TecC 23 - Daring to Ask: Crafting Curiosity’s Compass

How bold innovators shaped scattered wondering into methodical inquiry, pioneering progress in the pursuit of knowledge

As you know from the last couple of episodes, our technocentric journey has now taken us to the Iron Age. In the previous episode we looked at what makes it the iron age, in literal, material, or artefactual terms. Let’s now explore other aspects of it - for we are now at the beginning of the Classical era!

As before we start with silly.

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We saw in the previous episode how Steve, who we followed through the Stone Age made a comeback! Alongside Bryan, Brenda and the tailwaggy Bruno from the Bronze Age also getting promoted. We also met Irene and her cat Iris for the first time! Now, Steve, having suddenly turned up in the Iron Age, directly skipping the intermediate period, is in a bit of a haze.

Things look rather different. So he’s become curious. Plus even though he was instrumental in taming the dog in good old Stone times (I mean that only literally), he’s never seen a cat! So every time he’s pondering about something in this new environment that intrigues him, he gets a strange look from Iris, as if it’s going “but why?” Steve is a creative guy, after all he was the first to tame fire, so he’s offering his own explanations to phenomena around him, and he better do, in the previous episode he invented steel!¹ But every time he offers an explanation, he has to confront Iris’s gaze, or sometimes the sudden nonchalant distractedness only cats are capable of!²

So with each questioning look he gets from Iris, Steve feels obliged to further refine his conjecture and explanation. And that… was the birth of philosophy!

And you’ve just been watching the shenanigans of Stevecrates and Iristotle!³

Stirring the Pot

Ok, back to serious stuff, I intend to make two points with this. First is curiosity. Curiosity is fundamental to the human condition, nay, to all animals. Why? I’ve discussed this at some length in my introductions to my whole body of writing, I urge you to have a look at Wherefore Curiosity? so you can satisfy your curiosity there!

But something curious happened early on in Ancient Greece. The systematization of curiosity, or at least, of their endeavor to satisfy their curiosity. And this is really important, permit me to explain.

The spirit of inquiry required in the pursuit of knowledge, where imaginative thinking is a vital component, can lead to seemingly absurd tangents of thought. If you think I was silly in my cat story above, try this: Thales, who’s seen as the very first philosopher ever (at least in the Greek / Western tradition) is best known to have posited that everything is made of water. Yes, all material existence. Which, you might say, sounds rather absurd, surely his argument doesn’t hold water?

But think about it for a moment. As per modern scientific explanation of the origin of the universe - the Big Bang theory,⁴ the leading model offering this explanation, the primary and primal element that came into existence is Hydrogen! And it was only with the formation of stars millions of years later (stellar nucleosynthesis) were formed by fusion of hydrogen and helium elements like oxygen.

So Thales was right? At least by two parts to one?

When we talk about philosophy, in particular the Greeks, we invariably think about the gang of three. But the origins of the philosophical approach began about a couple of centuries before culminating in the works of these three towering greats. So great was the impact of these three that we popularly do not know that a vibrant tradition existed for a considerable period of time before them. So let me redress this here, let’s give the pre-Socratics their due.

So yes, Thales (~624-546 BCE) is known as the first of them. There were other similar early philosophers who endeavored to explain that one single substance or one principle behind all existence (mind you, isn’t this a bug that’s bitten many a scientific inquirer into modern times including Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking?)

These other names, contemporary to Thales or coming shortly after him, included Anaximander who introduced the apeiron - a boundless source of all existence. He also speculated that humans evolved from fish-like creatures.⁵ But can you see a bit of parallel between his fishy claim and the modern science of evolution in which Darwin does trace mammals from early fish?

And then there was Heraclitus, famous for his saying “You cannot step into the same river twice” expounding that change is the essence of existence. (Btw, his chosen element was fire, he was probably sponsored by the Ancient Greek Association of Arsonists!) Heraclitus is also said to have introduced the idea of logos - a rational order governing the universe.⁶

In contrast to Heraclitus’s emphasis on change, Parmenides argued that reality is eternal and unchanging, rejecting plurality and motion as illusions.⁷ Finally for this list, Democritus posited that all matter is made up of indivisible particles he named atoms - a concept, with refinement, we still hold today!

The key point I’m trying to demonstrate is this. These philosophers, you’d be right to say, were just throwing random stuff and seeing what would stick. But as I’ve said before, for example in the discussion of how we struggle to think of life before the invention of the wheel - a circular problem, we can only understand, or get closer to understanding, the endeavors and achievements of such ancient people, if we discard our own current conceptions of reality, for they are momentarily a hindrance.

