By Richard Marranca

Toolbox of Greek Philosophy: A Conversation with Dr. Paul Cartledge" by Richard Marranca is an in-depth interview exploring various facets of ancient Greek philosophy, including the ideas of the Presocratics, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and others. It delves into themes like the essence and impact of early Greek philosophical thoughts, the intersection of philosophy with everyday life, and the relevance of ancient wisdom in contemporary society. Dr. Paul Cartledge, a renowned scholar from Cambridge University, shares insights into the philosophical innovations of the ancient Greeks and their enduring legacy in shaping Western thought.

Presocratics and Pythagoras

• Can we go back to the Presocratics or Milesian philosophers? Are there any ideas or aphorisms that you find to be especially useful to improve our lives?

We can, indeed. At one level, the title is transparent, obvious, and helpful: the earliest of the Presocratics were thinkers, intellectuals, who practiced a version of the Socratic nostrum ‘the unexamined life isn’t worth living for a human being’ avantlalettre, i.e., before the lifetime of Socrates (470–399), although what they chose to examine was not chiefly human behaviour and ethics but natural phenomena, the cosmos. Since it’s generally agreed that Socrates was among the first, if not the first, to qualify for the title ‘philosopher’ properly so called, the anomaly arises that some ‘Presocratics’ were not pre-Socrates but his contemporaries, practicing their intellectual craft or putting forth their ideas during Socrates’ lifetime. However, undoubtedly some of the most interesting and pioneering Presocratics did live and do their thinking well before 470—none more so than Thales of Miletus (in today’s Western Turkey, on the Aegean seaboard), who flourished in the years around 600 BCE.

Later jokes at their expense made them out to be the classic ivory-tower intellectuals: always falling down wells while looking up at the heavens. But actually they were far more than that: their mode of thought represented a huge intellectual leap forward because it postulated that the cosmos and the sublunary world could be accounted for and explained in non-supernatural, non-religious, and above all, non-mythical terms. Hesiod, a poet of central Greece (c. 700), had done the religious bit: accounting for the genealogies of all the divine beings and accounting for how, after the divine, came the human sphere, decisively influenced by the divine, in several stages of decline: from a gold to a silver and then a bronze and, contemporaneously, an iron generation or age. Thales & Co. would have no truck with all that. In order to provide an account (logos) of what they could see before their eyes and experience through their other senses, they postulated a single, underlying causal element—selectively borrowing one (they were monists) of the four known elements—earth, fire, wind, or water. For Thales, it was all water. Not scientists in any sense of that word that we’d want to apply; they were rather physiologists, students of phusis, or the non-human natural world.

Besides Thales and his immediate pupils and followers (Anaximenes and Anaximander, both also of Miletus), three other Presocratics have captured posterity’s imagination. I’ll return to Pythagoras momentarily. The other two have stayed in memory in part because of their memorable utterances or aphorisms. The enigmatic Heraclitus from Ephesus (also on Western Turkey’s Aegean shore) opined or observed: You can’t step into the same river twice. (Some were then inspired to claim you couldn’t do that even once.) In no less philosophical a spirit, channeling Thales, he claimed that ‘everything flows’ or ‘everything is in flux’. Xenophanes, yet another from ancient Ionia (Colophon), has been claimed as the father of natural or naturalistic philosophy, of a decidedly relativistic and ethnographic kind. If lions and horses had hands, he said, so that they could draw pictures of their gods, they’d draw them looking like lions and horses.

In just the same way as the (non-Greek) Thracians (from roughly modern Bulgaria) image their gods and goddesses with red hair and blue eyes—just like themselves. So much likewise, inferred Xenophanes, for the Greeks’ anthropomorphic conception of the divine, which (merely) projects human features and human qualities onto their gods and goddesses. No better than lions or horses, really. Did that make him an atheist? Not necessarily, but he certainly anticipated a very late Presocratic, Protagoras, from Abdera in northern mainland Greece, who, in some of the very few ipsissimaverba of his that have been preserved, asserted that man (the human being as a species) is the measure of all things—of all things that are that they are—and, concerning the nature (rather than the existence) of divine beings, that the subject was obscure and life too short to puzzle it out satisfactorily. Something of a cop-out, perhaps.

• Pythagoras looms large in Western philosophy but is also mysterious. I recall stories about him being kind to a puppy or releasing fish back into the water. Is this more of a Hindu, Buddhist, or modern mode?

