The Sociology of Philosophies

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of peak artistic creativity are not closely correlated with such periods in phi-
losophy, as is clear from a generation-by-generation comparison in Greece,
China, medieval through modern Europe, and elsewhere. The notion of an
all-encompassing zeitgeist, whether golden or decadent, will not get us very
far. A more explicitly sociological argument by Joseph Bryant (1996) attributes
the new contents of Stoic and Epicurean philosophies to the Macedonian
conquest of the 330s, which destroyed the city-state democracies and replaced
their citizen armies with mercenaries. If philosophy flourished in Athens be-
cause public debate encouraged the skills of argument and focused on concepts
of public law and civic virtue (an argument also of Lloyd, 1990), the destruc-
tion of those external conditions is responsible for the shift to privatized ethics,
a withdrawal from the ideal of citizen participation.
What we miss here is the fact that the entire field of intellectual oppositions
shifted at this time. Aristotelean science, and the technical argument of Aca-
demic skepticism (and Stoic logic as well), were equally part of the Hellenistic
cultural field. The timing, too, is not quite right. Bryant’s thesis works best
not for the Stoic and Epicurean schools but for their predecessors in the
lifestyle movements of the previous three generations, especially the Cynics and
Cyrenaics. The content of their doctrines is that of non-citizens, freed of
military, family, and civic obligations. That describes well these men without
a city, some of them exiles (such as Diogenes, from far-off Sinope on the Black
Sea), moving from place to place with little or no means of support. They
survived by a display of contempt for the conventional virtues, an épater le
bourgeois which appealed to a sufficient audience of onlookers. And the very
existence of this audience depended on the fact that an intellectual community
was now well established, carrying on a distinctive forum of debate whose
contents changed across the generations.
Most of the shift in ideas that followed the Macedonian conquest was
produced not by change in the political context but by the law of small
numbers. It was a time of great strain within the intellectual community. The
competition among too large a number of schools and factions meant that
most of them could not survive in the long run; the successful schools were
those which seized on the weak ones, to amalgamate their doctrines into a few
workable mixes. Aristotle had originated this maneuver, bringing together
many of the finest available materials and crowning them with his synthesizing
creativity. Epicurus acquired what was probably the most powerful doctrine
still left without a strong base, that of the atomists, who heretofore had no
well-supported material organization in the Athenian metropolis. Plato’s Acad-
emy had early drawn on a wide range of materials, and was the best positioned
of the older schools, both materially and in intellectual turf, to survive in the
time of rival syncretisms. The Stoics, last to appear, took an uneven grab bag


Partitioning Attention Space: Ancient Greece^ •^105
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