Is Cosmos Knowable?

Is Cosmos Knowable?

Plato and Aristotle were comfortable in a slave society. They offered justifications for oppression. They served tyrants. They taught the alienation of the body from the mind (a natural enough ideal in a slave society); they separated matter from thought; they divorced the Earth from the heavens – divisions that were to dominate Western thinking for more than twenty centuries.

Plato, who believed that “all things are full of gods”, actually used the metaphor of slavery to connect his politics with his cosmology. He is said to have urged the burning of all the books of Democritus (he had a similar recommendation for the books of Homer), perhaps because Democritus did not acknowledge immortal souls of mortal gods or Pythagorean mysticism, or because he believed in an infinite number of worlds. Of the seventy-three books Democritus is said to have written, covering all of human knowledge, not a single book survived. All we know is from fragments, chiefly on ethics, and second-hand accounts. The same is true of almost all the other ancient Ionian scientists.

We are flawed by ancient contradictions. Image: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

In the recognition by Pythagoras and Plato that the Cosmos is knowable, that there is a mathematical underpinning to nature, they greatly advanced the cause of science. But in the suppression of disquieting facts, the sense that science should be kept for small elite, the distaste for experiment, the embrace of mysticism and the easy acceptance of slave societies, they set back the human enterprise. After a long mystical sleep in which the tools of scientific inquiry lay moldering, the Ionian approach, in some cases transmitted through scholars at the Alexandrian Library, was finally rediscovered.

The Western world reawakened. Experiment and open inquiry became one more respectable. Forgotten books and fragments were again read. Leonardo and Columbus and Copernicus were inspired by or independently retraced parts of this ancient Greek tradition. There is in our time much Ionian science, although not in politics and religion, and a fair amount of courageous free inquiry. But there are also appalling superstitions and deadly ethical ambiguities.

Alien Culture

It was in Alexandria, during the six hundred years beginning around 300 B.C., that human beings, in an important sense, began the intellectual adventure that has to led them to the shore of space. But of the look and feel of that glorious marble city nothing remains. Oppression and the fear of learning have obliterated almost all memory of ancient Alexandria, whose population was marvelously diverse. Macedonian and later Roman soldiers, Egyptian priests, Greek aristocrats, Phoenician sailors, Jewish merchants, visitors from India and sub-Saharan Africa – everyone, except the vast slave population – lived together in harmony and mutual respect for most of the period of Alexandria’s greatness.

The city of Alexandria was founded by Alexander the Great and constructed by his former bodyguard. Alexander encouraged respect for alien cultures and the open-minded pursuit of knowledge.

According to legend – and it does not much matter whether it really happened – he descended beneath the Red Sea in the world’s first diving bell. He encouraged his soldiers and generals to marry Indian and Persian women. He respected the gods of other nations and he collected exotic lifeforms, including an elephant for Aristotle, his teacher.

Is it not worthy of tears that, when the number of worlds is infinite, we have not yet become lords of a single one? (Alexander the Great, when asked why he wept on hearing there was an infinite number of worlds, from On the Tranquility of the Mind, by Plutarch). Image : © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)