From: Goody, ed., Literacy in Traditional Societies (Cambridge University Press, 1968) - 3rd part
ALPHABETIC CULTURE AND GREEK THOUGHT
The rise of Greek civilization, then, is the prime historical example of the transition to a really literate society. In all subsequent cases where the widespread introduction of an alphabetic script occurred, as in Rome for example, other cultural features were inevitably imported from the loan country along with the writing system; Greece thus offers not only the first instance of this change, but also the essential one for any attempt to isolate the cultural consequences of alphabetic literacy.
The fragmentary and ambiguous nature of our direct evidence about this historical transformation in Greek civilization means that any generalizations must be extremely tentative and hypothetical; but the fact that the essential basis both of the writing systems and of many characteristic cultural institutions of the Western tradition as a whole are derived from Greece, and that they both arose there simultaneously, would seem to justify the present attempt to outline the possible relationships between the writing system and those cultural innovations of early Greece which are common to all alphabetically literate societies.
The early development of the distinctive features of Western thought is usually traced back to the radical innovations of the pre-Socratic philosophers of the sixth century B.C. The essence of their intellectual revolution is seen as a change from mythical to logico-empirical modes of thought. Such, broadly speaking, is Werner Jaeger's view; and Ernst Cassirer writes that 'the history of philosophy as a scientific discipline may be regarded as a single continuous struggle to effect a separation and liberation from myth'. [1]
To this general picture there are two kinds of theoretical objection. First, that the crucial intellectual innovations - in Cassirer as in Werner Jaeger - are in the last analysis attributed to the special mental endowments of the Greek people; and in so far as such terms as 'the Greek mind' and 'genius' are not simply descriptive, they are logically dependent upon extremely questionable theories of man's nature and culture. Secondly, such a version of the transformation from 'unphilosophical' to 'philosophical' thought assumes an absolute - and untenable - dichotomy between the 'mythical' thought of primitives and the 'logico-empirical' thought of civilized man.
The dichotomy, of course, is itself very similar to Lévy-Bruhl's earlier theory of the 'prelogical' mentality of primitive peoples, which has been widely criticized. Malinowski and many others have demonstrated the empirical elements in non-literate cultures, [2] and Evans-Pritchard (1937) has carefully analysed the 'logical' nature of the belief systems of the Azande of the Sudan; [3] while on the other hand the illogical and mythical nature of much Western thought and behaviour is evident to anyone contemplating either our past or our present.
Nevertheless, although we must reject any dichotomy based upon the assumption of radical differences between the mental attributes of literate and non-literate peoples, and accept the view that previous formulations of the distinction were based on faulty premises and inadequate evidence, there may still exist general differences between literate and non-literate societies somewhat along the lines suggested by Lévy-Bruhl. One reason for their existence, for instance, may be what has been described above: the fact that writing establishes a different kind of relationship between the word and its referent, a relationship that is more general and more abstract, and less closely connected with the particularities of person, place and time, than obtains in oral communication. There is certainly a good deal to substantiate this distinction in what we know of early Greek thought. To take, for instance, the categories of Cassirer and Werner Jaeger, it is surely significant that it was only in the days of the first widespread alphabetic culture that the idea of 'logic' - of an immutable and impersonal mode of discourse - appears to have arisen; and it was also only then that the sense of the human past as an objective reality was formally developed, a process in which the distinction between 'myth' and 'history' took on decisive importance.
Myth and history
Non-literate peoples, of course, often make a distinction between the lighter folk-tale, the graver myth, and the quasi-historical legend (e.g. the Trobriands; Malinowski [B. Malinowski, Myth in Primitive Psychology, London] 1926: 33). But not so insistently, and for an obvious reason. As long as the legendary and doctrrinal aspects of the cultural tradition are mediated orally, they are kept in relative harmony with each other and with the present needs of society in two ways: through the unconscious operations of memory, and through the adjustment of the reciter's terms and attitudes to those of the audience before him. There is evidence, for example, that such adaptations and omissions occurred in the oral transmission of the Greek cultural tradition. But once the poems of Homer and Hesiod, which contained much of the earlier history, religion and cosmology of the Greeks, had been written down, succeeding generations were faced with old distinctions in sharply aggravated form: how far was the information about their gods and heroes literally true? How could its patent inconsistencies be explained? And how could the beliefs and attitudes implied be brought into line with those of the present?
