THE PHILOSOPHICAL FORUM

Volume XXXII, No. 2, Summer 2001

PHILHELLENISM AND GREEK PHILOSOPHY

NICKOLAS PAPPAS

Modern European nationalism has often drawn inspiration from the past, link-
1
ing contemporary compatriots to their shared ancestors. In the rhetoric of
nationalistic movements of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the
nation’s past defined the destiny to which the nationals of the present were
reawakening. So there was nothing surprising in Adamantios Koraes’s speaking,
in 1803, of modern Greeks’ fateful discovery of their “ancestors’ glory,” a
discovery that humbled and intimidated the moderns but also showed them who
they were.2
But while Greek nationalism fit a common pattern in its reappropriation of
that lost past, the Greek reawakening also took sustenance from an atypical
phenomenon that has helped to set Greek nationalism apart from most other
species. For in the late eighteenth century Greek intellectuals came to realize
that, over the preceding fifty years or so, English and German scholars had been
independently developing a philhellenic enthusiasm for Greek antiquity, fueled
by the dissemination of ancient literary works.3 The modern Greeks drew
encouragement from this foreign enthusiasm; and so modern Greek nationalism
has oriented itself toward the past in an unusual manner (most obviously paral-
leled by Israel), beginning the story of its own history not a few centuries back
but deep in antiquity.
Modern Greek nationalism has subsequently always retained at least a tincture
of Philhellenism, i.e., the identification of contemporary Greek-speakers with
the Greeks of classical antiquity, and especially those ancients of the several
centuries that began with Homer and ended with Alexander. During and after
the war of liberation from the Ottoman Empire, Philhellenism helped the Greeks
find support from foreign classicists, artists, and poets who projected their own
nostalgia for antiquity onto the modern liberationist movement. For German and
English Philhellenes such as Byron and Shelley, the thought of a persevering

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unity between ancient and modern Greece gave them a reason to support the
modern state.
For the Greeks themselves, the possession of an unusually splendid ancient
past elevated their sense of their own dignity, instilled their uprising with
world-historical significance, and—not least—provided some content to the
Greek ethnic identity. Those inhabitants of the Peloponnese and a bit of the
Greek mainland who first called themselves citizens of modern Greece shared
scarcely more than their nationalism. “Being Greek” simply did not mean
enough, after centuries of occupation, shifting international zones of influence,
and no clear Greek nation-state in the past. Part of the project of becoming mod-
ern Europeans therefore involved the Greeks’ enterprise of allying themselves
with the ancient inhabitants of their country. If being a modern Greek implied
kinship with Plato and Aristotle, then those authors’ language, creations, and
principles could form the foundation for modern Greeks’ own creations, lan-
guage, and guiding principles. Here nationalism led to the development of a
modern national identity, on the basis of just the wish for that identity.
Philhellenism thus practices a form of what Nietzsche calls “monumental
history,”4 a useful source of encouragement when a time calls for heroic efforts.
The distance of classical Greece from the present helped to erase the details of
antiquity, considered as merely one historical epoch among others, and replace
those details with the display of its highest achievements.
But as Nietzsche also says, monumental history bears the finest fruit when
used by those building monuments; in lesser hands, or in times of no emergency,
it can provide excuses for tearing monuments down. His example comes from
the arts, with obvious application to every other cultural history:

Think of artless and feebly artistic natures girded and armed by monumental history of art and
artists: against whom will they now direct their weapons? Against their traditional enemies, the
strong artistic spirits. . . . It is their path which is obstructed and their air which is darkened when
one dances idolatrously and diligently round a half understood monument of some great past, as
though to say: “See, this is true and real art: what do you care about aspiring newcomers!”
(ADHL, 18)

It cannot be doubted that Greece’s identification with antiquity does not carry
the same significance now, when the nation can assume its continued existence.
(Probably for this reason, Greeks today take their ancient ruins and authors quite
for granted.) And deprived of such monumental projects as the formation of a
modern identity, Philhellenism threatens to turn into a rhetorical prop for free-
wheeling attacks on modernism at large, or the European West. The monumen-
tal history of classical Greece then invites a super-nationalism that takes refuge
in an unassailably distant past and sees all subsequent developments in Euro-
pean history as symptoms of decline.

