An outline of philosophy
Source: Victorian Labor College lecture, circa 1970
First published: Labor College Review, 1990-94
Transcription, mark-up: Steve Painter
With the final break-up of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD — the “world state” that had given a certain homogeneity to history in the West for more than 500 years — a period of confusion set in, of destruction and reconstruction, of the stirring of new forces. This period is often known as the Dark Ages, but this term refers not so much to lack of historical material as to the difficulty of finding connecting threads amid a tangle of warring purposes.
In Western Europe, outstanding developments in the Dark Ages included the consolidation of Teutonic invaders into nationalities on the wreckage of the old Roman provinces, the rise of the Papacy, the birth of the Holy Roman Empire under Charlemagne towards the end of the eighth century and its rebirth under Otto the Great (963). For 1000 years after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, its eastern section lived on at Byzantium, or Constantinople, upholding Christian traditions and culture against the rapid conquests of the Arabs as missionaries of Islam.
Before proceeding with the advance of Western philosophy, it is advisable to know some of the reasons for the collapse of Rome, as well as what has been called the Golden Age of Arab culture.
Both are placed in the Dark Ages, which may be reckoned from 400 to 1000 AD. The Arab “golden age”, was at its peak from about the ninth century (towards the end of the Western Dark Ages) through to the thirteenth century, keeping alight the torch of culture in a difficult period.
The mode of production of the territories at the heart of the Roman Empire was agriculture. Crafts and trading were much less important. Production for self-consumption dominated, although there was some commodity production.
Craftsmen and merchants often had farms in close connection with their domestic establishments. The farm provided provisions as well as raw materials such as flax, wool, leather, wood, from which members of the family made clothes, house furnishings and tools. Only the surplus, if any, was sold.
This mode of production required private property in most of the means of production, and from this economic inequality arose. For instance, natural causes could favour and enrich one farm and impoverish another. The fortunate farmers were able to get more land and cattle, which in turn raised the question of a special labour force to care properly for the increased herds and cultivation of more extensive fields. Thus, class differences and contradictions appeared.
Increasing productivity in agriculture also increased the surplus, which was used to feed craftsmen locally, but it also was used in exchange for useful objects that could not be produced locally due to natural causes or lack of skill. This gave rise to crafts and trade as well as creating further inequalities in landed properties due to differences in proximity for exchange of their produce with merchants.
Transportation difficulties made it harder it is for some farmers to bring products to market, favouring those closer to markets. Soon the big landowners were able to make use of their economic superiority to take the surpluses of the work of peasants and craftsmen and so win new riches.
But owning land is nothing without labour-power to work it and as production was mainly on the subsistence level it created a peculiar problem for the owners of large estates. Wage labour was not an option because even in occasional misfortunes that disrupted their subsistence, most families could find aid through relatives or neighbours.
As there was only a small supply of wage laborers, demand for them was also small. At this stage of history only compulsion could supply the necessary labour for the large estates. The answer was slavery.
In war, not only captured soldiers, but often entire populations of conquered land, were enslaved and divided up among the victors or sold.
In peacetime there were ways of catching slaves, such as sea-trading, which frequently was linked with piracy. The prize was able bodies, who were snatched by the coasting sailors when found defenceless on the shore.
In addition, male and female slaves mated and their offspring were slaves. However, it must not be thought that slaves in this category were ill-treated. Karl Kautsky, in his work Foundations of Christianity describes the slave in this period:
When they did productive work, it was often — in the case of the wealthy peasants — in common with the master; and always only for the consumption of the family itself, and that consumption had its limits. The position of the slaves was determined by the character of the master and the prosperity of the families they belonged to. It was in their own interest to increase that prosperity, for they increased their own prosperity in the process. Moreover, the daily association of the slave with his master brought them closer together as human beings and, when the slave was clever, made him indispensable, and even a full-fledged friend. There are many examples in the ancient poets of the liberties slaves took with their masters and with what intimacy the two were often connected. It was not rare for a slave to be rewarded for faithful service by being freed with a substantial gift, while others saved enough to purchase their freedom. Many preferred slavery to freedom; they would rather live as member of a rich family than lead a needy and uncertain existence by themselves.
