"INQUIRY INTO PERFECTION"
"UNITY"
VALUES of the Greco-Roman Cultural Matrix

A Value-System That Is Integrated by
"INQUIRY INTO PERFECTION"
The Greek Cultural Matrix

Getting a View of "Inquiry into Perfection"

1. ALTHOUGH EARLIER PEOPLES had inquired with vigor into the nature of the world and their roles in it, the Greeks brought "inquiry" into a new prominence in human thought. Developing an agenda whose essentials were established during the late Post-Amarna Hellenic Cultural Matrix, the Greeks focused their inquiry on one of the most abstract ideas in human language. This is the idea of "perfection."

1.1. What is a perfect life? a perfect city? a perfect building? a perfect sculpture? If you won the lottery, would it make your life "more" perfect? How does one inquire into such questions, much less answer them?

1.2. To consider inquiry into perfection as the value which integrates the other values of the Greek Cultural Matrix, we must first get a view of the value by looking at each of its parts: inquiry and perfection. One might say that to practice the value of inquiry into perfection, one must first devise a process for inquiry and then imagine perfection.

Modes of Inquiry

2. THE GREEKS SYSTEMATIZED modes of inquiry in ways that still determine our thinking. Greek modes of inquiry include conversation, induction, and deduction.

2.1. One mode of inquiry emphasized by the Greeks was inquiry through conversation. This mode seems designed to help people discover their hidden, incorrect assumptions. Socrates was the most famous practitioner of this mode. To witness Socrates in action, go to Plato's "Crito."

2.2. The more formal modes of inquiry are induction and deduction. To understand the difference between induction and deduction, it is necessary to understand how "arguments" work. An argument in this context is a form of language that includes two parts: premises and conclusion. The conclusion is the point that is made by the argument. The premises give support for the point.

2.2.1. Inquiry through induction depends on observation of specifics. In an inductive argument, the conclusion achieved by the inquiry intentionally goes beyond the information stated in the premises. The premises are meant only to provide significant support for the conclusion. If the premises are true, the conclusion becomes more probable, though it still might be wrong. The conclusion must make an "inductive leap" from the evidence to some wider concern. Inductive arguments may go from sample to generalization, or from evidence gathered in one case to a conclusion about another, or from a given set of facts to a hypothesis explaining the facts. In inductive arguments, the word "probably" makes sense before the conclusion, because the conclusion should be rated as more or less probable, depending on the weight of the evidence. Inductive arguments do not necessarily move from specific to general. "The Coke I got from the machine is good; therefore the Coke you got from the machine will be good" is an inductive argument whose conclusion is no more general than its premise. /Moore+2 25-26/

2.2.2. Inquiry through deduction begins with generalizations. In a deductive argument, the conclusion must not go beyond the information stated in the premises. It covers no more ground than the premises. The premises are intended to guarantee the truth of the conclusion, or to make the conclusion inevitable in the sense that if the premises are true and the argument is set up according to the proper rules of deduction, it is impossible for the conclusion to be false. Notice the "if" in the preceding sentence. It's a big one. Deduction arguments may start with false premises, or they may not be set up properly. In such cases, the fact that an argument is deductive does NOT guarantee the "truth" of a conclusion. So one has to know a lot about the "facts" and a lot about the process of deduction to be able to evaluate a conclusion. Nevertheless, in deductive arguments, the word "certainly" makes sense before the conclusion -- because this is the aim of a deductive argument: to provide "certainty." Deductive arguments do not necessarily move from general to specific. "No Cokes are Pepsis; therefore no Pepsis are Cokes" is a deductive argument in which the premise and conclusion are equally general. /Moore+2 25-26/ With deduction, the rules of correct arguments had to be established, so that the Greeks developed an ongoing concern with the limits and nature of human language. Aristotle is the person who gets credit for stating the basic rules of logical argument.