The disappearance of so many early Greek writings, and the difficulties of dating and composition in many that survive, make anything like a clear reconstruction impossible. Greek had of course been written, in a very limited way, during Mycenaean times. At about 1200 B.C. writing disappeared, and the alphabet was not developed until some four hundred years later. Most scholars agree that in the middle or late eighth century the Greeks adapted the purely consonantal system of Phoenicia, possibly at the trading port of al Mina (Poseidon?). Much of the early writing consisted of 'explanatory inscriptions on existing objects - dedications on offerings, personal names on property, epitaphs on tombs, names of figures in drawings' (Jeffery [L.H. Jeffery, The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece, Oxford] 1961: 46). The Homeric poems were written down between 750 and 650 B.C., and the seventh century saw first the recording of lyric verse and then (at the end) the emergence of the great Ionian school of scientist philosophers. [4] Thus within a century or two of the writing down of the Homeric poems, many groups of writers and teachers appeared, first in Ionia and later in Greece, who took as their point of departure the belief that much of what Homer had apparently said was inconsistent and unsatisfactory in many respects. The logographers, who set themselves to record the genealogies, chronologies and cosmologies which had been handed down orally from the past, soon found that the task led them to use their critical and rational powers to create a new individual synthesis. In non-literate society, of course, there are usually some individuals whose interests lead them to collect, analyse and interpret the cultural tradition in a personal way; and the written records suggest that this process went considerably further among the literate élites of Egypt, Babylon and China, for example. But, perhaps because in Greece reading and writing were less restricted to any particular priestly or administrative groups, there seems to have been a more thoroughgoing individual challenge to the orthodox cultural tradition in sixth-century Greece than occurred elsewhere. Hecataeus, for example, proclaimed at about the turn of the century, 'What I write is the account I believe to be true. For the stories the Greeks tell are many and in my opinion ridiculous' (Jacoby [F. Jacoby, Die Fragmente der Griechischen Historiker, I, Genealogie und Mythographie, Berlin, 1923]), and offered his own rationalizations of the data on family traditions and lineages which he had collected. Already the mythological mode of using the past, the mode which, in Sorel's words, makes it 'a means of acting on the present' (Hulme [T.E. Hulme, Reflections on Violence, New York] 1941: 136; Redfield [R. Redfield, The Primitive World and Its Transformations, Ithaca, New York] 1953: 125), has begun to disappear.
That this trend of thought had much larger implications can be seen from the fact that the beginnings of religious and natural philosophy are connected with similar critical departures from the inherited traditions of the past; as W.B. Yeats wrote, with another tradition in mind: 'Science is the critique of myths, there would be no Darwin had there been no Book of Genesis' (Hone [J. Hone, W.B. Yeats, London] 1942: 405, our italics). Among the early pre-Socratics there is much evidence of the close connection between new ideas and the criticism of the old. Thus Xenophanes of Colophon (fl. c. 540 B.C.) rejected the 'fables of men of old', and replaced the anthropomorphic gods of Homer and Hesiod who did 'everything that is disgraceful and blameworthy among men' with a supreme god, 'not at all like mortals in body and mind', [5] while Heraclitus of Ephesus (fl. c. 500 B.C.), the first great philosopher of the problems of knowledge, whose system is based on the unity of opposites expressed in the Logos or structural plan of things, also ridiculed the anthropomorphism and idolatry of the Olympian religion. [6]
The critical and sceptical process continued, and, according to Cornford, 'a great part of the supreme god's biography had to be frankly rejected as false, or reinterpreted as allegory, or contemplated with reserve as mysterious myth too dark for human understanding' (Cornford [F.M. Cornford, Greek Religious Thought from Homer to the Age of Alexander, London] 1923: xv-xvi; Burnet 1908: 1). On the one hand the poets continued to use the traditional legends for their poems and plays; on the other the prose writers attempted to wrestle with the problems with which the changes in the cultural tradition had faced them. Even the poets, however, had a different attitude to their material. Pindar, for example, used mythoi in the sense of traditional stories, with the implication that they were not literally true; but claimed that his own poems had nothing in common with the fables of the past (1st Olympian Ode). As for the prose writers, and indeed some of the poets, they had set out to replace myth with something else more consistent, with their sense of the logos, of the common and all-encompassing truth which reconciles apparent contradictions.
