The Art of Manliness - The Lesser-Known Philosophy of the Iron Age Greeks

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.280 When we think of Western philosophers who pondered questions about the good life,

00:00:14.980 we typically think of the classical era of Greece and the likes of Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle.

00:00:20.400 But my guess would say that the poets and philosophers who came out of the preceding

00:00:23.660 period, Greece's Iron Age, also have something to say about the nature of existence.

00:00:28.600 Adam Nicholson is the author of How to Be, Life Lessons from the Early Greeks.

00:00:33.340 Today on the show, Adam takes us on a tour of Iron Age Greece and how these seafaring people

00:00:37.740 set the stage for our modern sense of self.

00:00:40.740 Adam makes the case that the early Greeks had what he calls a harbor mindset,

00:00:44.200 which lent them a mentality centered on fluidity and transience.

00:00:47.920 We discuss how Odysseus exemplifies this harbor mindset and how a group of lesser-known

00:00:52.360 pre-Socratic philosophers define life through a lens of change and contradiction.

00:00:56.280 Adam then explains how a mystical guru named Pythagoras paved the way for Greek thinkers like Plato

00:01:01.780 and Aristotle in the rise of cooperative civility.

00:01:05.280 After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash howtobe.

00:01:20.020 All right, Adam Nicholson, welcome back to the show.

00:01:22.300 Thanks for having me.

00:01:24.380 A pleasure.

00:01:25.120 So we had you on last year to talk about your book, Why Homer Matters, where we explore

00:01:29.640 Homer, you know, the great epic poet in his works, The Iliad and the Odyssey, and what we can learn

00:01:35.720 from him.

00:01:37.260 You got a new book out called How to Be, Life Lessons from the Early Greeks.

00:01:41.820 And in this book, you explore the intellectual development of the Iron Age Greeks and then

00:01:48.520 how their geography influenced their philosophical outlook on life.

00:01:53.420 And I think when we typically think of the ancient Greeks, I think we typically think of Greeks living

00:01:59.460 in the classical era.

00:02:00.700 We think of Plato and Aristotle.

00:02:03.020 But your book goes further back into Greek history.

00:02:06.620 So what's the time period that you explored in your book?

00:02:10.200 Well, this book really is a successor to that one I wrote about Homer.

00:02:16.860 It takes on where Homer leaves off.

00:02:19.420 And so conventionally, people date Homer nowadays to about 750 BC, 720 BC, something like that.

00:02:28.340 And Homer lives just at the beginning of this revolution in thought and life that represents

00:02:37.660 the beginning of what is conventionally called the Archaic Age in Greece, stretching from then

00:02:43.060 about 700 to really about 500, 470, when you could say the classical age begins.

00:02:52.180 I mean, these are artificial divisions and artificial categorizations.

00:02:58.000 Obviously, it's a continuous, evolving process.

00:03:01.700 But there is something unique about this age known as the pre-Socratic Age of Philosophy, i.e.

00:03:09.180 the age before Socrates.

00:03:10.540 And filled with a series of really intriguing thinkers, almost philosophers, almost poets, many

00:03:22.660 of them wrote in poetry, shaman-like figures in some ways, not unlike even prophets, Hebrew

00:03:31.760 prophets on the other side of the Mediterranean in Israel.

00:03:35.220 And it's absolutely filled with a sense of beginnings, of a new way of thinking about things and

00:03:44.640 evolving away from the Homeric universe that we talked about last time of, you know, a terrible

00:03:54.260 sense of destiny, of divinely inspired destiny controlling the nature of human life.

00:04:03.060 And instead, beginning to say, how can I make my life good?

00:04:09.680 I do not depend on the divine.

00:04:13.020 I can think myself or how to make a good society, how to have a good self, how to live well, according

00:04:22.300 to my own choices.

00:04:23.660 And I think that that's what's extraordinary about this moment, that it appeals to many,

00:04:31.120 many modern questions.

00:04:33.280 Many of the modern questions which say, you know, are we really satisfied with the inherited

00:04:39.580 answers?

00:04:41.200 Are we not in a kind of very fluid and in many ways troubling time that demands of us that

00:04:48.500 we think, what is it to be, you know, what is it to be good?

00:04:52.820 What is it to conceive of oneself as something distinct in the world?

00:04:58.560 And so there's a curiously powerful connection for me anyway, between now and then.

00:05:04.600 And these seem very arcane, very distant people, 2,700 years ago.

00:05:10.160 And yet their concerns are still ours.

00:05:14.640 And that's really what intrigued me about them.

00:05:18.180 Yeah, I was intrigued by that too, as you described these different philosophers during

00:05:22.760 this period, was it seemed both foreign, but at the same time, very familiar.

00:05:28.560 I agree, both foreign and familiar, because, you know, so much of our intellectual inheritance

00:05:36.060 is really about, it seems to me, the kind of imposition of certainties, the need to accept,

00:05:44.860 for example, the kind of great platonic vision that things of value are not in this world,

00:05:51.400 but in another world or in a world distinct from this one, lying behind and above this one.

00:05:57.420 And that this world that we're in now may be interesting scientifically and materially,

00:06:02.940 you know, you can investigate its stuff, but the place of value is somehow not here.

00:06:09.220 And I've always really resented that idea that our life here is somehow second rate compared

00:06:16.320 with the life that might be lived elsewhere or is being lived elsewhere in heaven or whatever

00:06:21.120 you want to call it.