2.3. The Greeks also realized that the mode of inquiry determines where people look for perfection. For an "idealist," the search for perfection (or the ideal) should begin outside the particular. Idealism favors deduction as the most important mode of inquiry. Plato is generally considered the fountainhead of Idealism. For the most famous example of Plato's idealism, see "The Allegory of the Cave." A "realist" would argue that the ideal is within the particular, so perfection might be discovered through observation and analysis of specific examples. Realism tends to emphasize induction over deduction as the mode of inquiry. Aristotle was a famous (and complex!) Realist. To get a feel for his way of arguing, read "book" 1 of the Nicomachean Ethics.

The Idea of Perfection

3. HAVING CONSIDERED MODES OF INQUIRY, we can now turn to the idea of "perfection." The concept is so elusive it might be considered infinite. There always seem to be a higher level. If you want to try this for yourself, look for an ultimate end to the statement: "The [baseball] pitcher pitched a perfect game." We might be shy about making bold proclamations about perfection, but we all can imagine that something is "better." For us, the Greeks raised the question: how can we know something is better if we don't have some idea of perfection?

3.1. To find anything that can be labeled "perfect" implies that one has hit on some universal truth. This seems to correspond to Greek practice. Once they had achieved (their idea of) perfection, in a city, or a sculpture, or a building, they quit experimenting and either recycled the end product or moved on to something else. By seeking universally true answers in their inquiry into perfection, the Greeks envisioned the perspective of tolerance. In this vision and its enactment lies much of the Greek contribution to subsequent culture, both positive and negative. We could view Greek impact as predominantly a matter of style.

3.2. If the Greeks aspired to tolerance (universal truths), it seems reasonable to ask if they achieved it (or anything like it). The metaphor of "Greek Fire" /see Taplin/, a fire that cannot be quenched, offers some information relevant to this question. Greek Fire symbolizes the view of those who have looked back to the Greek Cultural Matrix as the start of a major series of human values and achievements rather than as the continuation and supplementation of values and achievements inherited by the Greeks. In European universities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a great lie was circulated with the idea that it would give one group of people more status than all other people. The lie was that the Greeks owed nothing to their Ancient Mediterranean heritage: all the good ideas in human life were invented by the Greeks themselves, and then by those who could lay direct claim to the Greek tradition.

3.3. In fact, the Greeks borrowed freely from their Ancient Mediterranean ancestors, but a significant part of Greek style was an ambivalence about acknowledging their cultural debt. At the least, they tended to devalue the contributions of other peoples in their inquiry into perfection. This is not tolerance; it is ethnocentrism.

3.3.1. A symbol for Greek ethnocentrism is the Greek word "barbarian," a word that first appears (once) in Homer, although perhaps not with its later connotations. Its significance by Greek times was that the peoples of the world could be divided into two classes: those who speak Greek and those who speak nonsense (bar is a syllable which has no meaning in Greek), the "bar-bar-ians." Couldn't we imagine that the Greeks (the Athenians) inquired into perfection and thought they found enough of it so that no one else's opinion really mattered? The spread of the polis through Hellenization supports this idea: the polis was more a matter of imposition than syncretism (combining). (This situation seems to have been the case while the Greeks were doing the spreading; when the Romans took over, it becomes possible to speak of syncretism in a serious fashion.)

3.3.2. Part of the reason for Greek ethnocentrism might be the obvious desire for innovation (for example, in art). To reach higher and higher ideals of perfection, it seems that by the Golden Age Athenians pretty much quit talking to other people. There's just no evidence for the kinds of conversations that are massively documented in Roman literature, in which, for instance, an agriculturist like Cato or Varro pulls together information from people all over his "world" (even beyond the larger Mediterranean Cultural Matrix), far into the past as well as his own present. We might take Aristotle's work on constitutions to be representative of the extent of Athenian interest in inquiry into perfection: look at what other Greeks are doing. It is possible that the Greeks deliberately concealed their Ancient Mediterranean heritage. Like any culture, they borrowed massively from their cultural ancestors, yet Greek sources make little effort to document the borrowing. For the most part, they just don't give credit to their cultural ancestors. (Again, the Roman situation is entirely different.) Take, for example, the extensive (as measured by the overall amounts of information we possess from Classical and Hellenistic Greece) discussion of musical modes. You won't find even a hint that the musical theory inherited and revised and revised by the Greeks came from Pre-Amarna Mesopotamia and developments in India during the Post-Amarna era.