From the point of view of the transmission of the cultural tradition, the categories of understanding connected with the dimensions of time and space have a particular importance. As regards an objective description of space, Anaximander (b. 610 B.C.) and Hecataeus (fl. c. 510-490), making use of Babylonian and Egyptian techniques, drew the first maps of the world (Warmington [E.H. Warmington, Greek Geography, London] 1934: xiv, xxxviii). Then their crude beginnings were subjected to a long process of criticism and correction - by Herodotus (History: IV, 36-40) and others; and from this emerged the more scientific cartography of Aristotle, Eratosthenes and their successors (Warmington 1934: xvii, xli).
The development of history appears to have followed a rather similar course, although the actual details of the process are subject to much controversy. The traditional view gave priority to local histories, which were followed by the more universal accounts of Herodotus and Thucydides. Dionysius of Halicarnasus writes of the predecessors of these historians who, 'instead of co-ordinating their accounts with each other, ... treated of individual peoples and cities separately... They all had the one same object, to bring to the general knowledge of the public the written records that they found preserved in temples or in secular buildings in the form in which they found them, neither adding nor taking away anything; among these records were to be found legends hallowed by the passage of time...' (Pearson [L. Pearson, Early Ionian Historians, Oxford] 1939: 3).
Jacoby, however, has insisted 'the whole idea is wrong that Greek historiography began with local history' ([F. Jacoby, Atthis. The Local Chronicles of Ancient Athens, Oxford] 1949: 354). As far as Athens is concerned, history begins with the foreigner Herodotus, who, not long after the middle of the fifth century, incorporated parts of the story of the town in his work because he wanted to explain the role it played in the great conflict between East and West, between Europe and Asia. The aim of Herodotus' History was to discover what the Greeks and Persians 'fought each other for' (History: I, 1; Finley [M.I. Finley, ed., The Greek Historians, New York] 1959: 4); and his method was historia, personal inquiry or research into the most probable versions of events as they were to be found in various sources. His work rested on oral tradition and consequently his writings retained many mythological elements. So too did the work of the logographer, Hellanicus of Lesbos, who at the end of the fifth century wrote the first history of Attica from 683 to the end of the Peloponnesian war in 404. Hellanicus also tried to reconstruct the genealogies of the Homeric heroes, both backwards to the gods and forwards to the Greece of his own time; and this inevitably involved chronology, the objective measurement of time. All he could do, however, was to rationalize and systematize largely legendary materials (Pearson 1939: 193, 232). The development of history as a documented and analytic account of the past and present of the society in permanent written form took an important step forward with Thucydides, who made a decisive distinction between myth and history, a distinction to which little attention is paid in non-literate society (Malinowski [B. Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, London] 1922: 290-333). Thucydides wanted to give a wholly reliable account of the wars between Athens and Sparta; and this meant that unverified assumptions about the past had to be excluded. So Thucydides rejected, for example, the chronology that Hellanicus had worked out for the prehistory of Athens, and confined himself very largely to his own notes of the events and speeches he related, or the the information he sought out from eyewitnesses and other reliable sources (Thucydides: I, 20-2, 97). [7]
And so, not long after the widespread diffusion of writing throughout the Greek world, and the recording of the previously oral cultural tradition, there arose an attitude to the past very different from that common in non-literate societies. Instead of the unobtrusive adaptation of past tradition to present needs, a great many individuals found in the written records, where much of their traditional cultural repertoire had been given permanent form, so many inconsistencies in the beliefs and categories of understanding handed down to them that they were impelled to a much more conscious, comparative and critical attitude to the accepted world picture, and notably to the notions of God, the universe and the past. Many individual solutions to these problems were themselves written down, and these versions formed the basis for further investigations. [8]
In non-literate society, it was suggested, the cultural tradition functions as a series of interlocking face-to-face conversations in which the very conditions of transmission operate to favour consistency between past and present, and to make criticism - the articulation of inconsistency -less likely to occur; and if it does, the inconsistency makes a less permanent impact, and is more easily adjusted or forgotten. While scepticism may be present in such societies, it takes a personal, non-cumulative form; it does not lead to a deliberate rejection and reinterpretation of social dogma so much as to a semi-automatic readjustment of belief. [9]
In literate society, these interlocking conversations go on; but they are no longer man's only dialogue; and in so far as writing provides an alternative source for the transmission of cultural orientations it favours awareness of inconsistency. One aspect of this is a sense of change and of cultural lag; another is the notion that the cultural inheritance as a whole is composed of two very different kinds of material; fiction, error and superstition on the one hand; and, on the other, elements of truth which can provide the basis for some more reliable and coherent explanation of the gods, the human past and the physical world.
