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p In the days when the ancient Greeks first coined the term “philosophy” there was presumably no disagreement as to what should be considered wisdom. Anything incomprehensible, which had not existed before (such as philosophy), fell into the category of things which, in the tradition of mythology, were regarded as perfectly obvious and beyond all argument or doubt.

p Wisdom was attributed to the gods (or at least to some of them). Athene was worshipped as the goddess of wisdom. She was portrayed in sculpture with an owl perched at her feet, the owl being regarded as a sacred bird, presumably because it could see in the dark.

p What men then regarded as wisdom was knowledge of things of which they were ignorant or could not understand, particularly prophecy. According to mythology, the gods endowed the oracles and other chosen individuals with wisdom. Like all outstanding human virtues, wisdom was the gift of the gods. In Book One of The Iliad Homer says of Calchas, the supreme augur:

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p ........... and next
Rose Calchas, son of Thestor, and the chief Of augurs, one to whom were known things past And present and to come. He through the art Of divination, which Apollo gave, Had guided the ships of Greece... .

p The mythological view of the world, which immediately preceded the first philosophical doctrines of Ancient Greece, was the ideology of the primitive communal system. The development of mythology, its transformation into a kind of " artistic religion”, the emergence of theogonic, cosmogonic and cosmological notions, which were subsequently naturalistically interpreted by the first Greek philosophers, reflected the basic stages of development of the pre-class society. In this society the individual possessed no world view of his own. Philosophy could not yet exist because, as A. F. Losev has written, "here it was the tribe that thought, that set its goals, and there was no obligation upon the individual to think, because the tribe was the element of life and the element of life worked in the individual spontaneously, i.e., instinctively, not as consciously articulated thought".  [19•1 

p The emergence of ancient philosophy coincides with the period of the formation of class society, when mythology was still the dominant form of social consciousness. In fact, the first philosophers were philosophers just because they came into conflict with the traditional mythological view of the world.

p While mythology still held sway over men’s minds they never thought of asking themselves 20 the question, "What is wisdom?”. Mythology answered this question, and many others besides, in the most unequivocal manner. The rise of philosophy replaced myths and oracular prophecy with man’s own thinking about the world and human life, independent of any extraneous authority. People appeared who could astonish others by reasoning about things that no one had ever thought about or dared to call in question before. These people were at first, no doubt, regarded as madmen. They called themselves philosophers, i.e., lovers of wisdom. First came the philosophers, then the name “philosopher” appeared, and after that the term “philosophy”.

p Thales maintained that everything which existed had originated from water. According to Anaximenes, not only all things but even the gods themselves had come from air. The cosmos, Heraclitus taught, had given birth to both mortals and immortals. These assertions were revolutionary acts that established a critical mode of thinking independent of mythological and religious tradition.

p We do not know whether the contemporaries of the early Greek philosophers actually believed that the Milky Way was the sprinkled milk of Hera. But when Democritus declared it to be no more than a conglomeration of stars, we may be sure that most people thought this was blasphemy. Anaxagoras, who claimed that the Sun was a huge mass of rock, brought persecution on his head.

p The fact that the teachings of the early Greek thinkers were still not free from elements of mythology should not be allowed to overshadow their fundamental anti-mythological tendency. Myth, said Hegel, is an expression "of the 21 impotence of thought that cannot establish itself independently".  [21•1  The development of philosophy signified a progressive departure from mythology, particularly the mythological notion of the supernatural origin of wisdom. It was for this reason, as Hegel wrote, that "the place of the oracle was now taken by the self-consciousness of every thinking person".  [21•2 

p It is hard to say who first called himself a philosopher. Probably it was Pythagoras. According to Diogenes Laertius, Leon, tyrant of Phliontes, asked Pythagoras who he was and Pythagoras replied, "I am a philosopher”. The word being unfamiliar to his questioner, Pythagoras offered an explanation of the neologism. "He compared life to the Olympic Games,” Diogenes Laertius writes. "There were three types among the crowd attending the Games. Some came for the contest, some to trade and some, who were wise, to satisfy themselves by observation. So it was in life. Some were born to be slaves of glory or the temptation of riches, others who were wise sought only truth.”  [21•3 

p This account suggests that Pythagoras interpreted wisdom as something reserved for the chosen few. According to some other sources, however, he maintained that only the gods possessed wisdom. At all events, the teaching of Pythagoras reveals only a general tendency towards secularisation of “divine” wisdom.