3.4. With the resumption of Greek-style ethnocentrism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the cover-up of the Greeks' Mediterranean heritage was certainly deliberate and used to de-value all other cultures besides those supposedly deriving from Greece (and to a lesser extent, Rome as the conveyer of Greek culture). In this we find the roots of two widespread and vague notions that may be put together in one sentence: there is a "Western" tradition that began with the unique contributions of the Greeks. When one tries to find out what "Western" means or what it is that the Greeks started from scratch, one has no luck in the sense of getting answers that are generally applicable or actually supportable. All the answers go back to the Greeks' view of themselves.

3.5. From our vantage-point, we can see that a major part of the story of the Greek heritage is the struggle between those who gladly accepted the real Greek perspective of ethnocentrism and those who fought for the Greek ideal of tolerance. (Remember that the beauty of cultural heritages is that you don't have to know about them to use them. The downside now is that many people have given up on tolerance as a useful category. Unlike the Greeks, they don't even seek a phony tolerance!)

Eight Supporting Values

4. BECAUSE OF "OUR" ONGOING ENTHUSIASM for the Greeks, people seem to really enjoy mentioning Greek values. Here are eight frequently cited ones. In our values-analysis system, these values are integrated by inquiry into perfection, and so begin to fill out the inquiry into perfection values-pyramid.

4.1. Greek optimism is said to be based on the defeat of the Persians, following which the Athenians achieved a remarkable string of accomplishments over the next half century. This is optimism about one's possibilities in the future based on one's success in the past.

4.2. The value that provided the necessary framework for Greek inquiry into perfection was freedom. For those who qualified as citizens, the Hellenes had established political freedom in Athens, and the Greeks turned the idea of freedom into an open pursuit of knowledge without reservation about where new knowledge might lead.

4.3. Arete is diligence in the pursuit of excellence. With this the Greeks institutionalized one of the primary Hellenic values. The "Olympic Games" are often cited as an example.

4.4. Hubris is excessive pride that could harm another human being. It includes hamartia, a "fatal error" (or some would say "tragic flaw") that brings about the downfall of the person who made the error. Arrogance that injures other people is the paradigm of a fatal error. Greek playwrights such as Sophocles warned of the dangers of acting on the basis of this value -- the prime example is Oedipus the King. Nevertheless, the Greeks recognized hubris as one of the driving forces of human nature. With this recognition, they moved from the "hero-of-achievement" model of human potential to the "tragic hero" model, which takes full account of the price that must be paid for achievement.

4.5. The values of Athens during its Golden Age began with a balance between individuality and the wellbeing of the state. Artists, writers, musical theorists, philosophers, and politicians all spoke of the importance of balance.

4.5.1. The Athenian polis was set up to provide citizens with a balanced life. During the Age of Pericles, Athenian values shifted toward the individual. The Athenian state began to decline when it abandoned the value of balance. The idea of balance is so strongly associated with Greece that it often becomes the central principle of a "Classical Ideal" (or some similar expression).

4.5.2. Although balance is well worth our consideration, we probably tend to overrate its importance for the Greeks. At least, the value is diminished by the population statistics for Athenian democracy, if the actual voting population of Athens during the Golden Age was about 40,000 of a population of 250,000 (no women, no resident aliens, and, of course, none of the slaves who did the work that made it possible for the elite to have the free time to pursue their inquiry into perfection). A balanced life as an individual marked an ideal that applied only to the few, not the many. Might we imagine that the Greeks were on the right track, and that balance can never become a mass commodity? (Remember that a value has to be acted out before it is really a value!)