Arguably, there are connections between early Greek philosophy and oriental philosophies, including Buddhism. It’s thought to be not coincidental that the Buddha flourished in the same 6th century BCE as the earliest Presocratics, although direct connections between the Greek world and the Indian subcontinent were not firmly established for another couple of centuries (see below, on Alexander the Great in the East). And there’s a strong case for seeing in some of Pythagoras’s behaviour qualities the mystic or the shaman. What’s undeniable is that this native of the island of Samos emigrated to the Greek West and set himself up in southern Italy, where he attracted disciples rather than pupils, who in turn worshipped him, at least after his death, as a more than merely human being. Most famous for ‘his’ theorem—not in fact his at all; he simply borrowed it—Pythagoras was a profound believer that animals had souls and that it would therefore be wicked and impious to sacrifice and eat them.

Other Greeks, followers of Orpheus, were also vegetarians, but as such, they were a very tiny minority. Allied to his vegetarianism was Pythagoras’ belief in metempsychosis, that is, the transmigration of souls after death, both from one human being to another and from a human being to a non-human being such as a puppy. At the highest intellectual level, beyond that of everyday religion or philosophy, Pythagoras was an ace mathematician, hence ‘his’ theorem. Anticipating Plato, he tried to go beyond the analytical truths of mundane equations and perceive a harmony or music of the spheres, and, further, to push to its limits the explanatory power of number theory. That was very far from releasing captured fish back into the water.

• Pythagoras began a community that was like a monastery. Is it fair to say that this means that to live a philosophical life, it’s a good idea to spend time in a community or visit one? How do we deal with modern life—the madding crowd?

I think by ‘community’ here you must mean something quite different from the ‘community'—or’ society—about which Aristotle theorized and wrote. Pythagoras’ community I’d prefer to call a ‘’ or indeed a ‘cult’, and a very peculiar (odd) one at that, by anyone’s standards. To take a more normal or normative ancient instance, Aristotle’s ideal-typical ancient Greek community, the polis, was by our modern standards teeny-tiny (often a few hundreds, rarely several thousands of citizens) and, so far as developed countries go, remarkably un-diverse culturally speaking. And yet such is the—what shall we call it?—moderateness, sobriety, and sheer good sense of his ethical recommendations that they still speak to many of us to this day, providing us with genuine life lessons.

• Robert Oppenheimer has recently been all over the news with the release of his biopic. He loved the Bhagavad Gita and other classics, such as Plato’s Theaetetus. Can you tell us about this dialogue and about Plato?

Plato presented his philosophy through the medium of invented dialogues, tried out first of all on his pupils at his Athens Academy of Higher Learning (founded in the 380s), later published on papyrus as finished works, many of which are also considered masterpieces of prose literature. They exemplify the so-called ‘Socratic’ Q&A method of inquiry, so named because Plato’s mentor Socrates (who never wrote a word) is featured in almost all of his dialogues as the principal interlocutor. It must be emphasized that these dialogues are not transcripts but Platonic creations or fictions. The ‘Socrates’ character is very much Plato’s version of him. Plato lived to a very great age, and the dialogues were published over some three decades; the Theaetetus, named for one of Socrates’ two principal discussants here, is thought to fall towards the end of that period.

Like most of the earliest, this dialogue focuses on a single definitional question, a matter of epistemology: what is knowledge? ‘Theaetetus’ has three goes at trying to define it; none of them satisfies ‘Socrates’. The aporetic (no decisive answer reached) discussion then turns to another, related question: what is it/what counts as ‘to give an account’, to construct a logos (literally ‘word’, by extension speech, reasoning, account) of any complex concept? All three explanations or justifications offered are deemed to fail, leading once again to aporia (literally no way forward or through, though discovering that to be the case a reading of can of course be a positive gain). Plato’s Theaetetus was, in real life, a brilliant mathematician. Presumably what Oppy, a super-brilliant physicist, found appealing about the dialogue were the processes involved in ground-level philosophizing about foundational concepts such as knowledge and giving an account.

• So, is it fair to say that these great philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, offered self-help—that is, that they were therapeutic?

