What we think of now as the mainland of Greece, then filled with communities of farmer-warriors, played essentially no part. Recorded philosophy was almost entirely a harbor phenomenon, a byproduct of trading hubs on the margins of Asia, on the islands, and eventually in the rich lands of Sicily and southern Italy. Its creators were from the mobile edges, merchants in ideas, people from communities in which exchange was the medium of significance and for whom inherited belief was not enough.
Those mercantile qualities of fluidity and connectedness were precisely the governing aspects of the new thought. The philosophers’ emphasis was on interchange and, in Heraclitus in particular, the virtues of tension. Just as in a bow, he wrote, the string pulls against the frame, and would collapse if either string or frame failed; a just society needs to be founded on a tension between its constituent parts. Everything flowed through everything else, multiplicity was goodness and singularity the grounds of either sterility or tyranny.
There is nothing stiff about this way of thinking. These early Greek forms of thought cross all the boundaries between poet and thinker, mystic and scientist, in a rolling, cyclical, wave-based vision of the nature of reality. The thinkers did not provide a set of rationalist solutions nor of religious doctrines, but again and again explored the borderland between those ways of seeing. Possibility and inquiry, the effects of suggestion and implication, rather than unconsidered belief or blank assertion, were the seedbed for the new ideas.
Which is fine so far as it goes. I have repeatedly emphasized here that creativity in art and thought often springs from interchange, such as Europe's encounters with Asia and the Americas in the early modern period. In Europe, anyway, new ways of thinking have tended to emerge from mercantile regions in touch with other parts of the world.
And Nicolson is far from the first western writer to muse over how the Greek landscape encouraged creativity: sea, clear sky, bright light, and so on.
But, you know, there were other centers of philosophical creativity in the classical world. I don't know much about India in that period, but I have never read that Indian philosophy emerged from mercantile cities. I do know something about China, and the origins of Chinese philosophy are almost exactly opposite to everything Nicolson says about the Greeks. It arose in powerful, agricultural, military states with large bureaucracies, and most of its leaders were either court bureaucrats themselves or made their livings training future bureaucrats. They all despised everything non-Chinese and had no interest in trade or the sea.
Nicolson might counter (other people have) that the character of European philosophy is different from the Chinese because of its origins in mercantile city states. Well, maybe, but it seems to me that really creative periods produce all different sorts of philosophy. Nineteenth-century Europe gave us Marx, Lenin, John Stuart Mill, Tolstoy, Stirner, Lord Acton, etc., etc., exponenents of every political theory under the sun. Writing about the 1600s, English and Dutch historians like to emphasize the ties between their thinkers and the mercantile, maritime world, but there were also cutting-edge thinkers in France, Austria, and Prussia.
Simple theories about human progress are almost all wrong.
Hear, hear. Indeed, I was somewhat surprised the NYT even published Nicolson's rather superficial and hackneyed piece. It occurred to me as I was reading it that it was Sumerian royal and priestly bureaucrats who, arguably, invented the western traditions of writing, mathematics, and astronomy. Golden Age Spain is another nice counterexample I've used.
ReplyDeleteOne can only hope Nicolson isn't going to use this column as the basis for yet another book proclaiming "why the West is ahead and the mercantile middle class rocks" (to be followed by hyped-up "debates" with some leftist who's published yet another "why the West is utterly evil" book).
I don't know much about India in that period, but I have never read that Indian philosophy emerged from mercantile cities.
ReplyDeleteWhile I'm admittedly not very well versed in India either, my understanding is that most (if not all) of the major centers of learning and culture were major mercantile hubs.
It's important to remember that India is massive; features dozens of distinct ethnic and linguistic groups to this very day; and is home to a tremendous length of coastline well suited to maritime trade, as well as numerous large, long, navigable rivers which also directly provide huge areas of arable land, as well as allow for the relatively straightforward construction of canal and irrigation systems, well back into the BCE years.
These factors are further augmented by the prevalence of mountains and jungles in the South and East, further encouraging travel via water; and by the prevalence of mountains and deserts in the North and West, also further encouraging travel via water.
The geography of India is actually quite remarkable, particularly in the arrangement of the different mountain ranges, and collectively this definitely promotes a considerable amount of trade in the region by default. India's interior regions have always been less well populated because of their geographic isolation.
In the South, settlement is predominantly coastal. Both coastlines directly follow rugged mountain ranges - the Western and Eastern Ghats. Compare to the Pacific Northwest of America, where you have heavy population along a narrow band of land between the Pacific Ocean and the Cascade Mountains, and then once you cross over those mountains the population density drops off remarkably. The mountains cast a considerable rain shadow, as well as impeding travel, and so people prefer to live on the side closer to the water - agriculture is more successful there, and travel is much easier by sailing down the coast rather than hiking over hills and mountains.
In the North, the Indo-Gangetic Plateau is by far the most heavily populated part of the country, and is indeed one of the most densely populated areas on earth. The Himalayas form a veritable wall, impeding human travel, yes, but much more importantly acting as a colossal rain collector which turns what would otherwise be a dry and dusty region into one of the most fertile and productive agricultural landscapes in earth's history, as clouds moving north away from the sea collide with the tallest mountain ranges on earth, and virtually all of their moisture then flows back down and feeds a sprawling network of rather massive rivers.
