The Origin of Philosophy and its Connection to Tyranny
Philosophy is the framework of modern law and morality. It is the software that governs our minds. In its practice, we question the nature of our existence and glean timeless wisdom that is passed on through the ages. Classical Athens has been in ruins for millennia, but because of philosophy, Socrates lives forever.
This article will investigate the origin of philosophy and the conditions which surround its unique conception. First, it will cover the cultural preconditions necessary to allow for philosophy to have come into existence. Then, it will focus on how those preconditions manifested in early Europe. Finally, it will expand on how these preconditions allowed for the origin of philosophy in classical Greece and its various consequences.
Nature and Convention
Philosophy relies on the distinction between nature and convention, and it is important to clarify the meaning of these words in this context before proceeding further.
Nature refers to the intrinsic quality of all things, both living and inanimate. The sky is blue, the sun is bright, some horses are faster than others. This is essentially a rudimentary understanding of the world as being a separate phenomenon from our own existence.
Convention refers to human patterns, rituals, or behaviors. For example, we drive on the right side of the road. This is not a necessity or a law of nature; it is simply an unimportant arbitrary pattern that governs how we live. Today, these are often referred to as norms. Burial practices, fashion, and diet are also examples of conventions.
In the modern world, the difference between nature and convention is very obvious to us. However, for much of human history, it was unthinkable; the distinction was altogether alien. There was no concept of nature as independent from rituals. Without this distinction, nature as we understand it today cannot be conceived of. If you believe you need to dance to make the rain fall or eat a sacred yam to induce pregnancy, your concept of nature is inextricably linked with your conventions.
Distinction and European Layer Cake
There is a convincing hypothesis from PhD Costin Alamariu as to how the Greeks in early Bronze Age Europe were the first to have expressed this essential distinction in prose by discovering philosophy. The answer as to how this occurred, however, is far from intuitive. It is as follows.
It lies in the western migration of the tribes of militant pastoralists from the Eurasian steppe, from modern-day Russia, into continental Europe around 3000 BC. These people are known as the Proto-Indo-Europeans, often referred to as PIE. The PIE are the ancestors of all modern peoples of Germanic, Scandinavian, Southern Mediterranean, Persian, Russian, and Northern Indian descent. They are responsible for the lactose tolerance of most people on Earth and for the language family that links Sanskrit with English (Alamariu 2023).
Nearly all people living in Europe during this period of history were actually agrarians. Unlike the PIE, these indigenous Europeans lived sedentary lives. They had relatively egalitarian cultures that practiced rituals and enforced them to an authoritarian degree. These indigenous agrarians lived their whole lives near or within the settlements of their birth. They had poor diets, consisting almost exclusively of whatever crop their settlement specialized in.
These agrarians worshiped the female goddesses of nature above all others, as evidenced by the Gravettian culture’s “Venus of Willendorf” (Kupier, 2023). they conceived of nature itself as being female. They passed down this conception to us. what we call “mother nature.” Their primary cultural focus was fertility and procreation, as they likely had no concept of paternity. The indigenous farmers of Europe could not conceive of nature being distinct from their conventions. To them, the two were, in fact, one and the same. This is, after all, the default state of humanity.
The migrating pastoralists, the PIE, were very different. They had herds of domesticated cattle, sheep, goats, dogs, and, most importantly, horses. They were semi-nomadic, moving from pasture to pasture in order to sustain their livestock (Alamariu 2023). While they sometimes practiced agriculture, their primary food source was their cattle, milk, wild fruits and game from wherever they were located at any given time (Garnier, Romain, 2017).
The PIE encountered many different cultures and, therefore, many different rituals. This diversity in experience informed them of the disconnect between convention and nature. Some people they encountered avoided certain foods, or buried their dead as opposed to cremating them etc. This cultural realization–gleaned from being semi-nomadic–allowed them to conceive of rituals as being separate from nature, and rather as a product of culture. (Alamariu 2023)
The PIE also practiced animal husbandry, i.e., breeding cows for increased milk production and horses for greater strength or speed. This, in turn, gave them the concepts of both paternity and genetics. Neither of these is evident to human intellect; it is acquired through observing nature as distinct from oneself. This genetic realization of paternity was then extended to make decisions in human mating pairs within PIE societies. They worshiped strength, beauty, adventurousness, and war, and so they selected mates accordingly (Alamariu 2023)..
