From Ancient Philosophy to Modern Philosophy: What Went Wrong?

         “The first generation builds the business, the second makes it a success, and the third wrecks it”. This widely known phrase used amongst businessmen worldwide can be applied to many fields, and although tends to be an exaggeration there is some truth about it. You may say that in some cases it goes down as far as the fourth or fifth, but in the end there is a tendency to shift from the vision envisaged by the first generation that makes the business collapse.

In a way, this can also be applied to philosophy. If you look upon the pre-Socratics and their remarkable achievements through intellect and reason as the first generation of philosophers, the second generation would be Plato, Socrates and Aristotle, who took philosophy to a greater level, to the extent that it is said that the rest of the philosophy are mere footnotes to Plato and Aristotle.  The grandchildren, or third generation, the one who in some way shifted from the original vision of the pre-Socratics, would be what most studious would refer as modern philosophy and its regarded father: Descartes.

Certainly, it can be argued that from awe and wander of the early thinkers we moved into doubt and a certain skepticism on knowledge that has shaped the way we have philosophized ever after.

You could say with Saint John Paul II at his “Fides et Ratio” that “…reason […] has wilted under the weight of so much knowledge and little by little has lost the capacity to lift its gaze to the heights, not daring to rise to the truth of being. Abandoning the investigation of being, modern philosophical research has concentrated instead upon human knowing. Rather than make use of the human capacity to know the truth, modern philosophy has preferred to accentuate the ways in which this capacity is limited and conditioned.^[1]

In a way, the focus has been shifted from truth to certainty, and however meritorious and noble the effort has been, -to the extent of taking epistemology to a higher level-, “This has given rise to different forms of agnosticism and relativism which have led philosophical research to lose its way in the shifting sands of widespread skepticism.[…] A legitimate plurality of positions has yielded to an undifferentiated pluralism, based upon the assumption that all positions are equally valid, which is one of today's most widespread symptoms of the lack of confidence in truth^[2]

Without taking any merit to the evident contributions to philosophy and knowledge in general of modern philosophers, like for example the categories of the mind of Kant or the Lockean Theory of Memory, the hunger and thirst from knowledge experimented by the Greek civilization started to get satisfied with minds like the one of Anaximander. He, and with him many contemporaries, would sympathize with the cry from Kant more than eighteen centuries later: “SAPERE AUDE”, Dare to know! This quest contributed to the birth of science branches such as astronomy, biology or mathematics, and certainly some of the pre-Socratic philosophers are regarded fathers of several sciences. Certainly, without their hunger and thirst of knowledge we would probably not be writing and reading this essay.

But what made the early Greeks philosophize in the first place? Or better still, what made humankind in general start thinking? As Aristotle would put it: “For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about the greater matters, e.g. about the phenomena of the moon and those of the sun and of the stars, and about the genesis of the universe. And a man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant (whence even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of Wisdom, for the myth is composed of wonders); therefore since they philosophized order to escape from ignorance, evidently they were pursuing science in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end”^[3] Certainly, that approach, in words of Fr. Copleston, enabled us to: “watch problems come to light that have by no means lost their relevance for us, we find answers suggested that are not without value”^[4].

Taking Anaximander as an example of what the Ionian school did achieve, it is fascinating to see that through mere observation and reason he managed to give a remarkable-for-his-time explanation of the origin of the world and on other fields such as astronomy, geography and biology. His theory that the world stuff is an infinite, living, material substance “Appeiron” or “The Boundless” and his explanation of how the heavenly bodies separated from the primal mass through heat and condensation and cooled off is remarkably daring for that time and the way he imagined primal mass is very similar to the whirling nebulas known to modern astronomy. Through speculation and thirst for knowledge, together with his observation he was able to venture some answers that given the resources available at the time were admirable.

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