Professor Donald
Kagan: Now, I'm going to ask you this
question. Why are you here?
That is to say, why should you,
we, all of us, want to study these ancient
Greeks? I think it's reasonable for
people who are considering the study of a particular subject in
a college course to ask why they should.
What is it about the Greeks between the years that I
mentioned to you that deserves the attention of people in the
twenty-first century? I think the answer is to be
found, or at least one answer--the truth is there are
many answers--in that they are just terribly interesting,
but that's very much of a--what's the word I want,
the opposite of objective--subjective
observation by me. So I would say,
a less subjective one is that I believe that it comes from their
position, that is to say,
the position of the Greeks are at the most significant starting
point of Western Civilization, which is the culture that most
powerfully shapes not only the West but most of the world
today. It seems to me to be evident
that whatever it's other characteristics,
the West has created institutions of government and
law that provide unprecedented freedom for its people.
It has also invented a body of natural scientific knowledge and
technological achievement that together make possible a level
of health and material prosperity undreamed of in
earlier times, and unknown outside the West
and those places that have been influenced by the West.
I think the Nobel Prize laureate, V.S.
Naipaul, a man born in Trinidad, of Indian parents,
was right, when he spoke of the modern world as our universal
civilization shaped chiefly by the West.
Most people around the world who know of them want to
benefit from the achievements of Western science and technology.
Many of them also want to participate in its political
freedom. Moreover, experience suggests
that a society cannot achieve the full benefits of Western
science and technology without a commitment to reason and
objectivity as essential to knowledge and to the political
freedom that sustains it and helps it to move forward.
The primacy of reason and the pursuit of objectivity,
therefore, both characteristic of the Western experience seem
to me to be essential for the achievement of the desired goals
almost anywhere in the world. The civilization of the
West, however, was not the result of some
inevitable process through which other cultures will
automatically pass. It emerged from a unique
history in which chance and accident often played a vital
part. The institutions and the ideas
therefore, that provide for freedom and improvement in the
material conditions of life, cannot take root and flourish
without an understanding of how they came about and what
challenges they have had to surmount.
Non-Western peoples who wish to share in the things that
characterize modernity will need to study the ideas and history
of Western civilization to achieve what they want and
Westerners, I would argue,
who wish to preserve these things must do the same.
The many civilizations adopted by the human race have
shared basic characteristics. Most have tended toward
cultural uniformity and stability.
Reason, although it was employed for all sorts of
practical and intellectual purposes in some of these
cultures, it still lacked independence
from religion and it lacked the high status to challenge the
most basic received ideas. Standard form of government has
been monarchy. Outside the West,
republics have been unknown. Rulers have been thought to be
divine or appointed spokesmen for divinity.
Religious and political institutions and beliefs have
been thoroughly intertwined as a mutually supportive unified
structure. Government has not been subject
to secular reasoned analysis. It has rested on religious
authority, tradition, and power.
The concept of individual freedom has had no importance in
these great majorities of cultures in human history.
The first and the sharpest break with this common human
experience came in ancient Greece.
The Greek city states called poleis were republics.
The differences in wealth among their citizens were relatively
small. There were no kings with the
wealth to hire mercenary soldiers.
So the citizens had to do their own fighting and to decide when
to fight. As independent defenders of the
common safety and the common interest, they demanded a role
in the most important political decisions.
In this way, for the first time,
political life really was invented.
Observe that the word "political" derives from the
Greek word polis. Before that no word was needed
because there was no such thing. This political life came to be
shared by a relatively large portion of the people and
participation of political life was highly valued by the Greeks.
Such states, of course, did not need a
bureaucracy for there were no vast royal or state holdings
that needed management and not much economic surplus to support
a bureaucratic class. There was no separate caste of
priests and there was very little concern,
I don't mean any concern, but very little concern with
life after death which was universally important in other
civilizations. In this varied,
dynamic, secular, and remarkably free context,
there arose for the first time a speculative natural philosophy
based on observation and reason, the root of modern natural
science and philosophy, free to investigate or to
ignore divinity. What most sets the Greeks apart
is their view of the world. Where other peoples have seen
sameness and continuity, the Greeks and the heirs of
their way of thinking, have tended to notice
disjunctions and to make distinctions.
The Greek way of looking at things requires a change from
the characteristic way of knowing things before the
Greeks, that is to say,
the use of faith, poetry, and intuition.
Instead, increasingly, the Greeks focused on a
reliance on reason. Reason permits a continuing
rational inquiry into the nature of reality.
Unlike mystical insights, scientific theories cannot be
arrived at by meditation alone but require accurate observation
of the world and reasoning of a kind that other human beings can
criticize, analyze, modify, and correct.
