Pythagoras – the Mystic Philosopher from Ancient Greece

hello and welcome back for some more philosophy here at Solomon's cave there are many great pre-socratic philosophers and we have seen three of them so far but in my opinion there are only four truly amazing pre-socratics the first one was staleys the very first philosopher i discussed and the second one is Pythagoras which I'll be discussing in this video as for the other two ayyyy you'll have to wait and see now Pythagoras was born in Samos a Greek island off the coast of Turkey some have speculated that in his youth he studied in Meletis as there was some overlap between him and the Malaysians or that he went to Egypt to study by the way though I did not mention this in his video some historians think that they Lee's also went down to Egypt this the recurring theme of wise people going down to Egypt to study probably says more about how Egypt was viewed back in the day than it does about the philosophers themselves but moving on in this case quite literally to Croton a town in the south of Italy which at that time was also controlled by the Greeks why did he move there well that's the kind of thing that happens when dictators start governing cities or countries or in this case islands smart people flee and so did Pythagoras what happened next is that Pythagoras founded a school and started teaching philosophy mathematics music and astronomy or Pythagoras founded a cult based on divine revelations that he received from God and started brainwashing his followers into following a complex set of arbitrary rules all shrouded in secrecy or perhaps he did both it was probably both but regardless this is also where most of our unquestionable information about Pythagoras kind of ants because just like they lease and laid the Socrates and Jesus and Muhammad he didn't write anything himself now maybe your once had a history teacher who told you that if you want to be remembered you have to write something which is generally speaking true but if you don't want to be just remembered but you want to be remembered as a legends well then apparently you should not write anyway getting back to the Pythagoras is two hobbies namely science teacher and cult leader this would later lead to two very distinct groups of pythagoreans the philosophically oriented mathematically who focused on the things that were studied by Pythagoras and the acousmatic boy who focused on the more spiritual or mystical things that Pythagoras had set so let's start with the more eccentric follows of Pythagoras the acousmatic oi the aquas Matic boy were the most spiritual followers of Pythagoras and they followed a long list of superstitious rules of do's and don'ts for example they were not allowed to stir a fire with a knife they had to rub out marks as well like the mark that a pot makes if you put it in ashes or the mark your body makes on a mattress they were not allowed to wear rings whenever you clip your nails or trim your hair you had to spit on the trimmings they were not allowed to have swallows inside their houses and they were not allowed to urinate facing the Sun and finally they were not allowed to sacrifice white roosters but as interesting as this group of acousmatic oil is it seems they were not big on writing either so in order to know something about Pythagoras we have to go to the mathematically true of the most famous mathematical were phil allows and architects but they lived some time after Pythagoras and those are only some of the earliest people who wrote about him and they themselves also actively contributed to Pythagorean philosophy so it is not always clear which ideas came from pythagoras himself and which were developed later by his followers what is even more important here is that in this later period somewhere between 500 and 450 BC was a very dense period in philosophical development and it was here that the most important philosophical debate of all time was started and it is relatively easy to see that these later pythagoreans were heavily influenced by one side of the debate sins are not enough of an expert to have a credible opinion about what is originally from pythagoras and what is from later i will just throw everything into one big heap and pretend that it was all from pythagoras himself who believed and taught these things so the first idea i want to explore is the so-called transmigration of the soul Pythagoras believed that after you die you saw migrates to another body this could be the body of a land dwelling animal of a fish or a bird or of another human one fun story that illustrates this belief is that it is said that Pythagoras once heard a puppy yelping when it was beaten he then rushed over and yelled at the man beating the puppy that this puppy was his deceased friend he claimed to recognize the voice of his friend in the way the puppy helped another story is that he claims to have had memories of previous lives in some of which he was a true hero in any case the goal of life was not to be transmigrated or reincarnated continually but to escape the endless cycle of rebirth and become truly free this is also one of the very first times that Egypt comes into the picture since this idea of a soul transmigrating was something that was also believed by the ancient Egyptians another belief that was related to this was that a full transmigration cycle going through all the different kinds of animals takes about 3,000 years now this doctrine of the transmigration of the soul should be kept in mind because they will become very popular in some of the following centuries and especially Plato makes frequent reference to this belief so that was the more explicitly spiritual side of his teaching that he contributed to Greek philosophy so what else did he contribute he was especially interested in numbers he saw numbers in geometrical shapes he saw numbers in music he saw numbers in astronomy any even some numbers in numbers in fact his love for seeing numbers everywhere led him to ascribe special meaning to some of