From Religion to Philosophy: A Study in the Origins of Western Speculation

297 Pages·1991·136.303 MB·English

by  F. M. Cornford

FROM RELIGION TO PHILOSOPHY

FROM RELIGION
..
TO PHILOSOPHY
A STUDY IN THE ORIGINS
OF WESTERN SPECULATION
F. M. CORNFORD
WITH A FOREWORD BY
ROBERT ACKERMAN
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
/C,{'
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.:;I//
To
FRANCIS DARWIN
Published by Princeton University Press,
41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom by Princeton University Press, Oxford
Copyright© 1991 by Princeton University Press
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cornford, Francis Macdonald, 1874-1943.
From religion to philosophy : a study in the origins of western
speculation / F. M. Cornford ;
with a foreword by Robert Ackerman.
p. cm.-(Mythos)
Originally published: London: E. Arnold, 1912.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-691-02076-0 (alk. paper)
1. Philosophy, Ancient. 2. Greece-Religion. 3. Mythology,
Greek. I. Title. II. Series: Mythos (Princeton, N.J.)
B188.C6 1991
180-dc20 91-26966
This book was originally printed in 1912 by Edwin Arnold,
London, and is reprinted courtesy of the Cornford Estate.
The text is reproduced by arrangement with E. J. Arnold & Son, Ltd.
First Princeton Paperback printing, with a new foreword by
Robert Ackerman, in the Mythos series, 1991
Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,
and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the
Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the
Council on Library Resources
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 (pbk.)
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
Foreword by Robert Ackerman vii
Preface xm
I. DESTINY AND LAW 1
II. THE ORIGIN OF MOIRA 40
III. NATURE, GOD, AND SOUL 73
IV. THE DATUM OF PHILOSOPHY 124
V. THE SCIENTIFIC TRADITION 144
VI. THE MYSTICAL TRADITION 160
Index of Citations 264
General Index 270
FOREWORD
ROBERT ACKERMAN
University of the Arts
IN THE QUARTER CENTURY before the First World War, three British
classical scholars known as the Cambridge Ritualists undertook a
radical reinterpretation of the history and nature of Greek religion
and philosophy by introducing the data and methods of evolution-
ary anthropology and the sociology of religion. Francis Macdonald
Cornford was one of that brave trio of Ritualists, and From Reli-
gion to Philosophy (1912) was part of their reconstructive project.
Since the Renaissance most scholars had silently assumed that
despite resemblances between classical myths and those of the ab-
original peoples whom Europeans encountered in their explora-
tions, the Greeks were somehow the beneficiaries of a special dis-
pensation and were thus exempted from serious consideration as
"savages" or "primitives." This exemption had first been chal-
lenged by Friedrich Nietzsche in 1871 in his amazing leap in the
dark, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. There, lacking
anything that "careful" minds would regard as evidence, he "felt
his way into" the prehistoric Greek psyche, presenting the
achievements of the fifth century as the result of a continuous
high-pitched creative tension between the two principles of indi-
viduation and coalescence that he called Apollonian and Diony-
sian. For his daring, Nietzsche was excommunicated from the
ranks of scientific philology-to the immense benefit of subsequent
European philosophy. (In the preface to From Religion to P hiloso-
phy Cornford salutes Nietzsche as a pioneer.)
On a more sober level, and therefore more difficult to dismiss as
the ravings of an eccentric, three convergent factors-the general
ascendancy of evolutionary ideas after the publication of The Ori-
gin of Species in 1859, a series of dramatic archaeological discov-
eries in Greece and the Middle East in the 1870s that suddenly
gave new reality to the narratives of Homer and the Bible, and a
tide of ethnographic information that flooded European imperial
vu
FROM RELIGION TO PHILOSOPHY
Vlll
capitals at the end of the nineteenth century as a by-product of the
rush for colonies-together laid the groundwork for a view of the
gradual development of prehistoric culture over a much longer
time span than biblical chronology had permitted. Much of this
new approach to the past and the "primitive" was elaborated in
Britain, where the most important single work, at least in terms
of creating and informing educated opinion, was J. G. Frazer's The
Golden Bough. The Golden Bough offered a vision of humanity
slowly coming to the rationality and critical self-consciousness
represented by modern science and in the process emancipating
itself from the errors and confusions of magic and religion. In do-
ing so, the worldwide survey offered by this increasingly massive
compendium (2 vols., 1890; 3 vols., 1900; 12 vols., 1911-15) juxta-
posed the customs and ideas of so-called primitive peoples with
those of classical antiquity, not merely highlighting the similari-
ties between them but explicitly denying any privileged status to
the Greeks and Romans.
Building on both Nietzsche's irrationalism and Frazer's masses
of comparative anthropological evidence, and supplementing them
with new collectivist French sociology, the Ritualists boldly re-
imagined Greek religion and philosophy. While acknowledging
the greatness of the achievement of the fifth century, they noted
that even the Greeks were not self-created, that we could not fully
understand them without taking into account their prehistoric
past, and that because the Greeks had been so artfully thorough
in effacing that past, the only way we could re-create it was
through analogies to the beliefs and practices of other "savage"