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In the case of Christos C. Evangeliou, my immediate subject here, a mystic

and quite idiosyncratic interpretation of ancient Greek philosophy is brought for-
ward as a reproach to all philosophy since, but also to modernism and
postmodernism alike, to contemporary secularism, and to Christianity and Islam.
The guiding spirit of this enterprise pretends to be the love of true philosophy,
but it is more fairly called the mischievous side of Philhellenism.
Evangeliou’s essays on this subject are now collected in a volume, The Hel-
lenic Philosophy,5 that presents itself as a rediscovery of authentic Greek
thought and the first step in its reinstatement. The four essays in the volume
share Evangeliou’s guiding theme of a radical discontinuity between pre-Chris-
tian Greek philosophy and European thought since Constantine. Whitehead may
have called European philosophy “footnotes to Plato,” but Platonism since
Augustine—Evangeliou says—has nothing to do with the Platonic philosophy
that had already existed for a thousand years before Augustine. As for Aristotle,
modern Europeans salute him as the progenitor of philosophical rationalism, but
his thought is humanistic and spiritual (as theirs is not) and he knew how to be
an open-minded thinker. In general, so-called European “philosophy” shares
only a name with true philosophy, the Hellenic thought of Plato and Aristotle,
noetic yet undogmatic—that development of the soul to which Athena may yet
(as Evangeliou would put it) return a benighted world.
In a welcome—though not for that reason successful—departure from the
usual Philhellenic rhetoric, Evangeliou claims an origin for his ideas reaching
back beyond the Greeks. The works of Plato and Aristotle, on his view, transmit
ideas from even more ancient spiritual sources in Africa and Asia; and it is these
ideas, the heritage of the Greeks, that will save the modern world.
The argument of The Hellenic Philosophy may be called an exercise in the
delegitimization of medieval and modern philosophy. According to Evangeliou,
the last sixteen centuries of philosophy have lost two essential traits that were
present in Plato, Aristotle, and their legitimate successors from Porphyry to
Pletho. Platonism meant (1) open-minded free thinking and (2) the training of
the soul, and so did all other truly Greek philosophy. European “philosophy,” a
homonym of the real thing, has never meant either. If modern Greece managed
to wake up to its ancient destiny, the rest of the West remains in dogmatic
slumber.
Evangeliou sees free thinking in the Greek philosophical habit of investigat-
ing topics without the need to reach conclusions dictated by religion, science, or
political ideology. Thought alone determined what direction it would take.
Philosophy was a queen then, not a handmaiden. European philosophy, by con-
trast, obeyed theocratic orthodoxy until the fourteenth century, then scientific
technology until the twentieth, and today either totalitarian ideology or fancy
neo-sophistical nihilism (1, 29, 166).

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Training of the soul, meanwhile, as Evangeliou uses the concept, embraces a

number of features of Greek philosophy: its attention to self-development; its
transposition of hero-paideia to the psychic domain; its equation of moral worth
with the accomplishments of the individual, as opposed to the operations of
grace (e.g., 3, 27). Christianity’s need for grace brought the end of this spiritual
exercise, so that by now both features of ancient thought have disappeared:
“Neither the spirit of free inquiry and bold speculation nor the quest for perfec-
tion, via autonomous virtuous activity and ethical excellence, survived . . . the
coming of Christian religion and the theocratic proclivity of the Church” (157).
Revisiting the recent discussions of antecedents to Greece, Evangeliou argues
in favor of Egyptian and other influences on Greek culture generally and Greek
philosophy especially. As in the other three essays, he principally wants to
demean the Europe that lies outside Greece; but his argument has a good con-
science here, where he pursues that goal by giving credit to other cultures. His
monumental nationalism permits there to have been greater monuments in the
more distant, non-Greek past. Evangeliou quite rightly does not expect Philhel-
lenism to rest on a spontaneous “Greek miracle” by which the ancients boot-
strapped their way out of Mediterranean culture. So he does not waste his time
on the fantasy of autochthonous civilization: ultimate and pure sources for phi-
losophy are not what philosophers or anyone else should be looking for.
Still Evangeliou’s treatment of the subject falls short of the argument he needs
to make, mainly because he focuses on the question of who, according to the
Greeks, influenced them, instead of the question that inspires the controversy,
which asks who really did influence them. The former question is easy to an-
swer, inasmuch as Herodotus, Plato, Isocrates, and other authors explicitly
testified to Egypt’s impact on their culture. No one has denied that they spoke of
the Greek debt to Egypt, or that they believed what they said. But what the
Greeks say about themselves plays only a subsidiary role in determining who
they are. Given some of the other wild tales that Herodotus swallows whole, he
cannot be said to offer reliable evidence for the Egyptian influence. And we can
only guess who Plato’s sources were. More fundamentally, the problem is that
nothing prompts a civilization’s myth-making like the question of its own
origins. On this score the Greeks are most likely to be spreading untruths, and
the modern researcher must bear in mind that it gratified their self-importance to
attribute their learning to Egypt. Evangeliou distances himself from Bernal’s
Black Athena (144n78), but at least Bernal knows to do more than ask the
Greeks themselves where their culture came from.
Besides, Evangeliou is attacking a straw man. Scholars know what Herodotus
and Isocrates said about the Egyptians—these are not arcane references—and
most acknowledge the existence of some influence between Greece and Egypt.
Evangeliou pictures himself swimming against a current of opinion that takes

