THE GREEK MIND

Now that we have surveyed, in brief fashion, the history of this Greeks down to the virtual end of the city-state, we may pause, and survey the character of the Greek mind and some if its achievements during this period.

• A sense of the wholeness of things is perhaps the most typical features of the Greek mind.  We have already met some notable expressions of this – the way in which Homer, for all his love of the particular detail and the individual character, yet fixes it firmly into a universal frame.
• A universal frame
• The modern mind divides, specializes, thinks in categories
• The Greek instinct was the opposite, to take the widest view, to see things as an organic whole
• The particular issue must be generalized
• There is the word ‘kalos’ and its opposite ‘aischros’
• Virtue is ‘beautiful’, that it is a ‘beautiful’ thing to die for one’s country
• The man of great soul ‘strives to attain the beautiful’
• Aesthetic view of things
• The moral
• The intellectual
• The aesthetic
• The practical
• This refusal to specialize the meaning is habitual
• ‘Hamarita’ means ‘error’, ‘fault’, ‘crime’ or even ‘sin’; literally, it means ‘missing the mark’, ‘a bad shot’.
• Greek virtues seem to be as much intellectual as moral
• Mental error as deadly, as a moral one
• Adikia ‘injustice’
• Hybris ‘wanton wickedness’
• Kings and prices are portrayed sharply with all the limitations of their class and time
• Proud, fierce, vengeful, glorying in war
• Exemplars
• Living inspiration
• Their ideal was not a specifically knightly ideal like Chivalry or Love: aretê
• ‘Excellence’
• Excellent – morally, intellectually, physically, practically
• Hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that man must endure without too much complaining what the gods send; and he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Phaeacian youth at boxing wrestling or returning; flay, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by a song.
• All-rounder: ‘A maker of speeches and a doer of deeds’
• Heroic age divided between the knight and the churchman
• Tennyson
• Virgil
• That the body is the tomb of the soul is indeed an idea which we meet in certain Greek mystery religions, and Plato, with his doctrine of immortality, necessarily distinguished sharply between body and soul
• Greek made physical training an important part of education
• He made games part of his religion
• The Olympian Games
• Held in honor of Zeus of Olympia, the Pythian Game in honour of Apollo
• Athena
• Contest was a means of stimulating and displaying human aretê
• The aretê of the whole man
• Marathon :Greeks would have regarded is as a monstrosity
• Aristotle’s remark that a gentleman should be able to play the flute – but not too well
• Man
• Hero
• Dorians
• Early fifth century
• Aeschylus
• Pindar
• Odes to athletes
• Ecclesiastes
• Invocation
• Complete fusion of the physical, the intellectual, the moral, the spiritual and the sensuous disintegrated
• Paroxysms of savagery
• Oligarch(y):government by the few
• Democrat
• Commercialism
• Mystical ecstasy
• Cults of Dinoysus
• Hippolytus
• Virgin goddess Artemis
• Euripides make of him tragic misfit
• Man must worship both these goddesses, antagonistic though they may seem
• Hippolytus is destroyed by the Aphrodite whom he slights, and his Artemis can do nothing to protect him
• Belief in Reason
• Libellous: defamatory
• It obeys Law
• Is therefore capable of explanation
• Behind the gods
• Is a shadowy power that Homer calls Ananke
• Necessity
• Order of things
• It is Lat that regins, not chance
• Aeschylus
• Moral law
• Punishment follows Hubris
• Greek tragic poets
• Founders of scientific thinking
• Histories of philosophy makes it begin
• Thales of Miletus
• Egyptian mathematics
• Chaldean astronomy: a member of an ancient Semitic people that became dominant in Babylonia
• Commercial arithmetic
• Practical geometry
• Geometry is the Greek for ‘Land-measuring’
• Hypotenuse of a right-angles triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other sides
• What speculations that had been devoted to the physical universe had centered around the useless problem
• Hot is came into existence rather than how it worked
• Navigation
• Calendar
• Herodotus
• Demonstrated that a philosopher can make money enough, if he thinks it worth doing
• Had a passion for asking useless questions
• Purely disinterested enquiry is entirely characteristics of the Ionians in particular
• Empedocles
• Wine-skin
• Water-clock
• Xenophanes based a theory of geological change on the existence of sea-shells on mountains
• The imprint of seaweed
• Fishes in the stone quarries of Syracuse
• Abstract reasoning
• Permanent feature of Greek thought
• The universe
• Physical
• Moral universe
• Apparent multiplicity of physical things
• Elements are sixty-seven
• Mysticism
• Pythagoreans
• Anaximander
