From Watery Chaos

 

Cosmologies, like Hesiod's Theogony, are accounts of the beginnings of the universe, and they generally also, through the course of telling the universe’s origins, tell of the universe’s workings: i.e., why the sun rises every day. Cosmology most likely antedates the written language, since non-literate peoples during historical times had cosmologies (like the Amerindian Coyote myths).

The earliest written cosmologies were, like Hesiod's, “theogonies” (stories of the origins of the gods) because the creators of various elements of the universe, and oftentimes the elements themselves, were thought to be gods: super-human rational beings.

The earliest surviving written cosmology is the Babylonian Enuma Elish, which is thought to have descended from Sumerian sources. According to this work, the primal state of the world (which of course to an ancient was the whole universe) was a water mass in which salt water (Tiamat), fresh water (Apsu), and clouds (Mummu) were all intermingled. But these inter-mingled entities were not lifeless masses. They were characters, with personalities and rationality. Neither were they merely gods of the various forms of water: over-grown humans with command over their respective elements. Tiamat had a distinct personality, but she was also literally salt water itself (”tiamat” literally meant “salt water”).

Given that the Sumerians lived near the mouth of two great rivers, on can understand their preoccupation with water. The antiquarian Georges Roux, in his excellent work Ancient Iraq, mused on how the ancient poet might have envisioned such a primeval scene:

“If we stand on a misty morning near the present Iraqi sea-shore…what do we see? Low banks of clouds hang over the horizon; large pools of sweet water…mingle freely with salty waters of the Persian Gulf…all around us sea, sky and earth are mixed in a nebulous, watery chaos.”

“Creation” happened when this watery chaos began to un-mingle. First arose silt islands, like the ones which can be found where the Tigris and Euphrates pour into the Persian Gulf (personified as the gods Lahmu and Lahamu) Then came the horizon (personified as the gods Anshar and Kishar). 

This evolution in the story evinces a greater sophistication than myth-makers are often given credit for. Aristotle called myth-makers theologi, because they explained the mysteries of the universe by invoking personal forces (gods, or theoi), in marked contrast to those he called phusici, the later philosopher-cosmologists who explained those same mysteries by theorizing impersonal forces (nature, or phusis). But as I shall attempt to show below, many ancient myth-makers seemed to be trying to make rational cosmic theories within the bounds of the god-myth format.

Myths are also often derided for “just being stories”. But really compelling stories are often compelling for their plausibility. Thus, stories that survive the test of time are often the most plausible ones, and evince an author’s good grasp the plausible.

Let us examine the first two generations of gods in Enuma Elish, ignoring for the time being the proper-noun treatment given to the cosmic entities, and keeping an eye out for plausibility.

Firstly, let us imagine the three water gods as simply dumb masses of water, and that the poet is merely postulating that the earliest state of the world was a single, indiscernible foamy blob of fresh water, salt water, and mist. The notion that all discernible things arose from a single mass is not inherently fanciful. In fact it is quite plausible. There are only two possibilities regarding the primal state of the universe: either (1) things were distinct, various and discernible, as they are now or (2) they were indistinct, single and indiscernible. The Enuma Elish authors simply chose option number 2, as did many of the Greek philosophers of the 6th century¹, and chose water as that single thing.

Once the primal state is established, a cosmologist must decide which cosmic entity would arise out of the primal state first. The Enuma Elish authors chose silt islands, which is a very plausible choice for a Mesopotamian, given that silt islands occur right where the waters above (cloud and mist) and the waters below (salt and fresh waters) still mingle (as described in the Roux’s colorful quote above).

Then, if the clouds and the waters continued to separate out, the first discernible things one could see would be the bottom of the sky flush with the top of the earth: in other words, the horizon.

This account, arrived at from a sense of plausibility arrived at via induction, given the lack of scientific instruments at the time, is a perfectly adequate theory for how the world that ancient man saw around him could have come to be. Scientists even today use their sense of plausibility to construct theories. Of course they have much more powerful techniques for testing those theories, but other than that, there is not as much difference between ancient and modern cosmologists as might be supposed.