Much of Plato’s philosophy had to do with individual ethics, right and wrong, justice and injustice, and goodness, which for him required an ultra-high level of intellectual capacity. His most famous pupil, Aristotle, cast his intellectual net far wider, though he too wrote memorably on ethics, especially on the ethics of friendship, but for him, the social-political context of behavior mattered as much as did personal probity (see further below).But the two most influential ancient Greek philosophical systems that majored in therapy for the soul were Stoicism and Epicureanism. They were both founded in Aristotle’s lifetime, in the second half of the 4th century BCE, respectively, by Zeno, a mixed-ethnic Greek from Cyprus, and Epicurus, born of Athenian parentage on the island of Samos.

• I’d like to return to the theme of community. Most of us are worried about this today—that we are losing community and even friends. Individuals, families, societies—everything is changing, and people are on the go. Can the Greeks help us here?

One particular Greek may be particularly able to help us here, though with one rather huge preliminary proviso: the ancient Greek community (society, polity) was not ours; the Greeks did things very differently from us: they held slaves, on whom they depended, and did so mostly without any moral qualms whatsoever; they conceived and treated adult women, even if legally free persons, as of at best second-class status; and they, most of them, regarded all non-Greeks as by definition in principle inferior—culturally. That said, the virtue-ethical system of Aristotle is still considered by many experts today to have current pragmatic as well as theoretical value. Three Aristotelian treatises of ethical, or rather moral-political, philosophy have survived, of which the Nicomachean Ethics is overall by far the most superior work.

For Aristotle, community—living the good life within a totalizing societal framework—was all in all. What the Greeks called a polis—whence our ‘politics’, 'polity', etc.—was far more than merely a constitutional, political framework of self-governance. Rather, it was the framework—and the only possible framework—within which human beings could most and best flourish, that is, live the truly good life, as that was defined by Aristotle. It is far too often said that Aristotle coined the phrase ‘political animals’. What he actually did was define human beings as living creatures designed by their nature to realise their full potential within and only within the polis framework. Being socially conventional, he thought that that definition applied more particularly to the males of the species, especially adult free politically enfranchised Greek males, and did not apply at all to human persons whom he designated naturally ‘slav’, that is, lacking unalterably from birth the capacity of logical reasoning. Aristotle’s eudaimonia is often under-translated as ‘happiness’ but better interpreted as faring well, that is, living a life wholly in accordance with the virtue-ethics set out in the first seven ‘books’, all premised on two notions, one epistemological and the other pragmatic.

On the other hand, particular philosophers did indeed establish ‘communities’ of their followers, and although their schools were located in public, often religious spaces, and some (oral and written) lessons were made available to a wide public, it clearly was crucial for there to be a small, even intimate circle of pupils around each individual master for their philosophies to be developed before being more widely disseminated. Is any of that helpful for us trying to cope with the madnesses of modern life—AI, social media, bonkers political parties, insane dictators, the threat of nuclear or environmental extinction?? That’s anyone’s guess.

• Does this call for moderation, the golden mean?

Pragmatically, one should always aim at moderation, at a middle ground between excesses. For instance, it might be right, ok, understandable, or forgivable to be angry in a specific set of circumstances, but one should never be too angry, not angry enough, or angry for the wrong reason and/or with the wrong person(s) and in the wrong circumstances. The case of Homer’s Achilles springs to mind: he was far too angry, with immediately disastrous consequences for the Greek host at Troy. See further below on Aristotle’s ‘happiness’.

• I think that most people consider happiness to be a feeling, but Aristotle had something else in mind.

Yes, when we’re feeling especially happy, we might even speak of being in a state of euphoria (literally, well-bearing). And you’re right too that, though feelings or emotions do come into Aristotle’s virtue ethics (e.g., anger; see above), being happy for him meant rather attaining a permanent state than experiencing some temporary emotion. In short, being virtuous for Aristotle was essentially a matter of habituation: habituating one’s soul (including mind as well as spirit) to choose the right amount of feeling or emotion in the right situation towards the right person or person, right being the mean between two extremes of emotion or feeling, taking account of one’s own natural propensities—e.g., some are far more easily, more ‘naturally’, roused to anger than others. Their mean will be more emotionally angry than that of less naturally angry persons.

• Is the word Arete related to your answer? I also recall that Martin Seligman, one of the founders of positive psychology, emphasized the word eudaimonia?