The first enterprises producing commodities were probably mines. The very nature of mineral extraction and refining, especially metallic ores, hardly suits production for consumption by a single household. As soon as it is developed, it furnished a large surplus above individual needs and could only reach perfection when it was aimed at regular production of large quantities, for only that way could the workers acquire the necessary skill and experience to make the work profitable.
When minerals were no longer available from the most primitive surface gathering, larger workforces are called for. When the need exceeded the number of free workers that could be recruited from neighbouring villages, slaves or condemned criminals had to fill the gap.
These slaves no longer produced consumption objects for the personal use of their masters. They worked to make him money — that commodity with which one can buy everything, all the pleasures, all the power that some can never have enough of.
As much work as possible was squeezed out of the miners. The more work they did the more money their owner got. Moreover, they were fed and clothed as cheaply as possible, for money had to be provided for such purpose. As we have already seen, the proprietor of a rich household had no other outlet for his surplus consumption goods than to provide them for his slaves and guests. Now, under commodity production, the more money the enterprise earned, the less the slaves consumed.
The bigger the enterprise became, the greater was the loss to the slaves. Increasingly, they were detached from the household and kept in barracks that contrasted sharply with the luxury of their master’s dwelling. Personal relationships between master and slave were lost. The slave’s total absence of rights was now a fearful scourge. The free wage worker could still choose a master to a certain extent and, at least under favourable circumstances, use quitting work as a means of pressure on the master; but the slave who escaped from a master or refused to work was put to death immediately.
Slave labour was less productive than the labour of free peasants, but the slave, whose labour power did not have to be spared and who could be sweated to death, produced a greater surplus over the cost of their subsistence than the peasant, who required a higher standard of living.
There was the further advantage that the peasant was constantly being taken from the land for military purposes, while the slave was exempt from military service. The competition of slave labour also prevented the development of strong free crafts. The craftsmen in Rome remained poor, working alone for most part without an assistant, and as a rule working up material supplied to them, either in the house of the client or at home. The guilds remained weak and the craftsmen always depended on their clients, usually the big landowners and very often led a parasitic existence on the verge of sinking into the lumpen-proletariat as the landowner’s dependents.
The technological inferiority of slave economy is referred to in Marx’s Capital:
To use an expressive phrase of the ancients, the slave is merely a vocal instrument, distinguished only as vocal from the beast as semi-vocal instrument, and from the inanimate tool as dumb instrument. But he himself is careful to let both beast and tool know that he is of a different order from them, that he is a man. He has the self-satisfaction of convincing himself that he is different, by misusing the beast and damaging the tool. Consequently, it is a universal principle in production by slave labour that none but the rudest and heaviest implements shall be used, such tools as are difficult to damage owing to their sheer clumsiness.
Unintelligent, half-hearted, malicious, welcoming any chance to do harm to their hated tormentor, the slave labour of the latifundia produced far less than peasant farms. In the first century AD Pliny was already pointing out how fruitful the fields of Italy had been when generals were not ashamed to do their own farming, and how refractory Mother Earth became when she was turned over to mistreatment by chained and branded slaves.
This sort of agriculture might yield a greater surplus than peasant farms in some cases, but it could by no means support as many people in well-being. Meanwhile, all through the wars during which Rome kept the whole Mediterranean in constant unrest, the slave economy kept expanding and the peasant class kept shrinking; for war brought rich bounty to the great landowners who conducted it, new tracts of land and countless cheap slaves.
Like every mode of production that is founded on contradictions, the ancient slave economy dug its own grave. The Roman Empire was based on war. Only continual victory, continual subjugation of new territories and populations, could supply the masses of cheap slave material it required.
But war cannot be waged without soldiers, and the best military material was the peasant. Accustomed to steady hard work in the open, in cold and heat, in sun and rain, the peasant was the best fitted to endure military hardship. When peasant numbers dwindled, so did the supply of soldiers needed for the Roman army.