p Thus, the emergence of ancient Greek philosophy simultaneously implied the growing 22 conviction that wisdom as the supreme ideal of knowledge (and conduct), without which human life could be neither worthy nor honest and would be virtually wasted, could be achieved through one’s own efforts. This meant that the source of wisdom lay not in faith but in knowledge and the quest for intellectual and moral perfection. Thus we see that a contradiction between faith and knowledge arises at the very fountainhead of philosophy.  [22•1 

p Ancient Greek philosophy tells the story of the Seven Sages who founded the first city states. Some of them must have been legendary figures, but Solon, for example, is an actual historical figure whose reforms are associated with the rise of the State of Athens. Pythagoras, for whom the history of Greece was by no means the distant past, evidently had a more or less clear conception of the actually existing historical figures (Thales was said to be one of them) who afterwards came to be known as Sages.

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p The teaching of the materialists of the city of Miletus was directly continued by Heraclitus, who declared that "wisdom lies in speaking the truth, heeding the voice of Nature and acting in accordance with it".  [23•1  This was, of course, addressed not to the gods, for whom there was nothing to heed, but to man and man alone. But while acknowledging the existence of human wisdom, Heraclitus nevertheless maintained that such wisdom was nothing compared with the wisdom of the immortals, since "the wisest man compared with a god appears but an ape in wisdom, beauty and all else".  [23•2  This distinction between human and divine wisdom would seem to imply something more than the traditional conviction drawn from mythology. It is an acknowledgement (still vague and inadequately expressed, of course) of the fundamental impossibility of absolute knowledge.  [23•3 

p He who seeks wisdom must act in accordance with the order of things. Concretising this thought, Heraclitus maintained that one should 24 follow the universal. But what is the universal? It is fire, whose nature is a state of eternal flux. It is also Logos—absolute necessity, fate, which is sometimes identified with eternal fire and sometimes separated from it. The universal is infinitely varied. It pervades everything, gives birth to everything and destroys everything. Nothing can deviate from the universal. People do not understand the universal and fail to appreciate its limitless power even when they hear of it from the lips of the philosopher, because their own ignorance seems to them to be "their own comprehension”. Heraclitus remarks bitterly, "Most men have no understanding of the things they encounter, and cannot be made to understand by instruction, and yet it seems to them that they know.”  [24•1 

p Thus we find that wisdom presupposes above all understanding of what the majority of men encounter, of what is known to them in general, i.e., what they see, hear and know but cannot comprehend. This notion of wisdom is organically connected with the age of the formation of philosophy, when there were still no special scientific disciplines, discovering through special investigation directly unobservable phenomena and the relations between them. As yet the philosopher was able to argue only about things that all could observe: the Earth, the Sun, the stars, plants, animals, day, night, cold, heat, water, air, fire, and so on. The philosopher applied his powers of reasoning to everything that occurred in human life and that was known to everyone: birth, childhood, youth, age, death, unhappiness, happiness, love, hate, 25 etc. No wonder, then, that the first works of the ancient Greeks and also the Chinese and Indian philosophers, took as "first principles" the sensually observable things that were familiar to all, but to which a very special significance was attached. Even the basic, “substantial” properties of these things were also drawn from everyday experience, the properties of heat and cold, love and hate, the male and female genital principles, etc.

p Wisdom, or rather the quest for it, was seen by these early philosophers as the ability to reach a judgement about all manner of familiar things, proceeding from recognition of their intransient essence. Understanding of the universal reveals to the human mind that which is eternal, infinite and united in the countless numbers of transient, finite, multiform things. Thus not all knowledge ( knowledge of one thing, for example) could be considered wisdom. Even knowledge of many things, Heraclitus adds, does not augment our wisdom. The path of wisdom, which no man shall ever travel in its entirety, is understanding of that which is most powerful in the world and therefore the most important for our human life.

