TRAVELS IN FORMER REALITY
Nothing changes. Zeno’s paradox involving the race between Achilles and the tortoise is exemplary. The tortoise, given a head start, will always be ahead of Achilles at any given point in time. Achilles will reach the last point where the tortoise was, getting closer each time at infinitesimally smaller distances, but never overtaking the opponent. This reminds me the case of the developing countries some of which achieve extraordinarily high rates of economic growth year after year, but never catch up with post-industrial world with around five hundred years of head start in capital accumulation. So far so good. With the real cost of economic growth, the world should be upside down. While the majority notices this only a few seems to care.
The road takes me from İzmir to Miletus, the birthplace of the earliest Presocratic thinkers in 6th ct. BC.: Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes. Within almost three hour drive on the highway one can contemplate the fate of cosmology and the four elements: fire, water, air and earth, first uttered by Empedocles (of Agrigento, Sicily.) The route is surrounded by some of the most renowned landmarks of learning in antiquity, including the cities of Colophon, Ephesus, Magnesia, Priene and others, and by sacred hills, valleys, and the rivers of Meander (Menderes) and Caystrus (Küçük Menderes) in which one cannot bathe twice (Heraklitus of Ephesus.) As everything is in flux, so is the toxic waste running towards the sea. On the Turkish coast, Samos (Pythagoras’ birthplace) is visible all the way from the north to the south. West of Samos, visible on clear days, is the smaller island of Ikaria where, aside from Japan, the life expectancy is one of the highest in the world. On the way to Miletus, the scenery shifts from fields and orchards, to thousands of apartment buildings, factories, cement plants, new construction of all kinds, highways and junctions, wind generators, solar farms and other installations. As new structures rise up, certain others must diminish following the law of the conservation of matter. The sacred and semi sacred hills and mountains facing the highway are sacrificed to mines, and to marble and stone quarries, their forms neatly cleaved by huge machines following Euclidian geometry until the contour lines overlap on a vertical drop. Around here stone is the stuff of the world as one can observe on the walls, the column and its capital, the frieze, the pediment, the sculpture, inside the Bouletarion and outside in the theater. It is the prime element. Together with steel, it is also prime in the development plans of the Republic of Turkey. This time around, the fifth element may be reinforced concrete.
Ionia comprises some of the most mythical lands, albeit being relatively young in comparison to pre-historic settlements of the Fertile Crescent. But then, Neolithic, Calcholithic and Bronze Age settlements are usually found around and under these classical sites and cities. In that sense, one can discern a continuity of dwelling in these specific locations, a long term fitness of the location for human habitation and natural riches from water to fertile earth, to climate and to the sea, which also provided for the intellectual and spiritual search for answers to major scientific and ethical questions. However, within this vein of civilization as we know it, it is highly questionable whether the love of wisdom yield a better world for all, at all times.
The Presocratics asked the question ‘why’ as well as the scientific ‘how’ that set them on the course to be regarded as earliest philosophers as well as the scientists, provided that some of them only talked, some wrote in bits and pieces, in verses, but always saved from oblivion by the coming generations of classical philosophy that revived their teachings, culminating especially in Aristotle. Up to that time there must have been many more inquiring minds around the world that tried to understand where everything comes from and what makes the stuff of the cosmos in deep history. For many, myths held the answers. Few things had been written down. But the record has it that for the first time after around 600 BC the answers were sought outside divinity and supernatural forces.
Meanwhile Gaia, the earth goddess, is the title that James Lovelock chose for earth system theory in which the atmosphere, the biosphere, oceans and earth in (almost) unlimited possibilities of interaction and feedback loops act as one living organism to sustain life. In retrospect, Gaia is a modern day affirmation of the four elements of the Presocratic wisdom, with the addition of life itself as an active force (and not a byproduct.) Even the symbiotic relations Lovelock refers to are, for example, a reflection of Empedocles’ vision of cosmos, oscillating between unity and plurality, love and strife. After all, the presocratics were named the natural philosophers. In other words, to understand humankind the investigation should start from nature (physis). As we stand today after 25 centuries, it is but a short step from Gaia to ethics, facing the climate catastrophe and extinction. This time, our ‘moral compass’ should take into consideration every being that surrounds us, as though all is sentient.