It became increasingly necessary to fill the ranks of the militia through voluntary enlistment — professional soldiers serving beyond their term of conscription. When this proved inadequate, recourse was made to all sorts of riff-raff and vagabonds. The Roman armies had more and more barbarian mercenaries from the conquered provinces, and finally in order to fill the ranks they had to recruit foreigners, enemies of the empire. Even in Caesar’s time, Germans were in the Roman army.
The great migrations, the flooding of the Roman Empire by swarms of savage Germans, did not mean the premature destruction of a flourishing high culture but merely the conclusion of the dissolution of a dying civilisation and the formation of the basis for a new upswing, even if this last took place slowly and unsteadily over centuries.
Christianity took form in the four centuries from the founding of the imperial power by Augustus to the barbarian invasion. It was an era that began with the greatest brilliance the ancient world attained, with the most colossal accumulation of wealth and power in a few hands, proceeded through the most abundant accumulation of the greatest misery for slaves, ruined peasants, craftsmen and lumpen-proletarians, with the crudest class contradictions and bitter class hatred, and ended with the complete impoverishment and despair of the entire society.
During the Dark Ages that followed the destruction of Roman civilisation by the barbarian hordes, the torch of culture was held aloft by the Arabs in the first flush of their newly found enthusiasm as missionaries of Islam. The period covered five centuries of our era: the ninth to the thirteenth, and reached its greatest extent of conquest in the seventh century, from Persia to Spain and the Atlantic.
But the culture, although Arabic in language, was not Arab. The nomads of the Arabian deserts had little culture or literature and could seldom read or write. They could fight, as centuries of tribal wars had proved, and they could breed camels and train horses to perfection. They possessed also a native poetry full of an intimate understanding of the nature and life that surrounded them. They also professed an almost chivalrous attitude towards women.
For culture, the nomads had to reach outside Arabia, to the rich lands bordering their own infertile country. That required two things, national unity and a powerful stimulus to drive wide conquests. Both these they obtained through the leadership of Muhammad, who for a time was able to weld the rival clans and cement unity with a religion to fight for.
The rich and ancient empires of Rome and Persia lay before them, both decrepit and internally diseased, and neither able to offer more than a brief and hopeless resistance. In twenty years the barbarians from the deserts found themselves masters of wide dominions, peoples of various tongues, religions and cultures imbued with the ideas of Greek philosophers and trained in the principles of Roman law. These peoples now had to submit, almost as serfs, to ignorant rulers who could speak only Arabic and had but one book, the Koran, to furnish their culture and laws.
To the new Arab rulers, in their superb arrogance, these subject peoples with their noble traditions of wisdom and law seemed wholly inferior. Having no learning, no science, no philosophy they utterly despised those who had. Having nothing to teach, they had no desire to learn, and the last thing they could imagine was that these people, so easily subdued, would become in a very short time the masters.
The only thing the Arab rulers could do was dominate, and so for a century they ruled the spacious lands they had conquered. The Umayyad caliphs, who in 661 AD made Damascus instead of Medina their capital, were tolerant governors, but lax as Moslems, realising that every convert to Islam meant the loss of the convert’s poll tax, the sum levied by the state in accordance with the law of the Koran on every unbeliever. After the loot brought in by the early conquests had subsided, this tax became a vital asset in the caliph’s exchequer.
The schools and law courts went on much as before because the Koran was quite insufficient to deal with complicated cases that clamoured for settlement according to the lucid priniciples of Roman law. Thus the Arab rulers abandoned learning to the infidel, who transacted all the business of the state and kept the records.
These records had at first to be kept in the language of the conquered peoples, for it was not until more than sixty years after the Hejira in 622 that an Arab coinage was minted and Arabic gradually became the language of official business. The subject peoples had then to learn Arabic if they wanted to do or be anything of importance and they were not slow to perceive the advantages of professing Islam and thus escaping the poll tax and taking the road to promotion.
By the second century of the Hejira the great majority of those professing Islam belonged to the despised subject races: Egyptian, Syrian, Persian, Greek and Spanish. In becoming Moslems they claimed equality with the Arabs, for Islam knows no distinction of race.