• He made the first map
• Balance of Forces in mature
• Dikê
• ‘Justice’
• Man has developed from other animals
• Eleatic school
• Parmenides and Zeno
• Inventor of the famous paradoxes
• Metaphysical reasoning
• Atomic theory
• There is not such thing as nothing
• Motion is illusion, for a thing can move only by going into empty space
• Matter is uniform
• The Universe is a motionless, uniform, spherical plenum
• An infinite number of them, also empty space in which they could move
• These were the atoms that constitute everything that is, being brought together and separated again by a natural motion
• That Reality
• Heraclitus
• The essence of the universe is Change; everything is the state of flux
• You cannot step into the same river twice, fir the second time it is not the same river
• Heraclitan philosophy had a profound influence on Plato
• The distinction between the changing, imperfect and ultimately unknowable world of sense
• The unchanging, perfect and unknowable world of sense
• The unchanging, perfect and knowable world of Reality is of course fundamental to Platonism
• The transitory appearances of things
• Strove always to perfect
• Representation of The Athlete
• The God?
• Greek and Gothic architecture
• Habit of Mind
• Gothic architecture delights in multiplicity of parts
• Utmost contrast of light and shade
• The whole realm
• Elizabethan tragedy
• Crowded and various stage
• Present the whole complexity and richness of life
• Gothic cathedral is never finished
• Conversely Shakespeare has often been cut
• An obvious excrescence
• Cut a scene from a Greek play without making it unintelligible
• Greeks had a superior sense of form or an inferior imagination or joy in life
• Elizabethan dramatist would have given us a panorama of the whole war, its moments of despair, hope, and triumph;
• The Athenian stage and the Greek dramatic form did not permit a realistic treatment of he war
• Dramatists had no desire to be realistic
• Dramatists who make the theatre and the dramatic form
•  Every detail in the play is seen to be not only natural but necessary when we realize that Aeschylus had no intention of writing a ‘historical’ play, but a play, Rather on an idea
• It is not only the event, but its inner meaning, that Aeschylus is dramatizing
• If the historical events, in any particular, do not express the inner meaning enough Aeschylus alters them
• Thus illustrating in advance the dictum of Aristotle
• Poetry is more philosophical
• The qualities of the Greek :Between his confidence in reason, His strong sense of form, Love for symmetry, His creative or constructive, bent, his tendency to rely on a priori reasoning (deductive, derived by reasoning from self-evident propositions — compare a posteriori )
•  The tragic poet who does not dramatize the course of the war, But uses the events of the war-some of them-in order to present what he thinks to be its real significance
• Greek artist is always Constructing or creating
• There is all the difference in the world between giving a picture of life by building up a synthesis, through significant selection, combination and contrast, and interpreting it in the Greek fashion
• Simplicity and intensity
• Greek is trying not to give a representative picture of life ,But to express one conception, as forcibly and as clearly as he can
• The form that he achieves  is much more logical and taut
• Antony and Cleopatra
• Agamemnon   
• Cassandra
• Clytemnestra
• Aegisthus
• Aeschylus, like Shakespeare, had a long and complex story to work with
• Difference is that Aeschylus tears his to bits, and with the bits he begins to construct a play about a certain conception of justice
• That retributive justice inflicted in plain revenge lead to chaos
• His frame work is not his story, but this conception
• Those bits of the story which he does not want
• He throws away, and those which he does want he uses not in chronological order, but in the order that suits him
• He is able to treat the story in this way because his audience knew its main outline already
• One great advantage in using myth was that the dramatist was saved the tedious business of exposition
• He is, in this special sense, creating something new, the Form is entirely under his own control
• His theme, crime punished by crime that must be punished by crime, he states a first, second, a third time, with ever increasing tension, and the result is a logical, beautiful and powerful structure
• Greek plays are, in this way, built on a single conception and nothing that does not directly contribute to it is admitted
• The relation between the meaning and the form is so logical that any wayward interpretation can be convincingly disproved
• If it does not account for every detail of the play, it is wrong, for the true interpretation explains everything
• Greek sense of form