00:06:21.940 And so I think that this pre-Platonic, pre-Socratic understanding that this world is the one to

00:06:30.860 attend to, in a way beyond the scientifics, not only about its material structure, but

00:06:36.860 about how we are in it, is, you know, hugely valuable and something of a kind of, almost

00:06:45.540 I feel like saying an ally in a difficult time.

00:06:49.140 You know, here are people who have, at the very beginning of freedom, of intellectual freedom,

00:06:55.980 I mean, this is not a democratic world we're discussing.

00:06:59.480 So it's not as if there is universal liberty going on.

00:07:02.940 It's a very, very strictly run oligarchic world, actually, just a few people telling other

00:07:11.160 people what to do.

00:07:12.360 But those few people are thinking hard.

00:07:16.300 And it's extraordinarily refreshing.

00:07:19.960 It's like a kind of great surge of newness.

00:07:22.760 It's not a surge of oldness and exciting for that. 0.94

00:07:28.520 So it sounds like this period is a transition period where you start seeing the development

00:07:33.660 of, I think we call it agency in the Greek mindset, the sense of self, that I'm an individual,

00:07:40.480 that I'm not just buffeted by my environment.

00:07:43.020 That is going on, but there is a sense that I can do something about it.

00:07:48.400 Yes, it is.

00:07:49.240 It's definitely transitional.

00:07:50.960 And an intriguing thing that I discuss this in the book is that there is already a transition

00:07:57.280 visible within Homer, between the two Homeric poems.

00:08:01.840 If the Iliad is really a poem about the imprisonment of destiny, of destiny shutting you into a kind

00:08:10.760 of frame of unaddressable fate, then the Odyssey is really about choice.

00:08:18.680 How can you navigate a world?

00:08:22.400 How can you find your way out through all the troubles and turmoil of existence?

00:08:29.240 And there's a very interesting thing that in the Iliad, often when people are having to

00:08:35.760 make up their minds, a god appears and almost sort of infuses the human beings with their

00:08:43.400 godliness and kind of makes up their minds for them.

00:08:47.140 Even if there's one point in the Iliad where Athene grabs Achilles by the hair and kind of shakes

00:08:57.160 his head physically to change his mind.

00:09:00.360 The Odyssey is the very opposite of that, that Odysseus is clearly a man making up his own mind

00:09:08.180 in his own world.

00:09:10.120 And there's one point at which Odysseus compares his own heart to a sausage on a grill, turning

00:09:20.340 it and turning it in the flames, you know.

00:09:23.160 And so his mind is saying, shall I do this?

00:09:25.800 Shall I move this way?

00:09:27.840 Shall I turn that way?

00:09:29.560 And so already within Homer, you can see this, exactly what you were talking about, that transition

00:09:35.960 to agency and autonomy beginning to evolve.

00:09:40.120 Yeah, I love that chapter about the Odyssey, because the Odyssey is my favorite Homeric

00:09:44.900 epic. 0.78

00:09:45.800 And I think it's because Odysseus is such a relatable character, even for the modern age.

00:09:51.800 I think we all can feel like Odysseus at times where you're just, everything's confusing and

00:09:56.260 you feel like you kind of have to use your wiles to navigate all the changes you encounter

00:10:03.120 in life.

00:10:03.760 And you see Odysseus do that.

00:10:06.100 Yes, and I think wiliness, it's almost a synonym for agency.

00:10:11.540 You know, wiliness is exactly the mind engaging with the conditions you find yourself in and

00:10:18.440 being inventive in those conditions.

00:10:20.540 This philosophical moment, there are thinkers who talk about the material world, but there

00:10:27.620 are also the first lyric poets, poets who, like Sappho and Archilochus and Alcaeus from

00:10:37.720 the Aegean islands, who know all about Homer, often use Homeric language, use Homeric metaphors

00:10:46.480 and so on.

00:10:47.440 But do not put the self in that epic frame.

00:10:54.180 The epic frame, which even the Odyssey does for Odysseus, you know, that he isn't alone

00:11:00.460 in his world, you know, he's hugely accompanied.

00:11:03.680 The lyric poets have almost, you could say, the self as the battlefield on which the questions

00:11:12.700 of consciousness are played out.

00:11:14.500 You know, if the Iliad has the plane of Troy, Sappho has her own heart, her own heart in

00:11:23.100 which these storming questions are acted out.

00:11:28.380 And so it's as if the self comes up to the surface of the culture.

00:11:34.640 The self has clearly been in play.

00:11:36.700 You know, Achilles has a huge self, Odysseus has a huge self, Hector and Pram, they're all

00:11:42.360 kind of radiantly present in those poems.

00:11:46.220 But they are not the frame within which the poem is acted out.

00:11:50.860 And so for Sappho, especially Sappho, the self is the drama of itself.

00:11:57.480 You know, Wordsworth had this great phrase in the Prelude.

00:12:02.260 He says, there's a grandeur in the beatings of the heart.

00:12:06.140 And that notion, which of course has played itself out in any number of ways, that notion

00:12:12.700 begins with these early Greeks.

00:12:15.500 So the Odyssey takes place on the sea.

00:12:18.500 It's just Odysseus going from harbor to harbor, getting shipwrecked.

00:12:23.060 And one of the big themes or theses in your book is that the geography of this Iron Age

00:12:30.420 Greek era heavily influenced the thinking of these philosophers, writers, poets.

00:12:36.820 And you call it, they had a harbor mindset.

00:12:39.380 How would you describe this harbor mindset?

00:12:41.200 And how did it shape the thinking of these Iron Age Greeks?