The ancient Greek word that we translate as ‘virtue’ (derived from Latin) is indeed aretê. The four ‘cardinal’ virtues are (roughly) wisdom, prudence (practical wisdom), temperance (self-control), and bravery (courage). Plato, as we’ve seen, privileged the first, Aristotle the second. Both saw a need for the third. But the fourth—bravery or courage—was far more problematic. For a start, the very Greek word for the virtue of bravery or courage was gendered (as indeed is Latin virtus): andreia literally meant ‘manliness’ or ‘masculinity’. Aristotle was therefore typical in believing either or both that women couldn’t be brave at all or that, if considered so, their bravery was of a different, inferior kind from men’s. Calling a woman ‘brave’ in Greek—Clytemnestra, Artemisia of Halicarnassus were so called—was both very rare and somewhat disturbing to a male ear. But both Plato and Aristotle were unusual in questioning at least some aspects of the one application of bravery or courage that all Greeks and all Greek communities practiced, often willy-nilly: war. For example, Aristotle queried the value of a heavily militarized Spartan education that, though it produced above-average warriors, rendered the Spartans in some respects little more than wild beasts.

• What about those “dogs” or cynics? Can they help us on our quest?

The ancient Greeks were ambivalent about their feelings about dogs. In their foundational works of literature, the two Homeric epics could be found both extreme affection (of Odysseus for his hunting dog Argos) and the derogatory epithet ‘dog-like’. In Greek reality, a Greek princess could be named ‘Puppy’ (Cynisca of Sparta), and a Greek could choose to be buried with his favourite canine pet, yet dogs could also be used as metaphors for conduct deemed utterly inappropriate for civilized human beings, such as copulating and defecating in public. It was in the latter, negative sense, that followers of Diogenes, originally from Sinope on the southern shore of the Black Sea, acquired the label ''Cynics'—doglike.

But for the collective label to have some positive content, adepts had to agree and act on at least some philosophically defensible tenets or principles. One, roughly and crudely put, was ‘back to nature’: playing on a by then (4th century BCE) hackneyed philosophical debate over the merits and demerits of following nature as opposed to culture or convention, Cynics went all out for un-conventional, even anti-social behaviours. The agreed founder, Diogenes (see further next answer below), took his particular antinomianism as far as regularly masturbating in public. Others privileged a disdain for all material goods and practiced various versions of asceticism, literally ‘practised’, since ‘practice’ is exactly what ancient Greek askêsis meant. It wasn’t just a soft lifestyle option, as Epicureanism could be all too easily misconstrued and misrepresented by non-adepts or opponents.

• Did Diogenes really live in a barrel?

Different versions were given in antiquity. The one I like best was set in Corinth, the headquarters of the Greek anti-Persian alliance that Alexander had inherited from his (assassinated) father Philip II of Macedon. Diogenes was living 'rough' in his home, a large terracotta pot called a pithos. Alexander, an admirer, inquired of Diogenes whether he could be of service to him. Yes, replied the Cynic sage – you’re blocking the sunlight, so move away. Despite such a rebuff, Alexander is said to have commented that, if he could be anything other than Alexander, he’d want to be Diogenes. Believe that…

In 326, having won a great battle at the River Hydaspes (modern Jhelum), but then having had to face down a mutiny, Alexander the Great decided to march his victorious and mutinous troops down the Indus valley towards the river’s mouth before returning west to Iran and eventually Iraq (where he died at Babylon in 323 BCE). Accounts differ: Alexander, a former pupil of Aristotle, either encountered in person Indian philosophers called by the Greeks ‘Gymnosophists’ (literally, stark naked wise men) or he sent off one of his leading commanders, himself a Cynic, to meet with similar Gymnosophists further south. Developed, or embroidered, versions of these encounters, real or alleged, include the classic trope of Greeks posing to Indian ‘barbarians’ questions designed to reveal their ignorance but receiving answers that, on the contrary, demonstrated the latter’s sophisticated wit and wisdom.

Huston Smith, Plotinus and the Ideal of Beauty

• Years ago, Huston Smith, the author of The World’s Religion, quoted Plotinus: Those that contemplate beauty become beautiful. Can you delve into that?

