Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

The Origins of Science, Philosophy and the Humanities

When Allan Bloom, a professor at the University of Chicago, published his book The Closing of the American Mind in 1987, he had no idea he was about to become notorious. Incensed by the ‘dumbing down’ that he saw everywhere about him, he pugnaciously advanced his view that the study of ‘high culture’ has to be the main aim of education. Above all, he said, we must pay attention to ancient Greece, because it provided ‘the models for modern achievement’. Bloom believed that the philosophers and poets of the classical world are those from whom we have most to learn, because the big issues they raised have not changed as the years have passed. They still have the power to inform and transform us, he said, to move us, and ‘to make us wise’.¹

His book provoked a storm of controversy. It became a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic and Bloom was himself transformed into a celebrity and a rich man. At the same time he was vilified. At a conference of academics at Chapel Hill, the campus of the University of North Carolina, about a year after his book appeared, called to consider the future of liberal education, ‘speaker after speaker’ denounced Bloom and other ‘cultural conservatives’ like him. According to the New York Times, these academics saw Bloom’s book as an attempt to foist the ‘elitist views of dead, white, European males’ on a generation of students who were now living in a different world, where the preoccupations of small city-states 2,500 years ago were long out of date.

These ‘culture wars’ are not so sharp as once they were but it is still necessary to highlight why the history of a small European country, thousands of years ago, is so important. In his book The Greeks, H. D. F. Kitto opens with these words: ‘The reader is asked, for the moment, to accept this as a reasonable statement of fact, that in a part of the world that had for centuries been civilised, and quite highly civilised, there gradually emerged a people, not very numerous, not very powerful, not very well organised, who had a totally new conception of what human life was for, and showed for the first time what the human mind was for.’² Or, as Sir Peter Hall puts it, in a chapter on ancient Athens which he calls ‘The fountainhead’: ‘The crucial point about Athens is that it was first. And first in no small sense: first in so many of the things that have mattered, ever since, to western civilisation and its meaning. Athens in the fifth century BCE gave us democracy, in a form as pure as we are likely to see . . . It gave us philosophy, including political philosophy, in a form so rounded, so complete, that hardly anyone added anything of moment to it for well over a millennium. It gave us the world’s first systematic written history. It systematised medical and scientific knowledge, and for the first time began to base them on generalisations from empirical observation. It gave us the first lyric poetry and then comedy and tragedy, all again at so completely an extraordinary pitch of sophistication and maturity, such that they might have been germinating under the Greek sun for hundreds of years. It left us the first naturalistic art; for the first time, human beings caught and registered for ever the breath of a wind, the quality of a smile. It single-handedly invented the principles and the norms of architecture . . .’³

A new conception of what human life is for. The fountainhead. First in so many ways that have mattered. That is why ancient Greece is so important, even today. The ancient Greeks may be long dead, were indeed overwhelmingly white, and, yes, by modern standards, unforgiveably male. Yet in discovering what the historian (and Librarian of Congress) Daniel Boorstin calls ‘the wondrous instrument within’ – the courageous human brain and its powers of observation and reason – the Greeks left us far more than any other comparable group. Their legacy is the greatest the world has yet known.⁴

There are two principal aspects to that legacy. One is that the Greeks were the first to truly understand that the world may be known, that knowledge can be acquired by systematic observation, without aid from the gods, that there is an order to the world and the universe which goes beyond the myths of our ancestors. And second, that there is a difference between nature – which operates according to invariable laws – and the affairs of men, which have no such order, but where order is imposed or agreed and can take various forms and is mutable. Compared with the idea that the world could be known only through or in relation to God, or even could be known not at all, this was a massive transformation.