¹In fact, Thales, regarded as the first Greek philosopher, is thought to have traveled to Babylon and may have been directly influenced by Enuma Elish in his assertion that the world was created out of water, and that everything fundamentally is water. He, as Carl Sagan said, told the Babylonian story, but “took the gods out of it.” Sagan used the comparison to exemplify how different the mythmakers and early philosophers were. I think it exemplifies how surprisingly similar they were.

 

The Worldview of the Theologos

This post is one in a series on the Epistemology and Worldview Throughout History.  Previously in this series: Thales and Deductive Geometry.

Aristotle distinguished between two kinds of thinkers.  There were the theologi and the physiologi.  Logos means "account".  So the two types of thinkers had different ways of accounting for the universe.

Theo means "god".  So the theologi accounted for phenomena with reference to gods.  The ranks of the theologi were filled with poets (traveling bards like Homer) and priests (sacramental priests like the Iliad's Chryses,  oracular seers like the Pythian priestesses,  and peripatetic diviners like Calchas).

For Homer, a plague that decimated the ranks of the Achaeans besieging Troy was caused, not by the unwholesome conditions of a war camp, but by the god Apollo shooting invisible arrows into the army as punishment for King Agamemnon having disrespected his priest.  For the ancient Greek theologos, the sun is a blazing chariot being driven by the god Helios, earthquakes are either caused when Poseidon is angry or when Zeus is nodding his head in making a promise, agricultural seasons come and go according to the mood of Demeter, and the souls of the dead are escorted by Hermes into the underworld kingdom of Hades and Persephone.  Even human emotional states are explained by the influence of gods like Aphrodite and Eris, goddess of strife.

Sometimes such individual acts of god are constituent parts of a greater plan.  The events leading up to the fall of Troy are said, by Homer, to all be toward the fulfillment of the will of Zeus.

 Dios d' eteleieto boulê

(thus the plan of Zeus came to fulfillment)

But, even Zeus is said to be bound by the Moirae (the apportioners, or Fates) and their mother Ananke (Destiny or Necessity).

Thus, according to the most complete theologos, all phenomena are at bottom actions in the Misesian sense: purposeful behavior, products of will.  Therefore, to the theologos, all the sciences are praxeology.

Next in this series: The Worldview of the Physiologos.

Divination in the Iliad

This post is one in a series on the Epistemology and Worldview Throughout History.  Previously in this series: Inductive Practical Astronomy.

Homer begins his Iliad as Hesiod begins his poems, by invoking a goddess, probably a Muse (although Homer, unlike Hesiod, does not specify).

A similar kind of divine revelation is embodied in the character Calchas, a prophet...

"who had knowledge of all things that were, and that were to be, and that had been before, and who had guided the ships of the Achaeans to Ilios by the gift of prophecy that Phoebus Apollo had granted him."

Again we have divine knowledge granted by a god, and this knowledge encompasses the past, present, and future.  And like Hesiod, Calchas magically knows about seafaring, although it is not his trade.

In the story of Troy, Apollo also grants Cassandra the gift of prophecy, along with the curse that nobody will ever believe her.

Sometimes ancient Greek prophets would spontaneously realize their prophecies.  Most, however, would interpret their prophecies from various omens: dreams, the arrangement of entrails, and animal behavior.

Aside from any claim of divine authority, such divination can be thought of as a form of praxeology.  It implies that events in the universe can interpreted as willful actions of divine agents.

The diviner saw patterns that other people could not understand.  The layman had to trust the expertise of the seer.  King Agamemnon went so far as to sacrifice his own daughter on the authority of Calchas.

Our most pernicious modern-day diviners are climate scientists.  They too look oh-so-carefully at the patterns in nature that the layperson cannot understand (climate statistics in their case), and pretend to be able to infer from them judgments of great consequence.

Next in this series: Thales and Deductive Geometry.

Inductive Practical Astronomy

This post is one in a series on the Epistemology and Worldview Throughout History.  Previously in this series: Introducing Works and Days

Much of the Works and Days, like the Theogony, is concerned with outlandish tales about the past.  Here we have the myths of Prometheus, Pandora, and the Ages of Man (Golden, Silver, Bronze, etc.).  No doubt he bases his authority to speak on such matters on his divine inspiration as a poet.

