As discussed in my last post, the ancient Greek poet Hesiod was granted his superior poetical powers in a miraculous encounter with the Muses. At least that is how Hesiod himself says it happened. We may not take his word for it, but we should be glad that he (or one of his successors), unlike most of his poetical contemporaries, took the trouble to learn how to write, and to write his poems down.
His works, written some 2,700 years ago, are, along with those of Homer, the earliest surviving works of western literature. But Hesiod’s writings do not only give us a window into the superstitions of antiquity. For strikingly, in Hesiod’s writings, situated as they are at the dawn of the western literary tradition, we have an artifact of ancient reason. His works evince a mind striving to work out the subtleties of natural and moral philosophy through the medium of mythology. This is especially true with his epic poem, the Theogony.
The Theogony is likely the work of poetry which made Hesiod’s name. In his later poem Works and Days, Hesiod tells of how he won a prominent prize for poetry, and it is likely that he won by singing his Theogony. This performance must have been quite stunning. In the Theogony, Hesiod discloses the history of the cosmos, telling of the birth of each cosmic entity in its turn.
Jonathan Barnes, in Penguin Classics’ Early Greek Philosophy characterizes the Theogony as a precursor to ancient natural philosophy. He says that Hesiod’s tale “is not science; but it is, as it were a scientific story.” Let us treat Hesiod as something of a “pre-scientist”, and see where that takes us.
Scope of Inquiry
In Human Action, chapter 2, section 8, Mises wrote:
The first task of every scientific inquiry is the exhaustive description and definition of all conditions and assumptions under which its various statements claim validity.
A scientist must start by establishing the scope of his inquiry. What is the Theogony’s scope of inquiry? Hesiod establishes his intellectual authority in his proem (introductory part of a poem). In it he tells the tale, summarized in my last post, of his magical initiation as a poet which occurred during an encounter with the Muses.
In Hesiod’s own words:
“And one day they taught Hesiod glorious song”
“Taught” is translated from “edidaxan“, which is a tense of “didasko” (“to teach”), from which the English word “didactic” is derived.
What does it mean to teach someone song? One can teach the skill (tekhne) of singing well (tone, enunciation, etc). But this encounter was no mere singing lesson, for out of it Hesiod acquired the divine voice of the Muses.
The Muses themselves explain their power in the following:
“we know how to speak many false things as though they were true; but we know, when we will, to utter true things.”
The power of the Muse is divine persuasiveness (“to speak many false things as though they were true”) and divine knowledge (“to utter true
things”).
There are two instances of the adjective “true” in the above passage as translated by Evelyn-White, but they represent two different Greek words. The first instance (from “false things as though they were true”) is from the word “etumoisin“, a tense of “etumos” which can also be translated as “real”
or “actual”. The second (from “to utter true things”) is from the word “alethea” a tense of “alethes” which can also translated as “unconcealed”. From this we can get the sense that the power of the Muses is to expound upon formerly concealed things: the mysteries of the universe. Hesiod tells us exactly how the Muses they taught him song in the following:
“breathed into me a divine voice to celebrate things that shall be and things there were aforetime”
Here we see evidence of what I believe is a fundamental monist
materialism in archaic Greek thought. The divine voice is not a purely psychic power: it is a material breath which can be transferred via literal exhalation of the Muse and literal inhalation of the poet. This monist materialism can also perhaps be seen in the Iliad, as the souls of slain soliders exit the body as physical breath (the ancient Greek word for “soul”, psuche, can also mean “breath”).
Also in this passage, we get more detail as to the kind of mysteries that can be revealed by the inspired poet
(and which Hesiod does reveal in his Theogony). The poet is a prophet (“things that shall be”); he is also a super-human cosmologist and historian who can miraculously recount events he did not himself witness, including the evolution of the entire universe and the prehistory of man (“things that were aforetime”).
The Teleological Interpretation
A traditional synopsis of the Theogony might go as follows. The gods Khaos, Gaia, and Eros “come to be”. Then Khaos gives birth to Nyx and Erebos, who in turn give birth to Hemera and Aether. Gaia gives birth to Ouranos and Pontus. Ouranos and Gaia beget the twelve titans, as well as the Cyclopes and the Hundred-Handed Giants. Ouranos entraps the latter two within Gaia. Gaia is enraged, and has Khronos, the youngest Titan, castrate his father (thereby separating earth from sky, after which he becomes master of the world. The Titans have their own children. To forestall a prophecy of his overthrow from coming true, Khronos devours each of his children, except Zeus, who Khronos’s sister-wife saves by feeding her husband a rock in swaddling clothes. When Zeus comes to maturity, he forces Khronos to vomit out his siblings. Zeus and his siblings then go to war with the Titans. With the aid of the Cyclopes and Hundred- handers, Zeus overthrows the Titans and entraps them in the underworld realm of Tartarus. Zeus later has a final duel with Typhoes.