p According to Heraclitus, the most important, the most powerful and unavoidable thing is universal change, the disappearance of all that appears, the conversion of all things into their opposites, their unity in eternal fire, from which the Earth, air, soul and everything else is derived. It is this omnipresent unity of the infinite multiformity, the coincidence of opposites, that the philosopher seeks to understand as supreme truth pointing the right path in life. This path lies in contempt for passing things, awareness of the relative nature of all blessings, all distinctions and 26 opposites, understanding of the all-embracing and the all-determining. Although love of wisdom is separated from wisdom, which in itself is unattainable, it is quite clear that this selfless love and the knowledge it imparts are interpreted as attributes of absolute wisdom and in this sense (mainly because of their incompleteness) as relative wisdom.

p Heraclitus’s conception of the ideal of human wisdom and conduct has an aristocratic and pessimistic bias. At the moment, however, we are not concerned with these features of the " weeping philosopher”, nor even with his dialectics, which is not a specific attribute of philosophical thought. The point is that his conception of wisdom reveals features which not only in ancient times but in subsequent epochs have been regarded as inherent only in philosophical knowledge and the philosophical attitude to the world.

p Ancient Greece, where the concept of philosophy as love of wisdom (relative, human wisdom) first took shape, became the motherland of another and essentially different understanding of the meaning and purpose of philosophy, which was to exercise a substantial influence on all its subsequent development. I have in mind the Sophists. The word “sophist” is derived from the same root as the words “sophia” (wisdom) and “sophos” (wise man), and also means “craftsman” or “artist”. The Sophists were the first in the history of philosophy to emerge as teachers of wisdom, thus rejecting the understanding of philosophy that goes back to Pythagoras. The Sophists were the first encyclopaedists of the ancient world. They studied mathematics, astronomy, physics, grammar, not so much as scholars, but rather as teachers, and paid teachers at that. They 27 became the founders of rhetoric, and they considered it to be an essential part of their instruction to teach the free citizen of the city state to reason, to argue, to refute and prove, in short, to defend his own interests by the power of words, argument and eloquence.

p The Sophists identified wisdom with knowledge, with the ability to prove what one considered to be necessary, correct, virtuous, profitable and so on.  [27•1  Such knowledge and abilities were undoubtedly needed by the citizen of Athens for taking part in public meetings, court sessions, debates, affairs of trade and so on. By their activities as teachers of rhetoric, by their theories which overthrew apparently immutable truths and substantiated often quite unusual views, the Sophists furthered the development of logical thought and flexibility of concepts, which made it possible to bring together and unite things that seemed at first glance to be quite incompatible. Logical proof was regarded as the basic quality of truth. 28 The universal flexibility of concepts which made its first appearance in the philosophy of the Sophists was markedly subjective in character. To prove meant to convince or persuade. The Sophists came to believe that it was possible to prove anything they chose to prove, and this eventually made the words “sophist”, “sophism” and “ sophistry” insulting to any man of learning.

p The Sophists usually stressed the subjectivity and relativity of the evidence of the senses and of any deductions made from them. They were the first to grasp the fact which seems so obvious today that arguments can be found to support anything. This truth was partly interpreted by them in a spirit of philosophical scepticism and relativism, and partly in the form of recognition of the possible truth of contradictory perceptions, notions and judgements. In short, the Sophists taught a type of thinking that refuses to commit itself to any unconditional postulates except those a man needs for the achievement of the aim he sets himself. They strove to make commonplace notions and concepts versatile and to overcome their incompatibility that had become rigidly established by everyday usage. On this path some Sophists drew the conclusion that there was only a relative contradiction between good and evil, that religious beliefs were illusory, and that it was a mistake to believe, as most people did in those days, that the opposition between slaves and free men was fixed by nature.

p Some of the Sophists were the ideologists of slave-owning democracy, others were its opponents, but both understood philosophy as worldly wisdom, and knowledge, as the art of rhetoric with the help of which the educated man could always overcome the uneducated and the ignorant.