00:12:43.760 Yes, well, just to go back, I mean, obviously, these philosophers are not the first intellectuals

00:12:50.820 that ever were.

00:12:51.760 There have been huge, long, hugely powerful civilizations in the Near East, in Mesopotamia,

00:12:59.260 in Egypt, in Eastern Turkey with the Hittites, in Crete with the Minoans, highly sophisticated 0.98

00:13:05.640 palace economies, largely, dictated by great kings and huge bureaucracies with a very powerful

00:13:15.780 fusion of worldly authority, monarchical authority, with a sense of a kind of divinely ruled cosmos

00:13:25.860 with great, powerful, kingly gods.

00:13:29.420 And the status of the intellectual in all of those cultures was really subservient to power,

00:13:38.400 subservient to the monarchical powers.

00:13:40.620 They were officials of priests and royal bureaucracies.

00:13:45.160 Now, those civilizations famously all disintegrated at the end of the Bronze Age in about 1100 BC

00:13:51.440 for reasons no one has really yet satisfactorily explained.

00:13:54.480 Egypt, the Mesopotamian kingdoms, the Hittites, the Minoans, even the early Greek, the Mycenaeans,

00:14:02.480 all fell apart at pretty well the same moment.

00:14:07.020 And the Eastern Mediterranean was left as a power vacuum.

00:14:10.940 And as ever, with the end of empires, many small, piratical, self-determining invaders,

00:14:21.000 raiders, whatever you want to call them, pirates, came and expanded all through that world.

00:14:28.220 And one of them was the Phoenicians and what is now the coast of Lebanon, the great cities,

00:14:35.420 what became the great trading cities of Tyre and Sidon and Byblos.

00:14:41.980 And almost as their successors, these Greeks, who have uncertain origins, 0.97

00:14:49.800 maybe to the north, north of the Black Sea, but as their successors,

00:14:55.880 the Greeks also set up trading cities on what is now the west coast of Turkey,

00:15:01.260 the Aegean coast of Turkey. And these cities were, none of them had great hinterlands,

00:15:09.920 great kind of fertile hinterlands. They were not like the great river civilizations of Mesopotamia

00:15:15.680 or Egypt, which were hugely productive of their own wealth agriculturally.

00:15:21.540 These cities entirely depended for their well-being on seaborne trading.

00:15:27.780 And they became great sea adventurers, sailing to the far north of the Black Sea,

00:15:34.800 to the far west, to what is now Spain in the western Mediterranean,

00:15:40.120 to southern Italy, to the Mediterranean islands and so on.

00:15:44.140 And so there is an absolute foundation on sea journeying,

00:15:50.060 on the connectedness that sea trading relies on,

00:15:55.780 on really the foundation of the city not being in the city itself,

00:16:01.180 but in the links and connections it makes all across the adjoining sea.

00:16:07.220 And so there is something kind of essentially different

00:16:11.340 about a great centrally shaped empire like Egypt or the Mesopotamians.

00:16:20.780 And this kind of marginal, small, unmonarchical, none of these cities had kings.

00:16:28.860 Well, from time to time they had a tyrant, but essentially they were mercantile oligarchies.

00:16:34.320 And so the whole structure of authority changes.

00:16:40.000 And instead of it being, I think the word is centripetal,

00:16:44.800 that everything gets sucked in towards the center,

00:16:48.960 it becomes absolutely at its core centrifugal,

00:16:53.560 that things are dependent on the distant, the fluid, the connecting.

00:16:59.880 And so in these cities, in these mercantile cities,

00:17:04.820 you have a frame of mind, which as you say, I call the harbour mind,

00:17:09.340 which doesn't conceive of itself as needing a great dominating regal force,

00:17:18.760 but knows about the network, the meshwork of connections,

00:17:24.180 on which their life, their well-being,

00:17:26.320 and I think their sense of reality comes to depend.

00:17:32.140 That none of them are sort of, none of them are dependent on the great gods.

00:17:37.780 None of them are dependent on a kind of rigid, dominating set of ideas.

00:17:44.220 All of them are interested in fluidity and change

00:17:50.160 and the transformations of who we are, what the world is made of,

00:17:55.900 what the cosmos is made of.

00:17:58.300 And so, you know, I think it was rarely said that philosophy has a geography.

00:18:04.420 People think of philosophy as something existing in this pure, immaterial sphere.

00:18:11.300 But it seems absolutely clear to me that these ideas of fluidity and change

00:18:17.860 as being at the heart of existence emerge from a world

00:18:22.260 in which fluidity and change are the governing facts of their lives.

00:18:27.940 Right. So you can see this in the Odyssey.

00:18:29.400 Odysseus is described as a polytropos, a mini-wade.

00:18:35.220 He's slippery.

00:18:36.560 And then also we'll see this in some of the philosophies of the pre-Socratics. 0.91

00:18:40.580 And you also make the point that the Greeks,

00:18:43.740 while they did emphasize the fluid and the change,

00:18:46.900 because that harbor mindset, they weren't completely fluid.

00:18:49.360 They tried to find some sort of basis.

00:18:51.540 And you make the point that they found a third way.

00:18:55.300 They cut the difference between the river kingdoms of Egypt and Mesopotamia,

00:18:59.640 where it was very bureaucratic and stable and power-centered.

00:19:03.420 And they combined that with this sort of piratical,

00:19:08.600 you know, pirate-like free-for-all.

00:19:11.160 Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's right.

00:19:12.300 I mean, say you could, if you think of that in historical terms,

00:19:16.040 if you think of the term one, the great set-up empires

00:19:21.280 that last in the Bronze Age,

00:19:24.100 then the kind of anarchic, piratical moment

00:19:27.980 of what people have conventionally called the Dark Ages.