To defend their herds of livestock, the PIE became very militant. They were some of the first to utilize horses as well as the chariot, which, in late Neolithic and early Bronze Age warfare, was a rare and dominant technology. As the PIE migrated, the native farmers–who did not even possess horses–were conquered over time by the less populous but militarily superior migrating bands of PIE.
The migrating PIE slowly rearranged European society from an egalitarian and matriarchal structure to a hierarchical patriarchy. This is clear by the emergence of worshiping the “sky father,” as seen in the Norse Odin, the Hellenic Zeus, Roman Jupiter and German Wotan, which are all evidence of this change in European mythology. Moreover, along with patriarchal deities came the emergence of chariots in Eurasian mythology. Stories like Castor and Pollux in Greece and the Ashvin twins in India. In both cases, mythological pairs of brothers operate a chariot, indicating a conquest in India and Greece by similar PIE peoples.
The migrating PIE, as opposed to the native agriculturalist, had (1) a conception of nature distinct from convention, (2) military supremacy, and (3) a patriarchal culture. The PIE did not wipe out the native agrarians; however, they slowly became the ruling caste of the European continent and culturally mixed with the local populations. They married their sky father to the native’s mother earth, which in Greek mythology are called Uranus and Gaia, whose children are titans and whose grandchildren are the gods. This marriage of the two cultures' chief deities symbolizes the layer cake forming in Europe, mixing the pastoral and militant patriarchy of the PIE with the indigenous agrarian matriarchy of the natives, whom the Greeks referred to as the Pelasgians.
The Origin of Philosophy and its Connection to Tyranny
Fast forwarding now to the late Bronze Age, we find ourselves in classical Greece. The PIE and native agriculturalists have mixed for millennia and are now, in this region, all Hellenic Greeks. They still possess the previously discussed mythology, and they are simply the descendants and inheritors of the past this article has just described. Part of their inheritance was the cultural worship of beauty, strength, and war, as well as the selective breeding of animals and, by this point, the ruling class of people.
While this admixture of culture happened all across Eurasia, Greece–the birthplace of philosophy–was unique. Classical Greece had developed the polis, or the city-state. This is a distinct emergence that was the combined result of geographic, historical, and cultural factors, which this article cannot cover in depth. The polis, being how Greek life was organized at this time, is essential to the fruition of philosophy.
The centralization of Greek society into the polis meant that populations now lived in urban environments, with public gathering spaces and a cohesive identity as members of their particular polis. However, within each city-state, there were also very distinct castes and ethnic identities.
The ruling aristocracies of Greece were the genetic and cultural descendants of the PIE. Aristocrat comes from the Greek aristo, meaning best. The nobles were called aristoi. “Best” meaning they considered themselves the greatest people in the polis in terms of: wealth, influence, power, beauty, ethics, genetics, morality, etc. For this reason, many city-states were monarchies or oligarchies run by this class of PIE descendants. This ruling class supplied the armies, cavalry, and navy for their respective cities, as well as public funding for infrastructure.
In these ruling classes, daily labor was frowned upon as beneath them, just as the PIE considered the laborious agrarian work to be. Some aristocratic men began to use their spare time and luxury to ponder the universe and reality itself. Thales, Heraclitus, Democritus, and many more began the first-ever practice of philosophy, using their cultural inheritance of understanding nature and convention as distinct phenomena, which they called physis and nomos, respectively. They first wondered about the material reality of the world, often pondering what all things are made of. Thales hypothesized the world was made of water, Hereclitus thought it was fire instead, while Demosthenes thought the universe was composed of tiny structures he called atoms. Philosophy began here, as the ponderance of the most fundamental questions of nature.