What we have to appreciate is how they got going with what they did compared to what existed until then. And indeed, what other contemporary societies were doing on such matters. That’s when we truly come to recognize and appreciate the pure genius of the early Greeks. And this is why I’m calling these early intellectual developments the birth of Early Science.

Breaking Fresh Ground

So let me reiterate this point, at the risk of sounding tautological.⁸ It takes an intellectual leap to go from a given state of mind or mindset that did not think in a certain way to a better (more efficient, efficacious) one. And so far I’m still discussing the pre-Socratics.

The posits I mentioned above against known early inquirers were just, what we may call, hypothetical - they had no way of confirming such grandiose claims by way of sophisticated instrumentation, or even advanced mathematical devices we might take for granted today. But this is the beginning of that systematization of the whole process of applying curiosity in the inquiry into the nature of things. And I’ll also mention, other individuals in other societies have also had elaborate ventures of intellectual inquiry (and I expect to discuss some of this in some detail in later episodes), but there is a unique effervescence in the way it emerged in early Greece.

And this is not just about some random musings, this is the basis of a whole set of extraordinary achievements of the Ancient Greeks in a great many fields including architecture, logic, ethics, politics, economics, biology, physics, metaphysics and much more. (Notice that all those terms are Greek!)

So what explains these extraordinary developments? To understand this better, we need to take a step back. Let’s then explore the background to this before we talk again about the two current periods in question, what historians call Archaic and Classical Greeces, some history (what do you call history of an era that’s older than archaic?!):

Weathered Roots Beneath Fertile Soil

We have seen in my technocentric treatment of the Bronze Age such as in TecC 17 the emergence of mighty palace economies such as the Mycenaeans in the Aegean, and how as part of the Bronze Age Collapse these centralized imperial systems crumbled, leading to the loss of technologies such as writing and globalized trade. The lands of Greece are thus conventionally seen to have retreated into a so-called ‘dark age’ (those who called it dark was because they were in the dark!). However, folk memory of those glorious times persisted, by way of copious oral retellings of the famous men and deeds of the good old days. For centuries. We know these as the epics of Iliad and Odyssey, attributed to Homer.

Roughly around the 8th century BC, across Greek lands there began to emerge a number of city-states, the Greek term for it being a polis, which became the definitive method of organization of the Greek world during the whole Classical period and even beyond.⁹ Each Greek city-state was largely autonomous and the common unifying feature they had was the Greek language, the Greek gods and the Homeric epics, not much more. The more prominent of the city-states were Athens, Sparta, Thebes, Corinth, Argos, etc.

And again, within the city-states, in the archaic period, Greek societies developed the notion of the citizen (polī́tēs)¹⁰ and in extension the concept of isonomy (isonomia) roughly translated as ‘equality under the law’ or ‘equal participation in the political process’, albeit mainly in regard to citizens as qualified above. (Modern commentators have labeled these ancient peoples or their institutions ‘flawed’, ‘narrow-minded’ and worse. I shall refrain from such value judgements on the basis of our own current value systems, which no doubt future generations could be tempted to say the same thing about. I’ll discuss the broader epistemological matters underlying this in Polymathon.)

Neither the system of the city-states under the common framework of shared cultural norms nor the system of citizens as defined having significant political participation within the city-states was all smooth and perfect (which system indeed is?), but it had some remarkable consequences.

It gave the individuals remarkable freedoms, and sense of freedom, to try out new things, take risks, venture out, etc., something contemporary societies elsewhere, or indeed most societies later could hardly come close to achieving, to this day. How did these freedoms come about? It was the largely bottom-up nature of both arrangements. Because of grassroots participation in the polity, citizens were hugely incentivized - something that doesn’t happen in extractive institutions where power is concentrated at the top and individuals are commanded from on high about what they can and cannot do.

These freedoms were complemented by commensurate responsibilities such as participation in war, in the defence of their city-state, participation in policy, especially in city-states such as Athens, and more. Furthermore, these freedoms were under the backdrop of massive competition between individuals within the city-states and between the city-states within the wider Greek world.