In Hesiod’s Theogony, as in much creation mythology, inanimate objects (like earth), forces (like love), and phenomena (like night) are presented to a large degree as acting beings: they are anthropomorphized. Thus, the story Hesiod tells might be thought of as a superhuman soap opera: an interpersonal saga, in which the characters happen to have outlandish powers; an eminent example of the “cosmology as teleology” worldview I discussed in a previous post in this series. However, the Theogony can also be viewed in a vastly different way.
Aristotle, who wrote some 400 years after Hesiod wrote his Theogony, made a distinction between two classes of thinkers: theologi and physici. Thetheologi impute the causes of phenomena to personal, mysterious gods: again, cosmology as teleology. In stark contrast, the physici look to mechanistic explanations. The ranks of the theologi were supposed to be filled with poets, priests and prophets. The ranks of physici were populated by proper philosophers.
The supplanting of the theologi by the physici, as characterized by Aristotle, can be thought of as an instance of the cultural evolutionary process described by Mises in Human Action, chapter 1, section 6:
Both primitive man and the infant, in a naive anthropomorphic attitude, consider it quite plausible that every change and event is the outcome of the action of a being acting in the same way as they themselves do. They believe that animals, plants, mountains, rivers, and fountains, even stones and celestial bodies, are, like themselves, feeling, willing, and acting beings. Only at a later stage of cultural development does man renounce these animistic ideas and substitute the mechanistic world view for them.
The Mechanistic Interpretation
However Aristotle seemed to make a possible exception for Hesiod. The great philosopher pointed out ways in which the great poet showed his truephysicoi colors in his cosmological formulations.
When Greek myths are translated into English, the names of the gods are left in a transliterated version of the original Greek. Thus it can be easy to miss the fact that many (if not all) of Hesiod’s gods in the Theogony are anthropomorphized representations of observable objects, forces, and phenomena. For example, Gaia is not simply the name of “the goddess of the Earth”. “Gaia” literally means “earth” in Greek (it is the origin of our “geo-” prefixes in our words “geology” and “geography”), and Gaia was thought of as the earth itself.
Thus, if you ignore the proper noun treatment Hesiod gives to his objects, forces, and phenomena, what at first might seem like a fairy tale of love and strife between gods begetting children and blood will seem more like an impersonal account of attraction and repulsion between natural objects begetting generation and dissolution.
So, a “mechanistic” telling of the Theogony might be as follows. First there was invisible air (Khaos). Then earth (Gaia) and attractive/generative force (Eros) came to be. Then out of air came a dark gas (Erebos) charged with its own motive energy (Nyx). Out of that came a bright gas (Aether) charged with its own motive energy (Hemera).
A starry firmament (Ouranos) springs up out of the Earth, as well as salt water (Pontus). The firmament holds the earth down, and matter from the former is compelled by the attractive force to come down upon the latter.
This process generates twelve entities, including: time (Khronos) and its motive force (Rhea), fresh water (Okeanos) and its motive force (Tethys), inquiry (Koios), intelligence (Phoebe), mortality (Iapteus), natural order (Themis), memory (Mnesomyne), and sight (Theia).
The same process later generated storms (Cyclopes being the lightning and thunder and Hecatonshires being the winds), which became entrapped within the earth. Time itself brought a halt to this process.
The twelve entities, as well as the motive energy of the dark gas (Nyx) then engendered further entities. Some were abstract forms which would later be actualized in human affairs, such as strife, rumor, etc. Some were material beings such as rivers and mountains.
Taken thus, Hesiod’s Theogony exemplifies many important strands in the history of thought regarding “natural history”. In the Theogony, there is no one special creator, and no single instance of creation. Instead there is a gradual process of generation and change.
Of course for all his systematic and rational presentation, Hesiod still had his “Time” entity literally castrate his “Sky” entity with a flint sickle. His audience expected the interpersonal saga of epic poetry, and this
necessitated that his cosmic powers have distinctly human characteristics.
Deductive Demonstration
Even though Hesiod pleads “for the Muses told me so” as his chief intellectual justification, a careful reader can glean attempts at non-divine inference in the Theogony. In fact an extremely careful reader, Aristotle, did just that.
