Sophus’ choice: Redefining the role of Ancient Greek scholars in modern society

It is known by most high school students that Ancient Greek scholars were very adept in philosophy (from ‘philos’ and ‘sophos’), math (geometry), debates, and music. They depicted the universe as a set of harmonious arrangement of circles (the most idealistic shape in their mind).

Furthermore, they want to understand how natural phenomena (and the universe) conduct themselves, and by doing so they tend to believe that this is the best way to govern their city, as the proverb says: “Like in heaven, so does in earth." In other words, they would like to adapt their daily life in accordance with these natural laws (mimesis).

While this apparently simple principle appears make-sense (at least at first glance), upon careful thinking this intention (utopia) to bring ‘natural laws’ down to earth, actually involves at least some fundamental lemma:

v That the universe is comprehensible, i.e. it is governed by some eternal laws

v These laws are ‘objective’, outside the perception of the observers

v The society agrees to accept these ‘natural laws’ to govern their social world

v There is consensus of what are these laws, and how they could be interpreted in social-interaction world

v There is enough mandate by people to let the ‘philosophers’ rule their life (aristocracy).

As history told us almost clearly, sometimes these principles could be applied to reality, but sometimes weren’t. It is also known that even Socrates himself suffered a bad experience because of this kind of ‘ostracism’, where the leading philosopher was forced to take poison because the ruling-mediocre-elites were afraid of his teaching.

And so forth, we tend to believe that someday this idealistic-utopian City could be built into reality (like E. Fromm wrote some decades ago), but most of the time it is not. In history, this ‘’naturally-democratic" people was defeated by Rome, with its Spartan-pragmatic principle. And so does in our daily life, our utopian-policies are always defeated with various kinds of pragmatic thinking. This was reflected by a tragic story of Archimedes who continuing draw circles and triangles despite troops entered his house: ‘Don’t touch my circles!’

Furthermore, in our modern society, simple geometry of triangles and circles is no longer the idealistic shape, so does the epicycles of ancient cosmology. In the same way, post-modernistic thinking starts questioning whether such depiction of ‘theories’ is indeed a complete-representation of nature instead of merely an attempt to justify the injustice reality.[1]

However, if there is a bright side of this story is that there are few ancient scripts which seem to suggest that in the age of these great Ancient Greek people a peak of human culture was achieved. Even it was told in Indian scripts that these Greek people could craft the first flying-vehicle built by mankind (which perhaps inspired the Icarus legend). And if ancient script written by Plato is believable, then in the same age the sinking of Atlantis happened, because of the human mistakes to make the proper technology choice (how similar to our present days!). Furthermore, the Renaissance movement and Industrial age was partly motivated by these Ancient Greek scholars.

So it seems that, only if a new initiative to reintroduce Ancient Greek thinking in modern school teaching is intended to give some remembrance to people like Socrates, then a rethinking of Ancient Greek in high-school teaching could be properly considered. Otherwise, there is always a risk of this kind of initiative could lead to another school fraud: ‘freezing today reality in the name of the greatness of the ancient past.’ This could lead pupils to sing a known refrain: ‘We don’t need no education…’

On the other side, the essential spirit of great Ancient Greek thinkers is freedom to express opinions, which is the basis of democracy. The same principle seems to apply also to self-archiving of preprint scientific papers.

So what do you think, fellows?

November 28^th, 2004.

V. Christianto, vxianto@yahoo.com