Are you an original thinker? When I think about my thinking, I acknowledge that I am not the first to entertain any thought. I had predecessors, and they had ample opportunity to address the nature of the Cosmos, maybe not by modern scientific methods, but certainly by philosophical ones. Wouldn’t I be naïve to think that my contemporaries (including you) and I developed our ideas in a philosophical vacuum?
“In no other department is a thorough knowledge of history so important as in philosophy,” says Richard Falckenberg in his 1893 summary of philosophies. Falckenberg considered modern philosophy to be a continuation of thinking initiated by philosophers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. He is wrong, not about the connection between the evolution of philosophy and modern philosophers, but rather about the idea of a special connection.
The Greeks laid the groundwork for almost all forms of western thinking and understanding, not just philosophy. There is a similar connection between the history of philosophy and the modern concept of the Cosmos held by most physicists.
“Where’s the connection to ‘old philosophers’?” you ask in reference to modern science. “Those ‘old guys’ didn’t have access to modern technology, such as powerful optical and radio telescopes and satellites that could see deep into space and time. Shouldn’t we merely cite the modern astronomers and physicists who revealed an expanding universe’s age and arguable origin? Why go back? Why look for some evolutionary connection to ancient and medieval philosophy?”
Memory provides the context for our lives. We appear to be bound to a version of psychological Linnaean need that requires us to interpret the present on the basis of categories locked in memory. Understanding ourselves generates an interest in a personal past and seems to be fundamental to our brains’ wiring. How else can we explain the success of a company like 23andMe that offers customers an individualized DNA search?
Do I know the origin of my way of thinking? Not completely, but I have some historical idea derived in part from my culture’s documented memory. So much not only of what I know, but also of how I think probably originated on a rocky hill in Athens, Greece, or in the tradition of thought that avalanched from it. I think in that Greek tradition—probably more rather than less. No, I can’t know all the sources of all my thoughts and ways of thinking, of course; but I can guess that had I been enculturated solely by eastern mysticism rather than by western logic, I would probably see the world a bit differently. Certainly, because of some exposure to eastern thinking, I am not exclusively “western,” but I am mostly so.
There’s no superiority claim here. Neither the Occident nor the Orient provides a direct path to understanding an irrefutable Absolute. But I believe Greek thinking was the underlying impetus for much of modern science, and I’m not convinced that eastern mysticism would have led to the modern understanding of something like the Big Bang. In the chief modern understanding of the origin of the Cosmos lies evidence for that connection to the history Falckenberg mentions.
If I ask myself why I accept the fundamental premise of the Big Bang, I should consider whether or not western thinking underlies that acceptance. How is it I accept the explanation that a unity of some sort—call it the Singularity—inflated 13.8 billion years ago to become today’s Cosmos? The simple answer is tied to my understanding of evidence—my Greek understanding of evidence. And it is that same tie to understanding evidence that underlies the work of those scientists who have worked out whatever details we know about the origin of the universe.
The process of the Big Bang seems to be evidenced by data from two satellites: The Cosmic Origin Background Explorer (COBE) and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). Both provided data for images of the early universe. Both devices mapped the permeating cosmic 2.7 K microwave background (CMB) identified in 1964 by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. What do maps of a cosmic microwave background have to do with ancient and medieval philosophy? Are they the result of pure science unconnected to that tradition of philosophy inspired by the Greeks? Does the idea of an original Singularity beg philosophical and theological speculation?**
A Singularity preceding the Big Bang is a convenient story that fits into my Greek thought tradition. And I am neither first nor insightful in holding a view similar to that outlined by cosmologists. One of those predecessors of my thinking who transferred Greek thinking into the modern world was Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus Von Hohenheim, known as Paracelsus.
Paracelsus (1493-1541) was just one of many thinkers who carried the ancient Greek way into the modern world and into our Big Bang model of the Cosmos. Born into the age of discovery and exploration, Paracelsus thought philosophy was essentially “… knowledge of nature, in which observation and thought must co-operate; speculation apart from experience and worship of the paper-wisdom of the ancients lead to no result. The world is a living whole, which, like man, the microcosm, in whom the whole content of the macrocosm is concentrated as in an extract, runs its life course. Originally all things were promiscuously intermingled in a unity, the God-created prima materia, as though inclosed [sic.] in a germ, whence the manifold, with its various forms and colors, proceeded by separation.”***
And where are we in our thinking 500 years after Paracelsus? Paracelsus had no satellites like COBE or horn antennae like Penzias and Wilson to capture the ubiquitous microwave background of the universe. He had no Hubble tell him that the universe is expanding. He had no Lemaître to suggest that “germ” from which grew a Cosmos. His thinking wasn’t necessarily insightful or prescient. It was Greek. And here we are half a millennium later, mostly bound to that same tradition, envisioning a unity, some prima materia as a “germ” we call a Singularity. That relatively recently discovered “unity” existed prior to the Big Bang and Inflation.