All in all, on a fundamental geopolitical level, India is (and always has been) a deeply mercantile land, with virtually all of its most important historical cities being major centers for trade.
I do know something about China, and the origins of Chinese philosophy are almost exactly opposite to everything Nicolson says about the Greeks. It arose in powerful, agricultural, military states with large bureaucracies, and most of its leaders were either court bureaucrats themselves or made their livings training future bureaucrats. They all despised everything non-Chinese and had no interest in trade or the sea.
ReplyDeleteAnd all of this is arguably reflected in the very different content and message of Chinese philosophy - which is predominantly concerned with order, hierarchy, governance, warfare, etc.
Greek philosophers focused on ideas such as Democracy, rational inquiry, individualism, etc. Whereas Chinese philosophers focused on ideas such as Divine Right, mysticism, collectivism, etc.
Greece was a region of disparate peoples, with different ideas of how to govern or what to value, with very little overarching unification. China was a region of equally disparate peoples, but they chiefly lived under monolithic empires (periodically fracturing into smaller , but still reasonably monolithic, petty kingdoms ruled by warlords), and they didn't particularly disagree on a fundamental level about how to govern - they just fought amongst themselves to determine who WOULD govern.
Obviously, again, like India, not a region I'm terribly well versed in - but even a novice level familiarity should suggest that Greek and Chinese philosophy are very different from one another in their specific content and the approaches they take.
Writing about the 1600s, English and Dutch historians like to emphasize the ties between their thinkers and the mercantile, maritime world, but there were also cutting-edge thinkers in France, Austria, and Prussia.
ReplyDeleteWeird to use France and Prussia as counter-examples, when they both have strong maritime and mercantile traditions.
As for Austria, while technically land-locked and located on the wrong side of the Alps, the Austrians had extensive trade connections with perhaps the single greatest mercantile and maritime nation of that era in Europe - Venice.
Austria was also directly bordered by the Ottoman Empire's (largely Christian) Balkan holdings, and saw substantial influence from the East. They took lessons from the Ottomans themselves (such as the importance of gunpowder), but they also took influence from (and conducted a great deal of trade with) the many Balkan peoples who resented their Ottoman overlords and sought an ally in Austria (and by extension, the entire Holy Roman Empire).
Austria was not directly a maritime power, but it was still a major cultural, religious, economic, and technological crossroads, and ABSOLUTELY a great mercantile power.
G.
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry, but I find Nicolson's and some of your arguments too simple and beside the point. I say the same my own overly glib counterexamples of Sumer and Golden Age Spain. (I do esteem your hymn to the geography of India, a fascinating place whose history I've been scratching the surface on in a tiny way int the past few years.) The fact is, I don't think anyone has any secure answers as to why there are sudden creative periods of culture (or, for that matter, why some cultures seem to drift, or indeed whether periods of "decline" really are periods of decline, how far "decline" and "efflorescence" are really just cultural-linguistic tropes we have that create our perceptions, or whether saying decline isn't decline isn't really just another trope, etc., etc., etc.). But however cultural change might be explained, I doubt it has much to do with blunt, large-scale factors like geography, mercantilism or the lack thereof, the presence of monarchy or aristocracy or the lack thereof, economic prosperity or the lack thereof, political or military vigor or the lack thereof, encounters with foreign cultures or the lack thereof, etc., etc. simply stated in any sort of tendentious and certainly not a monocausal fashion.
I think a place to make some sort of start might be with the microhistory of the people we associate with these periods. After all, in a lot (I suspect most) of these cases we're mainly talking about teeny-tiny numbers of very high achieving people. How do we get .1%-ers? I don't know.
The problem makes me think of that horrible essay linked to a while back, the one by that horrible person who suggested professional academics should be required to determine dates at which their field's work will be complete. Did I mention I found this essay and the person writing it to be horrid? (Or maybe the essay, which I could hardly bear to skim, was meant as a satire, like A Modest Proposal? Or maybe they took it all back by the end. Anyway, Knausgard, I guess I'm one of your judgy fascists. So be it.) Anyway, for any field at all, but in particular for any field related to the study of human phenomena, including all the humanities, I would confidently suggest a completion-by date of "not soon." We're closer than we were say, a century ago, to understanding people as individuals and in groups. But not by much.
@David
ReplyDeleteI made no arguments of my own, aside from the distinction between Greek and Chinese philosophies and their contents.
I don't share or champion Nicolson's view, I simply was directly responding to some of John's statements, and showing how they were (to the best of my knowledge) incorrect claims. If John was more factually accurate in his rebuttal, I might find his point of view more compelling.
As it stands, I have no particular opinion either way - Nicholson might well be right, but in line with your own view, I think that would require much greater rigor to prove one way or the other. That doesn't mean I'm going to discount him as wrong, though - just that I'm not ready to accept that he's right.