Hesiod begins his cosmic geneology by declaring that
“in truth at first Khaos came to be.”
Khaos meant space, void, or air, which to the ancient Greek, forgiveably unfamiliar with vacuums, meant much the same thing. Khaos did not mean what the modern English word “chaos” means. Our word “chaos” was derived from misinterpretation (whether from carelessness or poetic licence) by later authors- especially Ovid:
“Ere land and sea and the all-covering sky were made, in the whole
world the countenance of nature was the same, all one, well named
Chaos, a raw and undivided mass, naught but a lifeless bulk, with
warring seeds of ill-joined elements compressed together.”
-Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book I
In other words, the primordial chaos, according to Ovid and later authors, is a mixed-up mass of solid, liquid, and gas: rather like a cosmic cappuccino.1
But Khaos would be more appropriately translated, as Glenn W. Most did, as “chasm”. A chasm is not, strictly speaking, cracked earth, but the crack itself: the part where there is no earth, in other words “space” or “expanse”. (Just as for the Chinese philosopher Laozi, the path (tao) was the place in the forest where there is no forest.)
Aristotle was impressed with Hesiod’s placement of Khaos at the beginning of things. He wrote in his Physics, Book IV:
Again, the theory that the void exists involves the existence of place: for one would define void as place bereft of body. These considerations then would lead us to suppose that place is something distinct from bodies, and that every sensible body is in place. Hesiod too might be held to have given a correct account of it when he made chaos first. At least he says: ‘First of all things came chaos to being, then broad-breasted earth,’ implying that things need to have space first, because he thought, with most people, that everything is somewhere and in place. If this is its nature, the potency of place must be a marvellous thing, and take precedence of all other things. For that without which nothing else can exist, while it can exist without the others, must needs be first; for place does not pass out of existence when the things in it are annihilated.
In other words, before any thing existed there had to be a place for it to exist in.2
After Khaos, Earth (Gaia) next came to be, followed by Love (Eros). Aristotle was also impressed at Hesiod’s placement of Love (Eros) near the beginning of things. In it, he recognized Hesiod as implying that “among existing things there must be from the first a cause which will move things and bring them together.” (Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book I)
In other words before any thing underwent change, there had to have been a cause or force to bring about the change.
So, the first two entities were Khaos and Gaia. Note that Hesiod never said that Khaos gave birth to Gaia: the latter just kind of “happened”. So nothing at that point had been born out of anything else yet: nothing has changed from one state to another. Khaos and Gaia might have gone on forever without creating anything unless they felt the urge to. This motive force, this “urge to create”, had to exist first. And Hesiod called this “urge to create”: Eros” or “Love”.
So, according to Aristotle, Hesiod may have thought that the pre-existence of “place” is a necessary implication of the existence of bodies. And the pre-existence of “cause” or “force” is a necessary implication of the existence of change. Aristotle called such reasoning deductions, or syllogisms.
“Place” is a category of “Body”, but not vice versa; therefore, “Place” must have preceded “Body”. And perhaps “Change” presupposes “Cause”, therefore “Cause” must have preceded “Change.”
What’s more, Hesiod’s deduction is not merely a word game (like “All As are Bs; all Bs are Cs; therefore all As are Cs”). Rather it says something about the real world. Aristotle called a deduction that produces knowledge about reality a “demonstration.”
Aristotelean demonstrations have been the holy grail of rationalist thinkers from Parmenides to Descartes to Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
Misesian praxeology, which is comprised of deductions from the action axiom, the results of which say things about the real world, can be thought of as Aristotelean demonstrations. Praxeology is an aprioristic science, and as Mises wrote in Human Action, chapter 2, section 3 (emphasis added):
Aprioristic reasoning is purely conceptual and deductive.
And furthermore…
The theorems attained by correct praxeological reasoning are not only perfectly certain and incontestable, like the correct mathematical theorems. They refer, moreover, with the full rigidity of their apodictic certainty and incontestability to the reality of action as it appears in life and history. Praxeology conveys exact and precise knowledge of real things.
Regularity and Induction
As much as I respect Hesiod as a thinker with more subtlety than classicists give him credit for, Aristotle does seem to have been a tad too generous in the deductive sophistication he is crediting to the great poet. That is not to say that Hesiod only had divine inspiration as his epistemological foundation: for the careful reader can also glean inductive reasoning from Hesiod’s beliefs.
As discussed above, Hesiod’s Eros (Love) can be thought of as a motive force that brings entities to come together (much like gravity) and to create. Khaos felt Eros, the urge or internal force that made it seek to give birth.