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p The Sophists were the first to attempt the complete secularisation of wisdom, to make it accessible to anyone who acquired the necessary education. This democratic tendency of the Sophists, however, went hand in hand with an oversimplification of the tasks of philosophy, with disregard of philosophy’s quest for understanding of the quintessential and universal in everything that exists, understanding of that which is most important in and for human life. These basic features of the Sophists’ teaching were harshly criticised by Socrates and particularly Plato, who again raised philosophy to a pedestal beyond the reach of the mass of the people.  [29•1 

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p Plato argued that neither true knowledge nor true virtue could be acquired extraneously, by means of education which at best would help to bring out the knowledge that was in a man’s soul but of which he remained unaware, having obtained it during the soul’s sojourn in another world.

p Thus Plato reinstated that aristocratically intellectual understanding of philosophy as a love of wisdom for its own sake, inherent only in chosen natures, which had fully emerged in the first period of ancient Greek philosophy. According to his teaching, wisdom lies in understanding the abiding transcendental reality, the realm of ideas, and above all the absolutely just, absolutely true and absolutely beautiful, and in examining from this supersensual position all natural things and human affairs.

p Inasmuch as Plato aspires to create a system of absolute knowledge (an essential difference between him and Socrates), he departs from the original conception of philosophy as love (quest) for the unattainable ideal of knowledge and life. His criticism of the Sophists’ worldly wisdom turns out in the final analysis to be merely a repudiation of the earthly basis of wisdom. Like the Sophists, he seeks to be a teacher of wisdom, although he makes the reservation that wisdom cannot be taught to those whose souls have not been initiated. Plato’s teaching thus emerges as a system of wisdom, not only in its theoretical but also in its practical aspects.

p Plato’s ideal of the state is a doctrine of the wise management of society ensuring the perfect embodiment of absolute justice, absolute truth and absolute beauty, thanks to which a social system will be established in which every man will 31 occupy the place assigned to him, whether he be craftsman or farmer, guardian or ruler- philosopher. The theoretical substantiation of this reactionary Utopia, which reflected the crisis of the Athenian state, lies in the notion of achieved wisdom, which radically distinguishes Plato from his predecessors and from later philosophers of the ancient world.  [31•1 

p The point of departure of Aristotle’s teaching is his criticism of Plato’s doctrine of ideas and entails a revision of the Platonic conception of wisdom as knowledge of the transcendental. Aristotle rehabilitates reality as that which is received by the senses and strives to explain the qualitative variety of the material world, proceeding from the notion of the forms inherent in things, which in most cases are also perceived by the senses. Admittedly, Aristotle recognises, besides sensually perceived forms, the "form of forms" and the prime mover, since he can see no other way of explaining the world as a whole. Aristotle’s idealism, however, differs essentially from that of Plato, who interprets philosophy as an ascent from this world to the next. Aristotle, on the contrary, believes it to be 32 the task of philosophy to examine the basic causes, the foundations and forms of nature. In this he sees genuine wisdom, while condemning the teaching of the Sophists as "only apparent and not real".  [32•1  Wisdom, in Aristotle’s view, coincides with knowledge, though not knowledge of single things, but of the essence as such. In the field of ethics Aristotle’s understanding of wisdom anticipates the philosophy of the Hellenic period: "The man of Practical Wisdom aims at avoiding Pain, not at attaining Pleasure.”  [32•2 

p It is true that Aristotle calls the prime mover God, but this assertion recalls the deistic views of the New Age, since God is not regarded as a subject of philosophical investigation. Aristotle describes as theologians Hesiod and other poets, the forerunners of ancient Greek philosophy, who on the basis of mythology evolved theogonic or cosmogonic theories, attributing the immortality of the gods to their drinking ambrosia and nectar, for example. Such an explanation, Aristotle remarks ironically, may have satisfied the poets themselves, but it goes beyond the bounds of our understanding. Theology, as Aristotle sees it, is not a teaching about God (or the gods) but the "first philosophy”, whose subject is first causes and their foundations.