However, in this poem, he also expounds upon techniques for managing natural resources using the stars as a guide.  Here is a sample of his astronomically-based advice:

"When the Pleiades, daughters of Atlas, are rising, begin your harvest, and your ploughing when they are going to set "

"When the piercing power and sultry heat of the sun abate, and almighty Zeus sends the autumn rains, and men's flesh comes to feel far easier, -- for then the star Sirius passes over the heads of men, who are born to misery, only a little while by day and takes greater share of night, -- then, when it showers its leaves to the ground and stops sprouting, the wood you cut with your axe is least liable to worm."

"When Zeus has finished sixty wintry days after the solstice, then the star Arcturus leaves the holy stream of Ocean and first rises brilliant at dusk. After him the shrilly wailing daughter of Pandion, the swallow, appears to men when spring is just beginning. Before she comes, prune the vines, for it is best so."

Obviously Hesiod the farmer wouldn't have relied on divine inspiration to know such lore.  Again he, like all ancient farmers, would have used induction.  He would have noticed, for example, that in the past, crops planted when the Pleiades star cluster sets (late October/early November)  and harvested when they rise (first half of May) happened to be more bountiful.  He would have inferred from repetitions of such instances that those would be the best times in the future to plough and harvest.

Such careful inductive thinking and experimentation of the working man who improved his tools and techniques, thereby increasing his prosperity, is the realm of “science” which did, by far, the most good for mankind.

Hesiod also holds forth on seafaring, of which he admits he has no experience or "instruction" ("sesophismenos", a word closely related to sophia, or wisdom).  But here, he plays his "divine inspiration" card:

"Nevertheless, I shall speak forth the mind of aegis-holding Zeus, for the Muses have taught me to sing an inconceivable hymn."

Here "inconceivable" is translated from  athesphaton: literally "beyond even a god's power to express".

Next in this series: Divination in the Iliad.

Introducing Works and Days

This post is one in a series on the Epistemology and Worldview Throughout History.  Previously in this series: Night, Day, and Induction.

After receiving magical poetic powers from the Muses, Hesiod sailed to Euboea to compete in the funeral games of a local big shot.  This is likely where he first performed the Theogony.  He won first prize (a golden tripod), and introduced to the Greek world a work of literature that would become canonical.

Shortly after that, Hesiod gets sued by his brother Perses for a larger share of their inheritance from their father.  Perses wins the case, according to Hesiod, by bribing the judges.  Hesiod responded by writing a poem which denounces Perses and the judges, and tries to teach the feckless brother how to make an honest living.  Through the course of this lecture, Hesiod waxes poetic on the history of mankind, household management, and bronze age agronomy.  This poem also becomes canonical in the Greek world, and it has come down to us with the title Works and Days.

Next in this series: Inductive Practical Astronomy.

Human Nature in the Theogony

This post is one in a series on the Epistemology and Worldview Throughout History.  Previously in this series: History in the Theogony.

The anthropomorphic aspects of Hesiod's gods also give the Theogony some interesting insights into human nature.  We have male striving: an eternal quest for women and power, and a perennial resentment of the son toward the father.  The nature of women according to Hesiod is outlined in my post History in the Theogony.  A further aspect of womankind is represented by Gaia and Rhea caring ultimately more for their children than for their husbands.  We also have an analysis of the virtues of the basileus (king or magistrate).  The basileus is said to be blessed by the Muses, and to engender justice (dike).

And an over-riding message is that the actions of man are impelled by qualities that are embodied in gods: Love, Strife, Jealousy, Hatred, etc.  The fates of mankind are decided by Zeus's agents such as the Fates and the Furies.

Next in this series: Ethics in the Theogony.

History in the Theogony

This post is one in a series on the Epistemology and Worldview Throughout History.  Previously in this series: The Cosmology of Hesiod.

The anthropomorphic aspects of Hesiod's cosmology are interesting in their own right as possible mythological tellings of actual events.  (Herodotus and Plutarch took several myths to be as such)  For example, Zeus's accession to the throne, establishing a new world order can be taken to represent mankind's shift from savagery to civilization and the state.  After defeating Chronos, Zeus couples with Themis.  Thus authority (of the state) is married to natural order, whose literal children are lawfulness (Eunomia), Justice (Dike), and Peace (Eirene).  And through his coupling with Msemonye, he begets the Muses (who can be thought of as the arts themselves).  Thus the supposed boons of civilization and the state are born, after generations of savagery.  Of course another of Zeus's children is Ares: war.

