Places tend to shape us in ways we don’t fully understand. Even in something as universal as our contemplation of the basic ideas around knowledge, truth, right and wrong, religion, and the nature and meaning of life, we focus through the lens of our daily encounter with the world. In a place.

The premise that philosophy has a geography is the driving force of a delightful new book on the dawn of investigative thought.

How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks (2023) by Adam Nicolson looks at the time in western history where a few individuals decided to move beyond the oppressive world of god-kings and their priests and think more expansively about the nature of things. In this thought-provoking work, Nicholson is focused on “the motley group of mathematicians, moralists and mystics” we know as the pre-Socratic philosophers from between 800 and 450 BCE. What makes it a book wise beyond its self-help-like title is his attention to the importance of place—Megale Hellas (Greater Greece)—in shaping how they thought. He makes the brilliant case that day-to-day existence in the “bustling port cities” of archaic Greece, where there was an emphasis on “fluidity . . . interchange and connectedness,” gave birth to philosophy. Trade, in other words, along with the coming and going of peoples and ideas that trade brings, required “new ways of thinking about the world, of configuring our relationships with one another.”

He calls this approach to life the “harbor mind” and in his skillful hands it becomes an apt metaphor for thinking more expansively about a world that is always expanding before our eyes, in ancient times as well as today. Nicholson is, in effect, arguing that “engagement with the environment is always a philosophical act,” with one reviewer noting that “the close looking of the naturalist is more similar than we might think to the work of the philosopher.” 

Throughout this book, Nicholson travels to the ruins of these ancient port towns on islands and along the coasts of present-day Turkey, Greece, and Italy to try and envision what life was like in the centuries when they were at the hub of new and expanding trade routes. He wants to see “why this eruption of new thinking had happened in this place and at that time.”

Bertrand Russell wrote that in an attempt to “to conceive the world as a whole” the “greatest men who have been philosophers have felt the need both of science and of mysticism.” Nicholson continues that philosophy’s stature comes from its attempts “to bridge the transition between the perception of a universal harmony and the daily encounter with the world as it is, in all its difficulty and multiplicity.” To get there, those men and women—the early philosophers—did so not with assertions, but with inquiry. “They lived in a fluid world and thought with a harbor mind.”

Place is so very important to Nicholson. It is in the “meeting of the western limits of Asia, the northern shore of Africa in Egypt and the braided and tasseled fringe of southern Europe” where a new way of thinking about the world took root. He uses a variety of maps and numerous photographs and illustrations to help us understand how the world moved from a time where the texts that survive are “self-centered and repetitious” paeans by autocratic monarchs to works with dialogue, opposing views, and “multilayering of perspective.”

The author sails with us around the islands and into ancient harbors to consider, as another reviewer notes—“the lives of the pre-Socratic philosophers—some of whom you may know: Pythagoras, Heraclitus (‘You can’t step into the same river twice’) and Zeno. Others have been more or less forgotten: Anaximenes, Xenophanes and Archilochus.”

Nicolson is an English aristocrat (though he doesn’t use his title) and his father-in-law, John Raven, was “a Cambridge classicist who literally wrote the textbook when it comes to the pre-Socratics.” He uses this background to good effect to help us understand the world of the ancient Greeks and their writings in the context of today’s world. He is also upfront about how slavery is the foundation of this world’s wealth. Multiple times he takes pains to show the reader how the luxury of the those who rule and benefit from this trading in ideas and goods comes by standing on the backs of conquered people who are often interchangeable and ultimately disposable. Like many of the questions he explores, this facet of life in the world—of the wealthy exploiting others to hold on to their wealth—is persistent to the present day.

Each chapter is structured around a specific question—How to Be Me? Does Love Rule the Universe? Can I Live Multiple Realities?—and then ends with a chapter of takeaways, which readers of the self-help genre will find familiar. Yet even that chapter is written with a sparkle and wit that makes it a joy to read. Here he reminds us that the habit of questioning is the foundation of knowing and that because our knowledge is “afloat on a certain liquidity,” it is best not to cling too tightly to what we know. Yet because such liquidity can lead to anarchy in thought, we should work to determine what it is that makes the world whole. We can come to better understand that coherence, Nicholson suggests, when we see that our own individual soul is just the entry point to the “presence of souls throughout all aspects of creation.”

And he ends by pointing to the words of Empedocles. “Neither an intolerant idealism nor the tragic aspects of existence” can be allowed to dominate. They should be held in check by the “power of clear-eyed love, caught in its endless tussle with the forces of strife.” Empedocles considers each of his fellow citizens a harbor, and we take and give in our contact with other humans, accepting wisdom where we find it. “Existence will always carry within it the seeds of its own redemption.”

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash