Ancient Philosophy

The Main Philosophical Issues of Antiquity: Cosmocentrism

Ancient philosophy, that is, Greek and Roman philosophy, arose in the 6th century BCE in Greece and persisted until the 6th century CE, when in 529, Emperor Justinian closed the last Greek philosophical school — the Platonic Academy, thus bringing an end to an unbroken tradition of philosophical thought that lasted for approximately 1200 years.

However, the importance of ancient philosophy lies not in its geographical or chronological framework, but in the logic of its development. Ancient philosophy emerged alongside the institution of slavery, which necessitated a separation between intellectual and physical labor. This division prompted the distinction between an inanimate object and the one who owns and controls it. A slave, in this context, was not viewed as a person, but as an object, an instrument with a soul, belonging to someone else.

Yet the slave and the slaveowner could not exist without one another. They were two sides of the same coin. Together, they formed a whole — first as the ancient Greek polis, and later as the vast Roman Empire.

The Logic of the Slaveholding Principle:

1. a) The slave is not a person, but a thing, a material substance devoid of initiative, thus existing only as potential. This is how the concept of matter came to be understood — not as the thing itself, but as the potential for something, akin to the relationship between dough and the bread it will become.
2. b) The slaveowner, likewise, is not viewed as an individual, but as a supra-personal formative idea, leading to the understanding of "idea" as a formative principle that transcends individual personality.
3. c) The slave and the slaveowner exist only in relation to each other and together form a unified whole — the slaveholding polis or the ancient state (first the Greek polis, and later the enormous Roman Empire). This unity represents the dialectical oneness of idea and matter.

Since the slave and the slaveowner are opposites, their unity is dialectical and supra-personal.

Logic compels one to explore these categories to their limits, leading to the conception of a sensory-material cosmos, which encompasses all things and all ideas and, most significantly, embodies the ideal principle of their unity.

Thus, the logical development of the slaveholding principle culminates in the affirmation of the sensory-material cosmos as the absolute — a supra-personal unity of idea and matter.

It is important to add that the sensory-material cosmos, as an absolute, requires nothing outside of itself. It is eternal becoming, eternal cyclicity, eternal return to itself, eternal repetition of itself. Therefore, the ancient sensory-material cosmos is ahistorical. It is astronomical, not historical. Its "history" is the eternal cycle or return to itself.

The cosmos was absolute; it never came into being, no one created it, and thus it could never perish.

The consciousness of the slaveholding class, already rational and no longer mythological, has a structured logical framework and enters into conflict with mythology, creating a system of abstract rational categories. "Cosmos" is the first category of ancient thought.

In modern science, this signifies the transition from myth to logos.

The general formula: the main problem of antiquity was the sensory-material cosmos as an absolute, governed by soul and reason, and subject to fate.

Thus, the entirety of ancient philosophical inquiry can be understood in the most general terms as the dialectical unity of idea and matter, developed through the concept of a sensory-material cosmos, animated by the cosmic soul and governed by the cosmic mind.