I suspect the common Homeric mythological framework shared across the Greek lands had a part to play. Despite being mythological, we can say it retained, even if in some dormant form, elements from the previous intellectual flowering in the Bronze Age, however attenuated. It gave the reviving Greeks a basis both to draw from and diverge from. The systematic method of inquiry emerges when they decide not to proceed on the basis of the established myths, but open their minds to the newer ways of contemplation as I’ve outlined.

I also suggest another feature of their mythology as having played a crucial part. The Greek gods were fallible. They embodied a wide range of behaviors such as rage, jealousy and even adultery which exposes their imperfections, despite being elevated from man, not least in their immortality in contrast to the human lot. How many societies do we know where this is the case: pretty much everywhere else, our gods and God are infallible, perfect, even absolute. How much did the lack of comforting, omnibenevolent divinity one could fully fall back on propelled the early Greeks to seek to fend for themselves, more resolutely and creatively?

All these in essence are what underlie that most extraordinary flowering of what we may call Greek genius.

Further on to Fresh Frontiers

There is so much more to be said about all this, I cannot do justice to it in one piece such as this, but also, a lot of the achievements of this period have been documented, studied and known. So I will skip the next 100 pagefuls of detail that would be necessary as a minimum to cover this topic. But since the topic here is philosophy, I would have to partake of the hemlock too if I didn’t mention the three towering names here, the gang of three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. Right, done, consider them mentioned!¹¹

Also, a disclaimerly note. The term ‘philosophy’ as meant by the Ancients and up until much later, is somewhat different from what we understand it to be now. To the originals, it encompassed the whole range of the pursuit of intellectual inquiry, even in the lack of methods of experimentation and instrumentation. It thus included not just those disciplines which may continue to have existed later as philosophy, such as metaphysics, epistemology, etc, but also a great many others which have in the modern period moved into the domain of modern science, with the more rigorous application of the scientific method, experimentation and advanced instrumentation.

Thus from our vantage point in the current day, a lot of the propositions of the ancients might come across as absurd, downright nonsensical. But what matters is their systematic intellectual approach to it. Furthermore, our own connotation of ‘philosophy’ can verge on the ‘random and bizarre thinking of no material value’. But we shouldn’t let this prejudice the sheer achievement of the ancients with the relatively more limited resources, intellectual and instrumental, they had to live with.

As I’ve said, many of the disciplines originally in the domain of philosophy have moved to the domain of modern science. And while this has been the story of how the Ancient Greeks paved the way for the birth of philosophy and early science, I have yet to recount the dazzling tale of the queen of the sciences! So get counting down the days till the next episode!

\(- finis -\)

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Article written by Ash Stuart

Images and voice narration generated by AI

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Further Reading & Reference

• Ober, Josiah. (2022). Greeks and the Rational: The Discovery of Practical Reason. University of California Press. ISBN ‎ 978-0520380165.

• Ober, Josiah. (2015). The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-1400865550.

• Anderson, Greg. (2018). The Realness of Things Past: Ancient Greece and Ontological History. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0190886660.

• Popper, Karl. (2008, original 1932). The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge. Routledge Classics. ISBN 978-0415610223.

• Deutsch, David. (2012). The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World. Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0143121350.

• Russell, Bertrand. (1967, original 1945) The History of Western Philosophy. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0671201586. (And possibly every book of Russell you can get hold of!)

1. If you are protesting how he could make steel but not know about cats, let me remind you, Steve is not real!

2. You can see, dear reader, I’m also making up for the constant attention given to Bruno in previous episodes, the cat people wrote too many letters to complain!

3. Sorry friends, the gang of three is not complete yet, the one who's yet to find his form is Play-dough

4. Weren’t the folk who gave that name being silly like me as well? As if they were going to name a comedy series or a James Bond steamy encounter?

5. Which makes me wonder if he had a slightly-different-origin-proposing brother named Salamander

6. No connection to ‘legos’ despite a possible shared desire for rational order!

7. I wonder if he ever modified his drafts

8. My excuse: ‘tautology’ is quite relevant to the current topic!

9. This word polis comes from a Proto-Indo-European root literally meaning “fortification, city” and is cognate with the Sanskrit ‘puras’ of the same meaning seen in names such as Singapore. The Ancient Greek word also gives us all these words: politics, polity, policy, police; not to mention a range of place names or concepts such as Constantinopolis, Metropolis (“mother-city”), Naples (neapolis - “new city”), Sevastopol etc etc.

10. The public participation of these confined to free males and in most cases restricted to ethnic Greeks only

11. I promised to skip 100 pages of detail, didn’t I? ;-)