Before Philosophy. The World Thales Broke

Go down. The passage is narrow enough that in places you crawl on your belly, and the limestone is wet against your shoulder. Your torch is a bundle of burning pine, and the light it throws is orange and unsteady. You have been moving through the dark for the better part of a kilometer, and above you sits a hundred meters of mountain. There is no water here worth carrying and no game to hunt. Nothing a body needs is this far in. And here, on the wall, in the reach of your small flame, are the horses.

They are thirty-six thousand years old. This is the Chauvet cave, in the south of what we now call France, and the animals painted on its walls – lions, rhinoceroses, cave bears, the great long-horned aurochs – were laid down by human hands so far back in time that the last ice age had not yet ended. Whoever made them planned the compositions and used the swell of the rock itself to give a bison its living shoulder. These people came back over centuries to the same walls. And they did all of it in a place where no one lived, that took real effort and real danger to reach, to make images they themselves could almost never see.

Whatever that was, it was not primitive. Set the word aside. A person who crawls a kilometer into a mountain to paint an animal he has no intention of eating is not a simpler version of you. He is doing something you have perhaps forgotten how to do. This course is the history of philosophy, and it will begin, in the next lecture, with a man who broke the world these painters lived inside. Before you can feel what he broke, you have to stand in here, in the cold and the torchlight, and take that world seriously.

The painters had no science and no philosophy, and they were not waiting for either. They already possessed something that did the work both of those would later claim – a way of holding the whole world together so that it made sense and could be lived in. The pieces of it we call myth, ritual, the ancestors, the sacred. Taken together they were a technology, and the thing they produced was order.

Start with the oldest word for that order. The Greeks called it kosmos, and the word did not first mean "outer space." It meant an arrangement, a good arrangement, the way a well-set table or a disciplined battle line has its arrangement. A cosmos is the opposite of a mess. And nearly every people that has left us its stories tells the same deep story about where the arrangement came from: in the beginning there was chaos – a formless water, or a gaping void where a monster coiled – and the world we stand on was wrested out of it. Marduk splits the body of Tiamat and makes the sky from one half. The God of Genesis moves over the face of the waters and divides them. Order is not the natural state of things. Order is a victory, and a recent one, and it can be lost.

That last sentence is the key to the whole archaic mind, and you must hold it if you hold nothing else. To the people in the cave, and to their descendants for tens of thousands of years, the world was not a stable machine that runs on its own. It was a settlement won from chaos that had to be defended. The sun rising tomorrow was not guaranteed by physics. It was guaranteed by whether the community did its part.

How does a community do its part? By repeating. This is the discovery of Mircea Eliade, the historian of religion who spent his life reading the myths of peoples who never met, and found under them one shared architecture. He called it the eternal return.

Here is the idea. Everything that matters was established once, at the beginning, by gods or ancestors – how to plant, how to marry, how to build a house, how to bury the dead. That first time was the real time, the strong time. Everything since is a copy that stays alive only as long as it keeps touching the original. So when the priest tells the myth of creation at the new year, he is not reminding anyone of an old story. He is doing the creation again. The telling is the act. The world, worn thin by a year of ordinary time, is refounded by the ritual and set back to its first strength, the way you wind a watch.

Read what this does to time. Time is not a line going somewhere. Time is a wheel, and the whole labor of religion is to keep drawing the wheel back around to the sacred beginning, without end. And read what it does to novelty. In a world like this the new thing is not exciting. The new thing is dangerous. A new rite, or a young man with a question no one taught him, is a tear in a fabric that was woven at the start of the world and must not be altered. To invent is close to to blaspheme. Hold that in mind when, in the next lecture, a man in Miletus opens his mouth and says something no one had ever said.

Now we can say exactly what myth is and what it is not, because the confusion on this point has ruined a great deal of thinking about it. Myth is not bad science. It is not the fumbling first draft of an explanation that Newton will later get right. Myth and science answer different questions, and they barely even hear each other.

Ask the mythic mind why the Nile floods. The answer will be a name and a story: the goddess weeps, the god returns, and here is what we owe him for it. The question myth answers always has this shape – who did this, and what is our debt to them. It is a question about persons and obligations, about whom to thank and whom to fear. It binds the one who asks it into a web of relationship with powers he did not choose. What myth never asks, in tens of thousands of years, on any continent, is the other question: what is it made of, and how would we check. That question does not occur, because it would be impious to the point of meaninglessness. You do not run an audit on your father. You do not run a test on the god who feeds you.

This is why the sentence Thales is about to say – that everything, at bottom, is water – is stranger than it sounds. On its face it is almost childish, and it is wrong. Its weight is that it answers a question no one had been asking. Thales looks at the flooding river and does not ask whom to thank. He asks what it is. That is not a better myth. It is a different organ, opening in the human skull for the first time. The next lecture is the story of the men in whom it opened, and of what it cost them.

There is one more institution at the center of the old world, and it is the hardest for us to look at. Walk into any archaic society, anywhere, and near the middle of it you will find an altar with blood on it. Sacrifice is the one human institution nobody remembers inventing. It is simply always already there, older than writing, older than the city, and everywhere it does the same work: it buys the community's peace at a price paid in a life.