The adoption of this way of thinking was the beginning of
the liberation and enthronement of reason to whose searching
examination, the Greeks thereafter,
exposed everything they perceived natural,
human, and divine. From the time they formed their
republics until they were conquered by alien empires,
the Greeks also rejected monarchy of any kind.
They thought that a human being functioning in his full capacity
must live as a free man in an autonomous polis ruled by
laws that were the product of the political community and not
of an arbitrary fiat from some man or god.
These are ideas about laws and justice that have simply not
flourished outside the Western tradition until places that were
outside the Western tradition were influenced by the West.
The Greeks, however, combined a unique sense of
mankind's high place in the natural order.
The Greeks had the most arrogant view of their
relationship to the divinity, as I will tell you about later
in the course, of any people I know.
So on the one hand, they had this very high picture
of this place of man, but they combined it--excuse
me, and what possibilities these
human beings had before that--with a painful
understanding of the limitations of the greatness and the
possibilities before man. This combination of
elevating the greatness in reality and in possibility of
human beings with the limitations of it,
the greatest limitation being mortality;
that together, composes the tragic vision of
the human condition that characterized classical Greek
civilization. To cope with it,
they urged human beings to restrain their overarching
ambitions. Inscribed at Apollo's temple at
Delphi, which became–well, the Greeks came to call it the
navel of the universe, but it certainly became the
center of the Greek world--and which was also seen as a central
place of importance by non-Greeks who were on the
borders of the Greek world. That temple at Delphi had
written above the Temple these words, "Know Thyself," and
another statement, "Nothing in Excess."
I think those together really mean this: know your own
limitations as a fallible mortal and then exercise moderation
because you are not divine, you are mortal.
Beyond these exhortations, they relied on a good political
regime to enable human beings to fulfill the capacities that were
part of their nature, to train them in virtue,
and to restrain them from vice. Aristotle, and his politics,
made the point neatly, and I quote him,
"As a man," - I'm sorry,
"As man is the best of the animals when perfected,
so he is the worst when separated from law and justice.
For injustice is most dangerous when it is armed and man armed
by nature with good sense and virtue may use them for entirely
opposite ends. Therefore, when he is without
virtue, man is the most unscrupulous and savage of the
animals." Aristotle went on to say that
the justice needed to control this dark side of human nature
can be found only in a well ordered society of free people
who govern themselves, and the only one that he knew
was the polis of the Greeks.
Now, the second great strand in the history of the
West is the Judeo Christian tradition,
a very different tradition from the one I have just described.
Christianity's main roots were in Judaism, a religion that
worshipped a single, all powerful deity,
who is sharply separated from human beings,
makes great moral demands upon them,
and judges them all, even kings and emperors.
Christianity began as a persecuted religion that
ultimately captured the Roman Empire only after centuries of
hostility towards the Empire, towards Rome,
towards the secular state in general.
It never lost entirely its original character as an
insurgent movement, independent of the state and
hostile to it, making claims that challenge
the secular authority. This, too, is unique to the
West, just like the Greek experience is unique.
This kind of religious organization is to be found
nowhere else in human society. So the union of a
universalist religion, with a monarch such as the
Roman Empire, who ruled a vast empire,
could nonetheless have put an end to any prospect of freedom
as in other civilizations. But Christianity's inheritance
of the rational disputatious Greek philosophy led to
powerfully divisive quarrels about the nature of God and
other theological questions, which was perfectly in the
tradition and uniquely in the tradition of Greek philosophical
debate. What I am doing is making a
claim that even the Judeo-Christian tradition,
which is such a different one from the Greeks,
and in so many ways seems to be at odds with it,
even they were dependent upon one aspect of the Greek culture,
which is inherent in Christianity and important in
Christianity. That too, was ultimately,
a Greek source. Well, the people who the
Romans called barbarians destroyed the Western empire and
it also the destroyed the power of the emperors and their
efforts to impose religious and political conformity under
imperial control. The emperor in the east was
able to do that because they were not conquered by the
barbarians, but in the West,
you have this situation where nobody is fully in charge.
Here we have arrived at a second sharp break with the
general experience of mankind. The West of the Germanic tribes
that had toppled the Roman Empire was weak and it was
divided. The barriers to unity presented
by European geography and very limited technology made it hard
for a would-be conqueror to create a vast empire,
eliminating competitors and imposing his will over vast
areas. These conditions permitted a
development of institutions and habits needed for freedom,
even as they also made Europe vulnerable to conquests and to
extinction, and Europe was almost extinguished practically
before there was a Europe; very early in its history.