p The problem of wisdom again comes to the fore and indeed forms the basic subject of philosophical meditation in the teachings of the age of decline of ancient society—in stoicism, scepticism, and Epicureanism. For the followers of these schools wisdom is not so much an ideal of 33 knowledge as a correct way of life which relieves the individual of avoidable sufferings, and of excesses that lead to suffering. One can trace the beginnings of these views in the first Greek philosophers, but their main conviction was that knowledge is an aim in itself. Only Hellenic philosophy proclaims the principle that knowledge in itself is of no value and is needed only because it teaches us the correct path in life.  [33•1  Happiness, which, according to Epicurus, constitutes the goal of human life, may be obtained by limiting one’s needs and renouncing pleasures that have deplorable consequences. The essence of happiness is perfect equanimity, ataraxia, renunciation of the world. "According to Epicurus,” Marx notes in his Doctoral thesis, "no good for man lies outside himself; the only good which he has in relation to the world is the negative notion to be free of it".  [33•2  But to become free of the world one must overcome one’s fear of the gods and also fear of death. Hence the purpose of natural philosophy, particularly if it can prove that there is no force in the world capable of destroying the contented self-assurance 34 of the sage. In this context natural philosophy plays the auxiliary role of introducing and substantiating a "philosophy of life”, which ultimately boils down to ethics. Thus wisdom comes to serve an “applied” aim; philosophy as a doctrine of the wise conduct of one’s personal life is interpreted as intellectual therapy. Epicurus says: "Hollow are the words of the philosopher that do not serve to heal any human suffering. Just as there is no use in medicine if it does not rid the body of disease, so is philosophy of no use if it cannot banish the sickness of the soul".  [34•1 

p Ancient Greek stoicism, which regards philosophy as "exercise in wisdom”, also stressed, like Epicureanism, the practical (in the highest sense) significance of philosophy, since its aim is to teach man "to live in accord with nature”. Stoicism proceeds from a fatalistic conception of the predetermination of all that exists. Hence the demand to live in accord with nature presumes, on the one hand, a knowledge of nature and, on the other, unconditional submission to natural necessity. Man can change nothing in the predetermined order of things. He is a philosopher or sage who, having realised the inevitable, submits to it and renounces sensual pleasures in order to rejoice in virtue, which is to be acquired through recognition of the essence of things and through the triumph of reason over appetite.

p Though differing in many ways from Epicureanism and stoicism, ancient Greek scepticism also reduces wisdom to the acquisition of 35 intellectual composure, aloof from human cares and worries. Diogenes Laertius, referring to Posidonius, relates that one day Pyrrho "was at sea in a ship; his companions were terrified by the storm; only he, who had remained perfectly calm and composed in spirit, pointed to a pig that was munching something and said that the wise man should preserve equal indifference.”  [35•1 

p It would seem that this evolution in the understanding of wisdom (and by the same token, philosophy) reflects the decay of the ancient city state and a social system that permitted the free citizen to take an active part in the life of the state. Now he feels that the ground is sliding from under him. Hence for him wisdom lies in the illusory assurance that one can live in society and be free of it at the same time.

Ancient Greek philosophy came into being as a powerful intellectual movement towards knowledge in its all-embracing theoretical form. It ends as a quest for repose in a society torn by antagonistic contradictions. This crisis does not, however, mean that there were no rational ideas in the doctrines of the Hellenistic age. These doctrines pose the question of the primacy of practical reason over the theoretical and for the first time systematically criticise the naively rationalistic notion of knowledge for its own sake, whose unexpected and tragic consequences- are only too obvious in the age of capitalism and particularly imperialism, when science becomes not only a productive but also a destructive force. "Greek philosophy,” says Marx, "begins with seven wise men, among whom is the Ionian 36 philosopher of nature Thales, and it ends with the attempt to portray the wise man conceptually".  [36•1  The subsequent history of Greek and GrecoRoman philosophy—the history of its transformation into the religious and mystical teachings of neo-Pythagoreanism, neo-Platonism, the later stoicism, etc.,—is in fact the prehistory of Christianity, which brought to an end the worldly wisdom of the ancient philosophers.