NOTES
[1] The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (New Haven, 1955), II, p. xiii; and An Essay on Man (New York, 1953), esp. pp. 106-30, 281-3. For Werner Jaeger, see esp. The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers (Oxford, 1947).
[2] 'Magic, Science and Religion' in Science, Religion and Reality, ed. Joseph Needham (New York, 1925), reprinteed Magic, Science and Religion (New York, 1954), p. 27. For an appreciation of Lévy-Bruhl's positive achievement, see Evans-Pritchard, 'Lévy-Bruhl's Theory of Primitive Mentality', Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts, University of Egypt II (1934), pp. 1-36. In his later work, Lévy-Bruhl modified the rigidity of his earlier dichotomy.
[3] See also Max Gluckman's essay, 'Social Beliefs and Individual Thinking in Primitive Society', Memoirs and Proceedings of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society XCI (1949-50), pp. 73-98. From a rather different standpoint, Lévy-Strauss has analysed 'the logic of totemic classifications' (La Pensée sauvage, pp. 48ff.) and speaks of two distinct modes of scientific thought; the first (or 'primitive') variety consists in 'the science of the concrete', the practical knowledge of the handy man (bricoleur), which is the technical counterpart of mythical thought (p. 26).
[4] 'It was in Ionia that the first completely rationalistic attempts to describe the nature of the world took place' (G.S. Kirk and J.E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers, Cambridge, 1957, p. 73). The work of the Milesian philosophers, Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, is described by the authors as 'clearly a development of the generic or genealogical approach to nature exemplified by the Hesiodic Theogony' (p. 73).
[5] Hermann Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Berlin, 1951), fr. II, 23; see also John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy (2nd ed. London, 1908), pp. 131, 140-1, and Werner Jaeger, The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers (Oxford, 1947), pp. 42-7; Kirk and Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers, pp. 163 ff.
[6] Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, fr. 40, 42, 56, 57, 106; see also Francis M. Cornford, Principium Sapientiae: The Origins of Greek Philosophical Thought (Cambridge, 1952), pp. 112 ff.; Kirk and Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers, pp. 182 ff.
[7] For a picture of note-taking (hypomnemata) among Athenians, see Theatetus, 142c-143c.
[8] Felix Jacoby notes that 'fixation in writing, once achieved, primarily had a preserving effect upon the oral tradition, because it put an end to the involuntary shiftings of the mnemai (remembrances), and drew limits to the arbitrary creation of new logoi (stories), (Atthis, 1949, p. 217). He points out that this created difficulties for the early literate recorders of the past which the previous oral mnemones or professional 'remembrancers' did not have to face; whatever his own personal view of the matter, 'no true Atthidographer could remove Kekrops from his position as the first Attic king... Nobody could take away from Solon the legislation which founded in nuce the first Attic constitution of historical times.' Such things could no longer be silently forgotten, as in an oral tradition. - The general conclusion of Jacoby's polemic against Wilamowitz' hypothesis of a 'pre-literary chronicle' is that 'historical consciousness ... is not older than historical literature' (p. 201).
[9] As writers on the indigenous political systems of Africa have insisted, changes generally take the form of rebellion rather than revolution; subjects reject the king, but not the kingship. See Evans-Pritchard, The Divine Kingship of the Shilluk of the Nilotic Sudan (The Frazer Lecture, Cambridge, 1948), pp. 35 ff.; Max Gluckman, Rituals of Rebellion in South-East Africa (The Frazer Lecture, 1952), Manchester, 1954.