The Intellectual “State of Exception”: ancient science, ethics, and democracy
Does science need democracy? Most American scholars would say it does when discussing the scientific advancements made in the modern age, but does this map onto the ancient world too? While some Classicists believe it does, we present a counterargument taking into account the influence of Near Eastern thought on the development of Greek natural philosophy.
Thales of Miletus, Pythagoras of Samos, Heraclitus of Ephesus, and Anaxagoras of Clazomenae. When reading a bit more about the hometowns of the early ancient Greek scientists and natural philosophers, one is immediately struck by the fact that none of these men were from Argos, Megara, or, least of all, Athens in Attica. They may have been descendants of the inhabitants of mainland Greece at some point in their past or of some Greek-speaking people. Perhaps their ancestors were Greek colonists who married indigenous inhabitants of Asia Minor, they were Asians who learned Greek. These kinds of biographical details are lost to time, so we are left guessing. Nevertheless, it is striking that so many of the earlier scientists who are considered the founders of ancient Greek "science" and "natural philosophy" are not from the Greek mainland, but came from the coastal cities of Asia Minor. We are not the first to make this observation and previous scholarship has suggested that the intellectual advances were a result of increased trade between Greece and Asia Minor. While it is difficult to prove that Near Eastern cultures inspired the early Greek scientific thought, an examination of the political systems of Greek-speaking, Near Eastern cities which were constantly interacting economically and socially with Persia might provide evidence for how non-democratic governments nurtured scientific advancement.
This project moves away from Atheno-centric explanations for the development of ancient Greek science and refutes the supposedly clear correlation between democracy and scientific innovation and advancement. Debate was a critical component of Athenian philosophy and this extended to natural philosophy and medicine. However, debate was not, if we approach this question from a more global perspective, unique to Athens and flourished elsewhere in non-democratic societies. We suggest that the reason for this was that innovation was further enabled by the intellectual freedom granted by the absolute authority of a sole ruler. This created what the controversial but highly influential Nazi Jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt claimed was the "state of exception" in which the executive branch of a government is freed from legal restraints, giving a single branch of the government absolute power. This endows the executive with sovereign power which decides on the exceptions made to the norms of a given society. Drawing on Schmitt and both Giorgio Agamben and Paul Kahn’s more recent explorations and reformulations of the theory, we examine the ways in which ancient scientific thought flourished under an Intellectual State of Exception created by a Political State of Exception.
Previous histories of ancient science have championed the idea that the intellectual community in democratic Athens was the central cause of Greek intellectual innovations. This Atheno-centric view, perhaps biased by 20th century American and British Democratic political ideologies, has generally been accepted as the most likely explanation. Geoffrey Lloyd describes the ways in which the ability for male citizens to debate and decide the content of their polis' constitution is indicative of a paradigm shift in intellectualism that endowed the common people with the power to exercise authority over acquired information (Lloyd 1971, 249). This implies that a king or monarch, on the other hand, would have regulated all information and that his subjects would have been forced to accept it as true. Indeed, this governmental system’s role in fostering a suitable environment for particular forms of intellectual activity, particularly debate, cannot be denied. However, this political theory does not exactly map onto the ancient political and scientific scene. Engaging with the State of Exception theory raises interesting questions of whether democracy’s role in science was and remains one of enforcing a code of ethics which are dependent on social norms rather than fostering intellectual innovation. Thus, perhaps science and natural philosophy needed science, but for an entirely different reason than historians of science have suggested thus far.
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