Contemplating the landscape, I get carried away in a kind of daydream. In search of the beginnings, I try to imagine a genealogy of humans that extend to our time. After all, it is only twenty five hundred years that separate me from these people that viewed the same vista, although in this time span not very much of geology but of geography had changed. Rivers usually are the culprit, the silt radically alters the shoreline and the port cities become landlocked. In addition, some endemic animals are mostly absent, and the fields are cultivated for new crops brought in from diverse parts of the world. But otherwise, one is tempted to ignore the modern installations as though looking through a viewfinder and arranging the picture frame. What did the ancients see? What they saw was pertinent to how they lived. Looking back, I think we tend to exaggerate the progress that we assume to separate us from antiquity, and thus convinced that ours is a different society in many ways. After all, Greeks were slave holders, far from an egalitarian society, and they thrived on colonialism in the then known ‘world,’ their vision was mostly shaped by strong men, and wars were the rule of the day. And at times, certain philosophical actors and congregations functioned like today’s think-tanks, advising the powerful on matters of war, conquest, governing and else. In one account, Strabo as the father of geography traveled (around the time of Christ) and accumulated knowledge that he deemed beneficial to the rulers and kings. In another, Sophists were the spin doctors and influencers, turning philosophy into a profitable profession. Knowledge equals power. To top it off, I find myself in the oracle of Claros where the high priests, the charlatans of the day, slaughtered oxen to see from the spilled innards what the future brings. They again advised rulers and warriors, including Alexander. What a scam!
Or is it really the way it looks? I visit Clazomenae (modern day Urla,) about twenty kilometers (roughly 140 stadia) from where I live. The ancient site is surrounded by many ‘tiny houses’ (pronounced ‘tin-ny haus’ in Turkish,) a new fad in Aegean Turkey to evade the building ban on agricultural plots, gardens, and on about any piece of land. Some of them are on wheels, some on stilts, never touching the ground, but all are immobile for a long time and look domestic enough with pitched roofs, and they are all small cabins indeed. One wonders if the owners knew about Anaxagoras of Clazomenae. If they did, they would be convinced that their houses could even be tinier, and still tinier, ad infinitum. In Large Hadron Collider(s), twenty first century quantum physics attempts to unravel the ancient riddle in search of the tiniest particle. In amazement, one admires the insight that the Atomists held all many centuries ago. “For of the small,” (Anaxagoras says,) “there is no smallest, but there is always a smaller. For what is cannot not be. And again compared with the large there is always a larger, and it is equal to the small in quantity. But compared with itself each thing is both large and small…”(*) If their reasoning is not crystal clear for us and if it is still riddled with esoteric propositions, this must be the problem not of scientific equipment they had at their disposal, but of the gap in language, of logic and interpretation.
As I come back home with images from these travels, it dawns on me that I fail to grasp even the basics of ‘truth’ just by recording appearances. Must I admit that appearances and reality are separate things? Is reality uniquely shaped within language? Should I fall in line with the long tradition of metaphysics? I remember the time around the senior year of high school when, as an aspiring Marxist youth, I was introduced to the (highly superficial) readings of dialectical materialism from a few basic texts of 20th century. Things were easy then: simply discard metaphysical line of thought and especially the ‘Aristotelian Logic.’ Afterwards it naturally turned out that thinking and reasoning are never to be trusted into the hands of a limited number of texts and ideas. Looking back and trying to comprehend the cryptic bits and pieces remaining from the Presocratic thinkers, one is reminded that some of their very basic propositions on phenomena, both scientific and moral, have endured for a very long time as the lines of current discussion. 25 centuries later, the natural, political and social context urge one to reconsider the ‘flow’ ‘becoming’ and the ‘unity of opposites’ (Heraclitus); or ‘veganism and reincarnation’ (Pythagoreans); or the ‘fractals and infinity of time and space’ (Zeno) and the sub-atomic particles. Even when we think matters of scientific debate had long been superseded, this philosophical and ethical train of thought sustains the behavior of the civilized world today. Yet still, much of the biosphere and a considerable part of the world population are commonly denied contribution to this existential debate with the unique wisdom and history of their own.
December 2023
(*) Catherine Osborne Presocratic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction Oxford Un. Press, 2004.