his favorite numbers for example the number two was female number three was male and if you add them up you get number five which is the number of marriage so he might wonder what is number four then maybe a lesbian marriage but no number four was actually the number of Justice mathematically he also ascribed numbers with meaning for example the number one was a dot number two was a line three his surface for a solid object oh and if you arrange one two three and four in a pyramid and you add them all up you get ten which was a Ted tractus since it is a number that comes from the dots in the triangle and because of this the number ten had a special meaning for him for example they said that Pythagoras was quite enamored with the idea of opposites and he compiled a list of ten fundamental opposites in reality the first one is the unlimited and the limit this pair actually plays an important part in the creation narrative of Pythagoras he believed that creation came about when God put a limit on the unlimited moving on we go to numbers and he divided numbers in even and part numbers another number related opposites is plural versus one now we move from numbers to positions naming you left and right that aren't to biology it seems with the opposites of female and male so as you can see according to Pythagoras men are right next is motion and rest another very important opposite that welcome back in future discussions the band and the straight the dark and the light and they're moving on to the more moral plane we have evil and good and we round up our 10th and final opposite with oblong and square and in Pythagoras is mind the things in each column were related to each other so I was joking about man being right but according to him they were on the side of good and odd numbers and squares and things that are at rest at cetera while women sorry ladies were on the side of motion and left and band and dark etc and the fact that his system of opposites and even more importantly his systems of numbers is interwoven into the fabric of reality can perhaps best be illustrated by his initial theorizing about music it is said that Pythagoras was one day walking past two blacksmiths they were happily hammering away on the rentals and as he was listening he noticed that the clangs that they made sounded pleasantly together and then he noticed that the bigger anvil was twice as big as the small one this observation led to the discovery of the octave and the system by which you can go up one octave and then the amount of Hertz or vibrations per second doubles a system that is still used in music today maybe there are many numbers in playing music itself but there most certainly is a lot in writing music or in analyzing music and if things in music go well what do you call that you call it harmony harmony can of course be achieved and recognized intuitively but there are mathematical ways in which harmony can be achieved or verified or predicted and once you have discovered that you can express harmony and numbers and at the same time you start doing geometry and you discover that you can come up with all sorts of mathematical proofs like the famous Pythagorean theorem then what is your conclusion if you combine those two facts well if something as surprising is music is essentially a form of math then maybe everything else can also be described in numbers and if everything can be described in numbers and you can show that often with incomplete data you can prove what the rest of the data should be then maybe the answers to life the universe and everything can not only be described as a number but it can even be calculated and he took the universe part of this quite literally as his entire cosmology was very complex but it was ultimately based on the assumption that perfectly harmonious numbers govern the motions of the earth and the heavenly bodies this is where we get the notion of the music of the spheres since everything in the universe was believed to move in harmonious spheres and he also took the life part of this pretty seriously since he applied this principle of harmony or balance to medicine as well he attributed illness to the body not being in harmony with the various opposites especially the Malaysian opposites of hot and cold and wet and dry so what do we see if we compare modern science with Pythagoras well on the one hand if we look at the actual theories that Pythagoras had I would much rather go with modern science I wouldn't want a doctor who says that he's going to balance the opposites of heat and cold in my blood that is a red flag insert communist pun here but on the other hand the principle that math works to describe reality still holds true today think of Einstein's theory of general relativity think of dark matter string theory black holes cosmic microwave background radiation or even Hawking radiation most of them started out as purely mathematical theories so now there were two distinct ways of doing philosophy on the one hand we had deductive reasoning and on the other hand we had observation followed by speculation and then there were two distinct objects for philosophy to ponder on the one hand there was the nature of reality and on the other hand the form of reality and these new ways and objects of philosophy make Pythagoras contribution to philosophy so important because now the stage is set for the greatest debate of all time and next time we all find out who the players are I hope you enjoyed that if you did give it a like subscribe to my channel and follow me on social media [Music]

Channel: Solomon's Cave

Views: 74,742

Keywords: Pythagoras, Philosophy, Ancient Greece, Milesians, Arche, History, Greek, Italy, Samos, Croton, Pythagoreans, Opposites, Cult, Science, Math, Mathematics, Deduction, Deductive Reasoning, Numbers, Transmigration, Soul, Reincarnation, Egypt, Ancient Egypt, Plato, Music, Music of the Spheres, Tetractys, Octave, Universe, Modern Science, Medicine

Id: W4dBP83YnOQ

Length: 14min 49sec (889 seconds)

Published: Fri May 18 2018