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Greek thought to be a self-created force; but he has to go back to Guthrie and

Jaeger to find representatives of that opinion.
Straw-man reasoning pervades the whole of Evangeliou’s argument, though.
No one really thinks philosophy has been footnotes to Plato: no one claims such
a thing, or offers evidence for it. No one asserts that Aristotle made Europe
rational, or believes any of the other clichés that Evangeliou sets himself to
refute. But the book’s real failure goes beyond its volleys at easy targets, its
stylistic infractions (florid appeals to Zeus and Athena; references to the con-
temporary political problems to be solved by a renascent Platonism; etc.), and
even beyond the nationalism that motivates the book so excitedly that before
being offended one is briefly amused. While all these flaws damage The Hel-
lenic Philosophy, without them it would still suffer from its central thesis, that
Greek philosophy was open-minded and elevating while its successors are dog-
matic and degrading.
This grand thesis of Evangeliou’s vacillates between history and biography,
which is to say between the claim that ancient polytheistic culture at large pro-
moted toleration, while Christianity and Islam brought dogmatism into the
world, and the claim that individual philosophers of pre-Christian Greece ex-
plored all possible beliefs, while Christian, Muslim, and modern philosophers
restricted themselves to justifying the dominant religion or science they lived
under. Evangeliou writes ambiguously, sometimes seeming as if he primarily
meant to celebrate the healthily tolerant culture that first nursed philosophy (see
35n28, 40n62), sometimes as if what really called for recognition were the brave
and flexible minds of the individual great Greek philosophers (e.g., 54).
In itself this ambiguity is not fatal. Someone might want to make both claims,
or believe them to be linked. The problem is that either way of stabilizing the
assertion leaves it false. Considered as a civilization, polytheistic Greece has
not earned the right to be called tolerant, whether in its practices or in its
unpracticed ideals. Considered as the product of individual thinkers, the philoso-
phy of Plato and Aristotle remains as loyal to unchallenged assumptions as the
philosophy of medieval and modern authors does.
As a historical claim about civilizations, Evangeliou’s thesis fails on its face.
Christianity must stand accused of repressive episodes, but there is no reason to
keep believing the countervailing legend—really it is more like a rumor—of
pagan tolerance.6 If tolerance means not just the slackjawed willingness to be-
lieve anything at all, and utter lack of a critical faculty, but some more active
trait worth praising, then it must imply the articulated idea, or else the
unarticulated practice, of permitting the expression of views one disagrees with.
And the polytheistic culture that Evangeliou writes about cannot claim either to
have done such a thing or promised to. Pre-Christian Greece never formulated
so much as the concept of tolerance, which had to wait for Tertullian, let alone a