In my estimation, we differ only in degree, and not in kind, from thinking like Paracelsus. For George Smoot, a developer of COBE, and others who developed the scientific instruments of microwave background detection, the original Singularity broke down, and in the process the four fundamental forces (Strong and Weak Nuclear, Electromagnetism, and Gravity) separated.**** The subsequent cooling allowed atoms and everything made from them to coalesce. From Democritus through Paracelsus to modern physicists like Smoot, a unity of thinking revealed much about that primordial unity and the current “disunity” of forces, matter, and energy distributed through the Cosmos.
My dependence upon thinking Greek is humbling. I know that original thinking is very difficult to come by and that creativity is mostly restatement—albeit sometimes with more details and to different degrees of understanding. Do you think of yourself as an original thinker?
*Falckenberg, Richard. History of Modern Philosophy.1893. From the Introduction. http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11100/pg11100-images.html
**Certainly, there are some who offer variations and alternatives to the Big Bang, and those involve no theological reference point. One view, offered by Stephen Hawking, is an argument that Nothing demanded Something (as I reduce his thinking to its core) to get around religion’s Divine Creator. Another view, offered by some multiverse advocates, is an argument for a cyclic Cosmos in which an indefinite number of eternal universes are free to bump into one another to create new universes or to alter existing ones. For this latter view evidence appears to lie in a supposed “gap” or “wound” in the WMAP image. Is that wound a place where a neighboring brane or universe bumped into and intruded our universe? But thinking Greek, I just can’t wrap my head around those arguments that for brevity’s sake, I reduce to eternal “dirt” creating and recreating itself.
***Falckenberg. from Chapter 1.
****Smoot, George and Keay Davidson. Wrinkles in Time. New York. William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1993.
“In no other department is a thorough knowledge of history so important as in philosophy,” says Richard Falckenberg in his 1893 summary of philosophies. Falckenberg considered modern philosophy to be a continuation of thinking initiated by philosophers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. He is wrong, not about the connection between the evolution of philosophy and modern philosophers, but rather about the idea of a special connection.
The Greeks laid the groundwork for almost all forms of western thinking and understanding, not just philosophy. There is a similar connection between the history of philosophy and the modern concept of the Cosmos held by most physicists.
“Where’s the connection to ‘old philosophers’?” you ask in reference to modern science. “Those ‘old guys’ didn’t have access to modern technology, such as powerful optical and radio telescopes and satellites that could see deep into space and time. Shouldn’t we merely cite the modern astronomers and physicists who revealed an expanding universe’s age and arguable origin? Why go back? Why look for some evolutionary connection to ancient and medieval philosophy?”
Memory provides the context for our lives. We appear to be bound to a version of psychological Linnaean need that requires us to interpret the present on the basis of categories locked in memory. Understanding ourselves generates an interest in a personal past and seems to be fundamental to our brains’ wiring. How else can we explain the success of a company like 23andMe that offers customers an individualized DNA search?
Do I know the origin of my way of thinking? Not completely, but I have some historical idea derived in part from my culture’s documented memory. So much not only of what I know, but also of how I think probably originated on a rocky hill in Athens, Greece, or in the tradition of thought that avalanched from it. I think in that Greek tradition—probably more rather than less. No, I can’t know all the sources of all my thoughts and ways of thinking, of course; but I can guess that had I been enculturated solely by eastern mysticism rather than by western logic, I would probably see the world a bit differently. Certainly, because of some exposure to eastern thinking, I am not exclusively “western,” but I am mostly so.
There’s no superiority claim here. Neither the Occident nor the Orient provides a direct path to understanding an irrefutable Absolute. But I believe Greek thinking was the underlying impetus for much of modern science, and I’m not convinced that eastern mysticism would have led to the modern understanding of something like the Big Bang. In the chief modern understanding of the origin of the Cosmos lies evidence for that connection to the history Falckenberg mentions.