I can delve, yes, but taking a deep dive is more difficult. Plotinus was an Egyptian Greek (CE 205-270), Alexandrian-educated, and a follower of Plato’s philosophy to such a degree of identification as to be labelled a Neoplatonist. His collected writings, edited by a student, consist of six Enneads, an Ennead being a grouping of nine endogenous Egyptian divinities. Within those writings, at Enneads 1.6 and 5.8.1-2, beauty and ideas of beauty are given centre stage, to the philosophical point even of there being a question whether Plotinus identified the ultimate goal of a good life, ‘the One’, with beauty itself. Regardless, Plotinus starts by drawing a distinction between beauty that is physical and visible, a matter of (mere) appearance, and beauty that is inner, spiritual, and therefore superior—very Platonic. Your Plotinus quotation has it that contemplaters of beauty become beautiful themselves; if by that is meant something like Plotinus’s notion that becoming beautiful is fully identifying ourselves with the beauty within us, then Huston Smith was quoting more or less accurately. But these are deep waters—too deep, I freely admit—to swim in comfortably or enjoyably.

• What does it all mean? Does philosophy answer things definitively?

What you seem to be asking, or rather presupposing an answer to, is (nothing less than):What’s it all about? What’s the meaning of life? For the ancient Greeks—or rather, I should say for some ancient Greek philosophers—there was no distinction, let alone contradiction, between what Latin-speakers came to call the vita activa and the vita contemplativa. To be virtuous, for Aristotle, my go-to exemplar, it wasn’t enough to be good in the sense of having good psychic habits and dispositions; it was necessary to do good in acts and actions. To be pragmatically and not just in principle virtuous demanded the application of energeia, translating thoughts, desires, and wishes into erga, practical deeds that might have lasting effects.

Materialism—how one should behave virtuously in regard to the possession and use of material goods—is just one relevant conditioning variable. It preoccupied everyone, especially Aristotle, his followers, and the various Stoics. But inner peace was the concern, rather, of the Epicureans. My answer to your question—really, a non-answer—is that a selective reading of varieties of ancient Greek philosophy can suggest how we might go about thinking about how to reconcile those modes, but that there is no Golden Rule already laid down somewhere in those extant writings that we may simply take down off the shelf, dust it off, and apply it in our daily lives.

• The value of philosophy and the other humanities is immense. But STEM, the vast entertainment culture, the need for practical employment, etc. create vast challenges.

A former university vice chancellor of my acquaintance, a leading immunologist, once said to me that, in his view, a university in which the sciences were considered omnipotent and omnicompetent and the arts and humanities subjects were therefore discredited and derogated was not properly speaking a university at all. Of course, the positive arguments in favour of studying STEM subjects are often unanswerable, both theoretically and pragmatically, both individually and societally. But is that a good or sufficient reason for derogating the arts and humanities subjects, whether at secondary or tertiary levels of education? Of course, as a professor of ancient (Greek and Roman, classical) history, I would say ‘no’, wouldn’t I?

It’s much harder to set out and defend or advocate for persuasively in a very brief compass such as this and the many reasons why. I suppose ultimately I’d go back to that Socratic aphorism about the unexamined life that I discussed earlier and mention it again in my next and final answer. But here I’d want to put it in a slightly different way, appealing to the ancient Greek words for a (legal-sense) ‘judge’ and ‘judgement’. The latter, krisis, when transliterated as 'crisis', usually means something quite other than its original Greek sense or senses, which denoted and connoted a process of judgement or moment of decision, relying on factually accurate evidence, rational argument, poised self-awareness, and other such mental and ethical qualities. One of my many reasons for being glad that all those decades ago I decided to devote my professional life to the study of the ancient Greeks’ civilization and culture is that they—some of them—subjected even their most fundamental institutions and beliefs to the most critical scrutiny imaginable.

Concluding Thoughts

• Time rolls by, and philosophy is an endless topic, game, and path. It feels like we just got started on the subject. Can you finish with any idea, person, aphorism, or practice that we missed?

You're, of course, right, but as someone once said somewhere, the beginning is half of the whole. My favourite ancient Greek philosophical aphorism is one I’ve already quoted, as attributed by Plato to Socrates. The original context is not irrelevant or unimportant; it’s from Socrates’ supposed apologia (defense speech) when on trial for his life in 399 for the capital crimes of impiety and treason. ‘The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being’. The last four English words, often omitted, are just one word in the original Greek: Socrates’ point, I believe, was that to be truly human, one must examine one’s way of life, something that only humans can properly do. The word translated as ‘examine’ meant examine forensically, as if metaphorically (as Socrates really in fact was) one was on trial for one’s life.

Socrates, as a citizen of the Athenian democracy, had, I believe, serious flaws, but as a champion of free thought and expression, he was and is a hero of the inner, the intellectual, life.