peoples. Needless to say, this "primitivization" of the Greeks
amounted to rocking the classical boat in a serious way, and the
Ritualists and their ideas were at the center of controversy until
all intellectual work was swept away by the war.
At the heart of the group was Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928),
whose radical reinterpretations of Greek religion (Prolegomena to
the Study of Greek Religion, 1903; The mis, 1912) made her the first
female classicist in Britain to achieve an international reputation.
To one side of Harrison stood Gilbert Murray (1866-1957), whose
role, accomplished largely through writing and lecturing and es-
pecially through translating and producing the tragedies on the
stage, was that of interpreter to an increasingly Greekless audi-
FOREWORD IX
ence of Hellenism as an attitude to life. To the other side of Har-
rison stood Cornford (1874-1943), who undertook the reconstruc-
tion of the history of early Greek philosophy in the light of
anthropology. From Religion to Philosophy reexamines the crucial
moment when the "first philosophers" appeared in Greece in the
sixth century B.C.
How did the Greeks invent philosophical thought itself? A cen-
tury ago the answer had itself been influenced by the struggle be-
tween evolutionism and organized religion in the wake of The Or-
igin of Species. After Darwin, educated people agonized: could one
continue to accept literally the account of creation given in Gene-
sis? More generally, the controversy raged between those who still
regarded religion as both necessary and sufficient and those who
no longer accepted the need for supernatural sanctions. Historians
of philosophy assumed that something similar had taken place in
sixth-century Greece: that is, certain extraordinary individuals
(whom we call the pre-Socratics) had somehow overcome the sti-
fling mythological structures of religious thinking and miracu-
lously managed to break through to the clear air of philosophy.
Cornford in From Religion to Philosophy sees such a progressive
view as wholly mistaken and offers a completely different expla-
nation.
Cornford not only denied the existence of a radical break be-
tween an "age of religion" and "an age of philosophy," but he in-
sisted that no new age whatever had dawned; instead, the seem-
ingly fresh spirit of rational inquiry, both in its structures and the
terms of its discourse, was entirely and directly a product of the
religion and mythology that had characterized Greek life and
thought for centuries. Indeed, he asked, how could it be otherwise?
At any moment, people are able to think only in and with the con-
cepts made available by the language and culture into which they
are born. This is as true today as it was in the sixth century in
Greece. Thus, Cornford was among the first to see that "common
sense" is a cultural construction, that the category of the "obvious"
represents a society's unquestioned assumptions, and that modern
Europeans were assuming that what was self-evident to them was
equally self-evident to the Greeks. Whatever the puzzling pre-So-
cratic fragments might mean, Cornford argued, we may with as-
surance dismiss any reading that silently assumes that their basic
X FROM RELIGION TO PHILOSOPHY
terms of reference (the ways they imagined the universe, physi-
cally and metaphorically) were essentially the same as ours.
If, as Cornford claimed, the pre-Socratics were not a small group
of exceptional individuals who, through sheer force of intellect,
had thought their way through to a fundamentally new (postmyth-
ical, postreligious) way of understanding the world, how then are
we to understand them? For his answer he drew upon a body of
knowledge that, for the insular classicists and historians of philos-
ophy of the time, was as exotic as the dark side of the moon-con-
temporary French sociology of religion.
Starting in the mid-1890s, a small group of French sociologists
in Paris led by Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) had been developing
a new way of understanding the mental evolution of "primitive"
peoples. Frazer and others in the primarily individualistic Anglo-
Saxon tradition had regarded the advent of profound changes in
primitive worldview as the result of the gradual acceptance of solo
efforts by so-called savage philosophers. For Durkheim, however,
there were no savage philosophers because the spirit of disinter-
ested inquiry implied in "philosophers" was unknown in such so-
cieties. Instead, so far were primitive people from being self-con-
scious that they had virtually no "personalities" and indeed were
barely individuals at all, as we understand those terms. Lacking
"selves," and uninterested in thinking for themselves, for them the
prescriptions and sanctions of the "group-mind" were everything.
For Durkheim, then, primitive religion was not to be understood
as a series of propositions to which the individual members of the
worshiping community gave conscious assent. Instead, it was the
product of the spontaneous overflow of powerful group emotion
that arose when these otherwise virtually affectless individuals
came together at significant occasions during the year. In so doing
they became wrought up, thus creating and becoming possessed by
a set of sentiments that Durkheim called "collective representa-
tions." These special emotional states were then projected out-
ward, so that primitive theology and cosmology were essentially
ideas about society writ large and imputed to a divine author.
Cornford then applies these concepts, especially that of the "col-
lective representation," along with the notion of totemism, which
had become well known as a result of Frazer's tireless industry, to
elucidate the meaning of some of the gnomic pre-Socratic utter-