Arabic joined together the peoples of Asia, Africa and Spain, just as Latin cemented the Catholic world of Western Europe. But far from establishing the supremacy of the Arab race, it uprooted it. Once subject peoples accepted the Koran and its language, there was an end to the Arab prerogative. AIl became Arabs in tongue, but few were Arabs born. The Arabs had come to rule, but the subject peoples remained to teach, and the tutor in time became the master in another sense.
The old Hellenic tradition inherited by the Romans had languished but never died. Egypt and Syria were thoroughly familiar with Greek ideas, and Persia in her many wars with Rome had carried back to her own land much of her enemy’s culture.
Moreover, the theological controversies that split the churches of Byzantium proved a blessing in disguise, for they compelled a constant study of the Greek philosophers, above all of Aristotle, whose logic became the basis of all theological disputation. Here were materials for a revival of culture.
The impulse, however, could not come from the conservative Arab caliphs of Damascus. Fortunately, a revolution transferred the seat of government from the inland Arab city to Baghdad. The shifting of the capital soon led to a far more important change. Persian ideas surmounted Arab limitations, although the new ideas were expressed in the Arabic idiom.
The various departments of government were administered by Persian officials of a very different order of intellect from the Arab rulers. Baghdad was short-lived. A bare century comprised what may be called its apogee, after which it became the prey of Turkish mercenaries.
Nevertheless, it gave an impulse to progress and the fact that it was situated on a great river made it accessible to traders from all parts, east and west. The wares of China and products of the spice islands found a market at Baghdad, and great hoards of coins of the caliphs found buried in Scandinavia show how extensively they traded with the north for furs, leather and other materials. The voyages of Sinbad in the Arabian Nights typify real adventures of Arab and Persian sailors.
But Baghdad at its zenith attracted more than material trade. It became the focus of Arabic culture. The sudden desire for learning throughout the Islamic world became an astonishing historic movement. With this, the desire for travel brought a rush of students from all parts to Baghdad and afterwards to other centres of literature and science, resembling what took place later in Europe when scholars surged upon the universities in search of new learning.
In the mosques, the universities of Islam, were throngs of eager students who came to listen to the lectures of professors in theology, jurisprudence, philosophy, medicine and mathematics. The professors themselves came from all parts of the Arabic-speaking world.
They lectured how and when they pleased, without diplomas, salaries or academic control, sure of crowded audiences if they were worthy. They were appraised on their merits and supported by small voluntary fees. Every student was welcome, whatever their nationality, and most of the students, like their teachers were poor; but they helped one another and living was simple and wants few.
The foundation of study was the Koran, and this led to a minute study of the refinements of the Arabic language, to grammatical subtleties, to philology. The variety of the professors from different lands induced mental alertness, but all spoke the same language, worked at the same subjects and felt almost as much at home in a distant mosque as in their own city.
What medieval Europe knew of Greek philosophy, mathematics, chemistry, astronomy and medicine was learned principally through Latin translations from Arabic, which held their place in the schools of Europe down to the sixteenth century and well into the seventeenth.
Arabic culture pervaded the universities of Europe. Even in France, where the decisive victory of Charles Martel put a stop to the tide of Arab conquest, the Saracens still kept some influence in Provence, where the mountains of Les Maures not only preserve the name of the Moors but even remains of their castles, while Provencal poetry has easily recognised affinities with Arabic poetry of Spain.
The period of the Moors in Spain was to outshine even the glory of Baghdad. This brilliance was due, as at Baghdad, to a fusion of races, in which the Arab played a subordinate part. In Spain, the Arab element was small. The main influences were African Berbers (Hamitic tribes inhabiting the mountainous regions of Barbary and the northern portions of the Great Desert) and Christian Goths, with an important addition of Jewish intellect.
Some fifteen centuries stretch between Aristotle and Averroes, the philosopher of Moslem Spain. In the course of this long journey it had become in turn Hellenistic, Christian and Moslem; it had appeared in Syriac, Arabic and Latin form. It had gathered tributaries from Egyptian, Persian and Indian sources. But the stream that carried it through all vicissitudes was the Arabic language.