Take the case we find easiest to hold at arm's length. The Aztecs believed the sun would not rise without human blood, that the god who carried it across the sky ran on hearts, and so their priests opened chests at the top of the pyramid on an industrial scale and told themselves they were keeping the cosmos alive. It is easy to file that under "them," a horror committed by strangers far away. So let me bring it home. The Greeks – the same Greeks who will give us geometry and tragedy and Thales – kept a ritual called the pharmakos. In a year of plague or famine an Ionian city would take a human being, often a beggar or a criminal kept for the purpose, feed him, parade him through the streets, then drive him out or stone him at the walls, loading the city's sickness onto his back as he went. The civilized Greeks had a scapegoat on hand for bad years. Students never expect this, and they should not forget it.

Cross to Gaul and the same logic shows its teeth. Julius Caesar, describing the Druids, reports that they packed giant human figures woven out of twigs with living men and burned them alive, and that they preferred convicted criminals for the fire – but, he adds in one flat clause, "when the supply of the guilty fails, they resort to the execution even of the innocent." Caesar was a conqueror writing up the very people he was subjugating, and every horror he records also flatters his war, so read him with care; yet the clause is too exact to dismiss. The machine needs a body. Guilt is a convenience, and when it runs out, innocence will do.

And you do not even have to take this on the word of a hostile Roman, because the northern bogs kept the evidence. On 8 May 1950 two men cutting peat near Tollund, in Denmark, uncovered a face so fresh and so calm that they stopped work and called the police to report a recent murder. They were right about everything but the date, which was off by some two thousand years. A plaited leather noose was still drawn tight around the dead man's neck and coiled down his back, and his last meal, preserved in his stomach, was a gruel of barley and wild seeds with no meat in it, eaten in the dead of winter – he had been hanged and laid in the bog to hasten the coming spring. The archaeologist P. V. Glob, who studied him, refused to call such people monsters: majesty and gentleness, he wrote, still stamped the face, and the men who killed him were ordinary Jutland farmers doing what their religion asked, in villages no more savage than yours. The same bog-piety that, in Tacitus's telling, drowned the goddess Nerthus's slaves in a sacred lake handed this one face back to us, unrotted, across the millennia – a sacrifice you can still walk up to behind glass.

I am going to set this down and walk past it for now, because it deserves better than a paragraph. A lecture near the middle of this course will come back to this altar and read it properly – why it worked, and what one Friday in Jerusalem finally did to it. For now hold only the fact: the old order, the beautiful ordered cosmos, had a body under its floor.

For most of the human story nothing disturbs this. The wheel turns, the myths are retold, the altars are fed, and it holds. Then, in a window of a few centuries in the middle of the first millennium before Christ, in several places that had no contact with one another, the fabric tears at once. Karl Jaspers gave the period a name: the Axial age, the hinge on which the human mind turns. In India the Buddha sits down under a tree. In China Confucius walks from court to court. And in the two places this course will follow, something cracks that never closes again.

One place is Ionia, the Greek coast, where the men of the next lecture begin asking what the world is made of and stop asking whom to thank for it. Hold that lane. The other place is a strip of hill country on the eastern Mediterranean, where a small and often conquered people, the Hebrews, are saying something with no parallel anywhere. Their God is not a force inside nature. He is not the storm or the harvest. He stands outside the whole of it, having made it, and – this is the part that changes everything – he makes moral demands. He is a person with a will, and what he wants is not more blood on the altar. Through the mouths of the prophets he says he is sick of your sacrifices and wants justice for the widow instead. A God who takes the side of the powerless against the crowd is loose in the world, and the later lectures of this course – six through ten – are the long story of what he did to it.

Two lanes, then. Athens and Jerusalem. The West is what happened where they crossed.

Before we walk into that next room, stop and count what the exit costs, because a course that only cheers the escape has lied to you about it. The mythic world was not a prison the clever were glad to leave. It was a home, and it gave two gifts a human being can hardly do without. It gave you a place – you knew exactly where you stood, in the web of your ancestors and your gods, from the moment you were born, and you never had to earn it or ask for it. And it gave you meaning without labor – the good harvest and the dead child alike sat inside a story that held them and made them bearable.

The philosophers are going to trade all of that away, and they will get truth for it, and truth turns out to be expensive. The man who says the sun is a stone and not a god has, in the same breath, made himself homeless. He no longer lives inside the story that gave everyone else their place. He stands outside it, in the cold, holding a fact. The next lecture is a ledger of what that homelessness cost the first men who chose it, and it is not a happy ledger – exile, burned books, flight by night, the cup of poison. Do not read their story as the clever finally defeating the foolish. The people in the cave were not fools. They had something whole, and the philosophers broke it, and some of what broke does not grow back. We are still, all of us, a little homeless from it.

One last thing, and then we go down into Miletus. Do not make the mistake of thinking the mythic order is safely dead, a thing behind museum glass. It is not dead. It waits. It is the oldest setting of the human machine, and under enough pressure a people will slide back into it without noticing – the wheel of sacred time, the demand that the new be crushed, the altar that asks again for a body, the crowd that feels whole only once it has found someone to blame.

You do not have to look far to see it running. A state that feeds its own young men into a war for the greatness of the state, and tells their mothers the death was a sacred duty and the killed are holy – that is not a modern invention. That is the archaic altar, back in operation, wearing a flag. It has re-entered the world, not far from where I am writing this, in our own time. The oldest thing is never as far away as you would like.

The course you are beginning is, from one angle, the whole record of the exits humanity found from that room. Some exits were Greek and some were Hebrew, some were arguments and some were a man refusing to run from a death sentence, and we will walk each of them slowly. But you cannot value an exit until you have felt the walls. So we begin inside. In the next lecture a man in a Greek port looks up at a sky full of gods and thinks, for the first time in the human record, that underneath them there might be only water, and a law. Turn the page and meet the daredevils.