Greek Philosophers: Pythagoras
From Early Greek Philosophy by Alfred Benn, 1908.
From: 570 B.C.E. To: 495 B.C.E.
Location: Samos, Greece
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From Early Greek Philosophy by Alfred Benn, 1908.
The Pythagorean School
Considerable uncertainty prevails with regard to the chronology of the Italian Schools, and our authorities hold conflicting views about their origin and mutual relations. Pythagoras, whom for convenience we may take first, is an especially problematic figure. There is good contemporary evidence for the fact of his existence; but in what we are told about him the historical element (if any)is not easily distinguishable from the mythical.
To be made the subject of marvellous legends—or inventions—is usually the fate of prophets or religious teachers rather than of philosophers; and in fact there is good reason to believe that Pythagoras belonged to both orders, to the lovers of simple knowledge—for whom, as will be remembered, he is said to have invented that incomparable name philosopher—and to those others who also claim truth for their heritage, but with a higher warrant than mere reason can give, to the class whom we generally call mystics.
According to the best of our information the life of Pythagoras extended through the greater part of the sixth century B.C., and ended with its close. Thus he came under the double influence of the scientific movement started by Thales, and of the great religious movement known as Orphicism.
Orpheus was a mythical personage who stood godfather to a vast, spurious literature, the scriptures of a new Salvationist method, the worship of a dying god, and the hope of a blessed hereafter. Pythagoras associated this belief in immortality with the old Oriental doctrine of metempsychosis. He or his disciples taught that the eternal soul passed through a series of reincarnations, rising or falling in the scale of existence according as each earthly life had or had not been spent in accordance with the law of purity.
As a help towards leading the perfect life Pythagoras founded a religious order to which women were admitted equally with men. At what period the sage began his social experiments is not known. Perhaps an attempt to set up the order in his native island of Samos may have excited the wrath of Polycrates, its brilliant and successful tyrant. At any rate, Pythagoras fled from Samos and settled in Croton, an Achaean colony on the Gulf of Tarentum. There, under his direction, the order flourished for many years until, like some more modern churches, it tried to obtain political supremacy in alliance with the aristocratic faction.
A popular tumult, in which according to some accounts Pythagoras himself perished, put an end to the reforming movement as an organised community. But as a ferment of thought the school lived on, exercising an unparalleled influence on the whole later course of Greek philosophy, down to the final extinction of paganism under the Roman Empire.
Pythagorean Science and Philosophy
Much learning does not give intelligence, or Pythagoras would have possessed it. So, with his usual scornfulness, wrote a somewhat later sage, the celebrated Heracleitus. And as a general principle the sarcasm is not without truth, as many a modern instance teaches. But it was not true of Pythagoras.
If tradition may be trusted he had not only mastered all the knowledge of his age but had enriched it with important discoveries. He is said to have demonstrated the most fruitful proposition of elementary geometry, the theorem that the square on the base of a right-angled triangle equals the sum of the squares on the two containing sides. And he is also credited with the discovery that the height of notes on the musical scale is determined by the proportionate lengths of the chords by whose vibration they are produced, so that a vibrating string of half the length produces a note an octave higher.
How much of the astronomy peculiar to his school goes back to its first founder we cannot tell. But he seems to have started that daring course of speculation which resulted between two and three centuries after his time in the theory, revived by Copernicus from Greek science, that the earth revolves on her own axis and is carried with the planets round the sun as the central orb of the system to which we belong.
No European teacher has ever been so completely identified with his school as Pythagoras; and if this fact precludes any accurate distinction between the original contributions of the master to science and the subsequent additions made by his disciples, it makes the task of determining what was individual to him in philosophy almost impossible.
In after ages the central Pythagorean doctrine undoubtedly was that all things are made out of number. Not, be it observed, that numbers or, more generally, mathematical relations constitute the very soul of nature, but that number is, like the Water of Thales or the Air of Anaximenes, the very stuff of which the world is made. But this seems too abstract a theory, not to say too subtle and elaborate, for so primitive a philosopher as Pythagoras himself to have constructed, even in outline; nor do we find any reference to it among his immediate successors.
What we do find them referring to as a current notion is the system of opposites, the idea that the universe is built up out of antithetical couples: the Limit and the Unlimited; the One and the Many; Rest and Motion; Light and Darkness; Good and Evil. To conceive things in general, and more particularly human affairs, under the form of balanced opposition was a fixed mental habit with the Greeks: our very word antithesis, taken straight from their language, still perpetuates that form of thought among ourselves; although no modern—not even Macaulay—has pushed its use to such excess. By its help Homer and Herodotus arrange their materials; by its laws the great sculptors disposed the reliefs on the pediments of the temples they had to adorn with groups of statuary; as a rhetorical artifice it disfigures the noble eloquence of Thucydides.
In philosophy we find the employment of antithetical couples first exemplified by Anaximander, who, as will be remembered, assumes an eternal Infinite out of which the finite and perishable things of experience are formed, developing such contrasted qualities as heat and cold, dryness and wetness, by a process of differentiation from its homogeneous substance.
We may suppose that the individual service of Pythagoras was to take up and generalise this fundamental idea, bringing the great social conflict of good and evil into line with the universal processes by which order is evolved out of chaos.
Benn, Alfred William. Early Greek Philosophy. Archibald Constable & Co, 1908.
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