The Pre-Socratics Part 2: The Pythagorean School

The Pythagorean school begins our break from the Ionaian school and the first foray into the Italian school. This is known as the Italian school because it really began in the Italian colonies. This school began with Pythagoras, but we will begin with Pythagoras' influence: Pherecydes. Diogenes Laertius lays down much of this knowledge in his Lives of Eminent Philosophers.

Pherecydes was the teacher of Pythagoras, and arguably the source of the Pythagorean school. However, according to Tullius Cicero he was more of a prophet than a natural philosopher, for he was most renown for predicting an earthquake by divining in water drawn from a well. Unfortunately, little else is known but he seems to be more of a religious figure than philosopher per se. I speculate that some of Pythagoras' more religious style views that we will get into shortly came from Pherecydes.

There is also an Alcamaeon of Croton that I won't be covering in this article. He just doesn't have enough information available for me to write a section on him. Although he did certainly exist. I will note that in general much fewer sources for these philosophers than those in the Milesian school that we covered recently.

Pythagoras

Pythagoras was seen as a religious figure, and he seemed to found a sort of religious order. Frustratingly, Aristotle is said to have written an entire book on this school of thought but it has since been lost. Diodorus Siculus in his Library notes that the men in the order of Pythagoras shared their property amongst themselves. I know some readers might be quick to jump to this being some sort of proto-communist living arrangement, but please dear reader, refrain from this temptation. Many religious orders to this day engage in such practices voluntarily and not for any of the same foundational reasons as communists might. As we discussed recently, communism is really a product of the Enlightenment and French Revolution. Livy in his The History of Rome tells us that Pythagoras founded this order in Crotona, a city in Southern Italy. Pythagoras was a big influence on Plato, and by extension, all Western thought

Of course, what he is most known for today is the Pythagorean theorem relating to right angled triangles. Indeed, it seems as though they were obsessed with numbers. Aristoxenos notes that Pythagoras was the first to take the use of numbers beyond commerce and simple uses. He devised systems of representing numbers as dots arranged in triangles and squares. The Pythagorans seemed to think that numbers were the basis of all things. They seemed deeply interested in music and harmony, and noticed a relationship between the harmony of music and the harmony of celestial bodies. Undoubtedly, they had discovered the laws of cyclical motion which any undergraduate physics student deals with to this day.

Pythagoras appears to have believed in reincarnation according to Xenophanes, he stopped a man beating a dog saying that he recognised the cry of his friend coming from the dog, so his soul was within. This is confirmed by Porphyry in his Life of Pythagoras stating that the soul is immortal and it changes into other kinds of animals. Porphyry also says that "[Pythagoras believed] things that happen recur at certain intervals, that nothing is absolutely new". There is a huge amount to learn from just a few lines! Firstly, it seems as though the concept of an immortal soul and reincarnation first came from Pythagoras. While the concept of reincarnation was mostly dropped from the Western philosophical canon, the concept of an immortal soul continues to this day. More interesting I think is the second line. Pythagoras has a cyclical historiography - that is, he believes that history is repetitive. This is still an active field in modern philosophy today that is often debated. There is a more progressive view of history coming from the likes of Marx, but Pythagoras seems more at home with philosophers like Oswald Spengler.

Philolaus

Thankfully, a few fragments of Philolaus' wiritings remain, and he is therefore not as much a mystery as most other pre-Socratic philosophers. He was born in Croton, the city where Pythagoras originally set up his order. His work is the earliest known example of Pythagorean thought, yet it differed drastically from Aristotle's account of Pythagorean philosophy. This indicates that there were by this time several different sub-branches of Pythagoreans that we are unaware of.

Philolaus has a very specific and complex way of viewing the world. He sees everting as being combinations of the "limitless" and "limited". Consider a cube of stone. Since I can imagine stone as being any size and shape, even infinite, it is a limitless property. It only appears in this instance in this block of stone because it has a limited property - it's specific size and shape. Of course, by the reverse, a size and shape can not exist on its own without a material to fill it. He then develops this idea by adding harmony - simply lumping limitless and limited properties together doesn't really do much, instead they must be joined in ways that are appropriate to the product in question.

It also seems likely that Philolaus abandoned earlier Pythagorean tenet of reincarnation, according to McKirahan, Philolaus says

The head is the location of intellect, the heart of the soul and sensation, the navel of the taking root and growth of the first part, the genital organs of the depositing of seed and of generation. The brain contains the principle of man, the heart contains the principle of animals, the naval that of plants, and the genital organs that of them all. For they all both flourish and grow from seed.

What we see is critical - plants do not possess souls. This then contradicts earlier Pythagorean principles of plants being one of the things people can reincarnate into. Of course, he may just have denied that humans could reincarnate into plants. Only if we could get more of his works could we know!

Archytas

Archytas seems to be a philosopher who was very concerned with rhetoric. Aristotle recounts that he said

there was no difference between an arbitrator and an altar, for the wronged betakes itself to one or the other. Similarly, if one were to say that an anchor and a pot-hook hung up were identical; for both are the same sort of thing, but they differ in this—that one is hung up above and the other below. And if one were to say “the cities have been reduced to the same level,” this amounts to the same in the case of things far apart—the equality of “levelling” in regard to superficialities and resources.

The point here is of course that metaphors should be properly related to the objects, but not too obvious!

He also had an interesting relationship with his anger. Once, Diodorus Siculus tells us that he became angry with a slave due to a serious offence and after calming down said

You would not have got off without punishment after such misconduct, had I not lost my temper

Pesudo-Plutarch gives us a scrap of information when he says that "music" was responsible for all motion. This, I assume, is a translation error and "harmony" would fit better. The Pythagoreans, as we have already discussed, were tremendously infatuated with the idea that harmonies or ratios between numbers described all things in the universe. It seems to me that this thought has generally left the Western philosophical canon. The only palce where it appears to still manifest is among New Age people, who often talk about the universe as having a fundamental "vibration" and "connectedness".

Sadly, I can not give any more details regarding Archytas since very little is known about him

Conclusions

This school was far more challenging to discuss than the Milesians: simply - less of their works and ideas have survived. However they had some interesting ideas too. And their work on mathematics can not be overstated. In general, I think their work carried less significance than the Milesian school. In the next edition we will be covering the Elatic school.

References

Lives of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius

Divination by Tullius Cicero

The History of Philosophy by A C Grayling

Library by Diodorus Siculus

Philosophy Before Socrates by Richard D. McKirahan

Life of Pythagoras by Porphyry

Rhetoric by Aristotle

De Musica by Pseudo-Plutarch

Preamble - Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Socrates