Did the accession of the state really bring these things about?  Was life before the state, represented by Zeus, like the world of the earlier gods, where the only justice was revenge?  In spite of Thomas Hobbes' contention that before the state, the life of man was nasty, brutish and short, there is strong evidence that that is not true.  In fact, there is strong evidence that the first city-states to arise in Mesopotamia created a marked increase in violence.  Was there no justice or lawfulness outside of the state?  Medieval Ireland would be evidence that this was not the case.  And the oral tradition represented by the Muses also pre-dated the state.

With Ouranos's shoving the cyclopes and hecatonshires into Gaia, we have an "orginal sin".

Another interesting "historical" event of the Theogony is the Prometheus "contract".  Prometheus brokers a "settlement" between the gods and man.  He puts before Zeus two piles of the body parts of an ox, and tricks him into choosing the one that was naught but bones and fat.  Thus, was the law established that sacrifices to the gods would be burnt offerings of bones and fat, whereas the good meat was reserved for man (or at least the priests).

Zeus in revenge tried to keep the technology of fire away from mankind.  Prometheus however managed to steal it away for them.  This is one instance in a theme throughout world literature of the gods wanting to hold mankind back in their abilities and technology.

Then in revenge for the theft of fire, Zeus arranges for Pandora, the first woman to be created.  Out of her, the "race" of women was created.  This is perhaps the earliest recorded instance of the "can't live with them, can't live without them" maxim: Hesiod says that women drive men to poverty (as man's eternal foil, a parallel with Biblical Eve), and yet without them, there will be no children to care for men in their old age.

Next in this series: Human Nature in the Theogony.

The Cosmology of Hesiod

This post is one in a series on the Epistemology and Worldview Throughout History.  Previously in this series: Introducing the Theogony.

A traditional synopsis of the Theogony might go as follows.  The gods Khaos, Gaia, and Eros "come to be".  Then Khaos gives birth to Nyx and Erebos, who in turn give birth to Hemera and Aether.  Gaia gives birth to Ouranos and Pontus.  Ouranos and Gaia beget the twelve titans, as well as the Cyclopes and the Hundred-Handed Giants.  Ouranos entraps the latter two within Gaia.  Gaia is enraged, and has Khronos, the youngest Titan, castrate his father (thereby separating earth from sky, after which he becomes master of the world.  The Titans have their own children.  To forestall a prophecy of his overthrow from coming true, Khronos devours each of his children, except Zeus, who Khronos's sister-wife saves by feeding her husband a rock in swaddling clothes.  When Zeus comes to maturity, he forces Khronos to vomit out his siblings.  Zeus and his siblings then go to war with the Titans.  With the aid of the Cyclopes and Hundred-handers, Zeus overthrows the Titans and entraps them in the underworld realm of Tartarus.  Zeus later has a final duel with Typhoes.

In Hesiod's Theogony, as in much creation mythology, inanimate objects (like earth), forces (like love), and phenomena (like night) are presented to a large degree as acting beings: they are anthropomorphized.  Thus, the story Hesiod tells might seem to be dismissed as a superhuman soap opera: an interpersonal saga, in which the characters happen to have outlandish powers.  However, the Theogony can also be viewed in a vastly different way.

The great philosopher Aristotle, who wrote some 400 years after Hesiod wrote his Theogony, made a sharp distinction between two classes of thinkers: theologi and physici.  Thetheologi impute the causes of phenomena to personal, mysterious gods, the knowledge of whom is only accessible through divine revelation.  In stark contrast, the physici look to impersonal, discernible forces which can only be detected through careful observation and reasoning.  The ranks of the theologi were supposed to be filled with poets, priests and prophets.  The ranks of physici were populated by proper philosophers.  However Aristotle made a possible exception for Hesiod.  He surmised that the great poet showed his truephysicoi colors in his cosmological formulations.