The Christian Church might have stepped into the breach and
imposed obedience and uniformity,
because before terribly long, all of the West had been
Christianized. But the Church,
in fact, never gained enough power to control the state.
Strong enough to interfere with the ambitions of emperors and
kings, it never was able to impose its own domination,
though some of the Popes surely tried.
Nobody sought or planned for freedom, but in the spaces that
were left by the endless conflicts among secular rulers
and between them and the Church, there was room for freedom to
grow. Freedom was a kind of an
accident that came about because the usual ways of doing things
were not possible. Into some of that space,
towns and cities reappeared and with them new supports for
freedom. Taking advantage of the
rivalries I've mentioned, they obtained charters from the
local powers establishing their rights to conduct their own
affairs and to govern themselves.
In Italy, some of these cities were able
to gain control of the surrounding country and to
become city states, resembling those of the ancient
Greeks. Their autonomy was assisted by
the continuing struggle between Popes and Emperors,
between church and state, again, a thoroughly unique
Western experience. In these states,
the modern world began to take form.
Although the people were mainly Christians, their life and
outlook became increasingly secular.
Here, and not only in Italy but in other cities north of the
Alps, arose a worldview that celebrated the greatness and
dignity of mankind, which was a very sharp turning
away from the medieval Western tradition that put God and life
in the hereafter at the center of everything.
This new vision is revealed with flamboyant confidence by
Pico della Mirándola, a Florentine thinker,
who said--wrote the following: "God told man that we,
meaning God, have made the neither of Heaven
nor of Earth, neither mortal nor immortal,
so that with freedom of choice and with honor,
as though the maker and molder of thyself,
thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt
prefer. Oh supreme generosity of God
the Father, oh highest and the most great felicity of man,
to Him it is granted to have whatever He chooses to be
whatever He wills." Now, this is a remarkable leap,
even beyond the humanism of the Greeks, something brand new in
the world. According to this view,
man is not merely the measure of all things as the Greek
Sophist Protagoras had radically proclaimed in the fifth century.
He is, in fact says Pico, more than mortal.
He is unlimited by nature. He is entirely free to shape
himself and to acquire whatever he wants.
Please observe too that it is not his reason that will
determine human actions but his will alone, free of the
moderating control of reason. Another Florentine,
Machiavelli, moved further in the same
direction. For him, and I quote him,
"Fortune is a woman and it is necessary to hold her down and
beat her, and fight with her." A notion that the Greeks would
have regarded as dangerously arrogant and certain to produce
disaster. They would have seen this as an
example of the word that they used, and we'll talk about a lot
in this course, hubris,
a kind of violent arrogance which comes upon men when they
see themselves as more than human and behave as though they
were divine. Francis Bacon,
influenced by Machiavelli, urged human beings to employ
their reason to force nature to give up its secrets,
to treat nature like a woman, to master nature in order to
improve man's material well being.
He assumed that such a course would lead to progress and the
general improvement of the human condition,
and it was that sort of thinking that lay at the heart
of the scientific revolution and remains the faith on which
modern science and technology rest.
A couple of other English political philosophers,
Hobbs and Locke, applied a similar novelty and
modernity to the sphere of politics.
Basing their understanding on the common passions of man for a
comfortable self-preservation and discovering something the
Greeks had never thought of, something they called natural
rights that belonged to a man either as part of nature,
or as the gift of a benevolent and a reasonable god.
Man was seen as a solitary creature, not inherently a part
of society. That is totally un-Greek.
And his basic rights were seen to be absolute,
for nothing must interfere with the right of each individual to
defend his life, liberty, and property.
Freedom was threatened in early modern times by the emergence of
monarchies that might have been able to crush it.
But the cause of individual freedom was enhanced by the
Protestant Reformation. Another upheaval within
Christianity arising from its focus on individual salvation,
its inheritance of a tradition of penetrating reason,
applied even to matters of faith and to the continuing
struggle between church and state.
The English Revolution came about, in large part,
because of King Charles' attempt to impose an alien
religious conformity, as well as tighter political
control on his kingdom. But in England,
the tradition of freedom and government bound by law was
already strong enough to produce effective resistance.
From the ensuing rebellion came limited constitutional
representative government and ultimately our modern form of
democracy. The example,
and the ideas it produced, encouraged and informed the
French and the American Revolutions,
and the entire modern constitutional tradition.
These ideas and institutions are the basis for modern liberal
thinking about politics, the individual and society.
Just as the confident view of science and technology has
progressive forces improving the lot of humanity and increasing
man's capacity to understand and control the universe,
has been the most powerful form taken by the Western elevation
of reason. In the last two centuries,
both these most characteristic elements of Western civilization
have in fact become increasingly under heavy attack.