This all began to change during the age of democracy, specifically in Athens. It is here that the demos, or “the people,” began to challenge the preeminence of the ruling classes. Suffrage was given to lower-class male citizens in order to justify their conscription in warfare, which required an ever-increasing number of soldiers. Amid this development, we pan to Socrates, who has begun to teach philosophy in Athens. He used this novel practice of philosophy–which was still novel and strange to his contemporaries–to question not just nature as a whole, but human nature and political realities, ethics, morals, and the desired outcome for society.
Most of his students were ruling-class citizens or aristoi like Plato, Xenophon, Alcibiades, Critias, etc. These aristocratic citizens generally resented the rise and expansion of democracy. Meanwhile, Athens was in a decade-long war with Sparta, one which split Greece at the seams in a class conflict. Pro-Athenian factions were generally democratic and pro-Spartan factions were generally anti-democratic. Eventually, Athens lost this war.
Sparta, an oligarchy, installed the “thirty tyrants” to rule Athens in place of the defeated democracy. These tyrants, like all Hellenic aristocrats, inherited the long line of eugenics from their PIE ancestors; they would not have legitimate children with anyone outside of the ruling class. Critias, the leader of the thirty tyrants, who was a student of Socrates and Plato’s relative, had 1,500 Athenian citizens executed under his reign and caused many more to flee. There were only ~40,000 to begin with. To contextualize the severity of that figure, imagine a President killing 12 million Americans and expelling 30 million or more; this is to scale with Critias’s tyrannical actions in Athens.
The tyrant Critias used his philosophical perspective of humanity to justify the treatment of citizens who had less than aristocratic bloodlines. The thinking is that aristocrats have in their blood “more life” than others and are, therefore, entitled to rule. The best example of this ideal is the Olympian. His physique, beauty, strength, and ambition all exceed those of others. This vein of ancient philosophy is also clear in Aristotle’s admiration of the Spartan state and its focus on physical strength, beauty, and aristocratic rule (Alamariu 2023).
The Greek word for this life energy or spiritedness is thumos, and it can also be thought of as the breath of life. By their deductions, the military-aged aristocrats had more thumos than ordinary men, slaves and women. Because of this logic, only aristocrats were able to train in the gymnasium, fight in wars, or compete in the Olympics. They were, as a class, considered to have more thumos than the rest of society and ruled as such.
Eventually, the thirty tyrants were ousted from power and either exiled or executed for their crimes. This led many to be very suspicious of philosophy, however, as it was used to justify tyranny over the people. Four years after democracy was restored in Athens, Socrates was imprisoned for “corrupting the youth.” This is often mistaken to mean that people were upset by the practice of philosophy in a vacuum. In reality, it is because of the fact that his teachings were thought to have inspired the eugenic tyranny of Critias and his thirty tyrants. The people voted to execute Socrates by poisoning. His surviving students, namely Plato, began to work in the abstract conceptions of idealism rather than stray too close to practical applications of philosophy. The same was true of Aristotle and many of the classical philosophers who were weary of the execution of Socrates.
Philosophy has come a very long way from Athens. Each new age of philosophy builds upon the last, but the foundation beneath them all is the same; nature as a force is separate from human convention, and it is from this presupposition that all philosophy is descended.
Conclusion
This article was a very brief summary of the complex history of the concept of nature as being distinct from convention and its manifestation as philosophy. The PIE’s migration into Europe is the precursor that culturally primed Europe for the advent of philosophy. When Greece’s unique history and geography allowed for the development of the polis and was eventually stressed by political discourse, it incentivized the ruling class to articulate a defense for their place in society, resulting in philosophy as we know it today.
Works Cited
Alamariu, Costin. Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy. Costin Alamariu, 2023.
Garnier, Romain, et al. “Milk and the Indo-Europeans.” HAL Open Science, inria.hal.science/hal-01667476/document. Accessed 11 Oct. 2024.
Kuiper, Kathleen. “Venus of Willendorf.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica,inc., 30 Aug. 2024, www.britannica.com/topic/Venus-of-Willendorf.
Norman, Matthew. “The Thirty Tyrants Who Killed Five Percent of Ancient Athens’ Population.” GreekReporter.Com, 27 Jan. 2024, greekreporter.com/2024/01/27/the-thirty-tyrants-killed-five-percent-ancient-athens-population/.