When Greek myths are translated into English, the names of the gods are left in a transliterated version of the original Greek.  Thus it can be easy to miss the fact that many (if not all) of Hesiod's gods in the Theogony are anthropomorphized representations of observable objects, forces, and phenomena.  For example, Gaia is not simply the name of "the goddess of the Earth".  "Gaia" literally means "earth" in Greek (it is the origin of our "geo-" prefixes in our words "geology" and "geography"), and Gaia was thought of as the earth itself.  Thus, if you ignore the proper noun treatment Hesiod gives to his objects, forces, and phenomena, what at first might seem like a fairy tale of love and strife between gods begetting children and blood will seem more like an impersonal account of attraction and repulsion between natural objects begetting generation and dissolution.

So, a "naturalistic" telling of the Theogony might be as follows.  First there was invisible air (Khaos).  Then earth (Gaia) and attractive/generative force (Eros) came to be.  Then out of air came a dark gas (Erebos) charged with its own motive energy (Nyx).  Out of that came a bright gas (Aether) charged with its own motive energy (Hemera).  A starry firmament (Ouranos) springs up out of the Earth, as well as salt water (Pontus).  The firmament holds the earth down, and matter from the former is compelled by the attractive force to come down upon the latter.  This process generates twelve entities, including: time (Khronos) and its motive force (Rhea), fresh water (Okeanos) and its motive force (Tethys), inquiry (Koios), intelligence (Phoebe), mortality (Iapteus), natural order (Themis), memory (Mnesomyne), and sight (Theia). The same process later generated storms (Cyclopes being the lightning and thunder and Hecatonshires being the winds), which became entrapped within the earth.  Time itself brought a halt to this process.  The twelve entities, as well as the motive energy of the dark gas (Nyx) then engendered further entities.  Some were abstract forms which would later be actualized in human affairs, such as strife, rumor, etc.  Some were material beings such as rivers and mountains.

Taken thus, Hesiod's Theogony exemplifies many important strands in the history of thought regarding "natural history".  In the Theogony, there is no one special creator, and no single instance of creation.  Instead there is a gradual process of generation and change.

Of course for all his systematic and rational presentation, Hesiod still had his "Time" entity literally castrate his "Sky" entity with a flint sickle.  His audience expected the interpersonal saga of epic poetry, and this necessitated that his cosmic powers have distinctly human characteristics.

Next  in this series: History in the Theogony.

Introducing the Theogony

This post is one in a series on the Epistemology and Worldview Throughout History.  Previously in this series: The Inspiration of Hesiod.

The Theogony is likely the work of poetry which made Hesiod's name.  In his later poem Works and Days, Hesiod tells of how he won a prominent prize for poetry, and it is likely that he won by singing his Theogony.  This performance must have been quite stunning.  In the Theogony, Hesiod discloses the history of the cosmos, telling of the birth of each cosmic entity in its turn.  He traces the passing of cosmic ages, characterizing them as a successive usurpations of divine royalty.  The tale culminates in the ultimate holy order under the reign of Zeus, the final usurper, in which mankind finds itself.  It will be necessary to summarize and briefly analyze the Theogony in order to glean from it any insights into Hesiod's epistemology.

Next in this series: The Cosmology of Hesiod.

The Inspiration of Hesiod

This post is one in a series on the Epistemology and Worldview Throughout History.  Previously in this series: Epistemology in (Western) History: From Hesiod to Hoppe.

One ancient day, at the foot of Mount Helicon in Boeotia, a lowly shepherd named Hesiod tended his flock.  Upon entering a clearing, he found to his astonishment nine unspeakably beautiful goddesses standing before him.  These were the Muses, the divine patronesses of the rhythmical arts (that which we call "music" in derivation from their name).  It is by the grace of the Muses that the choir sings, the flutist trills, and the dancer twirls.  These benificient goddesses impart their own divine abilities upon the mortals they favor.  And on that day, they chose to favor a mere shepherd.  The Muses gave Hesiod a staff of laurel to signify his new status, and literally inspired him by exhaling their "divine voice" directly into the shepherd's lungs.  With the divine voice came not only the ability to sing, but the knowledge of songs themselves.  And these were not short songs of love or worship.  These were songs that told stories: true stories.  Nor were these just brutish tales of kings and wars, but of origins: the genesis of man, the births of the gods, and the dawn of existence itself.  Thus did Hesiod the shepherd become Hesiod the poet.