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legal institution purposely designed to protect the expression of unpopular

views: that came into existence another century later with the Edict of Milan
(exactly at the time, Constantine’s time, that Evangeliou cites as the end of
open-minded philosophy). As for tolerant practices, they can hardly include the
Athenian prosecutions of Anaxagoras and Protagoras for quite mild religious
skepticism, or the expulsion of Diagoras of Melos for mocking the Eleusinian
7
mysteries. Surely the call to bring back Hellenic glory should not ground itself
in discredited theories of religious history—except that without those theories
Evangeliou has exactly no support for his grand thesis.
That thesis works no better if we turn it into a biographical claim. Certainly
Evangeliou does not give the allegation anything like the support it needs, but
rather shrugs off whole philosophical traditions as narrow-minded and takes his
proof to be self-evident. Descartes, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, and countless others
labor to keep their thinking orthodox, he says (21, 166), without a word about
these philosophers’ ideas or specifically how the ideas were bent into the pre-
vailing scientific Weltanschauung. Contemporary secular thought is all madness,
while religious belief is folly (69): only at this vertiginously general level does
Evangeliou describe modern philosophy’s loss of those essential traits that
Greek thought had hoped to bequeath to it.
As for the contrasting freedom of thought in Greek philosophers, one can only
suggest such a thing by ignoring the number of presuppositions that a philoso-
pher like Plato either fails to notice or consciously refuses to question. If modern
philosophers such as Descartes and Kant accommodate their philosophies to
Galilean and Newtonian science, it is just as true that Plato and Aristotle make
sure not to contradict the science of their own day. We only may not notice their
deference to science because the science is not always set out formally. Why
does the Timaeus, for instance, try to show why the creator made four earthly
elements (53a–b)? Because natural philosophers of that time assumed fire, earth,
air, and water to be the four elements constituting every physical object. Here is
a dominant scientific presupposition that predetermines the outcome of a philo-
sophical argument.
Aristotle makes a more nuanced case. He undertakes his own scientific in-
quiry, of course, so that his references to science will not have the flavor of
appeals to external authorities. Nevertheless Aristotle does distinguish his bio-
logical studies from his ethical and metaphysical ones, and takes care to con-
struct a logical theory that respects the discoveries of science. Substance stands
apart from the other nine categories because Aristotle takes science to have rec-
ognized the living thing as a particularly endowed object. The syllogism belongs
at the heart of the Organon not because some self-generated principle of thought
would have it so, but because syllogistic reasoning takes the human mind from
knowledge that the mind already possesses to its unseen implications. And

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according to Aristotle we can know the value of that movement of thought, from
old knowledge to new, precisely because that is the movement of thought that
characterizes the sciences (Posterior Analytics I.1 71a1ff.). The workings of
science determine the structure of reasoning and thereby the direction of inquiry.
(On the subject of Aristotle: it is time to stop a tendentious citation of
Nicomachean Ethics 1094b13–28 as a sign of Aristotle’s open-mindedness,
which is how Evangeliou reads the passage [54]. Aristotle warns his audience
not to expect the same precision and clarity in ethical discourse as in geometry.
First of all, it is hard to think of any modern philosopher who would disagree—
apart from Spinoza, say, who anyway does not fit Evangeliou’s caricature of the
moderns as orthodox. Secondly, Aristotle’s point is that he will speak generally,
not that his conclusions will be tentative. Exactly where courage lies on the
spectrum between rashness and cowardice cannot be stated as an arithmetic
proportion, but Aristotle has no doubt that it does lie between the other two.
However broad his ethical claims are, he takes them to be true and fixed.)
Science can shape ancient philosophy even when it does not look like science.
When a Platonic dialogue inquires into the nature of knowledge, it often uses the
technai or crafts—which include medicine, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy
—as the paradigms against which to assess philosophical beliefs.8 The Hippias
Minor contains a typical Socratic question:

Looking at your own arts [technas]—they suffice—and to those of others, tell me if you find
(based on the agreements between us) if there is any area in which the true and the false are
different and not the same. (Hippias Minor 368e)

In the existing sciences, mastery over “the true and the false” are identical prac-
tices. Hence, Socrates concludes, the same relationship must hold for every
sphere of human action:

If Odysseus is false he becomes true as well, and if Achilles is true he is false. (Hippias Minor
369a)