The unifying power of one language made possible the golden age of Arabic culture, which preserved and transmitted to the modern world the heritage of Greece and Rome.
Roughly, we may count the Middle Ages as lasting from AD 400 to 1500. The earlier part, the Dark Ages ram from about 400 to 1000. The eastern part of the Roman Empire kept its political and social constitution comparatively intact for centuries. The western half was wrecked, but once the Dark Ages passed the West forged ahead, even in those arts in which the Greeks excelled.
Through the Dark Ages it was an unquestionable historical fact that belief in a crucified Jewish carpenter, however it arose, took more men out of themselves than any similar event in recorded history.
The Christian religion compromised with the existing prejudices and practices of the day. From paganism it borrowed the custom of image worship, which was abhorrent to the early. From Judaism it borrowed a narrow intolerance: God’s chosen were but a fraction of humanity, the rest, “the nations, the Gentiles, were outside God’s covenant”.
Christianity was ready to adopt the imperial idea of world domination, by force if necessary, in its struggle to achieve universality. The barbarian invasion swept away the Roman governors and magistrates, but it left the bishop and the priest. This power was too tenacious and spiritual to be destroyed.
Latin, which has once been the language common to all cultivated folk in the West, was preserved by the permanence of church service books, and by that translation of the Bible which, as revised by Saint Jerome, became the Vulgate, the universally recognised version that practically superseded the original.
A few of these volumes survived in monasteries or in church sacristies. Thus, Christianity worked for the contamination of knowledge in both senses of the word. On the one hand, it cast overboard, as useless or even noxious, a great deal of the noblest of ancient thought. The classical volumes it preserved were comparatively few in number and narrow in their range, while the little that survived of ancient learning was spread among people far less cultivated than the society they had displaced, if more energetic and with a fresher outlook.
Coming to the Middle Ages proper (roughly the year 1000) we see the beginning of a real revival. Thinkers attacked with confidence the fundamental problems of predestination and free will, the origin of evil, etc. At the same time, a common belief existed that the last stage of the world was imminent. Sir Thomas More himself was inclined to it. This tended to slow progress, for what was the use of painfully beginning a long and continuous chain of facts and inferences that involved the labour of generations and centuries when a few years or even weeks might bring the end of all things?
As thinkers attacked the fundamental problems of the church, the decrees of the general councils also came under attack. But here, few thinkers dared to flatly contradict the church fathers, much less the saints.
Within those limits, though, argument and discussion were strongly encouraged. Thus we arrive at scholasticism, which meant the philosophy and theology of the university and school. In these new thinking shops, which came into existence at the end of the twelfth century, work was carried after the methods natural to a comparatively bookless but book-hungry age.
The teacher alone, normally, had a textbook; first he rehearsed all the arguments worth considering against what he judged to be the true conclusion. Then he rehearsed those that made for it. He then delivered his own formal judgment. Finally, he undertook to explain away, one by one, the apparent objections contained in his first list of arguments.
In other words he played four parts: plaintiff, defendant, judge and judge of appeal. Once clearly grasped, this combination of method and subject matter explains scholasticism as well as the main characteristics of medieval philosophy. That is, while the medieval agrees with ancient philosophy in its reliance on the dialectical method, it differs in its use, basing itself upon a certain body of traditional thought, contradiction of most of which was very dangerous if not absolutely forbidden.
Within these limits, thought became extremely active for many generations. Arguments among the highest went on as to whether god existed, whether he was perfect, whether he was the highest good, whether he was infinite, and so on.
It is not surprising, therefore, that these years betray a strong undercurrent of free thought in the modern sense. Amaury de Bene was condemned, and possibly burned, for pantheistic doctrines about 1207; David de Dinant’s writings were burned in 1210 and at this time some students were condemned to the stake. Also, by this time the Inquisition was in full blast; the authorities rejected a plea from one of its victims that a propositiion may be true in philosophy although false in theology. That plea was to remain the last defence of the freethinker. Free thought was driven underground; it could not form a school where the Inquisition was strong, yet it could not be altogether exorcised.
Foundations of Christianity, Karl Kautsky
What civilisation owes to the Arabs, Stanley Lane-Poole