00:19:31.220 And then this third term, emerging out of that,

00:19:36.620 which draws a lot on the learning and wisdom of Egypt and Mesopotamia,

00:19:42.100 you know, they get mathematics, navigational skills,

00:19:46.640 cosmological understanding,

00:19:48.180 and even, you know, the Greeks actually take their writing,

00:19:53.880 their alphabetic writing from the Phoenicians.

00:19:56.280 And so you get, as a third term,

00:20:01.280 the setting up of a new world,

00:20:04.940 a new independent world,

00:20:07.040 which is neither rigidly bureaucratic,

00:20:11.040 nor anarchically piratical,

00:20:13.440 but somehow fuses that into these philosophical cities

00:20:20.360 in which all the great questions are asked.

00:20:24.560 It is a questioning culture rather than an answering culture.

00:20:29.160 And they start to decide, you know, what is justice?

00:20:35.440 What kind of law system do you need? 0.78

00:20:39.580 How can you understand the essential nature of the material world?

00:20:45.520 What is the relationship between identity and change?

00:20:50.600 How can identity last in a fluid world?

00:20:53.980 And so there is a dialogue between the making

00:20:57.840 of the well-shaped thing,

00:21:00.680 whatever you like to call that,

00:21:02.240 temple, a city, a self, an idea,

00:21:05.560 and the idea that change is absolutely

00:21:10.020 at the heart of identity, paradoxically,

00:21:14.380 that our identities are essentially fluid.

00:21:18.360 And I think that is a source of real dynamism.

00:21:22.080 You don't just have, you know,

00:21:24.360 pirate kings, as you do in the Iliad.

00:21:26.960 It's easy to see those Greeks in the Iliad.

00:21:31.360 Or even you could see Odysseus as this,

00:21:34.580 as a kind of self-determining pirate king,

00:21:37.680 like a kind of terrifying Viking raider.

00:21:41.280 It's much more than that.

00:21:42.480 There is, people start to think of ideas of civility

00:21:47.100 and sociability and the good life together.

00:21:51.860 They set up the Olympic Games so that these often fiercely competing cities

00:21:57.920 can meet in a non-violent meeting every four years and so on.

00:22:02.920 And so there is a kind of lovely ambivalence permanently in play

00:22:09.580 between the sort of, you could say, I think,

00:22:12.880 the fighting mind, you know,

00:22:14.480 the going out and getting mind,

00:22:16.280 and the careful mind, the caring mind.

00:22:20.300 And that tension between let's make this good

00:22:24.760 and let's make this adventurous

00:22:27.340 is in play in any number of spheres.

00:22:30.620 We're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

00:22:36.180 And now back to the show.

00:22:38.140 So continuing on with this idea that this was a period

00:22:42.060 where the thinking was fluid because of that, you know,

00:22:45.400 harbor mindset they had,

00:22:47.160 you highlight three pre-Socratic philosophers

00:22:49.520 who all lived in Militos,

00:22:52.240 which was at the crossroads of all the navigation routes

00:22:55.460 of the Eastern Mediterranean.

00:22:57.000 You had Thales, Anaxaminer, and Anaxaminees.

00:23:01.760 And the question that they were all grappling with is,

00:23:05.540 what is existence made of?

00:23:07.560 And they felt that it was a substance that, you know,

00:23:11.340 life springs from and then it goes back into

00:23:13.620 and then it just, that's the process.

00:23:16.480 It goes up and it goes back down and it comes back up.

00:23:19.220 So tell us about them.

00:23:21.080 Yeah, so these three early Militos thinkers

00:23:24.480 all think that somehow lying behind

00:23:28.180 all the variable phenomena of existence,

00:23:31.900 you know, surely there is something to being

00:23:34.880 which is beyond the endless little details

00:23:37.620 which we're surrounded by.

00:23:39.600 And Thales thinks it's water.

00:23:42.860 Anaxaminees thinks it's air.

00:23:46.140 And Anaxamander thinks it's this thing called the aperon,

00:23:49.740 which just means the undefined,

00:23:52.380 either the limitless or something that you can't say

00:23:57.600 what qualities it has.

00:23:59.960 And in a way, this is all versions of one idea

00:24:04.440 that, of course, we now know,

00:24:08.600 we recognize, don't we,

00:24:10.200 that the material world that we are

00:24:14.880 and we're surrounded by

00:24:16.300 is only the form that stuff is currently taking.

00:24:22.760 We are all made of the stars

00:24:26.060 and we will all return to the stars in the end.

00:24:31.080 And so it is this idea that nothing is fixed.

00:24:37.320 We are only the form that the wave of existence

00:24:42.380 is currently taking.

00:24:46.140 And I find that idea incredibly liberating,

00:24:51.440 that you don't actually need to

00:24:55.180 become almost addicted to things as they are,

00:25:01.880 but you can allow, must allow even,

00:25:05.620 if you're to recognize the reality of things.

00:25:08.620 You must allow the wave to go on its way.

00:25:13.900 And there are so many implications of that idea

00:25:16.700 about the nature of birth and death.

00:25:19.820 You know, I think one of those Mylesian thinkers says,

00:25:23.440 there's no such thing as birth or death.

00:25:26.700 It is only things taking another form.

00:25:30.640 And is that such a relief?

00:25:32.700 I find that a huge relief, you know,

00:25:37.100 that you were never really born, Brett,

00:25:40.260 and you will never really die.