At least that is what Hesiod himself says happened.  We may not take his word for it, but we should be glad that he (or one of his successors), unlike most of his poet contemporaries, took the trouble to learn how to write, and to write his poems down.  His works, written some 2,700 years ago, are, along with those of Homer, the earliest surviving works of western literature.  But Hesiod's writings do not only give us a window into the superstitions of antiquity.  For strikingly, in Hesiod's writings, situated as they are at the dawn of the western literary tradition,  we have an artifact of ancient reason.  His works evince a mind striving to work out the subtleties of natural and moral philosophy through the medium of mythology.  This is especially true with his epic poem, the Theogony, which I will discuss next.

Next in this series: Introducing the Theogony

 

Night, Day, and Induction

This post is one in a series on the Epistemology and Worldview Throughout History.  Previously in this series: Hesiod and Aristotelean Demonstration.

As I discussed in my last post, Hesiod's Eros (Love) can be thought of as a motive force that brings entities to come together (much like gravity) and to create.

Khaos felt Eros, the urge or internal force that made it seek to give birth.  And what did it first give birth to?

Erebos, or Darkness, was the first baby in the universe.  You might ask yourself, "how can darkness be “born” when darkness is just the absence of light?"  But to Hesiod the materialist, Darkness was a black mist.

Erebos was born along with its own internal force, different from Love.   The force that moves Darkness was Nyx, or Night.

Nyx was often thought of as the wife of Erebos and shown as a woman in a chariot who “wore” her husband (Darkness) like a great big cloak.  When Night came to the land, riding her chariot, she would pull her husband (darkness) over the earth like a great big tent.  Night brings darkness, literally.  Erebos and Nyx then became the universe’s first husband and wife, brought together by Eros.

Together, Erebos and Nyx had a son and daughter: Aether or Brightness and Hemera, or Day.  Aether took after his father, in that he was a shapeless mist.  But he was different in that he was a bright, glowing mist.  As you can imagine, father and son had their differences.  Hemera took after her mother, in that she was a chariot-driving force of nature.  She felt that HER husband Aether deserved to cover the earth.

Thus began an eternal rivalry.  Every morning, Day arises in the east, driving her chariot, and scattering the mists of Darkness, which she gradually replaces with the Brightness of daylight, which is pulled over the earth like a great big dome tent.  As she finishes placing the Brightness of day in its proper place of glory, she completes her conquest over Darkness by driving it westward into the underworld.  But her victory is temporary, for soon Night reemerges on the east in HER chariot, scattering the Brightness of daylight in revenge, and pulling her husband Darkness to reinstall him in his rightful place.  And so to Hesiod, the ongoing cycle of days and nights is really a cosmic battle between the first two married couples in the universe.

If we think of the mists of Daylight and Darkness as mindless masses, and knock Day and Night from their chariots and think of them as Aristotelean internal principles of change (forces), then Hesiod's cosmology can be seen as a perfectly respectable mechanical theory, worthy of a 6th century Milesian proto-scientist like Thales or Anaximander.

Let us assume that Hesiod and the other Greek poets who formulated this myth did not use Aristotelean demonstration to infer the above cosmic scheme.  Is it then devoid of a reasoned basis?  Is it pure madness, with no method?  No.  Almost all cosmic myths make some kind of sense in their own way, and Hesiod's is no exception.  But it is the kind of sense humans more generally use in considerations of the natural world: induction.  Induction, as characterized by Aristotle, is reasoning from the particular to the universal.  After a child burns his hand on a flame, he infers from that particular instance that similar particular flickering lights will generally burn his hand.  He does not deduce "burned hand" from the universal category "flame".  Similarly, after a careful ancient observer repeatedly notices that the moon progressively waxes, without waning, until it is full, and then wanes, without waxing, until it is new, he will confidently predict from these particular observations that the moon will always follow this process.

The "rotating mists" conception of day and night may have made sense to the ancient Greeks, because for all they knew, the canopies of the night and day skies were material bodies.  They seemed to move, and they seemed to meet each other at a threshold.  In countless other particular instances of daily life, they have seen the movement of bodies be impelled by the movement of other contiguous bodies.  Falling rocks strike water and make waves; waves in the ocean shove ships and capsize them.  Why wouldn't the twin canopies of the sky follow the same basic pattern?

