little water. Without supplies from its provinces, the Roman Empire would never have achieved this cultural flourishing. Ultimately, Western civilization was the result of a major misunderstanding: It was assumed that nature was an infinite resource. The ruins that we see today in Rome, Greece and the countries around the Mediterranean are the skeletons of human progress. The people of the civilizations that once existed there thought that they were incredibly successful, that they could and must continue to do so, both in terms of their military expansion and their trade. They consumed more water, more wood, more food. In the time of the Caesars, in the first 100 years after the turn of time, there were some contemporaries who were already warning about environmental pollution and pointing to the destruction of the basis of life. That was 2,000 years ago. The Romans simply overshot the mark. In the end, there were a lot of losers and only a few winners. The fall of the Roman Empire should be a warning to us.