Why Study Ancient Philosophy?

Ramkrishna Bhattacharya

‘Greek thought, for historical reasons,
underlies that of later ages, and particularly the theories of modern science,
social as well as natural. We cannot think rationally except along the lines
the first philosophers laid down for us; most often we think in the very words
they first invented.’ (22)

To a Marxist these are by no means just far
away and long ago events to be studied for their intrinsic interest alone. They
are part of the struggle of today and tomorrow. Marx himself wrote his doctoral
thesis on the atomic philosophy of Democritus and Epicurus; Engels, notably in
The Origin of the Family, discusses the social origins of the Greeks. Just
because reaction is still able to use ideological weapons forged in defence of
privilege in Ancient Greece, there is all the more reason to examine how and
why this was done and to show the contrasting ideology which is arising in the
making of a classless society. (22)

JD Bernal

Defenders of the existing forms of class
society indeed often refer back to the glorious past of India and highlight
only a part of it. They tacitly deny the existence of classes in ancient
civilizations and speak of the idealist systems of philosophy as the greatest
achievement of human speculation. Greece produced Plato, India produced
Sankaracarya: they are projected as infallible guides for all times. Many
people fall prey to such propaganda. Generations of scholars too have joined in
reasserting this claim. If a challenge is to be thrown to them, one must learn
what the other side of the shield was like, and explain why the other side had
not been brought to light.

There is great danger, in discussing these
old thinkers, that one may read into them the meaning of a later age. It must
always be remembered that they were ignorant of all the accumulated knowledge
of modern science and all the refinement of ideas that centuries of
philosophical discussion had produced. In the world of thought, as in the world
of nature, everything flows.2 The very words with which we translate the
sayings of Heraclitus are charged with meanings unknown to him. It takes an
effort of historical research and of historical imagination to put oneself back
into the frame of mind of this great thinker when he supposed himself to have solved
the riddle of the universe by saying that there was a tension in things, ‘like
the bow and the lyre’. (41)

Thus we have once again returned to the
mode of outlook of the great founders of Greek philosophy, the view that the
whole of nature, from the smallest element to the greatest, from grains of sand
to suns, from Protista to man, has its existence in eternal coming into being
and passing away, in ceaseless flux, in unresting motion and change. (30-31)

Only with the essential difference that
what in the case of the Greeks was a brilliant intuition, is in our case the
result of strictly scientific research in accordance with experience, and hence
also it emerges in a much more definite and clear form. (31. Italics mine.)

Frederick Engels

Does it mean that the nineteenth-century
scientists had solved the whole mystery of nature and left nothing for their
successors to explore? Engels was modest enough to admit that ‘empirical proof
of this cyclical course’ is  still not
free from gaps,’ but said in defence that ‘these are insignificant in
comparison with what has already been firmly established, and with each year
they become more and more filled up.’ (31)

Empirical natural science has accumulated
such a tremendous mass of positive material for knowledge that the necessity of
classifying it in each separate field of investigation systematically and in
accordance with its inner inter-connection has become absolutely imperative. It
is becoming equally imperative to bring the individual spheres of knowledge
into the correct connection with one another. In doing so, however, natural
science enters the field of theory and here the methods of empiricism will not
work, here only theoretical thinking can be of assistance. (42. Italics mine.)

But theoretical thinking is an innate
quality only as regards natural capacity. This natural capacity must be
developed, improved, and for its improvement there is as yet no other means
than the study of previous philosophy. (42-43. Italics mine.)

In every epoch, and therefore also in ours,
theoretical thought is a historical product, which at different times assumes
very different forms and, therewith, very different contents. The science of
thought is therefore, like every other, a historical science, the science of
the historical development of human thought. And this is of importance for the
practical application of thought in empirical fields. … Formal logic itself has
been the arena of violent controversy from the time of Aristotle to the present
day. And dialectics has so far been fairly closely investigated by only two
thinkers, Aristotle and Hegel. (43. Italics mine.)

But it is precisely dialectics that
constitute the most important form of thinking for present-day natural science,
for it alone offers the analogue for, and thereby the methods of, explaining
the evolutionary processes occurring in nature, inter-connection in general,
and transitions from one field of investigation to another. (43)

Since physics and chemistry once more
operate almost exclusively with molecules and atoms, the atomic philosophy of
ancient Greece has of necessity come to the fore again. But how superficially
it is treated even by the best of natural scientists! Thus Kekulé tells us …
that Democritus, instead of Leucippus, originated it, and he maintains that
Dalton was the first to assume the existence of qualitatively different
elementary atoms, and was the first to ascribe to them different weights
characteristic of different elements. Yet anyone can read in Diogenes Laertius
… that already Epicurus had ascribed to atoms differences not only of magnitude
and form, but also of weight, that is, he was already acquainted in his own way
with atomic weight and atomic volume. (44. Italics in the original.)

The resemblance of the atomic theory of
Demokritos and Epicurus to the atomic theory of modern physics is superficially
so striking that we are tempted to regard the work of those philosophers as
scientific. This is a mistake. Ancient atomism is not science but ideology. It
is, no less than Parmenidean monism and Platonic idealism, an exercise of pure
reason ‘reflecting the structure of the society in which it was generated. (312.
Italics mine.)

But this is only part of the story. Those
truths would never have been reaffirmed, never indeed examined but for the form
in which their first statement was made, a form clear enough to be grasped,
tested, rejected, and improved upon. The Greeks were supreme as model builders.
Even if the models came from clan organization they are the linear ancestors of
our modern scientific concepts. The atom of today is not a rediscovery, it is
the original Democritan atom, hard, massy, impenetrable, that was recovered by
Gassendi and passed through Newton to Rutherford. (31. Italics mine.)

The fact that our subjective thought and
the objective world are subject to the same laws, and hence, too, that in the
final analysis they cannot contradict each other in their results, but must
coincide, governs absolutely our whole theoretical thought. It is the
unconscious and unconditional premise for theoretical thought. (266)