Next in this series: Introducing Works and Days.

Hesiod and Aristotelean Demonstration

This post is one in a series on the Epistemology and Worldview Throughout History.  Previously in this series: The Epistemology of Divine Poetry.

Even though Hesiod pleads "for the Muses told me so" as his chief intellectual justification, a careful reader can glean attempts at non-divine inference in the Theogony.  In fact an extremely careful reader did just that some 400 years after Hesiod: the brilliant philosopher Aristotle.

Hesiod begins his cosmic geneology by declaring that

"in truth at first Khaos came to be."

Khaos meant space, void, or air, which to the ancient Greek, forgiveably unfamiliar with vacuums, meant much the same thing.  Khaos did not mean what the modern English word "chaos" means.  Our word "chaos" was derived from misinterpretation (whether from carelessness or poetic licence) by later authors- especially Ovid:

"Ere land and sea and the all-covering sky were made, in the whole world the countenance of nature was the same, all one, well named Chaos, a raw and undivided mass, naught but a lifeless bulk, with warring seeds of ill-joined elements compressed together."

-Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book I

In other words, the primordial chaos, according to Ovid and later authors, is a mixed-up mass of solid, liquid, and gas: rather like a cosmic cappuccino.¹

But Khaos would be more appropriately translated, as Glenn W. Most did, as "chasm".  

A chasm is not, strictly speaking, cracked earth, but the crack itself: the part where there is no earth.  (Just as for the Chinese philosopher Laozi, the path (tao) was the place in the forest where there is no forest.)

Aristotle was impressed with Hesiod's placement of Khaos at the beginning of things.

Again, the theory that the void exists involves the existence of place: for one would define void as place bereft of body. 

These considerations then would lead us to suppose that place is something distinct from bodies, and that every sensible body is in place. Hesiod too might be held to have given a correct account of it when he made chaos first. At least he says: 

'First of all things came chaos to being, then broad-breasted earth,' implying that things need to have space first, because he thought, with most people, that everything is somewhere and in place. If this is its nature, the potency of place must be a marvellous thing, and take precedence of all other things. For that without which nothing else can exist, while it can exist without the others, must needs be first; for place does not pass out of existence when the things in it are annihilated. 

Aristotle, Physics, Book IV

In other words, before any thing existed there had to be a place for it to exist in.²

After Khaos, Earth (Gaia) next came to be, followed by Love (Eros).

Aristotle was also impressed at Hesiod's placement of Love (Eros) near the beginning of things.  In it, he recognized Hesiod as implying...

that among existing things there must be from the first a cause which will move things and bring them together.

Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book I

In other words before any thing underwent change, there had to have been a cause or force to bring about the change.  The first two entities were Khaos and Gaia.  Note that Hesiod never said that Khaos gave birth to Gaia: the latter just kind of "happened".  So nothing at that point had been born out of anything else yet: nothing has changed from one state to another.  Khaos and Gaia might have gone on forever without creating anything unless they felt the urge to.  This motive force, this "urge to create", had to exist first.  And Hesiod called this "urge to create" “Eros” or "Love".

So, according to Aristotle, Hesiod may have thought that the pre-existence of "place" is a necessary implication of the existence of bodies.  And the pre-existence of "cause" or "force" is a necessary implication of the existence of change.

Aristotle called such reasoning (from the universal to the particular) a deduction, or syllogism.

"Place" is contained in the category of "Body", but not vice versa; therefore, "Place" must have preceded "Body".

"Cause" is contained in the category of "Change", but not vice versa; therefore "Cause" must have preceded "Change."

What's more, Hesiod's deduction is not merely a word game (like "All As are Bs; all Bs are Cs; therefore all As are Cs").  Rather it says something about the real world.  Aristotle called a deduction that produces knowledge about reality a "demonstration."  Aristotelean demonstrations have been the holy grail of rationalist thinkers from Parmenides to Descartes to Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

As much as I respect Hesiod as a thinker with more subtlety than classicists give him credit for, Aristotle does seem to have been a tad too generous in the deductive sophistication he is crediting to the great poet.  That is not to say that Hesiod only had divine inspiration as his epistemological foundation: for the careful reader can also glean inductive reasoning from Hesiod's beliefs, as I shall discuss in my next post.