At different times, science and technology have
been blamed for the destruction of human community and the
alienation of people from nature and from one another - for
intensifying the gulf between rich and poor,
for threatening the very existence of humanity,
either by producing weapons of total destruction or by
destroying the environment. At the same time,
the foundations of freedom have also come into question.
Jefferson and his colleagues could confidently proclaim their
political rights as being self evident and the gift of a
creator. By now, in our time,
however, the power of religion has faded, and for many,
the basis of modern political and moral order has been
demolished. Nietzsche announced the
death of God and Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor asserted that
when God is dead all things are permitted.
Nihilism rejects any objective basis for society and its
morality. It rejects the very concept of
objectivity. It even rejects the possibility
of communication itself, and a vulgar form of Nihilism,
I claim, has a remarkable influence in our educational
system today, a system rotting from the head
down, so chiefly in universities,
but all the way down to elementary schools.
The consequences of the victory of such ideas,
I believe, would be enormous. If both religion and reason are
removed, all that remains is will and power,
where the only law is the law of tooth and claw.
There is no protection for the freedom of weaker
individuals, or those who question the authority of the
most powerful. There is no basis for
individual rights, or for a critique of existing
ideas and institutions, if there is no base either in
religion or in reason. That such attacks on the
greatest achievements of the West should be made by Western
intellectuals is perfectly in keeping with the Western
tradition. The first crowd to do stuff
like that, you will find, in the fifth century B.C.
in Greece is a movement called The Sophistic Movement.
These Sophists raised most of the questions that my colleagues
are now spending all their time with.
Yet, to me, it seems ironic that they have gained so much
currency in a time, more or less,
in which the achievements of Western reason in the form of
science and at a moment when its concept of political freedom
seemed to be more popular and more desirable to people in and
out of Western civilization than ever.
Now, I've been saying kind things about Western
civilization, but I would not want to deny
that there is a dark side to the Western experience and its way
of life. To put untrammeled reasons and
individual freedom at the center of a civilization is to live
with the conflict, the turmoil,
the instability, and the uncertainty that these
things create. Freedom was born and has
survived in the space created by divisions, and conflict within
and between nations and religions.
We must wonder whether the power of modern weapons will
allow it and the world to survive at such a price.
Individual freedom, although it has greatly
elevated the condition of the people who have lived in free
societies, inevitably permits inequalities
which are the more galling, because each person is plainly
free to try to improve his situation and largely
responsible for the outcome. Freedom does permit isolation
from society and an alienation of the individual at a high
cost, both to the individual and society.
These are not the only problems posed by the Western
tradition in its modern form, which is what we live in.
Whether it takes the shape of the unbridled claims of Pico
della Mirandola or the Nietzschean assertion of the
power of the superior individual to transform and shape his own
nature, or of the modern totalitarian
effort to change the nature of humanity by utopian social
engineering, the temptation to arrogance
offered by the ideas and worldly success of the modern West
threatens its own great traditions and achievements.
Because of Western civilization's emergence as the
exemplary civilization, it also presents problems to
the whole world. The challenges presented by
freedom and the predominance of reason cannot be ignored,
nor can they be met by recourse to the experience of other
cultures where these characteristics have not been
prominent. In other words,
to understand and cope with the problems that we all face,
we all need to know and to grapple with the Western
experience. In my view,
we need especially to examine the older traditions of the West
that came before the modern era, and to take seriously the
possibility that useful wisdom can be found there,
especially among the Greeks who began it all.
They understood the potentiality of human beings,
their limitations and the predicament in which they live.
Man is potent and important, yet he is fallible and mortal,
capable of the greatest achievements and the worst
crimes. He is then a tragic figure,
powerful but limited, with freedom to choose and act,
but bound by his own nature, knowing that he will never
achieve perfect knowledge and understanding,
justice and happiness, but determined to continue the
search no matter what. To me that seems an
accurate description of the human condition that is
meaningful, not only for the Greeks and
their heirs in the West, but for all human beings.
It is an understanding that cannot be achieved without a
serious examination of the Western experience.
The abandonment of such a study or its adulteration for current
political purposes would be a terrible loss for all of
humanity, and at the base,
at the root of that civilization stood the Greeks.
These are the reasons why I examined their experience and I
trust why you are thinking about learning about it.
Thank you. I'll see you guys,
some of you, next Tuesday.
These lectures are great.
I have seen all 24 of these, and they are great. Donald Kagen is one of the best in the business. His book "The Peleponnesian War" is one of the most entertaining bookd on the topic.
Edit: Sorry for the typo's, I was using my phone. Still haven't mastered the tiny touch pad!
Awesome, thanks for the link! I will definitely check these out.