Opinion | Why Was Philosophy Born In Greece? - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...ilosophy-greece-geography.html
philosophy greece fluidity connection interchange tension culture
shared by Javier E on 23 Oct 23
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philosophy has a geography. To be in the places these thinkers knew, visit their cities, sail their seas and find their landscapes is to know something about them that cannot be found otherwise; and despite that locatedness, and despite their age, the frame of mind of these first thinkers remains astonishingly and surprisingly illuminating today.
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Greece in the centuries between 700 and 500 was not land-based. It essentially existed at sea and, where it touched the land, it appeared and manifested itself as the cities from which these philosophers came.
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What we think of now as the mainland of Greece, then filled with communities of farmer-warriors, played essentially no part. Recorded philosophy was almost entirely a harbor phenomenon, a byproduct of trading hubs on the margins of Asia
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Those mercantile qualities of fluidity and connectedness were precisely the governing aspects of the new thought. The philosophers’ emphasis was on interchange and, in Heraclitus in particular, the virtues of tension.
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Just as in a bow, he wrote, the string pulls against the frame, and would collapse if either string or frame failed; a just society needs to be founded on a tension between its constituent parts. Everything flowed through everything else, multiplicity was goodness and singularity the grounds of either sterility or tyranny.
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These early Greek forms of thought cross all the boundaries between poet and thinker, mystic and scientist, in a rolling, cyclical, wave-based vision of the nature of reality. The thinkers did not provide a set of rationalist solutions nor of religious doctrines, but again and again explored the borderland between those ways of seeing. Possibility and inquiry, the effects of suggestion and implication, rather than unconsidered belief or blank assertion, were the seedbed for the new ideas.
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This harbor mind holds lessons for us now. We may want fixed answers and rigid definitions. but vitality — and perhaps even health — lies in the ability to stay afloat, stay loose, stay connected, stay with the questions and entertain doubt as the unlikely bedrock of understanding. The only understanding is in the fluidity of mind