Fragment 224, Word count: 2,070.

Tags: history, reality, culture, gods, teleology, Christendom, Enlightenment, rationality, nature, science, literacy, Protestantism.

The Ancient Greek Reconceptualization

Ancient Greek philosophers re-conceived their culture’s system of reality as a whole by marginalizing supernatural personalities, notably the Olympian gods, in their explanations of the world. Those gods were not disembodied spirits, although disembodied spirits were also represented in the culture. The gods of Mount Olympus had bodies including the appetites of human bodies, but they were not ordinary flesh and blood since they had the power to change shape and appearance. They were in principle immortal and had individual and collective superpowers, but as personalities they were not so different from normally embodied persons. Humans who did extraordinary deeds caught the attention of the gods and sometimes inspired divine admiration and support and sometimes malice. Heroes were the favourites of certain gods.

There were materialist philosophers who denied the existence of gods, but for Plato, Aristotle, and others there were still important supernatural forces in the world, and those forces had the character of personality since they were teleological, with the future-directed orientation of caring ideality: attentive, inquisitive, judging, and thinking. Both Plato and Aristotle gave importance of the highest order to a god or gods in an obscure but conceivable dimension of the world: Aristotle’s first unmoved mover and Plato’s One and the Demiurge. These were still very god-centred views of life and the world, but the nature of deity was transformed from that in Homer. Aristotle’s god is pure intellect, thinking thinking about thinking, pure actuality without matter (potential, for Aristotle). Aristotle associated this deity with the “fixed stars” visible in a clear night sky, and his conception of cause/ effect in nature was still god-focused since the unmoved mover, located at the top of the layers of the spherical cosmos (with planet Earth at the bottom/ centre), was an ultimate cause of everything. Changes, impulses, or motions passed from Thinking at the top, down through the layers of fixed stars, planets, and finally into the sublunary world inhabited by humans. Also, in Aristotle’s view, every substance is defined by its own internal essential teleology or final cause, a destiny toward which it strives as if pulled or called from the future. Plato’s Demiurge is very much like pure intellect eternally contemplating the unchanging Ideal Forms, which each send out images of themselves in layers of decreasing accuracy and stability, down to the layer of ceaseless change familiar to ordinary experience. Plato’s divine One seems also to exist under another aspect as the Form of the Good.

Although Plato and Aristotle were not materialists, it is clear that the materialism of Stoicism and especially Epicureanism was meant to free people from fear of gods and enable individual self-possession. This was an important theme of ancient philosophy, and the rough rationalism of Plato and Aristotle was part of that effort. Socrates, teacher of Plato, was executed by the democratic polis Athens for offending the gods, so this was not a trivial pursuit. The philosophical effort was to transfigure gods from unruly personalities into transcendent metaphysical moorings or shorings for the barely stable world of ordinary experience. The gods of the philosophers were more natural regularities rather than capricious supernatural personalities, and that was the dawn of a less terrifying construct of fundamental reality, based on an intuition that traditional conceptions were over-complicated, over-personified, and mostly expressions of fear in the face of the vast mysteries of human existence.

The philosophical sects or schools of ancient Greece were very focused on particular teachers, each with special messages and a specific legacy of ideas, and although texts were written and the messages launched into the literate social milieux of aristocratic young men of the polis, the larger cultural uptake of these ideas was minimal. In the Hellenistic era Stoicism and Epicureanism did become somewhat unmoored from direct contact with the line of successors from a founding teacher, and attracted more interest among a wider public. Philosophical views became familiar and respected enough within the community of the comfortably literate to require some degree of homage from rival systems of ideas, including the new religion of Christianity. Early Christianity was deeply informed by especially Platonism and some Stoicism. Christian authors were outright hostile to Epicureanism, which asserted that if gods exist somewhere they have no interest in humans, and that rationally chosen pleasure is the primary good.

Early Modern Enlightenment

Descartes’ generation of early modern philosophers again re-conceived fundamental reality, banishing Aristotle’s substance-essences and final causes from inanimate objects and from nature at large. These Baroque era rationalists were still in the belly of Christendom’s very totalitarian hive-mind beast, which used lethal force to impose an orthodox metaphysics featuring prophets of a personal father-God in the sky, supported by writings from Plato and Aristotle. Augustine of Hippo was grounded in Platonism, and Thomas Aquinas had structured Aristotle into the fabric of the Christian system of reality. The radical rationalists of the Enlightenment re-conceptualized all three branches of the Christian system of reality: nature, community, and the drama of human subjectivity. 

Nature

The rationalists re-conceived nature scientifically as a strictly physical system of ‘clockwork’, completely free of disembodied spirits and their power, free of cosmic teleology, purpose, or destiny, leaving just strictly impersonal forces and structures. Descartes, Hobbes, and others of their generation were crucial in that conceptual groundwork for science, breaking away from Aristotelian-religious ideas as previously codified by Aquinas. The conceptions of materialist science were persuasive enough and far-reaching enough to provide an answer to a cultural instability and vacuum that had developed at the core of Old Regime Europe’s sense of reality. The roots of that instability probably lie in the horrific collective experience of a pandemic, the Black Death bubonic plague of the late 1340’s and early 1350’s which, over a period of half a decade of extreme trauma reduced the population of western Europe by half without otherwise harming the environment, infrastructure, material culture, or the distribution of wealth in the society.

