Early Greek Philosophy

4. Reason and Myth in Early Pythagorean Cosmology

Carl A. Huffman 4 S Reason and Myth in Early Pythagorean Cosmology I. Introduction Scholarship on the emergence of rationality in early Greek thought has focused on two main topics. First, there is the movement from the explanation of the natural world in terms of persons, i.e., gods, to explanation in terms of impersonal natural materials, i.e., elements such as water and air. This movement is also accompanied by a shift from explanation in terms of the irrational and often inscrutable desires of the gods, particularly the desire for reproduction, to explanation in terms of unbreachable regularities, i.e., natural laws, which are completely accessible to reason and supported by appeals to experience. This first topic in the study of Greek rationality has centered on the transition from Hesiod to Ionian philosophers such as Anaximenes. Hesiod provides a simultaneous generation of the gods and the world, a theogony and a cosmogony at once. The fourth god to be born in Hesiod’s Theogony is Eros, the god of sexual passion, who “overcomes the mind and prudent council in the breasts of all gods and men” (Theogony 121–22). Eros’s dominion ensures that the account of the world that follows in Hesiod, although being quite systematic in many aspects, will nonetheless employ passion rather than reason as the primary means of explanation. The sexual passion of Earth and Heaven will lead to the birth of Ocean; Cronus’s anger and desire to please his mother Rhea leads to the castration of his father Ouranos, from whose blood are born the spirits of vengeance known as the Furies, as well as, oddly enough, ash trees (Theogony 131–32 and 173–85). By con55 56  Carl A. Huffman trast, Anaximenes argued that the world began, not from a person, but from air and that all things are generated from air, not by sexual passion or revenge, but by the completely regular process of condensation and rarefaction. When air is rarefied, it becomes fire; when cooled, it becomes first wind, then cloud, then water, then earth, and finally stone (DK 13A5).1 The second main topic in the study of early Greek rationality, which I will describe more briefly, has been the emergence of rigorous methods of argumentation, such as Parmenides’s deductive arguments about the nature of “what is,” in the first part of his poem. Recent scholarship, however, has been quick to emphasize that the transformation of mythical accounts of the cosmos was gradual and that the distinction between myth and reason is not absolute. On the one hand, there is a considerable amount of reason (logos) in mythical cosmogonies such as that of Hesiod; on the other hand, the rational explanations of the Presocratic philosophers preserve some of “the scaffolding,” as Burkert has put it, of the earlier mythical accounts.2 Burkert argues persuasively that to imagine the original state of the world as the antithesis of the developed world, as what has “not yet” become the world, is an achievement of speculative reason, of logos. Such a use of logos is found in mythical cosmogonies such as Hesiod’s Theogony, which begins with an empty gap, as well as in Presocratics, such as Anaximander, who postulates the apeiron, the unlimited, as the starting point for cosmogony.3 Furthermore, while Hesiod’s cosmogony does not assign a central role to a divine craftsman, Orphic theogonies evidently did, since the theogony that is the subject of the commentary in the Derveni papyrus gives Zeus a role in fashioning the world (Pap. Derveni col. 23.4). This is, strictly speaking, a non-rational explanation, since it appeals to the action of a person rather than to impersonal laws, but it is a characteristic that a number of rational Presocratics were unable to do completely without ;4 Empedocles makes Love a creative power; Anaxagoras needs Mind to start the motion from which the world arises (DK 59B13), while Parmenides has “a goddess who steers all things” (DK 28B12). However, even 1. For an excellent account of Anaximenes’s theory and the contrast between the Ionians and Hesiod, see Graham, Explaining the Cosmos. 2. Burkert, “The Logic of Cosmogony,” 104. 3. Ibid., 92. 4. Ibid., 96–97. Early Pythagorean Cosmology   57 those scholars who have emphasized that the story is more complex than the simple dichotomy between myth and reason suggests agree with the widespread consensus that “there was a...