00:25:43.440 The wave will simply move on.

00:25:46.440 Well, another pre-Socratic philosopher you highlight

00:25:48.500 who also explored, you know, metaphysically,

00:25:51.820 what is reality made of?

00:25:53.740 Heraclitus? Heraclitus?

00:25:55.980 Heraclitus, I say.

00:25:57.020 Heraclitus. Okay, Heraclitus.

00:25:58.460 And he also thought reality is constantly changing,

00:26:02.260 but he used, instead of water or fluid,

00:26:05.280 he used fire.

00:26:06.980 Talk about Heraclitus.

00:26:09.520 Heraclitus, who came from a neighboring

00:26:12.360 and rival city of Miletus in Ephesus,

00:26:15.580 just to the north of there.

00:26:17.660 And he is the most intriguing of them all.

00:26:23.340 He's exceptionally difficult to understand.

00:26:26.200 It's not clearly stated.

00:26:29.060 And the reason, I think,

00:26:31.900 is that for Heraclitus,

00:26:35.580 the nature of identity,

00:26:37.480 the nature of identity is,

00:26:40.380 at its heart, self-contradictory.

00:26:44.240 And that the self-contradiction

00:26:46.520 is the energy of things.

00:26:50.920 So, I mean, that's rather opaquely said.

00:26:53.500 But, for example,

00:26:54.520 one of his analogies is that justice,

00:26:59.780 and by that I think he means the good city,

00:27:02.420 the good society,

00:27:03.620 even the good self,

00:27:05.740 is like a bow,

00:27:07.720 like a bow and arrow,

00:27:08.960 or like a lyre.

00:27:10.780 And in a bow or a lyre,

00:27:13.700 the frame of the bow

00:27:16.040 and the string of the bow

00:27:18.600 pull in opposite directions.

00:27:21.300 That the bow is only a bow

00:27:24.640 because the frame pulls in one way

00:27:27.840 and the string pulls in another.

00:27:31.420 And if either string or frame

00:27:34.840 were to win out in that contest,

00:27:38.020 that tension,

00:27:39.440 then the bow would no longer be a bow.

00:27:41.780 It would be a kind of inert bit of string

00:27:44.620 or broken string and a bit of wood.

00:27:49.040 And so that kind of the pulling together

00:27:55.280 or the pulling against themselves of opposites

00:27:59.240 is what Heraclitus thinks kind of life and being is.

00:28:04.700 And so you can't ever really identify anything.

00:28:12.060 That everything has this self-contradiction to its heart.

00:28:16.040 And so I think that that is also a form of liberation.

00:28:20.920 We live in an age of extreme over-definition.

00:28:26.240 And so Heraclitus provides an answer to that in a way.

00:28:29.280 And he was absolutely ridiculed

00:28:33.120 for these ideas in classical Greece.

00:28:37.360 But I find them, you know,

00:28:40.600 it's another form of freedom.

00:28:42.420 That if you can,

00:28:43.660 if you think of an idea that you really treasure,

00:28:48.260 and the most enlightening and enlarging thing

00:28:51.280 to do with that idea

00:28:52.680 is to consider what's wrong about it.

00:28:56.380 You know, what the other thing in it is.

00:28:59.280 And that is a Heraclitus inheritance.

00:29:03.060 No, this idea that justice or vitality in life

00:29:08.340 requires that tension or competition.

00:29:10.200 You see this going on in Greek culture.

00:29:12.980 Like the Greeks had this idea of the agon. 0.96

00:29:15.260 Yes.

00:29:15.700 The competition.

00:29:16.580 It is only through that competition

00:29:18.060 where it's like the fire refines things

00:29:20.920 and you can actually see what is good,

00:29:23.160 what is virtuous.

00:29:24.740 But actually, I think there's no emergent term.

00:29:28.000 You don't end up with a kind of purified thing

00:29:32.740 that comes out of the agon

00:29:34.500 or the internal self-contradiction.

00:29:37.380 The process is never ending.

00:29:39.800 You never come to a moment

00:29:41.360 where you can say,

00:29:42.720 oh, now I have it.

00:29:44.200 Now I've refined the silver

00:29:46.780 and here's my pure coin or whatever.

00:29:50.480 Famously, he says that you can't step

00:29:55.740 into the same river twice

00:29:57.780 because if you step into a river twice,

00:30:02.380 it's not the same river anymore.

00:30:05.200 It has become something else.

00:30:08.120 It's other.

00:30:09.120 There's another river there.

00:30:11.080 Well, I'm curious.

00:30:11.980 This is interesting.

00:30:12.760 So these pre-Socratic philosophers

00:30:13.800 had this idea that things constantly change.

00:30:15.940 There is no beginning.

00:30:16.700 There is no end.

00:30:17.480 How did this thinking lead to Plato?

00:30:22.240 Plato said,

00:30:23.420 no, well, there is a form out there

00:30:25.360 that is the good

00:30:26.140 and our goal is to shape ourselves to the good.

00:30:29.420 So how do we go from everything's fluid

00:30:31.020 to there is actually an abstract ideal out there?

00:30:35.260 Well, one interesting thing that happens

00:30:38.560 with this stream of thought

00:30:40.580 that it begins in the East,

00:30:43.320 in the Eastern Aegean,

00:30:45.220 and then in its later terms

00:30:47.040 moves over to the new Greek cities

00:30:50.180 in Sicily and Southern Italy.

00:30:54.020 And one of the philosophers,

00:30:55.720 early philosophers who made that journey

00:30:57.500 was Pythagoras.