Subjectivity

The cultural instability in Old Regime Christendom, initiated by the personal and collective trauma of inexplicable disasters, enabled the effectiveness of a second Enlightenment culture punch by creating a widespread readiness for new foundational ideas. What participants in the ‘Republic of Letters’ came to offer was a humanistic campaign of strengthening the dignity and autonomy of individuals, in contrast to the Augustinian concept of human nature inherently tainted and enslaved by original sin. Individual subjectivity was re-conceived as universally educable to rationality and capable of spontaneous rationality, even though it was usually trained by legacy institutions to a condition of non-rational credulity, superstition, and abject deference to entrenched authorities. There was a new assertion of universally distributed rationality as an individually innate human ability to judge what has value and what is true and real based entirely on commonly available perceptions. The previous spread of proletarian literacy from around the time of Wycliffe in the 1380’s was crucial in fostering this increasing dignity and power of creative rationality at the individual level. The emerging spirit of Protestantism was also animated by a similar conception of the inherent power and dignity of the individual and became an inescapable cultural force defining and institutionalizing a literate subjectivity as the universal human norm.

Now at last a large and moderately stable society with an historically complex culture and an emerging collective sense of needing to get better was embracing the long philosophical work of re-conceiving reality based on commonly observable relevant evidence rather than on fear of a profoundly personified nature, the work that had begun in the ancient world. There were layers and niches in this society’s sense of needing to get better, and conservative devotion to medieval fear-culture was still strong among the most privileged. However, the devastations of the Great Plague lingered for generations in popular discourse and the need for recovery into a more just arrangement of society was part of that discourse, especially among less privileged classes. Also, there was an increasing cultural recognition of the relatively low level of accomplishment by the society that was western Christendom relative to foreign societies beyond the borders and to societies of the past. Christendom understood itself to be a society at risk of being surrounded and overpowered because of certain cultural inferiorities. Since the Spanish conquest of Muslim Toledo in 1085 there had been a growing excitement among the intellectually curious in the community of advanced literacy. The discovery of ancient works of Aristotle and Islamic philosophers in the libraries of Toledo inspired a profound response, including large scale translation and distribution of these works within Christendom, and the organizing of a number of universities. In the niche of advanced literacy there was fervent engagement with the mathematical, scientific, and philosophical achievements of ancient Greek and Medieval Islamic intellectuals. The fall of Constantinople to Islamic Turkish forces in 1453 sent a shock of vulnerability through Western Christendom, but also sent scholarly refugees from Byzantium into Italy and beyond with books of intellectual treasures from ancient Rome.

The foundational culture-punch of philosophy was promotion of the autonomous application of rationality for the most ambitious thinking, for a re-conceptualization of the most fundamental realities without appeal to any kind of ‘superego’ such as the omniscient/ omnipotent deity supposedly expressed through established authorities, both religious and civic. Re-thinking reality is distinctly a philosophical project, evading culture with intent to re-model it, and the Enlightenment movement was self-consciously philosophical. ‘Philosophical’ meant making use of rationality without religious assumptions of cosmic or divine purpose for people, without disembodied teleology or any kind of external superego. ‘Philosophical’ meant ‘rationally non-religious’ and consequently de-centralized, asserting a pluralism and diversity of thinking quite foreign to religious cultures and communities.

The earlier political philosophers of the modernizing era, notably Machiavelli and Hobbes, made an effort to justify the sovereignty of the fiercest of the aristocracy without a need for divine or Church authorization. (Hobbes thought the primeval ‘state of nature’ was a war of all against all.) Even in later stages of the Enlightenment it was urgently dangerous to question the established practices or ideology of sovereignty. Philosophers of the later and more radical stream of the Enlightenment presented rationality as ultimately justifying bottom-up control of society, re-enforcing universal equality, human rights, and democracy, specifically contradicting any justification for top-down social control in the name of rationality (sometimes falsely blamed on the Enlightenment). The materialist perspective began to undermine the religious metaphysics that promoted the legitimacy of Christendom’s top-down parasite factions, monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical hierarchies; instead conceiving a society of equals as a natural potential and possibly a pre-historic actuality that was unjustly hijacked by priests, aristocrats, and monarchs. The Enlightenment rationalists upset the Christian system of reality by finally bringing the human essence back from some faint hope of transcendent eternity, back into nature, rejecting all super-natural entities or realms of being, and then arguing that in the primordial ‘state of nature’, prior to establishment of arbitrary social conventions, all people would have had equal freedoms and rights. In that way, society was re-conceived as a system of equal persons with the same rights and freedoms of thought, expression, and association, best organized as a democratic republic (bottom-up political force).

There is a progressive enrichment of the individual as potential reader/writer throughout the history of literacy at the core of these cultural developments. In the earliest stages the individual was considered less important than the technology of letters, and the creative power of personal teleology was thought to reside in supernatural beings at large in the world outside and beyond human subjectivity. Such invisible power was thought to inhabit the concrete marks shaped as words and letters, making them speak. It was the work of a string of philosophers that very gradually had the effect of relocating the creative freedom of caring-ideality from supernatural entities, such as a remote deity, to ordinary individuals. Wycliffe’s views improved the status of the general reader/ writer substantially. By the era following the French Revolution of 1789-99, in a Euro-American culture struggling to come to terms with the rationalist Enlightenment, progressive pools of culture recognized the creative power to exist within the individual human who was assigning and interpreting meanings. The objective world had been simplified dramatically by removal of magical and supernatural entities and powers. The human individual was conceived as deep, complicated, powerful, and more important by far than the concrete marking systems, as useful as those might be.

Copyright © 2026 Sandy MacDonald.