compiled by various authors. Whatever the truth of this, whereas Confucianism seeks to perfect men and women within the world, Taoism is a turning away from the world, its aim being to transcend the (limited) conditions of human existence in an effort to attain immortality, salvation, the perpetual union of several different soul-elements. Underlying Taoism is a search for freedom-from the world, from the body, from the mind, from nature. It fostered the so-called 'mystical arts': alchemy, yoga, drugs and even levitation. Its main concern is tao , the way, though that name is not really applicable because language is not adequate for such a purpose (as with nirvana in Buddhism). The tao is conceived of as responsible both for the creation of the universe and its continued support (as with the primal sacrifice in the Vedas). The way can only be apprehended by intuition. Submission is preferable to action, ignorance to knowledge. Tao is the sum of all things that change, and this ceaseless flux of life is its unifying idea. Taoism stands against the very idea of civilisation; its view of God, as the Greeks said, was that he was essentially unknowable, 'except by the via negativa , by what he is not'.132 To think one can improve on nature is a profanity. Desire is hell.133 God cannot be understood, only experienced. 'The aim is to be like a drop of water in the ocean, complete and at one with the larger significant entity.' Laotzu speaks of sages who have attained immortality and, like the Greeks, inhabit the Isles of the Blessed. Later, these ideas were ridiculed by Zhuangtzu, a great rationalist.134 In all cases, then, we have, centring on the sixth century BC, but extending 150 years either side, a turning away from a pantheon of many traditional 'little' gods, and a great turning inward, the emphasis put on man himself, his own psychology, his moral sense or conscience, his intuition and his individuality. Now that large cities were a fact of life, men and women were more concerned with living together in close proximity, and realised that the traditional gods of an agricultural world had not proved adequate to this task. Not only was this a major divorce from what had gone before, separating late antiquity from 'deep' antiquity, it also marked the first split that would, in centuries to come, divide the West from the East. In all the new ethical systems of the Axial Age, the Israelite solution stands out. They, as we shall see, developed the idea of one true God, and that history has a direction, whereas with the Greeks and in particular with Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism, the gods stood in a different relation to humans as compared with the West. In the East the divine and the human came much closer together, the Eastern religions being commonly more inclined to mysticism than Western ones are. In the West, more than the East, the yearning to become divine is sacrilege. 6 The Origins of Science, Philosophy and the Humanities To Chapter 6 Notes and References 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. The first farmers appear to have settled around Thessalonika, in the north of Greece, about 6500 BC. The Greek language is believed to have been brought to the area not before 2500 BC, possibly by invading Aryan-type people from the Russian steppes. (In other words, similar people to those who invaded northern India at much the same time.) Until at least 2000 BC, the prosperous towns of Greece were still unfortified, though bronze daggers began to lengthen into swords.5 Greece is a very broken-up country, with many islands and several peninsulas, which may have influenced the development there of the city-state. Kingship, and the aristocratic hero culture, which in Homer is the universal political arrangement, had vanished from most cities by the dawn of history (roughly 700 BC). The experience of Athens shows why-and how-monarchy was abolished.6 The first encroachment on the royal prerogative took place when the nobles elected a separate war chief, the