00:30:58.740 He came from Samos in the Eastern Aegean

00:31:02.240 and went to live in a city called Croton

00:31:05.440 in Southern Italy.

00:31:07.780 And the Pythagorean inheritance,

00:31:11.440 who then has followers in other cities

00:31:13.700 in Southern Italy,

00:31:15.340 Parmenides and Zeno,

00:31:17.580 leave behind this absolute fluidity

00:31:21.480 of that first Eastern phase.

00:31:25.180 And Pythagoras is the first person,

00:31:28.140 for example,

00:31:28.700 to conceive of a soul,

00:31:29.960 of an everlasting soul.

00:31:31.100 And that Heraclitus would have laughed

00:31:35.340 in your face 0.50

00:31:36.220 if you'd said to him

00:31:37.600 that there was a soul.

00:31:38.840 And of course there is no soul

00:31:40.240 if everything is a fire.

00:31:42.160 Everything is a constant burning.

00:31:45.140 But Pythagoras,

00:31:46.840 who is a social and political dimension

00:31:50.460 to this,

00:31:51.080 that Heraclitus is definitely marginal

00:31:53.960 to his own world in Ephesus,

00:31:56.340 that he won't take on

00:31:58.240 any political responsibility,

00:31:59.940 he won't draw up any law or codes.

00:32:03.440 He spends his time playing with children

00:32:06.060 and beggars the marginal,

00:32:08.280 interestingly Christ-like position,

00:32:11.400 that he won't become powerful.

00:32:16.360 And Pythagoras does the exact opposite,

00:32:19.380 that when he arrives in Southern Italy,

00:32:21.900 he gathers around him

00:32:24.080 a kind of coterie of followers.

00:32:27.400 He becomes like a kind of guru,

00:32:31.060 shamanistic guru,

00:32:32.300 disappearing for weeks at a time,

00:32:35.420 underground,

00:32:36.120 returning apparently from another world

00:32:38.740 with visions of,

00:32:41.140 you know,

00:32:42.020 the beautiful destiny

00:32:43.520 that awaits the good soul

00:32:45.260 in another world.

00:32:46.260 And begins to conceive of

00:32:49.960 the purities beyond the material world,

00:32:53.580 which Thales and Coe and Heraclitus

00:32:57.280 wouldn't really have countenanced.

00:33:00.580 And so there is a shift,

00:33:02.480 a very, very deep shift

00:33:03.840 in the Italian phase

00:33:05.680 to an idea that

00:33:09.020 through all sorts of

00:33:11.180 really mystical processes,

00:33:15.020 one can conceive

00:33:16.500 of a good world beyond this one.

00:33:21.400 And Parmenides,

00:33:23.900 who is a follower of Pythagoras,

00:33:26.460 in a lovely little coastal town

00:33:28.840 just up the coast of Italy

00:33:31.420 from Sicily,

00:33:32.760 between Sicily and Naples,

00:33:34.280 He, in a great

00:33:36.600 and almost impenetrably

00:33:38.860 difficult-to-understand poem,

00:33:42.880 describes a journey

00:33:44.340 in which an initiate like him,

00:33:47.640 someone who is deciding

00:33:48.940 to engage with mystical realities,

00:33:54.180 travels to the underworld,

00:33:57.120 hurtles down to the underworld,

00:33:59.480 and in the underworld

00:34:00.940 meets the great goddess

00:34:02.520 of the underworld.

00:34:04.280 And she describes to him

00:34:06.680 a kind of singular perfection,

00:34:12.120 a sort of beautiful, glowing,

00:34:14.800 good, unaddressable world

00:34:18.460 of kind of oneness,

00:34:20.740 where nothing changes,

00:34:23.440 nothing moves,

00:34:25.440 everything is one thing,

00:34:28.160 beyond all this chaotic multiplicity.

00:34:33.380 And from that aspect of this tradition,

00:34:38.040 Plato undoubtedly takes on

00:34:40.420 the Parmenides with his follower,

00:34:43.480 Zeno,

00:34:44.120 who is an extraordinary kind of logician,

00:34:48.340 who, sort of logician-magician,

00:34:50.900 you could say,

00:34:51.620 who tries to explain to the Athenians,

00:34:54.840 Parmenides and Zeno both go to Athens,

00:34:56.980 and tries to explain to the Athenians,

00:34:59.960 Socrates included,

00:35:01.960 about this other world,

00:35:05.080 distant from the one in which we find ourselves,

00:35:08.160 where all true meaning resides.

00:35:10.500 And that, I think,

00:35:13.980 is the beginning of,

00:35:15.100 well, it's the beginning of so many things.

00:35:17.340 You know, the idea of the soul,

00:35:19.480 the platonic kind of good beyond,

00:35:22.020 you know,

00:35:23.220 of the ideas,

00:35:25.340 beyond this world,

00:35:26.480 and that,

00:35:27.960 to me, in a way,

00:35:30.600 loses sight of everything that was valuable

00:35:33.780 in the early philosophers,

00:35:37.660 it starts to,

00:35:39.820 it starts to devalue the world that we're living in.

00:35:44.220 And that is never anything that appeals to me.

00:35:47.820 Okay, so this is interesting.

00:35:48.580 You can see the lead-up to the classical age here.

00:35:52.260 So you had these early pre-Socratic philosophers.

00:35:54.420 They're developing this sense of agency,

00:35:56.440 this idea that we can think through problems,

00:35:59.120 think through existence.

00:36:00.800 Conflict was a part of that.