• The artist has a very clear idea of what he is going to say, and is in complete command of his material
• The Greek love of symmetry
• The irregularity of plan displayed by nearly every Gothic cathedral suggests to our minds the idea of dynamic energy, of life; to the Greek mind it would be abhorrent, suggesting only imperfection
• The perfect building, executed as conceived, will naturally be symmetrical
• With its passion for balance and antithesis comes directly from the acuteness of intelligence which at once analyses an idea into its component parts
• Antithesis, emphasized by parallelism of all kinds, rhyme,
• The Greek stylistic vice was not incapable shapelessness but bogus formalism
• In the works of Man, Reason and Perfection assume a symmetrical form; Man is part of Nature; therefore Nature too, being ex hypothesis based on Reason(1),will be symmetrical
• Darkness balances light, cold balances heat
• Symmetry, Law, and Reason were different aspects of the same thing
• ‘ On Ancient Medicine’ under the name of Hippocrates of Cos, the greatest fifth-century medicine
• Greek philosophy sought for uniformity in the multiplicity of phenomena, and the desire to find this uniformity led to guesswork , neglect of fact in the attempt to frame a comprehensive theory
• The philosophers tired to explain nature while shutting their eyes
• The human mind is much given to the thrilling exercise of leaping across chasms as if they were not there
• Although the eye-shutting retarded the growth of science, the mind-opening led to things perhaps equally important, metaphysics and mathematics
• The Greek conviction that the Universe is a logical whole, therefore simple, probably symmetrical
• The ultimate and simplifying Truth that the Ionians were trying to find in a physical Something was really Number
• Did Heraclitus declare that everything is always changing?
• Here are thing that do not change, entities that are eternal, from the flesh that corrupts , independent of the imperfect senses, apprehensible through the mind
• The further Greek thought advanced into this new world, the more its instincts seemed to be proved right, underneath the apparent variety there is simplicity; that Law rules, not Chances that the universe is based on Reason, and that reasoning can disclose its inner reality
• The road to the truth lies not through the senses but through the mind
• The Greek mind was given to arguing from analogy, to leaping across chasms, the real reason for this bring his assumption that the whole universe, Nature, is a unity-the physical, the moral and the religious universe together
• If we remember this; if we remember how he thought of morality as a mean between opposites, a proper ‘tuning’, a harmony of the soul; if we remember the great part played in Greek education by ‘Mousike’ if we remember that mathematical relations were already being discovered in the physical universe- then we can understand how the Pythagoreans, excited by their researches into the proper tired of the tuned string, took a leap, and thought that they could find a mathematical basis for religion and morality, how much easier it is to master the physical then the moral universe
• ‘God is always doing Geometry’
• Plato combined Socrates’ conviction that the proper study of mankind is Man, and the ultimate Good for Man
• He inherited, too, Socrates’ dialectical method, the search through logical enquiry for the ‘logos’ the all-embracing definitions, of the virtues
• That Virtue is Knowledge; that a man who knows what virtue is will necessarily practices it, since virtue, being good, is necessarily preferable to what is bad
• Estimate knowledge is not what a man has been told, shown or taught; it can be only what he has found out for himself by long and rigorous search
• Only the permanent, not the transient, can be the material of knowledge; the knowledge of God is the beginning of wisdom
• The knowledge of ‘what is ‘ comes only through a life given up to intellectual striving, the introduction to which is the study of mathematics, for this leas the mind away from gross objects of senses to the contemplation of things more real
• Unchanging Realities we can apprehend by the mind only: the senses can show us only transient and imperfect copies of Reality
• Plato does not formally identify The Goods and God, he speaks of its divine nature in such a way that formal identification would make but little difference
• Such is the knowledge having which a man cannot do wrong; it  is the Truth that the knowledge of Being, of The Good, virtually of God
• Something much richer and wider then our current, purely intellectual ‘ knowledge’, for a moral as well as an intellectual passion is its driving-force, and its object is the Truth that embraces everything
• Here is the culmination of the search made by Greek thinkers for the inner reality, the ‘logos’; The Word was God