Surely this use of technê, a typical Socratic example, amounts to looking to the
sciences not only for factual information but also for constraints on the nature of
knowledge. But that is all Kant does when distinguishing right from wrong
appeals to causal principle: merely looking to the sciences of his own day to
learn how causal claims work.
Plato constrains himself with an eye to religious institutions, too, despite his
occasional criticisms of the specific stories of his religion. In the Republic, to
mention only that dialogue, he regularly defers to the Delphic oracle as the high-
est religious authority, not to be gainsaid (427b–c, 461e, 540c). And the myth of
Er that closes the Republic builds enough choices into the otherworldly lottery

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of future lives to protect the gods from criticism. “God is blameless,” Lachesis
says (617e). Plato will not suggest heresies anything like the ones that brought
the state’s action against Anaxagoras and Protagoras, let alone against Socrates.
Often enough philosophers of the distant past strike us as pursuing pure phi-
losophy only because we overlook the intellectual context for their ideas. A
fundamental principle of political philosophy in both Plato and Aristotle, that
human beings must live in independent cities, would sound fresh and bold if it
had been invented today. Of course we know that principle not as a proof of
their ceaseless inquiry but precisely as a horizon to their thinking that they can’t
see. Likewise their acquiescence to slavery and (with rare and provisional ex-
ceptions) their deep distinction between Greeks and barbarians.
It is no insult to any thinkers to identify limitations in their assumptions. But
we should be mindful of the possibilities for a chauvinism that makes them seem
more open-minded than we are. Here Nietzsche’s concluding attack on the
connoisseurs of art applies precisely (after allowances for Nietzschean hyper-
bole) to the Philhellenic connoisseurs of philosophy who present themselves as
mourning the loss of a great possibility for the philosophical tradition.

Monumental history is the disguise in which their hatred of the mighty and the great of their time
parades as satisfied admiration of the mighty and the great of past ages. Cloaked in this disguise
they turn the proper sense of monumental history into its opposite; whether they know it clearly
or not, at any rate they act as though their motto were: let the dead bury the living. (ADHL, 18)

For all its faults, the philosophy since antiquity may be credited with as many
challenges to received opinion as Evangeliou finds in Aristotle and Plato. To
admit this parity, and the parochialism of ancient philosophy, is not to deny the
Greeks their privileged place in the history of philosophy. Nothing could. But
they can continue to occupy that envied status without being turned into the
sorts of wellsprings to good thinking from whom every departure amounts to a
betrayal.

The City College and Graduate Center,

City University of New York

NOTES

1 This generalization does not hold for nationalism from other parts of the world—the Americas,
for instance. Benedict Anderson calls the nationalistic movements of Europe, which do orient
themselves toward the past, “second-generation” movements, by contrast with the New World’s
original attempts to establish fresh and future-oriented states. Anderson, Imagined Communities,
revised edition (London: Verso, 1991), 194.
2 Elie Kedourie, ed., Nationalism in Asia and Africa (New York: Meridian, 1970), 40.
3 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 72.

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4 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. Peter Preuss
(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1980), hereafter ADHL; see especially pp. 14–19.
5 Christos C. Evangeliou, The Hellenic Philosophy: Between Europe, Asia, and Africa
(Binghamton, NY: Institute of Global Cultural Studies, 1997).
6 E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (New York: W. W. Norton and Com-
pany, 1965), typifies and no doubt abetted the bromide of pagan tolerance that Evangeliou’s ar-
gument relies on. For example: “The religious tolerance which was the normal Greek and Roman
practice had resulted by accumulation in a bewildering mass of alternatives. There were too
many cults, too many mysteries, too many philosophies of life to choose from. . . . Christianity
made a clean sweep” (133). Note that what Dodds calls tolerance is merely the willingness to
believe a large number of different claims, not the desire to preserve the expression of claims one
does not believe.
7 See Peter Garnsey, “Religious Toleration in Classical Antiquity,” in Persecution and Toleration,
ed. W. Shiels, Studies in Church History 21 (1984): 1–27.
8 The analogy to technê to establish criteria for knowledge recurs in Plato, especially in the shorter
dialogues. And technê often refers to science. For medicine as a technê see, among other exam-
ples, Charmides 161e, Gorgias 450a, Laches 185, Lysis 219a; for architecture, Charmides 161e;
for arithmetic, Charmides 165e, Gorgias 450d, Hippias Minor 367a; for geometry, Charmides
165e, Gorgias 450d, Hippias Minor 367d; for astronomy, Gorgias 451c, Hippias Minor 367e.

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