00:36:02.060 You'd have these discussions

00:36:03.820 and back and forth

00:36:04.820 and this idea that truth can be,

00:36:07.540 you know,

00:36:07.960 sussed out by looking at contradictions,

00:36:11.280 for example.

00:36:12.200 Yeah.

00:36:12.580 And then you have Pythagoras

00:36:14.460 who comes in and says,

00:36:16.160 well, the soul is immortal.

00:36:18.880 And Parmenides picks up on that

00:36:20.740 and says,

00:36:21.640 this world is the unreal world.

00:36:24.420 Like, reality is beyond this world.

00:36:27.720 And so that's where Plato picks up.

00:36:29.140 But even Plato and Aristotle,

00:36:31.020 they still continued this idea of,

00:36:34.600 you can call it conflict,

00:36:36.020 to suss out things, right?

00:36:37.700 Because that's the whole point of dialogue.

00:36:39.820 What I like about this is that you lay it out.

00:36:41.780 You see how we get Plato and Aristotle.

00:36:44.060 And it was because of these Iron Age Greeks 1.00

00:36:46.760 who were making that transition.

00:36:48.780 And another thing you mentioned earlier,

00:36:50.900 you all see during this time,

00:36:52.040 is the development of,

00:36:54.000 we'll call it manners and civility.

00:36:56.280 How would you describe the Greeks

00:36:59.580 or what came before the Greeks?

00:37:01.860 We'll call them Homeric Greeks, 1.00

00:37:03.160 the Iliad Greeks.

00:37:04.840 Yes.

00:37:05.060 How would you describe their approach

00:37:06.880 to life and civic engagement?

00:37:09.440 And then how do these Iron Age Greeks, 1.00

00:37:11.840 these pre-Socratics, 1.00

00:37:12.900 start changing that?

00:37:14.300 Well, there's a very interesting way

00:37:18.900 of reading the Iliad itself,

00:37:22.200 of the Greeks are away from home.

00:37:27.300 They're on the beach.

00:37:29.680 Their shacks are kind of built up

00:37:32.280 against the side of their ships.

00:37:35.040 The ships themselves are now rotten.

00:37:36.740 They've been there 10 years.

00:37:38.580 There's no civil society there.

00:37:44.180 Who is actually in charge is in contention.

00:37:49.620 It's difficult to know.

00:37:51.400 There's a kind of terrible, angry,

00:37:55.560 unplaced, mutual rivalry and hostility

00:38:00.100 that every single one of them needs to be the best.

00:38:04.780 When they go on the kind of rampage

00:38:06.960 through the battlefield,

00:38:08.060 it's called the Aristeon, I think,

00:38:10.180 the kind of the moment of bestness.

00:38:13.660 And so it is like there is no civility there.

00:38:19.340 There's Agamemnon, the kind of super king,

00:38:22.540 the top king,

00:38:23.740 can steal the girls from Achilles

00:38:27.420 without any sense of compunction.

00:38:30.180 It's just a kind of warring, angry,

00:38:34.760 disintegrated world.

00:38:36.140 On the other side of the plain of Troy is Troy.

00:38:41.380 And in Troy itself,

00:38:43.740 things are extraordinarily orderly

00:38:46.360 that there are men and women

00:38:49.900 living in families together.

00:38:53.020 The only women in the Greek camp 0.92

00:38:54.980 are captives, slaves,

00:38:57.920 no women with any authority there. 1.00

00:39:00.360 But they have authority in Troy.

00:39:02.400 They're living in well-built palaces,

00:39:06.280 all very well arranged.

00:39:07.860 There are complicated and intricate

00:39:10.200 and stable family and civic relations.

00:39:14.320 And so already in the Iliad

00:39:17.200 is a kind of suggestion

00:39:18.960 that the warring and piratical,

00:39:23.040 anarchic, mutually competitive world

00:39:26.100 of the Greek warrior

00:39:27.480 is in some ways a failing.

00:39:30.020 It's in some ways inadequate.

00:39:32.940 And so the kind of implication

00:39:34.720 or the presumption there

00:39:35.960 is that we've got to move beyond this.

00:39:37.660 And the Iliad ends

00:39:39.180 with that extraordinary scene

00:39:40.940 between Priam and Achilles

00:39:42.940 where they reconcile

00:39:45.300 and they eat together

00:39:46.960 over the body of Priam's son,

00:39:49.900 Hector, who Achilles has killed.

00:39:51.560 You know, the most extraordinary

00:39:54.100 outcome of a war story

00:39:56.280 that the two rival warriors

00:40:00.280 end up kissing each other's hands.

00:40:04.280 Achilles is called his man-slaughtering hands.

00:40:08.740 Incredibly moving and beautiful thing,

00:40:10.760 the most beautiful thing in Homer, I think.

00:40:13.540 And so already,

00:40:15.460 so if Homer's writing that

00:40:18.080 or whoever we call Homer's writing that

00:40:20.100 in the sort of 700,

00:40:22.660 there is there the seed

00:40:24.300 of the need for civility.

00:40:27.960 And the question is that

00:40:30.340 how do you find civility

00:40:33.040 outside dominating centralized power

00:40:38.640 in the way that previous civilizations

00:40:40.600 had achieved it

00:40:41.520 in the great cities of the Near East?

00:40:43.960 And the answer to that

00:40:46.940 is the evolution

00:40:49.200 of a courteous culture,

00:40:52.880 a kind culture,

00:40:55.180 and a just culture.

00:40:58.160 And so law codes.