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¹Ovid and the other writers may have confused Khaos with the primeval, undifferentiated mud of the rival theogeny attributed to Orpheus, which in turn may have been influenced by the Mesopotamian conception of the world's primal state as an undifferentiated mass:

When on high heaven was not named,

And the earth beneath did not yet bear a name,

And the primeval Apsû, who begat them,

And chaos, Tiamat, the mother of them both,

Their waters were mingled together,

And no field was formed, no marsh was to be seen;

When of the gods none had been called into being

-Enuma Elish, Babylonian poem from the 18th century BC

²Someone allegedly asked Thales (considered the first philosopher) what the biggest thing in existence is, to which he replied:

"place, for it contains all things."

Diogenes, Laertius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

Next in this series: Night, Day, and Induction.

 

The Epistemology of Divine Poetry

This post is one in a series on the Epistemology and Worldview Throughout History.  Previously in this series: Ethics in the Theogony.

Now that I've introduced Hesiod's teachings in his Theogony (regarding cosmology, history, human nature, and ethics), let us consider the grounds upon which he establishes the truth of those teachings.  Hesiod establishes his intellectual authority in the proem (introductory part of a poem) of his Theogony.  In it he tells the tale (which I have previously summarized) of his magical initiation as a poet which occurred during an encounter with the Muses.

As I previously wrote, "Assertions and arguments regarding particular topics (for example, ethics, economics, physics, etc) all rest on an epistemology (whether explicitly or implicitly): that is, a theory of knowledge, truth, and falsity.  Therefore, the first task of a thorough scholar is to make the case for his own epistemology."  Hesiod shows himself to be a somewhat thorough scholar by at least addressing the question of epistemological credibility, if not satisfactorily answering it.  In the proem of the Theogony Hesiod answers the fundamental question of "how do you know that?" with the perennial answer, "The gods told me so."  Hesiod's teachings, according to the proem, rest on divine revelation.

In Hesiod's own words:

hai nu poth' Hêsiodon kalên edidaxan aoidên,

which is translated by Hugh Evelyn-White as

And one day they taught Hesiod glorious song

"Taught" is translated from "edidaxan", which is a tense of "didaskô" ("to teach"), from which the English word "didactic" is derived.  What does it mean to teach someone song (aoidên)?  One can teach the skill (tekhne) of singing well (tone, enunciation, etc).  But this encounter was no mere singing lesson, for out of it Hesiod acquired the divine voice (audên thespin) of the Muses.  What is this "divine voice" of the Muses?  The Muses themselves explain their power in the following:

idmen pseudea polla legein etumoisin homoia,
idmen d', eut' ethelômen, alêthea gêrusasthai.

or

"we know how to speak many false things as though they were true; but we know, when we will, to utter true things."

The power of the Muse is divine persuasiveness ("to speak many false things as though they were true") and divine knowledge ("to utter true things").

There are two instances of the adjective "true" in the above passage as translated by Evelyn-White, but they represent two different Greek words.  The first instance (from "false things as though they were true") is from the word "etumoisin", a tense of "etumos" which can also be translated as "real" or "actual".  The second (from "to utter true things") is from the word "alêthea" a tense of "alêthês" which can also translated as "unconcealed".  From this we can get the sense that the power of the Muses is to expound upon formerly concealed things: the mysteries of the universe.

Hesiod tells us exactly how the Muses they taught him song in the following:

enepneusan de moi audên
thespin, hina kleioimi ta t' essomena pro t' eonta.

or

"breathed into me a divine voice to celebrate things that shall be and things there were aforetime"

Here we see evidence of what I believe is a fundamental monist materialism in archaic Greek thought.  The divine voice is not a purely psychic power: it is a material breath which can be transferred via literal exhalation of the Muse and literal inhalation of the poet.  This process is where we get our word "inspiration".  Also in this passage, we get more detail as to the kind of mysteries that can be revealed by the inspired poet (and which Hesiod does reveal in his Theogony).  The poet is a prophet ("things that shall be"); he is also a super-human cosmologist and historian who can miraculously recount  events he did not himself witness, including the evolution of the entire universe and the prehistory of man ("things that were aforetime"). 

Next in this series: Hesiod and Aristotelean Demonstration.