4.6. The distinction between "real" and "ideal" applied to Greek inquiry into perfect justice. The way the Athenians valued justice (and beauty, as we shall see in the next section) has caused them to be called "idealistic pragmatists." They thought of how things "should" be (idealism), but they observed things as they "really" were (pragmatism). For instance, they found justice in the law courts. If a legal decision did not measure up to the ideal of justice, then it was viewed as "unjust." When a higher form of justice could be imagined, the Athenians believed that the higher form should then be present in the courts.

4.7.  In exploring perfection of beauty, the Greeks (Athenians) could search for beauty in a particular object after they had reached agreement about ideal beauty (beauty in and of itself). Athenian standards of beauty changed over time. This may be seen in the evolution of the sculptural tradition. Athenians realized that perfect beauty cannot be found in an imperfect world, but that did not deter them from striving for perfection, to get as close as possible to the ideal of beauty they could imagine.

4.8. A lot of people talk about humanism as though it were a Greek invention. For example, people will say that the Greeks invented the "gods" in their own image; that is, they used themselves (humans) as the "measure." Actually, the major deities in the Greek pantheon came from Mesopotamia via the Hittites of Anatolia. So much for Greek invention! On reflection, however, isn't saying that "God" exists in the image of people just another way of saying that people relate to the divine in ways that are comprehensible to them. The deities of Mesopotamia acted just like the Mesopotamians, while the deities of Egypt acted like Egyptians! (The point is expressed in this way for comparison with the Greeks, but a reasonably acute observer of the current scene in world religions should be able to notice the same kind of thing.) That the experience of the divine is compatible with other experiences is something we can observe in any society, and there's nothing particularly unique about Greek religious beliefs and practices.

4.8.1. The novelty of Greek humanism exists in two ways. First, the Greeks produced witty sayings to celebrate the place of the human. No one before the Greeks would come right out and say, "Man [sic] is the measure of all things." It's not clear how widespread this cynical view was in Athenian culture, but that it existed at all is noteworthy.

4.8.2. To say that the Greeks from whom we hear had enormous confidence in the power of human reason and self-knowledge would seem to be an understatement. The human scale, as demonstrated, for example, in Greek art and architecture, is one of the most persistent values of the Athenian elite. Here is a second novelty: that objects, buildings, even cities should be constructed according to human proportions seems to have taken previous notions a step further than before. (For an earlier example of the same type of thinking in the Aegean, consider the Pre-Amarna Minoan Palace of Knossos, which seems to have been constantly revised according to ad hoc human needs and has a throne room where everyone basically sits down on a bench together. Even the ruler is seated just a little bit higher than everyone else!)

A Value-System That Is Integrated by
"UNITY"
The Roman Cultural Matrix
The Roman Ideal of Unity

5. LIKE THE EMPIRE-BUILDERS who had preceded them, the Romans faced the challenge of melding the lives of diverse peoples and groups into a manageable political whole. The question that seems dominant in Roman culture is: how would a group of diverse people achieve "unity"? (Note that unity only becomes a conscious concern when there is some problem of diversity. It would seem that nowadays even diversity does not prompt us to think about issues of unity; diversity only stimulates us to think about diversity, as in movements such as "multiculturalism.")

5.2.  Because the Romans, unlike the Greeks, outspokenly appreciated their cultural heritage and were open to vast differences among the peoples within their system, the Roman Cultural Matrix developed a value-system that promoted an overall perspective of relativism and established a situation in which tolerance in specific areas could flourish. While Roman leaders vigorously challenged anything that threatened political unity, they found they could best achieve their own goals of unity by encouraging the natural differences in beliefs and life-styles among the varied peoples under their control. Based on their distinction between what is essential to unity and what is not essential, the Romans developed fundamental institutions of government, such as law and public services, in forms which continue to have great influence. By encouraging differences, the Romans also found that the various peoples in their domain had knowledge and traditions that could make positive contributions to the overall unity of Roman society.

5.3. The value of unity also affected the work of Roman scientists, who created formal syntheses of past knowledge and their own ideas. Such syntheses display the perspective of tolerance that may be promoted by the value of unity. In consulting all known sources in the effort to determine the truth, a synthesis provides one of the purest models of tolerance.