If I ask myself why I accept the fundamental premise of the Big Bang, I should consider whether or not western thinking underlies that acceptance. How is it I accept the explanation that a unity of some sort—call it the Singularity—inflated 13.8 billion years ago to become today’s Cosmos? The simple answer is tied to my understanding of evidence—my Greek understanding of evidence. And it is that same tie to understanding evidence that underlies the work of those scientists who have worked out whatever details we know about the origin of the universe.
The process of the Big Bang seems to be evidenced by data from two satellites: The Cosmic Origin Background Explorer (COBE) and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). Both provided data for images of the early universe. Both devices mapped the permeating cosmic 2.7 K microwave background (CMB) identified in 1964 by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. What do maps of a cosmic microwave background have to do with ancient and medieval philosophy? Are they the result of pure science unconnected to that tradition of philosophy inspired by the Greeks? Does the idea of an original Singularity beg philosophical and theological speculation?**
A Singularity preceding the Big Bang is a convenient story that fits into my Greek thought tradition. And I am neither first nor insightful in holding a view similar to that outlined by cosmologists. One of those predecessors of my thinking who transferred Greek thinking into the modern world was Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus Von Hohenheim, known as Paracelsus.
Paracelsus (1493-1541) was just one of many thinkers who carried the ancient Greek way into the modern world and into our Big Bang model of the Cosmos. Born into the age of discovery and exploration, Paracelsus thought philosophy was essentially “… knowledge of nature, in which observation and thought must co-operate; speculation apart from experience and worship of the paper-wisdom of the ancients lead to no result. The world is a living whole, which, like man, the microcosm, in whom the whole content of the macrocosm is concentrated as in an extract, runs its life course. Originally all things were promiscuously intermingled in a unity, the God-created prima materia, as though inclosed [sic.] in a germ, whence the manifold, with its various forms and colors, proceeded by separation.”***
And where are we in our thinking 500 years after Paracelsus? Paracelsus had no satellites like COBE or horn antennae like Penzias and Wilson to capture the ubiquitous microwave background of the universe. He had no Hubble tell him that the universe is expanding. He had no Lemaître to suggest that “germ” from which grew a Cosmos. His thinking wasn’t necessarily insightful or prescient. It was Greek. And here we are half a millennium later, mostly bound to that same tradition, envisioning a unity, some prima materia as a “germ” we call a Singularity. That relatively recently discovered “unity” existed prior to the Big Bang and Inflation.
In my estimation, we differ only in degree, and not in kind, from thinking like Paracelsus. For George Smoot, a developer of COBE, and others who developed the scientific instruments of microwave background detection, the original Singularity broke down, and in the process the four fundamental forces (Strong and Weak Nuclear, Electromagnetism, and Gravity) separated.**** The subsequent cooling allowed atoms and everything made from them to coalesce. From Democritus through Paracelsus to modern physicists like Smoot, a unity of thinking revealed much about that primordial unity and the current “disunity” of forces, matter, and energy distributed through the Cosmos.
My dependence upon thinking Greek is humbling. I know that original thinking is very difficult to come by and that creativity is mostly restatement—albeit sometimes with more details and to different degrees of understanding. Do you think of yourself as an original thinker?
*Falckenberg, Richard. History of Modern Philosophy.1893. From the Introduction. http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11100/pg11100-images.html
**Certainly, there are some who offer variations and alternatives to the Big Bang, and those involve no theological reference point. One view, offered by Stephen Hawking, is an argument that Nothing demanded Something (as I reduce his thinking to its core) to get around religion’s Divine Creator. Another view, offered by some multiverse advocates, is an argument for a cyclic Cosmos in which an indefinite number of eternal universes are free to bump into one another to create new universes or to alter existing ones. For this latter view evidence appears to lie in a supposed “gap” or “wound” in the WMAP image. Is that wound a place where a neighboring brane or universe bumped into and intruded our universe? But thinking Greek, I just can’t wrap my head around those arguments that for brevity’s sake, I reduce to eternal “dirt” creating and recreating itself.
***Falckenberg. from Chapter 1.
****Smoot, George and Keay Davidson. Wrinkles in Time. New York. William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1993.
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