00:41:00.560 But also there's a figure

00:41:02.080 called Xenophanes

00:41:03.580 who lived in one of these

00:41:05.520 harbor cities

00:41:07.360 in a sort of double city

00:41:08.880 called Colophon and Notion

00:41:10.720 in what's now Western Turkey.

00:41:14.080 And Xenophanes

00:41:15.720 absolutely clearly says

00:41:17.780 he can't stand

00:41:19.860 the ancient gods.

00:41:21.260 So what kind of model are they?

00:41:23.200 They're no model

00:41:24.080 for a courteous, civilized life.

00:41:27.040 They're lying, cheating, fighting.

00:41:29.620 We need to get beyond that.

00:41:31.240 And in fact, for Xenophanes,

00:41:33.240 Xenophanes says

00:41:34.100 there is no distinction

00:41:35.620 between nature and God.

00:41:37.620 God is only another name

00:41:39.100 for the world as it is.

00:41:40.220 And so there is a kind of

00:41:43.800 emergent idea

00:41:46.380 of cooperative, civil life.

00:41:51.340 And it takes material form.

00:41:53.040 You know, these cities

00:41:54.280 are laid out very carefully.

00:41:57.100 They have council chambers

00:41:59.300 right in the heart of them.

00:42:01.140 All of them do.

00:42:02.260 Right next to the marketplace

00:42:03.680 where joint decisions are made,

00:42:06.080 not by everyone,

00:42:06.800 but by the merchant elite.

00:42:09.220 But as a kind of proto,

00:42:12.960 I mean, they're not democracies.

00:42:14.600 It's very tempting always

00:42:15.500 to think that democratic ideas

00:42:17.300 are nascent here.

00:42:18.560 They're not democracies.

00:42:19.800 But there is an idea

00:42:21.460 that those who can decide

00:42:24.720 about their own lives

00:42:26.000 must.

00:42:27.860 And I think it's absolutely intimate

00:42:29.840 with the idea,

00:42:31.000 as you were saying earlier,

00:42:33.000 that selves need agency

00:42:36.440 for dignity.

00:42:39.500 That the dignified life

00:42:41.600 is one in which you decide.

00:42:44.500 What is the big takeaway

00:42:46.180 you hope readers walk away with

00:42:47.940 after they finish your book?

00:42:51.800 I wanted to write this book

00:42:54.720 because it is about

00:42:57.520 an open frame of mind.

00:43:01.140 And I hope people reading it

00:43:03.880 will think there is no need

00:43:06.500 to be aggressively loyal

00:43:09.180 to what you think you think.

00:43:12.180 Open your mind

00:43:13.740 to the possibility

00:43:15.580 that you're wrong.

00:43:16.900 And that's what I would love

00:43:19.140 people to think

00:43:20.320 after reading it.

00:43:21.420 How absolutely thrilling

00:43:23.800 it is

00:43:24.560 that so long ago

00:43:26.380 these people were thinking

00:43:28.120 such civilized things.

00:43:30.880 Well, Adam,

00:43:31.360 this has been a great conversation.

00:43:32.420 Where can people go

00:43:32.920 to learn more about the book

00:43:33.820 and your work?

00:43:36.240 Well, I mean,

00:43:37.440 there are marvelous editions

00:43:39.360 of these thinkers' works.

00:43:42.120 None of them wrote very much,

00:43:43.740 which is very good.

00:43:44.680 And so if you find

00:43:46.520 a book about

00:43:47.580 the pre-Socratics, 1.00

00:43:49.580 their texts,

00:43:50.460 then there are

00:43:50.920 wonderful parallel

00:43:52.220 Greek and English texts

00:43:54.280 published by the

00:43:55.420 Harvard Loeb Library

00:43:57.500 and many other translations.

00:44:01.060 And I would go

00:44:01.740 to one of them.

00:44:03.140 Fantastic.

00:44:03.820 Well, Adam Nicholson,

00:44:04.480 thanks for your time.

00:44:04.920 It's been a pleasure.

00:44:06.240 Oh, for me too, Brett.

00:44:07.200 Thank you.

00:44:07.660 My guest today

00:44:09.660 was Adam Nicholson.

00:44:10.560 He's the author

00:44:11.020 of the book

00:44:11.380 How to Be,

00:44:12.040 Life Lessons

00:44:12.720 from the Early Greeks.

00:44:13.520 It's available

00:44:13.840 on Amazon.com

00:44:14.760 and bookstores everywhere.

00:44:16.000 Check out our show notes

00:44:16.580 at aom.is

00:44:17.460 slash how to be

00:44:18.220 where we find links

00:44:18.860 to resources

00:44:19.460 where we delve

00:44:19.800 deeper into this topic.

00:44:28.020 Well, that wraps up

00:44:29.100 another edition

00:44:29.760 of the AOM podcast.

00:44:30.900 Make sure to check out

00:44:31.540 our website

00:44:31.920 at artofmanliness.com

00:44:33.000 where you find

00:44:33.280 our podcast archives

00:44:34.280 as well as thousands

00:44:35.340 of articles

00:44:35.760 that we've written

00:44:36.200 over the years

00:44:36.560 about pretty much

00:44:37.160 anything you think of.

00:44:38.540 And if you haven't

00:44:39.040 done so already,

00:44:39.500 I'd appreciate it

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00:44:42.500 It helps out a lot.

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00:44:48.840 As always,

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00:44:49.960 continued support

00:44:50.540 and until next time,

00:44:51.200 this is Brett McKay.

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The Art of Manliness - November 13, 2023

The Lesser-Known Philosophy of the Iron Age Greeks

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