5.4. Fans of the Romans have made long lists of the values integrated by unity in the thousand years of Roman society. Usually the heading at the top of the list reads: VIRTUES. Doesn't this reveal something about the way in which the Romans have been appreciated in later times? Notable "Roman" virtues are:

·         thrift

·         honesty

·         loyalty

·         dedication to hard work

·         duty to the state

This seems like pretty heavy going. Perhaps the people who create such lists need to read all of Juvenal at least three times and reflect for a year on what they've read! Much of the supposed solemnity of Roman values must come from Virgil's Aeneid,  in which the hero exemplifies the qualities of:

·         pietas (performance of responsibilities to one's parents, ancestors, relatives, along with deities and the state)

·         gravitas (sober acceptance of responsibility)

·         simplicitas (singleness of purpose)

·         and virtus (courageous performance of duty)

At the same time he turns his back on a beautiful woman of great passion who was madly in love with him!

The Individual in the Roman Cultural Matrix

6. IN THE HELLENIC MODEL inherited by Classical Greece, the individual was inconceivable apart from the life of the free city /see Copleston 123/. By the time Greece became a province in the Roman Empire, the free city was totally submerged. When this submergence of the free city occurred, two new values developed. As a utilitarian value, cosmopolitanism, with its ideal of citizenship of the world, promoted the value of individuality. When the life of the city-state, compact and all-embracing, broke down, individuals were cast adrift from their moorings and so became the center of attention in a new way. /Copleston 123-24/ Roman interaction with Hellenism molded the kind of attention given to the individual.

6.1. The Roman Empire inherited and retained a Hellenistic world. However, the Romans changed Alexandrian Hellenism in two significant ways.

First, the old Romans, the Romans of the Republic, were less interested than the Greeks in speculation about the physical (and metaphysical) world. They emphasized the value of character for individuals, who needed and demanded guidance in life. In the Roman Empire, when the former ideals and traditions of the Republic had been swamped, the philosopher's task became that of helping individuals find a code of conduct that would provide them with moral independence. /Copleston 124/

Second, the Roman Empire inherited the tradition of Alexander, in which the classical Greek sense of the distinction between Greek and "barbarian" was unreal (because it reflects thought in terms of "city," with its limited population, rather than "empire," with its vast and varied population). /Copleston 123/ The Alexandrian version of Hellenism aimed primarily to impose Athenian culture on the other cities of the Empire. With a value-system that was integrated by unity, but having to confront the intrinsic value of individuality, the Romans found that unity could only be preserved by limiting its scope to matters of vital concern to the state. Otherwise, they encouraged diversity as a practical way of appealing to their interests of their diverse populations. By encouraging diversity in all non-essential areas of life, the Romans discovered something that the Greeks never learned. There was much to learn from the "barbarians" in the Empire. THIS NEW OPENNESS WAS THE REAL ROMAN GENIUS, and it encouraged the formation of sub-groups within the Roman Cultural Matrix, each promoting its own model of unity.

6.2. Groups such as the Stoics and the Christians proposed models for unity that would bridge ethnic and class distinctions. Perhaps most noteworthy for its influence on later developments is the model offered by Christianity. The triumph of Christianity, both religiously and politically, in late Roman times affirmed a model of unity that is ethnocentric in nature.

6.3. Christianity developed a profound belief in one way for all people, revealed by God rather than human discussion. When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, it gained the political clout to put its beliefs into practice. Christians had faced periodic persecutions for their unwillingness to support Roman political structures by acknowledging the legitimacy of the Roman pantheon. The triumph of Christianity resulted in the first systematic effort in Roman times to bring an end to all alternative forms of religious experience. The dominance of the Christian perspective eroded the old Roman ideals of unity with their grounding in relativism, and the Roman Cultural Matrix slowly crumbled, a victim to internal conflicts as much as external threat. As the Empire collapsed, Christianity flourished, as its value-system attracted greater and greater masses of people.