And what did it first give birth to? Erebos, or Darkness, was the first baby in the universe. You might ask yourself, “how can darkness be “born” when darkness is just the absence of light?” But to Hesiod the materialist, Darkness was a black mist. Erebos was born along with its own internal force, different from Love. The force that moves Darkness was Nyx, or Night.
Nyx was often thought of as the wife of Erebos and shown as a woman in a chariot who “wore” her husband (Darkness) like a great big cape. When Night came to the land, riding her chariot, she would pull her husband (darkness) over the earth like a great big dome tent. Night brings darkness, literally.
Erebos and Nyx then became the universe’s first husband and wife, brought together by Eros.
Together, Erebos and Nyx had a son and daughter: Aether or Brightness and Hemera, or Day.
Aether took after his father, in that he was a shapeless mist. But he was different in that he was a bright, glowing mist. As you can imagine, father and son had their differences.
Hemera took after her mother, in that she was a chariot-driving force of nature. She felt that HER husband Aether deserved to cover the earth.
Thus began an eternal rivalry. Every morning, Day arises in the east, driving her chariot, and scattering the mists of Darkness, which she gradually replaces with the Brightness of daylight, which is pulled over the earth like a great big dome tent. As she finishes placing the Brightness of day in its proper place of glory, she completes her conquest over Darkness by driving it westward into the underworld.
But her victory is temporary, for soon Night reemerges on the east in HER chariot, scattering the Brightness of daylight in revenge, and pulling her husband Darkness to reinstall him in his rightful place. And so to Hesiod, the ongoing cycle of days and nights is really a cosmic battle between the first two married couples in the universe.
If we think of the mists of Daylight and Darkness as mindless masses, and knock Day and Night from their chariots and think of them as Aristotelean internal principles of change (forces), then Hesiod’s cosmology can be seen as a perfectly respectable mechanical theory, worthy of a 6th century Milesian proto-scientist like Thales or Anaximander.
Let us assume that Hesiod and the other Greek poets who formulated this myth did not use Aristotelean demonstration to infer the above cosmic scheme. Is it then devoid of a reasoned basis? Is it pure madness, with no method? No. Almost all cosmic myths make some kind of sense in their own way, and Hesiod’s is no exception. But it is the kind of sense humans more generally use in considerations of the natural world: induction.
Induction, as characterized by Aristotle, is reasoning from the particular to the universal. After a child burns his hand on a flame, he infers from that particular instance that similar particular flickering lights might generally burn his hand.
Also, after a careful ancient observer repeatedly notices that the moon progressively waxes, without waning, until it is full, and then wanes, without waxing, until it is new, he will confidently predict from these particular observations that the moon will always follow this process.
That considerations of nature resort to such regularity was discussed by Mises in the introduction to Theory and History:
Epistemologically the distinctive mark of what we call nature is to be seen in the ascertainable and inevitable regularity in the concatenation and sequence of phenomena.
The “rotating mists” conception of day and night may have made sense to the ancient Greeks, because for all they knew, the canopies of the night and day skies were material bodies. They seemed to move, and they seemed to meet each other at a threshold. In countless other particular instances of daily life, they have seen the movement of bodies be impelled by the movement of other contiguous bodies. Falling rocks strike water and make waves; waves in the ocean shove ships and capsize them. Why wouldn’t the twin canopies of the sky follow the same basic pattern?
Viewed in this light, Hesiod’s poem Theogony can be seen as a work of “cosmogony”. In Human Action, chapter 2, section 8, Mises wrote:
Cosmogony, geology, and the history of biological changes are historical disciplines as they deal with unique events of the past.
As we shall see in my next post, human pre-history was another historical study which fell under Hesiod’s scope of inquiry. And, as with cosmogony, the great poet had some very interesting things to say on the matter.
This post is one in a series entitled A Misesian Perspective on the History of Thought
- 1Ovid and the other writers may have confused Khaos with the primeval, undifferentiated mud of the rival theogeny attributed to Orpheus, which in turn may have been influenced by the Mesopotamian conception of the world’s primal state as an undifferentiated mass:
When on high heaven was not named,
And the earth beneath did not yet bear a name,
And the primeval Apsu, who begat them,
And chaos, Tiamat, the mother of them both,
Their waters were mingled together,
And no field was formed, no marsh was to be seen;
When of the gods none had been called into being
-Enuma Elish, Babylonian poem from the 18th century BC - 2Someone allegedly asked Thales (who is considered to have been the first philosopher) what the biggest thing in existence is, to which he replied: “place, for it contains all things.” (Diogenes Laertius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers)
